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Hi, Welcome to Pete's astronomy. My location is Vanderbijlpark South Africa (Lat 26^o 41' 55" S Lon 27^o 49' 0" E), where the light pollution is terrible. Being a retired fellow I also frequent a small village namely Betty's Bay in the Western Cape for 6 months of the year. (Lat 34^o 21' 28" S Lon 18^o 53' 55" E). In Betty's Bay there are no street lights and the local residents respect natures absolute darkness. The skies are also wonderfully clear with no city smog.

Apart from the obvious my interests also include high voltage Tesla coils, radio meteors, general outdoors activities like fishing & walking. Before retiring I was a process engineer with a large petrochemical company.

These pages are intended as a source of general interest and information for the low tech astronomer and will be updated periodically. 

It has been a while since updating my web page. My stay in Betty's Bay (Aug to Dec 2009) was not the ideal for taking advantage of the dark skies. If it was not windy it was raining or too much cloud cover. On occasions wind exceeded 100km/h. Spent my time crawfish catching amongst other things. Back in Vanderbijlpark have been "playing with the Meade DSI II oneshot color imager and perfecting my understanding of it. See the tutorial and images of M42 in the info & links section.

With the winter on it's way (June - August) and the southern cross high in the sky, I hope to put the Meade through it's paces. Also the Nikon D40. I am currently building an IR control for BULB capture controllable via a laptop parallel port. Will put details up in due course. My old IMB think pad has a printer port which simlifies the IR control function.

A PDF has been uploaded with details of the IR BULB control. See info & links