Nice looking 'can' Dennis.
Not sure to call it a 'pot in a bucket' or 'bucket with pot' tho..
Luv the 'vernier' scale knob. Nice touch.
Adds class to your bucket.
Now, lets hope it does the job.
Regs, Laurie..
Quite a novel approach Denis. It looks very impressive. You might want to consider painting the outside of the bucket Black though. I notice that in the last image, the Leds individual glow can be seen, this means that external light if there is any, such as in daytime, might get in and cause uneven illumination.
But it looks great! hope it works well for you.
The illuminated exposure was of 20 secs duration to bring out the glow. In the field, I guestimate the exposure time to be around 1 sec for Luminance and up to 10 secs for R G B flats based on previous experience.
I mostly take flats in the dark, so daylight light intrusion is not an issue, although thinking further, I reckon that placing a diffuser sheet in an empty solar filter cell would be a good alternative if you want to take flats at dawn or dusk; just point the OTA at a clear piece of blue skies with no clouds or gradient.
Seeing the LEDs through the bucket can also be useful to confirm that all 6 are firing, although as they are wired in series I guess that isn’t necessary; if one goes they won’t illuminate.
The main reason I guess for blackening the outside, is to avoid being thrown out of the observing paddock by the DOB owners and eye-ballers!
Although this project started out with the circuit diagram showing LED’s in parallel, as I had a 24V 1A mains adapter and with the simpler in series wiring of the LEDs, I settled on wiring them in series with a single 120 Ohm resistor.
