Lunatic Astronomical

General

PushBullet notifications – now from the Dragonfly

For a long time, we’ve been using and recommending PushBullet as a very convenient way of receiving notifications from astronomy equipment. We added support for them in the Solo CloudWatcher, and then explained how to send the messages from scripts, so they could be issued from almost all of our products. Just now, we’ve added …

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Some notes about cloud detection and the CloudWatcher

Cloud detection is, unfortunately, not straightforward. Nobody has yet found a fail-proof way to determine the degree of cloudiness of the sky, other of course than the human eye, and then not always! The CloudWatcher, like most devices, uses IR measurement as the basic tool to determine if the sky is clear or not. A …

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Why is it best to guide with a short scope?

Autoguiding is one of the most challenging tasks to master in astrophotography; nowadays, with digital cameras (CCD or CMOS), manual guiding makes no sense, as it is almost impossible to keep the required accuracy, even more with the ever-increasing exposure times everyone is using.

Making the Solo, Platypus or Dragonfly more easily accessible in the network

With recent Windows 10 “updates”, and the treatment Microsoft is giving to all computers and networks, as if all were in a “high risk” zone, many security policies conspire to make simple devices, such as our Dragonfly, Platypus or SOLO CloudWatcher, more difficult to access in the network. With a few tricks, however, this can …

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How to drill aluminium?

The Lunático plates, and others, are designed for been apt to be easily adapted for the use that you wish to give them.

That is the reason why we make them in solid aluminum that shows much less machining problems that extruded forms.

We need:

Node-RED tutorial (for Dragonfly and CloudWatcher SOLO)

From Lunático we have been playing around a little bit with Node-RED – as they say “…a programming tool for wiring together hardware devices, APIs and online services in new and interesting ways.” Truth is, it is fun, quite easy, and very useful and interesting things can be accomplished with relatively little effort. I set …

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PocketCW

PocketCloudWatcher: Test report

LUNÁTICO ASTRONOMÍA POCKET CLOUD WATCHER (“Astronomía” Magazine nº. 238 – April 2019)   This month we bring a sort of personal weather guard. A small station that works along with a mobile application to inform us about local meteorological conditions in real-time. Lunatic Astronomical has marketed a small meteorological station for the observatory and the astrophotographer. …

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