I had an update on the progress of my new 18″ today. It should have been finished, or nearly so, around now but the completion date has been put back a few weeks due to complications with a prior order. It’s a bit frustrating, of course, when you’re itching to get your hands on a nice shiny new bit of kit, but it can’t be helped and these things happen. The good news is that the upper tube assembly is done and the mirrors have also arrived. Anyway, 5 to 5.5 months is actually a pretty good lead time for a completed premium scope, I know people in the States who have to wait anything between eight months to 2 years for their scopes, unless they’re getting Obsessions which are ‘off the shelf’ scopes – and even then the mirrors have long lead times.

Hopefully it won’t be too many weeks until it’s ready, then the skies will be nice and dark and the weather – I hope!! – will have cleared up a bit!

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Nothing to do with astronomy, I see that the BBC are going to pull the plug on their Wildlife Fund. This is a shame as, despite half-assed support from the BBC, it has raised £3 million since its inception in 2007 for good wildlife causes. It’s even more of a shame when you consider the effort the Beeb put into Children In Need, Comic Relief and Sports Relief – if they’d been half as enthusiastic about their Wildlife Fund it could have helped so many more wild animals and their habitats: habitats and animals that our species is destroying at a prodigious and terrifying rate. People might argue that the human fundraisers are more high profile and people care more about them but I disagree – it’s because the BBC have done nothing, or next to nothing, to promote the Wildlife Fund yet everything to promote the other fundraisers. To me – at the risk of getting outraged emails – wildlife and the environment is every bit as important as the other good causes, maybe even more so. However it seems that a lot of people, including the BBC, care about children but not about the environment that those children, like all of us, live in.
There’s a petition here if you’d like to sign it.