The Environment Home

This is my attempt to show you the environment of my observatory.  It is a mosaic of 8 pictures taken at equal intervals around the observatory from the hight of the roof (the base of the dome to come).  The final picture is pieced together with iMerge.  Issues of perspective mean that the pictures do not generally fit together well.  My own house (in the west) looks particularly odd, and my neighbour's looks as though it was built across a fault line.  But it gives you a general idea of my outlook.  My own house hides the sky up to about 25°, the two nearest neighbours' houses block me below 21°.  The greatest obstruction is the silver birch tree which blocks up to about 37° but fortunately it is fairy narrow.  The house to the south only blocks 10° and it is unlikely I would want to image below that altitude in any case.  When the telescope is installed I shall plot out my horizon in detail.

The pictures were taken with a Panasonic Lumix bridge camera in full automatic made.  This has a feature when there is a large range of intensity within the scene.  It takes two pictures with different exposures and combines them to give a better picture than could be obtained with a single exposure.  Unfortunately some of these pictures have triggered this feature and some have not.  This makes the mosaic even more difficult.  This feature has another effect in this picture.

Scroll right to see the whole picture.  I have marked the primary compass directions at the top of the picture.

Home      Back to Equipment