Well, since we’re going on four or so months of one of the worst winters I can remember, I’ve had to take on other small projects to keep my mind stimulated while I wait for human-tolerable weather conditions so I can start observing again!

I made an intercom system from the house to the observatory a few months back but forgot to post it here. Basically, I took a couple old landline phones, wired them together and applied power, added a buzzer button, and mounted them in the house and in the observatory so if anyone needed me, they could simply ‘buzz’ me instead of walking all the way out there. More importantly, my five-year old daughter Ella can reach me easily/quickly without having to put on shoes or dialing a phone number. -That was a fun project… works great too!

I also took this opportunity to fix the live webcam stream of the current weather/sky conditions. It went out for some reason a few months ago and I never did figure out why. Regardless, I got it fixed and it’s up and running again.

I made an addition to FOWLS – The Fisher Observatory Weather and Light Station: I added a radio telescope! Yeah, it’s the same radio telescope found on my Tools page, I just finally installed it and got a running log recording daily readings. These data are stored in a database as well as to a live graph on the website. I haven’t researched it enough or played with it enough to be able to make any valued judgment on how interesting the data will be, or even if it’s working correctly! Understanding the radio telescope more is definitely on my list of things to do. I’ve always loved the idea of radio astronomy…

One step at a time.

Keep moving forward…