Moon Locomotion

[00:00:00]Hello and welcome back to the Andy of Astro YouTube channel. We have had the driest weather that I can remember. The grass is just so dry. It's extraordinary to see most of the grass basically dying back. It'll be okay of course as soon as we have a bit of rain, but in the meantime I'm not going to cut the lawn just going to leave any flowers and things for the wildlife and the bees to make sure that they have enough to This thing I've been doing something which I haven't done for ages. I got out my very first ever telescope. It basically is a Newtonian. It's a 900 mm focal length and the mirror in there is 114 mm as well. The moon has just gone behind the house. Literally just went just like that over the top and I decided to get the Celestron phone mount and just take a couple of little videos of the moon. Of course there's very little at the fact there's no astronomical darkness at the moment.

[00:01:06]So as a result I'm not doing any deep sky imaging although I will be very soon. Let's have a look at some of the images that I've just taken through this telescope.

[00:01:25]>> [music] [music] [music] >> This particular mount, it's um kind of an EQ2, but it has, which is really good, a right ascension motor. So, it's just ticking over. I can just literally feel it ticking over at the moment. And that enables [music] the telescope to compensate for the Earth's rotation. And it's just powered [music] by four batteries in there. And um it's okay. It's really good. It's really good just for [music] taking quick uh videos and images of things like the moon. And because of its focal length, it's good for planets like Jupiter, as well.

[00:02:46]In August, we've got the partial solar eclipse in the UK. In fact, it's going to be pretty impressive. It's It's not uh It's not totality, but basically, we're going to have a very sli- We're going to have a very thin sliver of the sun still visible. I'm actually going to be on the south coast at the time. And I'm hoping to be able to get some solar glasses, or even if I can take a small telescope with me uh with a white light filter, such as my Herschel's wedge, which will allow me to image in white light, and hopefully be able to see the whole of the eclipse as it happens.

[00:03:27]Thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate you joining me on the channel. Um I've been building things recently, and I've got a very big project that I'd like to do if I can learn how to weld. So, I'm hoping to do something with some welding very soon. I've also been building a locomotive, which I ran on a local track. It's something I wanted to do for ages, absolutely ages. And unfortunately, I well, not unfortunately, I was studying for 2 years and then I was knocked off my bike in London and I broke my wrist. So, that put me back 2 years, but I finally finished my locomotive. Here it is.

[00:04:09]And yeah, I went and ran my locomotive at a local track which was really good. So, yeah. Thank you for joining me. Take care everybody and I'll see you again in another video.