For over 10 years, the main instrument at B.H.O. was a 40cm f5 Newtonian reflector on an equatorial computer controlled mount (manufactured by Astrotechniek). It was housed in our backyard in an observatory with a 4-meter rotating aluminium dome.(manufactured by Roger Van Huffel) Recently this telescope was moved to a darker site. Our dome now contains an 180mm APO refractor on an AP1200 mount. An important instrument placed in the prime focus of the main instrument is a CCD-camera. This is an electronic camera enabling us to make images of the stars. We are using an SBIG-ST10XME.  To operate the camera we use MaximDL-software. The camera is equipped with a filter wheel with BVRI filters (Bessel specifications) With proper software, the brightness of stars can be measured on these images. We also perform double-star measurements with ccd camera or bi-filar micrometer.

We are using Mira AP version 7 (distributed by Mirametrics (former Axiom Research)) for dark-framing and flatfielding our images, aswell as for performing aperture photometry.The resulting data are plotted with Excel. For period analysis we use Period98 and Peranso (made by Tonny Vanmuster)

In the autumn of 2003 we installed our old 25cm f/6 Newtonian telescope on an AP1200 mount, in a little roll-away shed. It was a very small shed, only containing the mount. The telescope tube and pc had to be taken in and out on clear nights, a very time consuming task. After a test - period of one year we concluded that the telescope had been giving us a lot of good data, and it was time to build a better shed...