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My travels in Sweden:
2017 years Mariestad Star Party

MAK, Mariestad Astronomy Club arranged a Starparty in August 2017. This was our second star party meeting at this place. New to this year for us was that I hold a speech about a DIY observatory building project.

The Star Party was held in 25th to 26th of August. We left Stockholm the 25th stayed at a B&B at Sjötorp, about 15 km away. A traffic accident delayed us and we didn't get time to participate the first day.

Arriving to the star party

We came early on Saturday, about 10 am. There were not many other here at that early time.

Here are the astronomers telescope place, they prepare their equipment to take deep sky photos the coming night. Some people stayed here several days in their camping buses.

In the club house they started early to prepare the dinner that was served later at the evening.

Tables are here for them who had equipment to sell, I bought some for me and a friend.

Newton telescope by R. Schöldström

This was fantastic for me to see. When I was a young boy in the late 1960s I dreamed about to build my own telescope. At company Clas Ohlson they had a book about how to build a mirror telescope, the writer was master engineer R. Schöldström. The book was printed already 1962. This never came true for me. One difficult part was that you had to grind your own mirror.

This man, Göran, did what I didn't do. He built one of these telescopes. But he cheated a bit and bought a ready made mirror. Göran built this telescope 1971, 46 years ago. Now he want to sell this beautiful wooden telescope.

Such a telescope must be meant to be in the living room!

Here I have found a text where R. Schöldström is mentioned, sorry, only in Swedish:

https://amatorastronomi. wordpress.com/ 2014/10/18/ teleskopestetik/

Who will be the lucky owner of this telescope? Let me know!

I forgotten to ask Göran what kind of observations he have done over the years with this telescope, I shall try to contact him.

Update:
Later when I came in contact with Göran again he told me the full story of his telescope, here you can read it, it's written in Swedish:

Göran's Telescope story

You find more photos of the telescope under Göran's telescope story.

Minnesfjället's mill stone mine

One part of Mariestad's Star party was that we could get a guided tour to a mill stone mine. It was just 30 minutes walk away. Here we follow the path to the mine.

Info about Minnesfjället's millstone mill (only Swedish):

http://qvarnstensgruvan.se/wp/

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We just need to follow the red markings that are for a pilgrim path.

The scenic path leads us past moss-clad stones.

Now we are in the mining area.

We pass a open-cast mine, there are a lot of them around the mountain's base.

An opening to a mine, this one is not allowed to visit, it could be dangerous.

Here is one mill stone that has been left because it's broken. Normally they don't even bring them up from the mine if they are faulty.

One of the old houses.

Here we got instructions were to go.

When working in the mine there is a need of iron tools, here the black smith made these tools.

A winch that they used to bring up the heavy stones from the mine.

Inside this house Werner Herthnek informed us about the mill stone mine and it's history.

Werner told us that this is a very old mine, it' started as open cast-mines lot of hundred years ago and lasted to about the beginning of the 2000 century.

Here I'm prepared to enter the mine.

This is the only mine here that we are allowed to visit.

It's dark inside here and cold too.

Werner told us that they inspect this mine every year to see that it's safe to enter.

They have left pillars to hold the roof up, about five meters apart.

Here you can see the arc from when they broke the big stones out of the rock, the weight of the biggest could be many hundreds kilograms.

If the mill stone broke apart it was a catastrophe, one or more weeks of work without being paid.

There is also a museum here where you can see the tools they had to their help in the mine.

Astronomy speeches

Sören started the MAK speech and told us about the MAK club.

Anders Wettergren talked about his visit to U.S. and the solar eclipse in August, 2017.

Christoffer Svenske talked about the Jupiter project. A collaboration all over the world led by Peter Rosén to take pictures of Jupiter. Peter has then joined all these pictures to a movie. Peter won this year's astronomy award for this. Christoffer was one of the participants.

You can see this fantastic movie here:

https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=YZc1Y662jtk

I (Lars Karlsson) talked about my observatory building project. This is a mini observatory to hold a 5" refractor, later maybe a compact 10" Newton telescope.

You can read about it here: