Scattered Thoughts . . .

I finished my homemade telescope pier extension project today and it seems to be working as planned. There isn't a whole lot in life that is more satisfying than designing something in sketches in a notebook, then building each individual part yourself, then assembling all the parts and finding that everything works just as designed and planned! My primary problem that prompted this project was that my longer telescopes would hit the tripod legs when viewing almost straight upward.  Also a factor in my decision is that my astronomy tripod isn't tall enough for my longer refractor telescopes which meant I would need to sit down very low on the ground to see into the eyepiece.  I needed a pier extension to raise the mount and telescope higher.   Some may ask why I don't just extend the legs fully to gain some overall height but this is a bad idea for two reasons.  First, it will do nothing for me to resolve the telescope colliding with the tripod legs.  And next, the more yo

I've been a little bit busy this week with a new project... finally!  I've been putting off a bunch of projects lately due to ongoing rainy, hot and humid weather, poor health, and medical appointments for both Sheila and me, but mostly due to the absolutely abysmal weather we've had this summer. I needed to get going on at least one project before the snow flies! I decided to start on a to-do list of about 20 items (most of which I'll never get to this summer) with building and installing a garden window over our kitchen sink. We've been talking about buying a garden window for quite some time but the prices are absurd so I opted to design and build my own. That's my answer and resolution for most things, actually... but this garden window is something new to me.  At this point, I have most of the wood cut and painted with at least one coat of white paint. I still need to cut some wood to length for the frames of the glass panes for the sides of the wi

I'm laying low for a while since I'm fighting off a cold. The cold isn't so terrible (yet) but my mast cells are angry causing some serious problems related to my primary illness. While I'm recovering, I am taking advantage of the quiet time to catch up on some blog entries.  One thing I have been meaning to write about is a wooden telescope case I designed and built. I have this nice, new, high-quality telescope but I had no way to store it. I feel a telescope of this quality deserves a nice case. Actually, I'd like to do this with all of my optics and I do have plans to do this very thing... I just need to find the time and energy!  I just finished the first homemade case which is for storing my better telescope and I have another wood case almost finished which is to store the tracking mount for this telescope. I also want to build a few other cases for other astronomy gear. This is something I should have started doing many years ago with my camera gear and