Itärastit, Latokartano

Saturday orienteering again.
#2 a short but steep hill to climb from #1. Better fitness would not hurt 🙂
#3 and #4 not much to report
#5 biggest mistake of the day as I ran too far to a bigger road, not finding the small path that would have led directly to the control. Maybe 2-3min lost here.
#6 and #7 ok.
#8 again up that steep hill, resulting in not-so-great running speed once on top of the hill towards #8
#9 through #12 and finish were easy. Could have possibly saved time on #12 by running on the road instead of through the woods.
Time 51 min 19 s.

Triangular base for Dobson-mount

I made this triangular base for the telescope Dobson-mount we are building. It has three ca 640mm long 25mm-by-25mm aluminium profiles, cut at a 30-degree angle to make an equilateral triangle. It is held together with tapered pieces of 100mm wide 10mm thick aluminium bar that attach to the T-groove of the profile with M6 screws. Each corner has an adjustable foot.

The mount that goes on top of this triangle is also from 25-25 alu-profile:

Stay tuned for hopefully some lunar and/or planetary images when this project is done.

Iltarastit, Stensböle

They have been running the "evening" orienteering events on Sunday midday for a while now, since it is quite dark after 17-18 or so. This is the last event for Iltarastit, but there are a few other clubs organizing these for a couple of weeks still this season.

Nothing too dramatic on #1, #2, and #3. Then a lot of deep "canyons" and other steep places around #4 which caused some confusion - probably cost me about 5 minutes here. No problems at #5 but a bit of searching for #6 (not too much lost here, max 1 minute). Then I chose to run not straight, but along paths and roads to #7 - we shall see if that paid off when all the results are up on the web. Again a longer route along a path to #8. From #10 it would probably have been slightly faster to run in-between the houses to the road more directly. Nothing special at #11 and #12. Then #13 was drawn close to a fence, but I didn't really know on which side of the fence the control was - luckily there were others running to/from the control so I just followed them.

This took me about 57 minutes. If I could have avoided the big mistake at #4 and some smaller mistakes the time approaches 50minutes, which is OKish for amateur/fitness orienteering on a 5km course (for me anyway!).

Aurora borealis, Kilpisjärvi

Some intense aurora borealis (northern lights) visible last night around 23:00. I stayed out watching and photographing until about 00:30 but it seemed the intensity was fading continuously while dark clouds also appeared.

As usual the camera sees a much more intense green, while the red is almost completely invisible to the naked eye (at least for me).

Here is a time-lapse video of all frames from last night.