April 2016 - And life moves on

A Year and a half since my last post... Wow.

Then again - I doubt anyone even read that one - so... ohh well.  For those of you who *are* keeping up with me, here's the skinny.

Kids are getting *big*.  Izak turns 7 in July and Aryanna turned 5 back in September.  As such, life is revolving slowly around them.  As such, I have re-arranged my hobbies again - around things we can do together. 

The RC car thing really didn't pan out so well...  They are still a bit too small for it, and the cars these days go so stinkin fast... so fast that over the summer I knocked Izak completely over in a flip with my RC8... I'm amazed he didnt get hurt - bad papa!  He asked me to drive it by him fast, and this was up north on the beach.... yeah - you know the rest... bad hop got me off course and took his feet out at about 40 mph... complete flip into the sand for him!  He's a trooper.  Was right back at it 10 minutes later.

This winter I decided to have a look into O-scale trains... I'll bear you the details - but that lasted until March... Lionel stuff must be gold plated because its stinkin expensive!!  Izak and I decided to go to HO scale (I had a bunch of stuff from years past)... so we sold the Lionel stuff and set up a nice HO track in the basement.  We have about 4'X12' of benchwork built and will likley expand that a bit.  We also got into DCC (Digital Command Control)... so we can run multiple trains and have sound, etc..  Its fun, and he is slowly learning to listen instead of being a typical grabby 6 year old.  Then again, I'm learning to be a patient Papa instead of a Surly engineer! lol!

The trains will be taking a bit of a back seat for the summer I believe, which brings me to a major update... ASTRONOMY!

So - when we last tuned in I was in the throes of selling some astronomy items and was very disenchanted in general with the whole hobby.  Most of this stemmed from the fact that my CPC1100 just was not set up for astro photography (AP)..  well, that came to a head back in December when I setup to test my Nikon D300 and see if I could use it for some AP work... then it happened... the mount died.  All kinds of electrical issues - and it looks like the control board in the mount needed to be replaced.  Long story short - I pulled the scope in the house and messed about with it for about two months before puting it on the bench in a fit of frustration.

Fast forward to a month ago.... I take a quick run out to the POD just to see if its still dry in there... still all good - save for needing a good cleaning.. and it hits me - "I really need to either start using this, or sell it".

All along I have wanted to get a GEM (German Equatorial Mount) for the scope.. but being as my scope weighs over 30lb, an adequate mount for AP is well over a grand....  so, no dice.

Then we find out that my company did pretty well last year... and they will be giviing us a bonus...

Wait.... what?  a BONUS?

After a discussion with Marie about the astronomy topic in general and the impending bonus situation, we decide that we do indeed want to invest in our astronomy outfit... especially now that the kids are showing interest and can actually enjoy the hobby.

So - that settles that... a GEM it is... a CGEM to be more accurate - Celestron's mid-line Equatorial mount that can support my scope and have a bit to spare, plus will allow me to do some AP.  Man these things are expensive...  Not sure how folks afford the big boys (a Losmandy mount is nearly $3k, and some of the very nice robotic mounts can be upwards of $5-$10k!!)

For reference - we are going from this:

To this:

I'm pretty geeked to get back into it.  It will be fun to start showing the kids all the wonders of the night sky...  Not to mention, it works perfectly with our Homeschooling plans. 

So - what else is going on... Work is interesting.  We were purchased my AVIC back in the fall - AVIC is a Chinese company that is into Aerospace and other diversified interests... they want to more than double our growth in about 5 years... that should prove interesting.  But from what I've read, they do invest a lot into growing the company and R&D, which we sorely need.

I suppose that enough blathering on and on - I'll really try and start doing something "online" again one of these days...  Hopefully it won't be another year and a half before I update everyone again!

- Chris