About this page, and the site

I am dark_adapted. I have been observing the sky with my own eye from a paddock behind a house in the Blue Mountains since 1991, and writing it down since 1995. This page went up in August 1996 because I wanted somewhere to put the logbook, and the message board arrived a year later when four people started sending me the same questions.

The board is small on purpose. There are eleven regulars. I read every message before it goes up — not originally by choice, but because the follow-up script broke and now I type them in by hand. It turns out that a board where somebody has to retype your post before anybody else reads it is a board with very little shouting on it.

The observing site

"Observatory" is generous. It is a cleared corner of the paddock, a fold-out table for charts, a kerosene heater I am not supposed to use, and a cat who has opinions about the reclining chair.

Telescopes

10-inch f/5 Dobsonian, home-ground mirror

The main instrument, bought secondhand in 1994 and worth every cent. Enough aperture to chase faint galaxies all night, and simple enough that nothing about it has ever gone wrong.

90 mm Maksutov on a photo tripod

Portable, grab-and-go, comes with me when the haze over the shed becomes unbearable and I walk up the fire trail with it. Genuinely how I confirmed that most of my haze problem is the nearby town's light dome and not the atmosphere.

1962 brass 3-inch refractor, equatorial mount

Cast brass, no coatings worth mentioning, takes twenty minutes to cool down and then sits rock steady all night on double stars. Not practical. I use it anyway.

Eyepieces and filters

32 mm wide-field eyepiece

Lives in the focuser more than any other eyepiece I own. Good for sweeping and for talking myself into looking at one more field before packing up.

Narrowband OIII filter (borrowed)

On loan from dob_or_bust since February. It turns a washed-out planetary nebula into something with a shape, and I am going to have to give it back, which I resent.

Other equipment

• A dictaphone for the flicker-star watch, so I can note the time and what I saw without needing light to write by.
• A wind-up alarm clock set to UT, because the one thing worse than missing a brightening is logging it against the wrong hour.
• Three ring binders of loggings, 1995 to date.
• A shoebox of eyepiece sketches. The gallery page for these has been under construction since November and I would appreciate it if nobody asked.

Board rules and netiquette

Rewritten 19 February 1999, after a bad week. These are not elaborate and they are not negotiable.

1. Log what you saw, not what you concluded. "Unid" is a respectable entry. A confident wrong identification gets quoted back as fact for years — see the reporting sticky.
2. Report full details, not just one number. Instrument, sky darkness and seeing, not just "I could see it." One figure on its own started an argument that ran for a week.
3. Correct the claim, not the person. If somebody is wrong, explain what is wrong and how you know. There is a good example of this and a bad example of it in the same thread, and the person responsible for the bad one has since apologised.
4. Changing your mind in public is the point. Two people did it in the aperture thread, including one with thirty-eight years of holding the other view. That thread is the best thing on this site because of it.
5. No arguing about who "discovered" what. We are here for what we actually saw. Every board like this one that has ignored this rule is now gone.
6. Beginners' questions are not off-topic. They are the only reason any of us learned this. If a question seems obvious to you, that is a fact about you.

Links

I am sorry about the state of this section. Most of these went dead when the free hosts started closing accounts, and I have left them listed because the names are sometimes enough to find things by. If you have working addresses for any of them, please write.

• The Australian Deep-Sky Observers' Ring — host closed accounts in 1998, no forwarding address
• Variable Star Notes Digest — moved twice, then stopped answering mail
• seeing_hermit's transparency notes — he keeps saying he will put it back up
• The Southern Binocular Users newsletter — still exists on paper, which is more than can be said for the rest of this list

The webring

The Southern Sky Observers Webring had fourteen member sites in 1997. As of this month it has four, and the navigation script on the ring's central server has been returning an error since January. Rather than leave the previous and next links at the bottom of every page struck through forever, I have joined a second ring — Bookring — purely because its server still answers. It is a book-themed ring, not an astronomy one, and has nothing to do with the night sky. A working link to the wrong subject beats a dead link to the right one.

Writing to me

Send me your loggings, your follow-ups for the board, corrections to anything on this site, and working addresses for the links above. I answer everything, eventually.

My address, written out so the address harvesters cannot read it:
dark_adapted AT example DOT invalid

(Spelling an address out in words like that, rather than linking it, was common practice back then — it kept the crawlers that scraped pages for addresses from picking it up automatically.)