Comet 17P/Holmes outburst

Yesterday evening I was searching for NGC1491, but at a sudden moment I caught a "strange" nebula in my 10x50 binoculars. I aimed the scope and saw this (strange) picture. After first realizing it was something special I found on the internet that it is comet 17P/Holmes.
17P/Holmes is a periodic comet in our solar system. It has been discovered by the British amateur astronomer Edwin Holmes on 6 november 1892. End of October 2007 this comet had a "outburst". It's lightstrength (magnitude) changed in a few hours from magnitude 17 (very faint) to magitude 2 (well visible to the naked eye). This is an increase of 400.000x in visibility.
The comet is still visible to the naked eve, and it looks like this in 10x50 binoculars. If you wish to see it yourself use the following picture:

Look for a bright "star" in the east, in the consellation Perseus. It is sitting left of the large cluster of stars in Perseus.

It's up and running again

The kiln is up and running again with its new computer system and the new cpu. Here it is firing its first load of real products again.






And here you see a detail of the upgraded control computer. The only thing that broke down was the original PC, so we needed to replace it. The only thing they had was an old laptop, but the whole thing is running ok now.

Working at the computer.....

Here me and Keith are installing new software and all system settings in the new computer.
It's all going well, the kiln did its first testrun.

Back to Ruabon!

This is the 737 that flew me to Manchester, but first.....








I had a nice cookie&cream Herbalife shake, ready to get going!!









And then with a real British taxi (the best accessable in the world) to Broughton.

Trip to Ruabon UK

Next week I have to work again in Ruabon UK.............so hopefully I get the chance to shoot some nice pictures over there again....

Telescopes

A telescope is never big, long or wide enough...............

New oil in the VFR!

The last days my VFR was protesting a little bit, so I put in new (synthetic) oil and a filter. Always very nice, you really feel the bike running better and more smoothly. Even this morning when it was very cold (only few degr.), smoothly running from the start!

M57 Planetary nebula

Focusing is much easier now with a self-made Hartmann mask (with 3 triangles).
See the result of better collimation and focusing. With only 20min I have the same result as previous 60min exposures.
Also the "coma" abberation is much less compared with the previous exposures I took from M57. It was a lot of work, but the re-adjusting of the whole telescope paid off.

Very faint, at 4-o-clock position from the nebula, 2-3 rings further is very faintly visible IC1296, a barred spiral galaxy of 15.3 magnitude, 300 million lightyears away from us.

Hornets nest.......

Yesterday our central heating in the house stopped............after looking inside I discovered many of those big mean hornets! I once got stung by one of those, compared to that a wasp-sting is like a mosquito bite........ I put on all my motorcycle gear to have some leather protection and removed about 20 of those hornets. But when I listened carefully I hear many more of these things inside the wall.
The wasp removal expert that had a look but couldn't reach it from the outside, so I arranged a ladder and this afternoon he will try again to fume them out........
At least our heater is running again (max. temperature guard was broken).
I'm curious what will come out of the hornets nest when the wasp removal guy comes back.........

To be continued............

Hay fever.........

Our neighbors got married! Their friends however blocked all entrances to their house with big packs of hay so they couldn't go in........