Haven’t posted in a while. Between Winter and some construction on the house, we haven’t had a chance to go out with the scope in a while. But that’s inspired me and some friends to build a ‘cheapo’ observatory on their property. We’ll be using a plastic shed (made by www.thinking-outside.com) which has a removable roof. I’ve just ordered a pier (35″ high) from www.durangoskies.com. The owner, Dave, was very helpful in working with me on the pier and fitting it to my Milburn wedge. Hopefully we’ll have it in 2 or 3 weeks. Sam’s Club used to sell the shed but they stopped selling it the day I was about to order it. Thankfully, another friend was willing to sell me his shed since he wants to upgrade his shed. We’ll be pouring a concrete foundation (probably 48″ down) for the pier. I’ll post more updates as the construction plans continue.

Sorry… no picture of this comet here. It’s too close to the horizon and sets to close to the sun. But this comet could be one of the brightest comets in the last 100 years. Here’s a link to a space telescope view of it (this link might expire eventually)…

http://www.space.com/spacewatch/soho_lasco_c3_live.html

I recently read a neat article in either Astronomy or Night Sky magazine (can’t recall which) where the author took pictures of the moon by splitting the moon into about 50 sections and then taking several pictures of each section. He then picked the best shots, stacked the shots for each section, and then spliced the 50 sections together for a really sharp image of the moon. I wanted to try this but only did 5 sections (about 8 shots in each section) for a total of about 40 shots. I used Registax to stack the images. The result is reasonable — could be better on a clearer night and with smaller sections but it was cold tonight! Click on the image for a close-up

We stayed up last night after a long day and hosting Thanksgiving dinner the day before but the sky was very clear with excellent “seeing”. We could very clearly resolve the Trapezium in Orion and the bluishness of Pleiades came through. I primarily focused on Pleaides, Orion’s Nebula, and the Beehive Cluster. I would have liked to try Comet Swan but the magnitude is now fairly low (and it was below the horizon!) Some things I learned are that the dew heaters and autoguiding are indispensable for a long period of imaging. I need to figure out a way to focus the camera better as well. The best shot was Pleaides shown here as I spent some time focusing (wish I had done more focusing on the other shots).

We didn’t see Mercury’s transit directly because it was raining all day but here’s a website that has some video.

I bought a Baader Solar-Filter which cost about $35 (got it from Company 7). This is a film-sheet that has a metalic filter laid on top and allows you to view the sun safely through the scope. Note: the film has to be added to the front of the scope since, if you put if after the light has been concentrated, the sunlight will burn through the film in a second (and burn through your eye in another second)! I removed the finderscope on the main scope to avoid the danger of looking through the finderscope and being blinded. I built a cardboard mask to put in front of the scope and to hold the solar-filter in place and got to try it out for 2 minutes before sunset — we were able to see the orb of the sun but because of the atmospheric turbulence, not much else. I’m hoping to try it again in the coming days and see if we can pick out a sunspot. The sun’s 11 year cycle of sunspots is at the low-end and will pick up again. Also, on November 8th, Mercury will transit the Sun so we’re going to try to see that if the sky is clear.

After two months of terrible skies (or being too busy), took the scope out tonight. Did some periodic error correction (compensates for inherent error in the gears of the scope) and then took a shot of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) which is about 2.5 million light years away. Here it is…

Tried some autoguiding again tonight but the clouds started rolling in. Plus the street lamp is just no fun so I’m going to try it at a darker site. Also did some imaging of Jupiter with the Meade LPI. Here’s the best shot… you can barely distinguish the atmospheric bands and the little blobs (left to right) are the moons Ganymede, Io, Europa, and Callisto.

Tried autoguiding for the first time last night. We first polar aligned the scope (not as well as I’d like but I didn’t need to get it perfect for what I wanted to try). I then used the Meade LPI camera connected to GuideDog software from barkoSoftware to keep the scope centered on a star. I mounted the Canon 300D on top of the scope and snapped some shots (of whatever dark patch of sky I could find). It was really a bad night for pictures (3/4 full moon, clouds, haze, you name it) but for the first time in all our attempts, the picture came out relatively sharp.

On a clearer night and with more precise preparation, I think this should could come out a lot better — I’m hoping to try to capture a nebula or something like that next time. I posted the shot here that turned out best.

Went out 2 nights ago but there was a lot of haze — it was the clearest night we’ve had in 2 weeks.  I had recently gotten the Meade LPI camera, a cheapo camera for planetary imaging.  I was using it primarily to calibrate the drive gears on the scope.  I will also use it to do periodic error correction (PEC) which corrects for inherent gearing problems with all scopes but I need to do that when the scope is on the wedge (another night).  We did try taking some shots of Jupiter but the haze was bad.  We capped the night by just doing some observing of the moon and tracking down craters with a moon atlas.