John Lewis Telescope on the Christmas TV Advert

The 2015 John Lewis Christmas TV advert is out and this year the theme is the Man in the Moon. The advert features a little girl looking through a telescope up to the moon, and she sees the man in the moon ad sends him a telescope as a gift so he can look back

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Celestron 130EQ Astromaster Reflector Telescope

NOTE: The John Lewis version is more money, as it comes complete with the tracking motors, the others do not. For views of the brighter deep space objects like galaxies and nebulae, we recommend the larger aperture and light gathering ability of the Newtonian reflectors such as this one. The Celestron 130EQ Astromaster comes with

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Celestron NexStar 4SE Computerised Telescope

The Celestron 4SE telescope is a 4 inch Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope with StarBright XLT high transmission coatings and the proven NexStar computer control technology. It also has nearly 40,000 object database and is also GPS-compatible with optional CN16 GPS Accessory. The box contains the NexStar 4 Pre-assembled Telescope, a 25mm Eyepiece 31.7mm, Star Pointer Red Dot

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Celestron NexStar 102 SLT Computerised Refractor Telescope

NASA Mars Rover Book by Haynes Book Review

NASA Mars Rovers by Haynes – Owner’s Workshop Manual 1997-2013 (Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity) This is one of Haynes’ astronomy owner’s workshop manual books. I have reviewed a few of these already including the Space Shuttle and the Lunar Rover books. Please note this book won’t take you through how to repair the Mars

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Lunar Eclipse Animated GIF

** Please click on the image above to see the animation ** This is a quick lunar eclipse animated GIF I put together in Photoshop of the Total Lunar Eclipse in September 2015. This phase is when the moon is coming out of the eclipse and going back to its normal full moon. The original

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Meade ETX105 Telescope Review

My son was lucky enough to have won the Cambridge Young Astronomers prize of a 2nd hand Meade 105ETX at the 25 anniversary event in 2015. So I thought I would do a quick Meade ETX105 telescope review. I had previously taken the main telescope part out one evening and placed it on a table

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Windows 10 Install on Observatory PC

After upgrading my laptops and the home PC I didn’t think I would upgrade the observatory PC for a while yet, as I was expecting problems with drivers etc. But last night I decided to just go ahead and upgrade my observatory PC which was running Windows 7 Pro to Windows 10 Pro. My observatory

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Windows and Prolific Serial to USB Adapter

Are you having problems with Windows 8 or Windows 10 and your older (maybe not official) Prolific Serial to USB Adapter on your observatory PC? Well you are not alone, and now after reading this article: https://www.ifamilysoftware.com/news37.html I am a bit worried about upgrading the observatory PC from Windows 7 to the free upgrade of

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Budget Astrophotography Book Review

Budget Astrophotography is an introduction into Imaging with a Webcam or DSLR for amateur astronomers. The books start with the anatomy of the DSLR camera sensor explaining various aspects of Pixel size, chip size, and Chip sensitivity and various other features in easy to understand terms. The next chapter deals with the Telescope types Refractors,

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