Category Archives: Uncategorized

In December I ordered the new QHYCCD QHY247C COLDMOS camera on their beta program and it arrived the last week of January. It’s a 24 megapixel APS-C format cooled CMOS camera with a 14-bit ADC (same one used in the … Continue reading →

Hoping you and yours have a blessed, safe, and Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Michael

After quite a bit of work, I’m proud to announce the incorporation of astrometry data to my astrophotography gallery. By incorporating the API from astrometry.net into a custom module I developed for the gallery software, I can now provide annotated … Continue reading →

For about the past four months I’ve been helping host Friday night star parties at the Texas Museum of Science and Technology (www.txmost.org), weather permitting. They’ve become quite popular, with as many as 100 people showing up over the summer. … Continue reading →

Hi Everyone, If you’re seeing this, hopefully you’re on our new web server and hopefully everything is going smoothly.  I’d actually posted this yesterday, but something still hadn’t refreshed in my browser and the post ended up on the old … Continue reading →

Hi All, As some of you may have noticed last night, I’m in the process of migrating the website to a new hosting service, which always has its difficulties.  However, in order to test I need to point the orionranchobservatory … Continue reading →

I’m running behind on my posts relative to the pictures I’ve been uploading and sharing on Cloudy Nights, so I’m going to merge a number of different related posts into one here.  I’d posted on my new business cards for … Continue reading →

I finally sold the used 8SE that I’d picked up, so I pulled out my original 8SE to use at the TXMOST star parties we’ve been having every Friday.  Unfortunately when I got there and set everything up, I discovered … Continue reading →

I’ve been doing a bit more outreach, helping to host star parties for TXMOST, so I finally got around to designing a business card to direct people to this website and getting them printed. I then decided I needed a … Continue reading →

Deep Space Products sells these neat looking vent replacement fans for the Celestron CPC series telescopes.  While they have a rather confusing selection of choices depending on whether you have a newer (e.g. EDGE HD) or older model, wedge mounted … Continue reading →