- The Sign of the Ox

Observatory pictures:
      The beginning
      Day 1 of construction
      More day 1
      Day 2 of construction
      Day 3 of construction
      Day 4 Finished!
      Fixing it up!
      Mounting my scope
      Finishing touches
      Some landscaping
      Wildlife
      3/31/07
      4/15/2007
      4/21/2007
      5/6/2007
      5/12/2007
      5/19-21/2007
      Memorial Day 2007
      6/10/2007
      6/24/2007
      7/29/2007
      8/11/2007
      9/7/2007
      9/22/2007
      10/2007 StarParty

Early pictures of DAV here,  here,  here,  here   here and  here

Email:
TaurusObservatory@comcast.net
IM:
Yahoo: TaurusObservatory

This website is hosted on a tiny Parallax Pink webserver which resides at the observatory. It's connected to a BOE board with a BasicStamp 24P microcontroller with a Sensirion Temp/Humidity sensor which is providing the temperature and humidity information.

I control the AC power on 16 different devices by the use of 2 DLI Web Power Switches

Eventually I would like to make this observatory completely usable from a remote location and perhaps even fully automated. The first project is to open and close the roll-off roof remotely across the Internet using two Stamp BS2P24 computers and 2 PINK webservers communicating with each other and controlled through the Webserver interface. I then plan to add on further BS2P24computers and PINK webservers to control other higher functions. Think of the observatory as just a big (expensive) robot!

I'll be using two Linksys NSLU NAS devices using Unslung software as the main site webservers, FTP servers and fileservers, a Toshiba Laptop for guidance tasks, an Acer Aspire 1712 Lugtop for imaging tasks, and a AMD workstation running SUSE Linux for webcam applications, an ObservatoryWiki (using the MediaWiki PHP software on Apache2 software and MySQL) and other applications that come up.