I’ve invested in some colour filters and a filter wheel for my astroimaging setup so I’m going to be posting some colour astroimages up over the coming months, I’ve already posted my first LRGB image of M27 into the gallery.

I thought I’d take a few words to explain how this works. The CCD camera I have is monochrome, these are generally better then singleshot colour cameras as they have a higher resolution and there are no filters in front of the chip. So to get monochrome images it’s just a case of capturing multiple exposures and stacking them in software to increase the signal to noise ratio. To get colour you need to take monochrome images through red, green and blue filters. The filters are very precisely made so they only pass through the correct wavelengths, they also block any infrared light which the cameras are sensitive to and can cause problems. They are also manufactured to ensure that they focus the light from the telescope to the same place, so you don’t have to refocus when you change filters.

The filters are held in a filterwheel, this is a mechanical device driven by batteries that rotates …

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I know you’ve been waiting for it eagerly since I posted Trophy #1 and here it is.

This one was awarded for being runners up in the Pembroke Cup competition in the Newbury league. Don’t worry, there isn’t going to be a Trophy #3 entry.

This is the first table tennis trophy awarded to me for the past season. Best player in Division 3.

Best player means the player with most wins and not necessarily the ‘best’. There were at least three players in the Division were better than me but didn’t win as many matches. This has been the traditional method of working out who wins the best player award for many years.

Rock Band, just how good is this?

I’ve played all the Guitar Hero games from the very beginning so I’m pretty good at plastic guitar now (still get whooped by my nephew though, boo) and played through Hard difficulty without any problems. Nearly finished Expert level as well now.

The game also comes with plastic drums (oh yes) and I’ve never played drums before, I found it pretty tough going to start with on Easy level! But now I can smack out a beat on Medium pretty good, dead chuffed that I can do it although alternate right hand and right foot beats still confuse my brain! So you can see what the drums are like check out this YouTube video of someone playing Expert level, that’ll be me soon!

I’ll not mention vocals, except I can’t sing!