Follow @lenadamastro Click on Astro Blog box below for latest Astro News and Images from Len Adam
Latest Astro Blog: Black Hole in Cygnus Latest Wildlife Diary Image: Leyland Wren and Buzzards
International Astronomical Union Observatory J82
Welcome to the website of Leyland Observatory. Follow @lenadamastro
The private observatory is located in my back garden in the town of Leyland in Lancashire, England and is close to the city of Preston.
Lancashire weather is not the ideal for astronomy - much of the time there is cloud cover. Increasing light pollution also causes difficulty. [With this in mind I spent last winter in Spain and am doing so again this year (2011 to 2012).] There are major obstructions to the view including a 100 ft oak tree which have to be worked around. This website acts as a focus for personal observations (see my Astro Blog here )and images , a personal reference site and a resource for whoever wishes to use it.
My main interest is in Supernovae and I am building up a Galaxy Image Library to store comparison images and searching for new Supernovae.
The challenges are aperture, the sky conditions, the dome itself and obstructions to the view, and of course the scale of effort required!
On the aperture front I have recently acquired an old C14 Celestron Optical Tube Assembly which is a major step forward in terms of aperture with a corresponding increase in light gathering power of 36% in comparison with my 12" Meade which preceded it, which is a great advantage in terms of detecting fainter supernovae. The set up is is a Celestron 355 mm SCT OTA on a Paramount ME with an SBIG ST-9XE camera mounted on the SCT with an f/6.3 focal reducer giving an image scale of 1.96 arcsecond per pixel for the 512 pixel camera giving an image size of 16.73' X 16.73' .