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About this privacy statement

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Contact Alistair Beasley

If you have any questions about this privacy policy or Alistair Beasley’s treatment of your personal information, please write:

• by email to alistair@alistairbeasley.com

According to information here - http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/W8ITProPreRel/thread/f862114e-8c30-4c66-830e-0018de1e8103 going into settings within steam then the voice tab and changing the always transmit audio to push to talk will fix the issue.

Worked for me.

Edit – Spoke to soon, happened again even with the new settings, closing steam fixed it again, hopefully Valve or Microsoft will fix the issue soon.

I decided to set my telescope up around about 9pm as it was getting dark to allow for the hour cool down time, then went back inside I used Stellarium to plan my viewing session, several Messier objects to knock off my list.

First up is the new purchases, a new power cable that replaced the standard one that came with my telescope, the new one was 10x better, no longer have to worry about a loose fitting undoing all my work getting the telescope assigned, it even survived being dragged 6 foot by my overly playful kitten, it was superb not having to worry about which way my telescope would be slewing to the next object and when it inevitably got wrapped round the telescope I just moved the power tank to unwrap it. The second purchase was a red dot finder to replace the 9×50 finder scope that comes with the flextube, it stays aligned much better than the 9×50 and I find it slightly less back breaking to use so I would recommend it as a cheap upgrade for anyone with a flextube. For more information of the upgrades then please go here http://www.alistairbeasley.com/?p=42 .

So onto my viewing session, my list for the night;

Castor, M95, M96, M97 M87, M81, M82 and M101.

First up I went for the Messier objects, it quickly became apparent however that all but the brightest are washed out by the light pollution from my garden, so I all but abandoned the list and decided to try out the sky tour on the goto of my telescope, here is what it came up with;

Castor

Castor is in the constellation of Gemini, as seen in the image below it’s the second brightest star in the constellation and to the right of Pollux. As the title of this post suggest what appears to be a single star to the naked eye is in fact a double consisting of two bright white stars and well worth a look. The best view of this for me was through the 10mm eyepiece.

Algieba

As above Algieba is a single point of light when looking at it with the naked eye but quickly reveals itself to be a binary star system when looking through a telescope, found in the constellation of Leo. Best view was through a 10mm eyepiece.

Beehive Cluster

Next up on the list is the Beehive Cluster (M44) is an open cluster of stars in the constellation Cancer, I was unable to count the number of stars and struggled to get it all in the view of my 25mm eyepiece.

Hercules Globular Cluster

Last but not least was the Hercules Globular Cluster (M13), often described as one of the most amazing sights in the northern hemisphere it’s hard to disagree, at higher powers individual stars were visible, a breathtaking sight and must be near the top of the list for anyone with a telescope.

Perhaps unsurprisingly it’s found in the constellation Hercules as shown below.

I briefly tried Dropbox but wasn’t overly keen and I’ve yet to try Microsoft’s SkyDrive though that may change with Windows 8, I use iCloud for my iPhone contacts etc…. but not documents.

That’s where Google Drive comes in, the new cloud storage service from Google, having been a fan of many of there other services I figured I’ll give it a go. So I went to sign up, unfortunately I was told it wasn’t available to me and I could register my interest which I did, expecting to have to wait anywhere up to a few months, I was pleasantly surprised the next day when the e-mail arrived telling me I could now start to use it.

Installation was nice and easy, a download of less than 1mb and a few minutes later I was ready to go, initial impressions are good;

1. The installation pops a short cut on your desktop for quick access which is perfect as I intend to use it as a replacement for “My Documents”.
2. It would appear and I stress that I haven’t tested this yet as I need to clear out my Documents folder that you can re-point “My Documents” to the Google Drive location which is a nice touch, see this website here for instructions on how to change your “My Documents” location.
3. All my Google Doc’s were automatically sync’d which was nice, although as a rare user Google Doc’s most were out of date and I’ve started afresh.
4. You can manually choose which folders to sync which will be useful for avoiding large files that would bust your data limit (5gb).

I will be interested to see how it pans out when using across several computers, but it will be nice to access my documents across all the different machines I use without trying multiple usb sticks.

This was taken last month when we actually had some clear nights, it was taken using an iPhone 4S held up against a 10mm eyepiece in a SkyWatcher Flextube 200p.

Almach can be seen with the naked eye as a single star slightly gold in colour, it’s the third brightest star in the constellation Andromeda, when viewed through a telescope what appears to be a single star show’s itself to be a double star, the larger golden coloured star and the smaller blue coloured star.

So how did I do it.

1. I used Greenfish Icon Editor Pro (Freeware) available from snapfiles here http://www.snapfiles.com/downloads/gficoneditor/dlgficoneditor.html none of the online converters were creating a file that would work with IE (note they would work with Firefox/Chrome).
2. Uploaded the finished favicon.ico to the root directory of my website.
3. Edited the header.php file for my theme, this file can be found in the following directory /wp-content/themes/themename/
4. Added the following line of code to the aforementioned header.php file; <link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”http://www.alistairbeasley.com/favicon.ico” type=”image/x-icon” /> , this needs to go in between <head></head> but before <title /> prefrably as the first line after the opening <head> tag.
5. After that if you’ve already viewed your page in IE you’ll need to completely delete your browsing history, a ctrl-f5 refresh won’t work.
6. You should be done and when pinning the page to your Metro start screen you should see something like this.

Note that Metro will pull the dominant colour from your icon and use that as the tile colour, I assumed this would be white, however I suspect it must take an average of all the colours used.

The Finderscope is the first thing I’ve upgraded, it comes with a 9×50 straight through, this makes finding things confusing as you have to move the scope in the opposite direction to what you think, also for things near the zenith it involves getting into some rather awkward positions, my final complaint is that it only takes the slightest knock (even with the rubber o-rings in place) to move it out of alignment with the scope. I’ve replaced it with a Baader 30mm Sky Surfer III from here http://www.firstlightoptics.com/finders/baader-30mm-sky-surfer-iii.html quite often sold out, no chance to test it yet, other than to align it on the flag at the top of the hill thanks to the weather.

The second part I have upgraded is the power cable, for a scope that costs in excess of £700 the power cable that comes with it is a bit shoddy, the part that plugs into a power tank is the cigarette lighter style, it’s on the small size which means it wobbles around causing power outages to the goto system, which then involves another 10 minutes re-aligning the scope. I’ve replaced it with a SkyTron power cable from here http://www.firstlightoptics.com/astronomy-cables-leads-accessories/skytron-power-supply-cable-for-skywatcher-celestron-mounts.html it has a couple of advantages;

1. It’s longer than the standard cable by a couple of metres meaning I have to worry less about which way the scope my turn when I switch objects.
2. Cigarette lighter end is bulkier and a more snug fit.

Venus taken from my back garden using a SkyWatcher Flextube 200p Synscan, a 2.5x barlow adapter and a Phillips SPC900 webcam.