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| Abbeydale Observatory was first set up in July, 1999, though
at the time you could hardly call it an observatory!
I had a 35mm camera lens attached to a MX5 mono CCD
camera. The whole lot was then attached to a battery powered
camera mount. I had this dream of imaging an asteroid, but with the equipment available I was doubtful. It wasn't until 20th August, 1999 that I imaged my first asteroid! 198 Ampella It was one of the most exciting days of my life. And certainly what really got me hooked on Asteroids. At the time, it took around 30 to 45 minutes just to manually align the camera with the asteroid! Also I had to take all of the cables and equipment outside and set it up. The whole process just to take one image was around 2 hours. A big improvement happened in 2001 when I purchased a Celestron NexStar 5 telescope that had the GOTO facility. Finding asteroids from then was a lot quicker. The drawback with this was that the tracking wasn't that good, and so only short images could be taken. Even so I still had the problem of setting up (mentioned before), plus a heavy telescope. Next came the Meade LX90. This is a superb instrument, and from then onwards I was able to start doing some serious asteroid work. But the scope was even heavier! About a year later I was given my Observatory Code J94 from the Minor Planet Centre. My disability was getting much worse, to the extent that I could only observe with the help of my wife Lin. The lifting and carrying was now beyond me on my own. Then in July 2003, with the help of some very good friends (the Willoughby family), my observatory was built. Now the whole operation is conducted from my house, and the scope is run remotely, using some excellent software written for me by John Rock (MPC 951). My thanks go to him for the time and effort put in to make this work for me. Now I am using a Meade LX200 'Classic' 0.3 metre. The latest milestone is the imaging of my 500th asteroid! I can't tell you how much this meant to me after all these years. Best Regards Alan Cahill |