Intro to Mike's Astronomy

Background

Equipment

Lunar

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The Astronomy background pages.

Introduction

Click to open a larger image My current permanent telescope mount in the back garden used mostly for Solar astronomy.

This part of the website provides for my interest in Astronomy.
This astronomy interest began at about the age of 8 following a meteor shower while on holiday in Wales. The perseids must have been magnificent, because a vague interest became a hobby.
Following that I was given a small 'toy' 50mm refractor which was basically a source of frustration until i asked for and received for christmas ( very lucky me ) the optical components for an 8" Newtonian reflector telescope. The tube was a 10" land drainage plastic tube, the mounting an undriven equatorial made from galvanised pipe, stainless steel shafts and turned bearings made from scraps of gunmetal. The counterweight was a lump of concrete cast in a bucket with some scraps of lead pipe to increase the density.

And the view was fantastic.! Each summer we went camping in Cornwall and the telescope went in the trailer on the back of the car. It wasn't small. The only eyepieces I had were a wide-field eyepiece and a barlow lens to up the magnification. The telescope was erected on the cover of a sess pit. It was smelly but flat and away from tent lights . Maybe thats not so much of a surprise.

Rossall School - the Assheton Observatory
The next step was to make much more use of the school telescope at Rossall. Rossall had the Assheton Observatory which contained a 6" Cooke Troughton and Simms refractor on a german equatorial mount driven by clockwork and descending weights. Once overhauled by cleaning and repairing some of the damaged teeth in the clockwork, the telescope and drive worked like a dream. Slow motion controls were by use of 'endless' ropes over pulleys attached to the end of worm wheels.
The dome was a conical roof running on runners around the top of a circular building and pulled around by pulleys in rope blocks. The observatory iself is in the middle of playing fields in the school grounds and thus as far away from bright lights as possible when located 4 miles from Blackpool, Lancashire. Until the Blackpool illumination season came upon us each year and then the laser mounted on Blackpool Tower could reach havoc.

Rossall School Assheton Observatory

The Rossall telescope was where I became interested in photography throught the photography club there. By hacking together a strip o metal and some jubillee clips around the telescope focusser, I culd mount an SLR camera up to the telescope for some pretty good results.

At Rossall I took the 'O' level in Astronomy that was available as a syllabus from the London board. there was noone to teach it so out came a textbook and a bit of study. The course involved an exam ans some practical work: I ended up doing three practicals - one on the tracking of sunspots, one on the Halleys comet apparation of 1986 and the last involved lots of lunar photography.
Not only that but we ( Peter Smith, Sam Gardener, and others ) set up a small astronomy society with guest speakers and lots of late evening observing.
All of which set up a university degree course....

University College London.

University College is located near to Euston Street station in Central London, at the top of Gower Street. Their practical facilities consist of a pair of large telescopes and numerous smaller refractors and reflectors in Mill Hill, 30 minutes north by train.
THe course covers a wide remit of Interstellar, solar, theoretical and applied physics as well as all the support courses of maths, mechanics, computer programming and such. Of course I'm sure a lot has changed by now.

Astronomy degree

I managed to fluke a viver on the High Energy Astrophysics course and got a first.
Infra red astronomy instrumentation Ph.D.
This was all about the application of fabry-perot interferometer technology that had been developed for the ISO IR satellite at long wavelengths and bringing all to bear at shorter IR wavelengths. It was all liquid nitrogen in foam canisters, liquid helium in bright stainless steel canisters and lots of programming in basic, C and assembler to write the control software that made the instrument tune to a particular wavelength and hold it there as the instrument cooled down to operating temperature at -273 degrees C. In the end I have to admit I ran out of time, will and money for the cryogens to complete testing for a full write-up.

RAL

So I joined the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory as a CCD detector engineer, analysing project operation requirements and creating electronic and mechanical designs for camera systems, both those meant to fly on satellites and on the ground.
Examples of this include:

The design of the water-cooled Durham University Adaptive very high - speed CCD imager mechanical housing for use on the Gemini Telescope.
the CMOS imager housing and illumination used to monitor the satellite behaviour inside the vacuum test environment at space temperatures of -200 degrees °C. This rig was used to inspect the behaviour of control mechanisms during satellite assembly tests.
the Rosetta lander module designed to land on Comert Berrelli - work involving designing alternative, micro-miniature mass spectrometer subsystems using piezo-electric gas valves.
Design work for the infra-red camera aboard Rosetta main spacecraft bus
Design specs and data modellling for an X-ray CCD camera to go on the ESA M3 MORO mission to re-map the moon.
Design work on efficient peltier cooling of ccd cameras.
Assembly and Testing of the two Jet-X orbiting X-Ray observatory guidance cameras for guide-star acquisition and observatory pointing.
Data modelling on stellar distribution and brightness compared to CCD camera speed and field of view for design of spacecraft star acquisition pointing systems.

Active Silicon

-This company ( found here on the web ) provided interface cards for widely used OS/hardware combinations to allow image acquisition from scientific and industrial video and CCD cameras. Here I wrote the LynXOS port of the camera interface card library and drivers. LynxOS was a real-time UNIX OS for X86 and PowerPC machine ( Remember the G3? ).

The driver was designed to compile for LynxOs on X86 and PPC by use of simple compiler directives. The test suite also included a powerful and simple X-windows interface.

The video acquisition side then branched out into Casino chip real-time identification and sorting using a video system to image the cips on a high-speed coveyor and control subsequent processes to sort them into bins. Here i provided the camera housing design which included a purpose-built flash gun. Similarly I also provided the mechanical and PIC embedded processor software designs for a roulette wheel landing-zone detector. How else do you think you can play roulette over the internet?

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