We're Back!

It’s been a long time between posts but we’re back! Over the last 5 years site has always been on my mind, I’ve been keeping the server up and running but life gets busy, other things are prioritised and momentum gets lost. Since kicking off in 2011 it’s been running on a self managed Wordpress setup. Wordpress is a great piece of software but the time had come to move on. To run Wordpress yourself requires at minimum a server and a database, plus a bunch of required software. Each has to be maintained, monitored, backed up and upgraded regularly. Servers are not cheap, you choose the smallest one that handles your traffic but then you get a traffic spike, or bots start to crawl the site, options are to re-engineer, pay more for a bigger server or get knocked offline.

I’d wanted to move to a static site for years to reduce the burden but learning a brand new thing and then converting the whole site was a bit daunting, I made a few starts but these days it’s hard to find uninterrupted time needed to make it happen. I’ve finally got it done by getting AI to do most of the initial work and conversions, it’s still taken a bit of time and I’ve had to learn a bunch of new things but it just wouldn’t have happened without that help.

I went with the Hugo Static Site Generator It does the job and is well used so it’s easy to find help out there. I might do a more in depth post on the conversion but the important thing is it’s working and I feel a renewed interest in getting back to posting!

To kick things off here’s a picture I took of the moon tonight!

It was taken in the front yard

The telescope is a Vixen Super Polaris 80M. I got it 30 years ago as payment for helping to paint a family friends house. It’s got good use over the years and is still going strong but it’s only been in the last 5 years or so that I’ve been experimenting with attaching my camera, a Canon 5D mk III, to it.

First I tried using an extension tube that allows the camera to look right into the eyepiece, magnification was good but clarity and stability were not great. Next I tried mounting the camera directly to the telescope without an eyepiece, in this way the telescope becomes one giant lense attached to the camera. This worked well, the magnification wasn’t as high but the images were much clearer. My camera takes massive photos so zooming in on the images gets almost as much magnification and it’s still a clearer picture.

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