Blue Tit eggs

In addition to automatically monitoring my TrailCam, the garden based Raspberry Pi has continued to watch the Blue Tits in Bird Box III which have this year laid a clutch of seven eggs, averaging one a day.

No eggs

One week later, seven eggs

Raspberry Pi Trail Cam - Update

Its been two months since I posted the first set of photos captured by my Raspberry Pi trail-cam. Since the UK had some unexpected snow in March 2013 - during which the garden based Raspberry Pi continued to work just fine.

Pheasants in the snow

Bar missing some days where the SD card filled up, and a couple of occasions when for reasons unknown motion failed, the Raspberry Pi worked very nicely - despite the cold. There were a few more unexpected sightings in the last week...

Moving the mirror on the SkyWatcher 130M

My SkyWatcher 130M telescope needs a little help to reach prime focus with a DSLR camera (see also this great blog post). So I decided to move the primary mirror up the tube to allow my Canon EOS to reach focus when attached directly to the T-ring for prime focus astrophotography. This involved almost completely dis-assemblying it, playing with new nuts and bolts, then putting it back together.

I started by removing the spider and secondary mirror assembly, which are held by four recessed screws and nuts on the inside (which should not be dropped onto the primary mirror):

Four screws hold the SkyWatcher 130M spider

SkyWatcher 130M (SK1309EQ2) secondary mirror

Installing Canon EOS Utility on Mac without the CD

My second hand Canon EOS 1000D has arrived (intended for astrophotography), but without the manual or software CD. Canon provide this stuff to download on their website which is great, except that the software is intended only to update an existing installation originally made from the CD-ROM. That seems stupid on many levels - the only people interested in using this software will have a Canon camera. Practically speaking, I have neither the Canon CD-ROM, nor in fact even a CD-ROM drive. Apple don't believe in them any more ;)

Fortunately enterprising people have worked out how to hack the Canon software to install without the CD-ROM, both on Windows (e.g. here) and on Mac OS X. Canon don't support Linux.

Raspberry Pi motion sensitive Trail-Cam

My Raspberry Pi at the bottom of the garden is now monitoring an unmodified XBox webcam pointing at a fence break, rather than the mice visiting the compost heap. This uses the Motion software to hopefully catch anything walking past - like the pheasants I've seen using this route.

Mr. Pheasant

Mr. Pheasant and two wives in two

Pheasant on a sunny day

Quite a regular visitor

While most of the images so far have been of pheasants, there were a few surprises too.