It’s been quiet here for a couple of weeks, partly down to the overcast weather but mostly because my observatory laptop stopped working. That shouldn’t be a show stopper, I could use a desktop PC rather than a laptop, but I’m lucky enough to have friends and family willing to part with their old equipment so I’m back in business (nearly).

I have an old Compaq (HP) laptop and spent a rainy weekend a couple of weeks ago installing all the required software and testing. I couldn’t test everything without opening the roof and that would have made me wet, so it didn’t happen. In hindsight I wish I had.

Tonight is clear (ish), certainly clear enough to run some first light tests on the new (old) laptop but after getting everything setup and running the system failed at the final hurdle. The camera control for the Canon tells the camera how many shots to take, what duration, how long to wait before and after each etc and that’s working but the camera goes through the motions without sending images back to the laptop. That’s a show stopper. I could sit down the garden until the early hours trying to resolve the issues or I could pour a pint of speckled hen and update my website – so here I am

More bad news on that Comet I had been hoping to take images of. Day by day it’s getting further away and fainter to the point where soon it will be beyond reach. My first slew of the scope this evening, before I found out the camera wasn’t working, was to an area just above the comet. Unfortunately it’s behind my neighbours shed, still too low in the North-Western sky. I think any hope of capturing an image of Panstarrs is slipping away, and with Summer and light evenings coming my opportunities to image will be few and far between.

I’ll see if I can fix the camera problem tomorrow and I have another laptop to fall back on if I can’t make progress with this one. Thanks to Tony and Jono for donating the equipment, I just hope I can do something with it.