Foro Britastro

Hang on. I just thought. You talked about an ME 2 years ago. From the forum it looked like the gears were not properly engaged and you might have had trouble with a serial to USB adapter. Is this the same scope? You mention in that old forum that you were using Sky6. Why? I thought this was a new install and part of the purchase deal for a Paramount is a TSX licence. Why would you use the old code?

How far out is the mount N/S alignment? Iron piers can be a pain because of their impact on a compass. Also, have you set the approximate latitude on the mount properly ie within a degree or two? So, you power up. You connect TSX successfully and you tell TSX to go home. Does it do that, making the bing bong noises it uses when it finds Home AND afterwards, are the lights on the mount the colours the manual says they should be (off hand, I don’t remember what they should be for an ME)? So, if you Go Home and then tell TSX to do sidereal tracking and try to image a star through the scope do you get untrailed star like images? Can I assume you have changed your location in TSX to the mount’s current location / height – Google or similar will easily give you 3 decimal place accuracy – height accuracy doesn’t have to be perfect. Also, how is your computer time being maintained? If a network is available Sync the time in Windows Settings or use the Meinberg server software. If not available then a £9 USB GPS dongle will do the job if used with NMEATIME2 software (cheap licence). Laptops have internal clocks but closing down Windows or not using the laptop for a week or two can -in some cases – lead to a big time difference between the laptop time and the real world. Further question, do you have the T-Point add on? That would make life much simpler.

First problem is I cannot set up the mount accurately N/S and altitude. Having done that approximately and aligning an object and synching, it will not slew back to it later. Another way I tried was to slew to an object, then physically adjust the mount in RA and Dec. This slews back to the original object but fails to slew to a new object. Sheridan Williams

What is actually wrong with it? The setup itself is pretty easy.

Despite trying for over a year we have been unable to get our telescope’s Paramount ME set up accurately. If anyone is willing to come and assist we would be eternally grateful. We are based in Milton Keynes. Sheridan Williams Sheridan Williams

Other informative links: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-48023047 https://www.meteoritehistory.info/UKIRELAND/NEIRE.HTM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLfy2Ts4fDM https://www.meteorite-times.com/birds-barks-and-belfast-the-bovedy-meteorite-50-years-later/ https://armaghplanet.com/the-bovedy-meteorite-remembering-the-bovedy.html And there’s more…!

There’s also this audio recording of the sonic boom: https://meteorites.asu.edu/meteorites/bovedy

Also see the report THE FIREBALL AND METEORITE OF 1969 APRIL 25 by Keith Hindley and Howard Miles in the 1970 June BAA Journal, Vol. 80, No. 4, pp. 313-322 and the meeting report discussion on pp. 258, 261-262. Alex.

….is the title of a fascinating paper on ArXiv today: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.33933 It is coauthored by BAA Member, E.T.H. Teague, and is a fascinating read.

John Moffat, founder member of the Society for the History of Astronomy writes: I attended the recent BAA meeting at Liverpool and I asked the chair, Janice McClean, if she would ask if anyone present witnessed the daytime Bovedy fireball of the 25th April 1969. I was really pleased when four members came up to me and shared reminiscences which were clear, even after 57 years. In the days well before mobiles, the records show only one black and white photograph but they record a very shallow angle of entry and a speed of around 30,000 miles an hour resulting in a temperature of 4000 degrees Celsius. Parts of the fireball landed in Northern Ireland with the largest part landing at Bovedy, near Garvagh. Co. Derry. This 5 kilogram meteorite is now on display at the Armagh Observatory and Planetarium but the main mass of the object came down in the Atlantic. The irony for all of us was, that despite all our hours of diligent night time observations, one of the most impressive objects any of us have witnessed was in David Moore and Graham Winstanley’s case, while playing football in Liverpool. In Alex Pratt’s case he, his cousin and at least one other friend were chatting on the path at the NW corner of Alex’s home in Leeds when one of them shouted “did you see that!” – they’d spotted what looked like “the tail end of a fragmenting firework” to their WNW-NW. In my case I was watching the Beverly Hillbillies on TV in Birkenhead! We all concurred on the East to North West trajectory

Here’s a little video I put together of this event: https://youtu.be/8KCNtXBmprQ?si=iFXxwkmNxEpBxWDA

V630 Cas is an unusual long period CV observed by the VSS. It last went into a 109 day outburst in 2009, which Gary Poyner and I wrote about in JBAA. A new paper, based on new spectroscopy and TESS photometry, about this interesting object appears on ArXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30669