Roger Pickard’s observatory

Leominster, Herefordshire

The telescope is a 12-inch SCT, used for CCD photometry of variable stars. Most of my observing is now carried out remotely, and my compact observatory houses only the telescope and its equipment, including the CCD. After setting up – which involves little more than centring a bright star in the eyepiece – there is no need to access the instrument except to change filters. Housed in an adjacent shed is a PC with two monitors – one displaying the downloaded image and the other an image from Guide8. This ‘control room’ PC is networked to another (more modern) PC in my study, from where I control the telescope. I have come to realise that I do not have the time to search for a large number of objects night after night, and instead prefer to concentrate on long time-series of observations of single objects. During the winter this may involve setting up on one object at the start of the night, moving to another by, say, midnight, when I go to bed, and then setting the alarm to wake me up to shut down the telescope just before dawn – after which I return to bed!

E-mail : rdp@astronomy.freeserve.co.uk. BAA Variable Star Section web site : www.britastro.org/vss/