Jims Orion XT10 Astronomy Blog

After my experimental “first light” imaging session with my newly modified Phillips SPC900NC webcam for Long Exposures (Steve Chambers mod), I have now processed the images and this is what they look like. They’re not visually fantastic, but for a first attempt I’m well pleased. Generally they were 15-20 second exposures. They couldn’t be any longer because I had not drift-aligned my scope. Also I setup K3CCDTools to take a sequence of only 5 frames for each object, because my objective is learning, not quality at this stage. I also created a Dark Frame image which K3CCDTools subtracts from frames to remove webcam noise and hot pixels.

Mars

First image is Mars again. I wanted to improve on my Mars imaging of a few nights ago, and tonights session was a much clearer night, but despite poor seeing the results are more detailed. This used the webcam in Normal mode (long exposure switched off), since Mars is far brighter than deep sky objects like nebulae and galaxies.

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Section of Pleiades

Next up is a section of M45 the Pleiades. I had hoped that with my focal reducer (0.6x) I would get a full view of the group of stars, but the webcams field of view is simply too small, so I probably need a better focal reducer. So, that’s something else I’ve learned! The exposure is simply too short to show any of the lovely blue nebulosity normally associated with the Pleiades.

M81 Bodes Galaxy

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Wow! My first properly imaged DSO, this is M81 Bodes Galaxy. If the scope were properly drift aligned to stop trailing I could have taken a much longer exposure than the 5x 20 second frames I took for this shot, which should have brought out detail in the spiral arms. All you can see in this image is the bright central core, but compared with pro photos the spiral arms would actually extend out to almost half the width of this photo! Maybe I should have said, sod the trailing just up the exposure to say 1 minute to see what it looked like.

You can see a better example of M81 taken with a webcam at Ash’s Astro Pages, a site I came across which gave me a good idea of what sort of results I should be able to achieve. And with a 10inch SCT (mine is 6inch), plus a Canon 350D and stacking 27×3minute frames you can aspire to get a fantastic image of M81 like this, awesome. I’ve got a little way to go yet!

M66

And here is M66, part of the Leo Triplet. Again the webcam field of view is too small to capture the neighbours in the triplet. Even though I took 5 frames set at 15 seconds each, sometimes K3CCDTools makes the timing of the first frame a lot longer (I think its to do with when you click the record button if you’ve already been previewing the image for a while). This resulted in the first frame being about 25 seconds long, and so this picture is actually just that single longer exposure frame, and shows just a bit more of the galaxies structure, albeit rather faint.

Overall the things I have learnt are:-

• to get good results I will need to stack more images to improve the quality
• I will need to learn drift alignment properly to get much better tracking of objects, and this will enable me to take longer exposures without trailing
• while the webcam is great for learning, I should set my expectations appropriately. Its not a professional camera, so it won’t give the smoothness, detail or quality of DSLR’s like the Canon 300D or 350D which are faourites for amateur astrophotography.

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Listed in Astrophotography, C6-SGT, XT10

Its the end of another long cold session with my Celestron C6-SGT and everything is packed away. Ice is melting off the screen of my laptop as I type and drink a nice mug of hot chocolate. Its been a very nice clear night and finally, at last, I have been able to try out the Long Exposure mod on my webcam. Hooray!

After another short session grabbing a couple more sequences of Mars, trying to improve and refine on my previous session shooting Mars (but poor seeing again - I think it must be heat rising from the neighbouring houses, particularly with their boiler fumes puffing out).

I felt the best and least taxing astro object to have a go at for “first light” with the LX mod would be the Pleiades. Orion and M42 would have been nice to try, but they’ve set below the neighbours house already.

The webcam has quite a narrow field of view, and even with a focal reducer I can’t get much coverage of M45. The next obstacle I’ve discovered when moving into the not-so-bright territory of stars, clusters and DSO’s is that finding them and focusing them is a lot harder than something bright and big like the Moon or Mars. First off, centering the view with an eyepiece, then replacing it with the webcam, and refocusing the scope while watching the image in K3CCDTools on the laptop takes time.

I’m having to learn to count 4 half-turns anti-clockwise of the focuser when changing from eyepiece to webcam, and something like 16 half-turns anti-clockwise when the focal reducer is also added to the webcam.

Anyway, I’ve managed to get a few nice bright stars of M45, and it seems plenty of colour. I will probably have to experiment more with settings of the webcam and exposure times, which I’ve been trying out 10, 15, 20 and 30 second durations. Above 15 seconds some motion of the stars is noticeable because even though I took my time to polar align the EQ5 mount as best as possible, I have not yet attempted “drift alignment” (all in good time, and one thing at a time).

The next target I tried was M81 (Bodes Galaxy?) and after quite a bit of time and effort finding it, swapping eyepiece for webcam, refocusing and recentering, while using a fairly short exposure of 2 or 5 seconds to make the process easier, I turned up the exposure, and could definitely see the core of the galaxy glowing quite nice and brightly.

There was also some haze around the core, and I’m wondering how much the processing of the images will improve the view, and whether I can expect to see the arms of the galaxy? I’ve also taken a dark map image so that hopefully this will improve things too.

Next I attempted finding M51 and M101, but they didn’t look very bright in the eyepiece, and it was hopeless trying to find them with the webcam. After a while, I thought I would check the glass on the front of the scope, and to my dismay found it completely covered with dew!

Damn, maybe I need to turn up my dew controller heater? So I flicked the switch to constantly On, and played tug-o-war with my dog while I waited a few minutes. When I came back, it seemed like nothing had happened, and I was beginning to curse my homemade dew controller thinking it was useless, or too cold, when I suddenly noticed, duh, even though the dew controller LED was flashing on and off, I hadn’t plugged the bloody heater cable into the controller box. What a freakin idiot!

So about 5 minutes later it was obviously working as the condensation was starting to disappear off the glass, and after about 15 mins was almost all gone, nice one it does work.

I also noticed on the preview screen for the image that the scope was catching some light at an angle from a cursed streetlamp at the end of my garden, so decided to try a different region of sky, and aimed at the Triplet of galaxies in Leo. Again it took a fair bit of work getting M66 centred and focused, but managed to take 5×15 second frames and 1 dark map frame.

I felt this was a good first attempt with Long Exposure images, and I should do the processing in K3CCDTools to see how things have turned out, before getting too ambitious with drift aligning or attempting even longer exposures.

I’m also starting to appreciate how much work goes into getting even basic astrophotography results. Very satisfying and exciting nonetheless.

Ok, its 1.20am and work tomorrow, so the processing will have to wait! Goodnight.

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Listed in Astrophotography, C6-SGT, Observing

Mars 1

Here are the processed images of Mars from my imaging session last night using an SPC900NC webcam and 2x Barlow, with my C6-SGT XLT telescope.

These were approx. 10 x 30 second duration AVI sequences which I aligned and stacked using K3CCDTools, and including some histogram and unsharp mask enhancement to bring out the details.

I only uploaded these 3 photos because the overall results are fairly similar.

Mars 2

The night was very misty, and with light cloud, and lots of movement due to poor seeing, so I’m very pleased with these first “proper” astrophotography pictures I’ve taken of Mars.

Another thing that surprised me was just how “red” the Red Planet really is.

The last time I attempted Mars was just over 2 years ago, by holding Pentax Optio L30  digital-cam to the eyepiece on my Orion XT10i 10inch Dobsonian, which were incredibly blurry and amateur.

You can see how awful those photos of Mars were in the Astrophotos section of the main website.

Mars 3

With these photos I feel like the results are actually worthy of being called “astronomy”, and I’m also impressed at being able to see the polar ice cap quite so clearly.

I’d like to have another go on a better night soon, while Mars is still bright and high.

Hopefully I will be able to get better detail, because observed by naked eye I am sure the polar ice cap covers more area, but I think the poor “seeing” has caused it to recede somewhat in the image processing.

If you look very carefully you can see NASA’s Spirit Rover stuck in the sand, poor thing!

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Listed in Astrophotography, C6-SGT, Observing

Just a quick diary post tonight. More practice at setting up and polar alignment of my EQ5 Synscan Goto, and C6 SCT, to try and get some webcam images of Mars. I’ve managed to get some footage at prime focus and 2xBarlow recorded into K3CCDTools. Too late to be processing tonight, so pics will have to wait. The seeing was not terribly good, and I was doing a lot of chase-me focusing! In fact that seemed to be about all I was doing. I was impressed by the redness of Mars through the webcam, and spent ages trying to get not only focus correct, but also experimenting with the settings; FPS, Gain, Shutter Speed, Gamma, Brightness.

I must be getting the hang of polar alignment, and scope 3-star alignment now, because even at 240x magnification Mars took a good 15 minutes to move only slightly off centre. I’ve yet to master drift alignment. Dew control was good also.

Really I had wanted to try out the webcam long exposure mod too, but yet again I’ve been foiled by light cloud and mistyness moving in after an hour or so, which meant that by the time I’d got to grips with Mars, there was just no way I would get any DSO’s, and the moon was rising, with a big misty halo, and consequently a very poor view of it. Patience is definitely a virtue, but I’m getting a bit fed up with all this waiting. I turned on the LX mode anyway, and was pleased that it is working properly now, with Mars looking like a mini-Sun.

On another note, I’m about half-way through creating a new page for the main website detailing my dew controller, with lots of pics and links to the various other sites I came across while researching it.

That’s all for now. Anyone else doing webcam imaging of Mars recently?

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Listed in Astrophotography, C6-SGT

Good nights for astronomy are often few and far between in the UK. We’ve had the usual run of miserable, rainy, cloudy nights. Sometimes when the early evening sky looks promising, inevitably the clouds roll in by the time we’ve had our supper!

So when a good, clear, cold night comes along you grab the opportunity, and make the most of it. Last night was one of those times, so I planned to get several things done which had been waiting far too long;

• Become more familiar with Polar Alignment
• Check the collimation of my C6-SGT (Schmidt-Cassegrain)
• Try viewing Mars again
• Try out my SPC900NC webcam now that I’ve done the Steve Chambers long-exposure mod (quite excited about this)
• More testing of my home-made Dew Controller

Polar Alignment

In a previous post I explained how I had installed my new polar scope in my EQ5 mount, but that it absolutely did my head in. Well I’ve done a fair bit of reading up on it, and now have it set up correctly.

1. I re-centred the reticule inside the scope body (I’d made the classic mistake of undoing the adjustment screws too much and it had dropped down inside).
2. I have done a daytime sighting up on a distant abject and collimated the polar scope reticule for rotational centred alignment with the RA axis.
3. I’ve learnt how to set the polar alignment RA index scale and date circles to give correct indication of Polaris transits for any day/time (always wondered what those scales were for!).
4. And using PolarFinder.exe I can double-check I’ve got it right (although you must remember to set your longitude every time you run the program, pity it doesn’t remember this setting).

So this time polar aligning went fairly well. I used the date circles to ensure I knew how to use them - practice makes perfect, and compared the RA rotated position of the reticule for the Polaris circlet, with the screen display of PolarFinder. Finally careful alt/az adjustments of the mount to bring Polaris into the circlet.

Tip: The reticule markings in the Polar Scope are difficult to see in the dark. Shining a red torch at an oblique angle into the top polar scope mount opening allows you to see the markings, although holding the torch there while also adjusting altitude and azimuth, and crouching below the mount to peer through the polar scope eyepiece, is quite tricky!

Polar Alignment Resources

Some of the web links I provide below mention finding the “transit of Polaris” for a given date. At first I thought this was some special date which occurs only once in a while! In fact any star “transits” the celestial meridian twice every day, at its highest and lowest points;

Transit: An astronomical transit occurs when a celestial body crosses your local Meridian due to the Earth’s rotation, about halfway between its rising and its setting (east/west). At this time it reaches its maximum altitude (highest point in the sky). For instance, the Sun transits the meridian at “solar noon” which may deviate from our clock-driven “local noon”. Observation of meridian transits were once very important for timekeeping purposes before the advent of standard time zones and accurate clocks.

Upper Culmination: An astronomical object’s Upper Culmination occurs at the time and place in the sky where it reaches its highest altitude on your Meridian. For polar alignment, it is this point we are interested in determining for Polaris, so we can set the date circles just once, and it will be reasonably accurate for all dates/times thereafter. Of course this must be set correctly for your longitude on earth (local meridian), for the date and precise time Polaris would be highest (say today), and once you know that time (using Polarfinder, an ephemeris or astronomy software like Stellarium), and you subsequently set the date circles, they will allow you to rotate the mount to the position Polaris has rotated to at the time you are setting up your mount.

Lower Culmination: An astronomical object’s Lower Culmination occurs at the time and place in the sky where it reaches its lowest altitude on your Meridian. If it is below the horizon at that time it is not visible so this term is usually applied to circumpolar objects.

The absolute best pages I found for describing the Polar Alignment procedure are as follows:-

• Astro Baby’s Polar Alignment for the HEQ5 mount - this gives 3 pages of very helpful instruction with several photos and diagrams. Exceptional. It also has a “simple polar alignment” page for quick/easy observation when accurate alignment is not required.
• this page by Carsten Arnholm at http://arnholm.org/astro/ on telescope polar alignment, which also contains a link to a nice little utility called PolarFinder.exe created by Jason Dale which replicates on-screen the “inverted” view through your polar scope of where Polaris is, at different times of the night. Simply rotate your mount about RA until the view matches the program, then adjust alt/az to put Polaris in the circlet. Easy!
• Galactic Fool - How to Polar Align an EQ mount - another excellent page with photos, but not quite as detailed as the first link above.
• Polar Alignment with HEQ5 and HEQ6 Mounts - a page by Chanctonbury Observatory with clear diagrams.
• A Quick Guide to the Celestial Sphere - this handy reference will remind you what is meant by meridian, circumpolar, celestial equator, zenith.
• Transits and Culminations - explaining transits, lower/upper culminations, circumpolar, and so forth.

Checking the SCT Collimation

Frequently while viewing through my SCT I’ve noticed stars had a slight flaring to one side of them, which made focusing to a fine pin-point difficult. Ever since buying the scope I’ve trusted that the factory had adjusted the collimation, but really I should have done something about this well before now.

So tonight I performed a “star-test” and sighted up on Sirius dead centre in a 10mm eyepiece to give a good degree of magnification, and then de-focused pre and post focus point to show the rings and pay attention to them.

Indeed as suspected, the rings were not concentric and shifted off to one side, so I carefully adjusted the three collimation screws on the front corrector plate. They were very tight, and it was necessary to loosen off one or other screw, to allow another to be tightened.

Only the tiniest adjustments must be made because each adjustment moves the star away from the centre of the view. If you make too large an adjustment the star disappears out of the field of view altogether. Re-centre, then make another small adjustment.

It didn’t take long to get the hang of it, and soon I had the correct concentric/parallel rings showing both pre/post focus, and when perfectly focused, the flaring had gone. So that’s two things ticked off my list.

Viewing Mars again

Mars is magnificent currently, very prominent in the night sky, bright and very obviosuly red. When I last viewed it through the scope a couple of weeks ago, it was very washed out by the blue Moon which was very close.

Tonight the half-moon is low down and in a completely different location, and now that I’ve got the scopes collimation sorted, I inserted my highest mag eyepiece and barlow combination. Wow! It’s a perfect disc, and I can see quite clearly the white polar ice-cap shining back at me, and even make out some of the darker markings on it. My scope is only a 6 inch, and so I’m quite pleased with this, although I must admit to getting “aperture fever”, and would love to get a bigger OTA now. Problem - money! Oh well, one day.

Try out Long Exposure mod

Now for the thing I’m most excited about trying out tonight.

Indoor testing of my webcam modified for astrophotography to allow long duration imaging, has been very encouraging. Putting the camera into dark cupboards, or experimenting in the bedroom with the lights turned out(!), has amazed me just how much the SPC900NC is able to make use of what little light there is.

I’ve been imagining wonderful vistas recorded of M42 Orion Nebula, or the blue wispyness of the Pleiades.

So I connected up the webcam to the laptop, and …… Boo, hiss, humbug. Nothing! Nada, zip! The laptop would not recognise it when I plugged it into the USB port. No amount of wiggling wires, unplugging and re-plugging would make it work. Sod it. I guess there’s a dodgy wire come loose. Which means I will have to dismantle and check it all over again.

So annoying.

Dew Controller performance

It’s very cold (in fact later after I had packed up we got snowfall), and tonight dew has been a big problem on the cold surfaces of the scope, the eyepieces, and also on the front corrector plate glass!

Fantastic! No, really this is great as it will be a good test of the dew controller!

So earlier I had turned on my newly built dew controller to see how well it works. It seems to be working ok-ish to keep the glass clear, but there is still some light coverage of very fine moisture on the glass, and as the night is getting colder it seems the dew controller is struggling to keep the glass clear.

There is a metal band around the front of the scope which holds the corrector plate, and I usually have the dew controller heater band positioned just below this at the “neck”, with an AC900 dark-cap observing shield wrapped around the metal band (to shade the scope from stray light).

I removed the dark-cap, and moved the heater band to wrap directly round the metal band of the corrector plate, then re-fastened the dark-cap shield over the top of the heater band. Within a few minutes the corrector plate completely cleared of moisture. Excellent!

Back to some real astronomy

The trouble with all of these gizmos and adjustments (some of them quite necessary), is that you spend an age getting ready, and get side-tracked from the simple enjoyment of just looking at the stars.

Being disheartened with the webcam not working, I decided instead to just get on and use the Tour feature of my Goto mount, and was soon looking deep into space marvelling at the faint fuzzies; Eskimo, Crab, Ring nebulas, Sombrero galaxy, M66, M67, M82 galaxies, M36/37/38 clusters, and a couple of others the tour pointed at, but for the life of me I couldn’t make out! Last of all I spent some time looking at several Double-Stars which I’ve done very little of.

By this time, the dew controller has paid its toll on my 12v PowerPack, the glass is starting to dew up again, and finally when I try to slew the mount round to another double-star, the motors just make a pathetic buzzing sound which means “Time for bed”.

Overall a good satisfying night of astronomy, with plenty of things achieved despite the failure of the webcam, which I can fix tomorrow, err I mean today!

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Listed in C6-SGT, Collimation, Observing

Well, maybe I’m slow on the uptake, but while experimenting with my iPod Touch more over the last few days to see what other astronomy related apps I can find (Star Walk, Starmap Pro, Moonwalk, etc), and the excellent NASA App being a fantastic resource, I have taken the time to find out more about podcasts.

So I did some searches in iTunes for astronomy related podcasts.

In part this was because I wanted to learn more about webcam astrophotography imaging since recently “modding” my SPC900NC webcam for Long Exposures (Steve Chambers mod), and found some podcasts which provided me with info on this topic.

Anyway, in doing so, I stumbled upon the excellent podcasts created by Fraser Cain & Dr. Pamela L. Gay at AstronomyCast.com and UniverseToday.com.

The teamwork and combination of Fraser who has a mellow, cool, young charm, coupled with the gorgeous voice of the incredibly knowledgeable Dr. Pamela Gay, makes for fascinating listening. I have suddenly discovered not only the convenience of enjoying podcasts in the car (I now drive slower), walking the dog (Ben now gets longer walks), or just before going to sleep (resulting in less sleep!), but also just how much I have been missing out in the furthering of my knowledge of astronomy.

Pamela has the ability to describe technical matter in a way that I can grasp. Her manner is relaxed, precise and very interesting, and she obviously knows her subject extremely well. Fraser also is very clued up, and asks the right kind of questions that pick up on things just discussed, to help summarize and clarify what was just explained by Pamela, while also leading into new areas. They work well together, and the presentation and quality of their podcast is excellent.

If you’re into astronomy I would highly recommend downloading their podcasts. The great thing is that there are several years worth of AstronomyCast podcasts in their archive to be listened to, on an incredibly diverse range of topics. So you can pick and choose what interests you immediately, and fill in the gaps with additional items from the archive later on.

I would also say, don’t skimp on the seemingly boring episodes. Even the historical stuff, for example learning about William Herschel, I found to be just as interesting as some of the “hot” scientific topics.

My appreciation of how stars, nebulas, clusters, black-holes, galaxies and so forth actually interact and affect each other has grown immensely over the last few days, right down to details of how atoms and electrons, quarks, strange, charm, ups/downs and all manner of our understanding of how things in the universe work. This new voyage of discovery makes my appreciation and observation of the heavens so much more enjoyable, now that I understand better what makes things tick.

Thanks Fraser and Pamela, you’ve answered so many questions I had, but was never sure where I would find the answers.

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Listed in Astronomy, Observing, Review

Last night/morning (Jan 29th/30th) was the first time I have been out with my C6-SGT not only for 2010, but also for a whole year (previous post explains about my pond building antics putting my astronomy on hold!).

Coming home from work the evening sky was beautifully clear, and I was in a great mood taking my dog Ben for his walk across the fields, listening to the brilliant Anjunadeep01 by Above&Beyond nice and loud on my iPod.

Earlier at work my astro mate James had showed me an article about the Moon, Mars and The Beehive Cluster in Cancer being nicely grouped, with Mars at opposition (closest/brightest, yet light takes 9 minutes to get to us!), and a Blue Moon (largest apparent diameter) and M44 in Cancer, (which is my star-sign), so in all a nice grouping to observe! (And another article about Moon, Mars and M44 Beehive Cluster).

Polar Frustrations

This was also the first chance for me to try out a new polar alignment scope I had been given (in return for a favour) for my EQ5+SynScan Goto upgrade (like a CG-5) german equatorial mount - but no instructions!

The main problem was that it took me an absolute age to get used to everything again, and despite taking it easy with the idea of understanding the polar scope and how to install and align it properly, it just did my head in!

Its difficult to see through it to make out Polaris and the surrounding stars, and I wasn’t sure whether it was screwed in the correct amount because the constellation markings for Cassiopeia and Ursa Major seemed on the wrong sides even when I rotated the mount about the Right Ascension axis (there are onstructions on my mount which prevent full rotation). So I was constantly taking the polar scope out, taking it indoors to see if there was some way of rotating the markings reticule independently of the body. Then I undid the 3 little hex screws of the collimation whilst it was in the mount, and I heard the reticule drop down inside the body of the scope! Hmmm. Thats screwed it for tonight. How the hell are you supposed to do this?

There are also markings for Octans on the reticule in the polar scope which I then thought was another star near Polaris that I was supposed to rotate the mount to align with. So some Googling revealed that was intended for use when you live in the Southern hemisphere, and use the constellation of Octans to align with, so this caused me yet more confusion.

After two hours frustration in the freezing cold (snow is forecast later tonight) I decided to just polar align by eye/hand through the mount without the polar scope installed, which has been perfectly adequate for casual observation on previous occasions, and I wanted to get on and observe properly.

On a positive note I found two useful things, this page by Carsten Arnholm at http://arnholm.org/astro/ on telescope polar alignment, which also contains a link to a nice little utility called PolarFinder.exe created by Jason Dale which shows you how to align the view through your polar scope at different times of the night. Check it out.

Dew Controller

At the start of the session I had plugged in my new dew controller band and control box which I had built myself, and this was again the first opportunity I’d had to try it out. Well there is no dewing up of the front glass on the telescope, but also tonight is quite a cold dry night, so perhaps not a real test of how effective it might be.

Stellarium Telescope Control

The next thing I wanted to try was controlling the Goto function of the CG-5 using my laptop with the Stellarium astronomy software installed. This requires the latest Ascom drivers together with a utility called Stellarium Scope

With these configured (some settings must be made, and serial cable plugged in via USB/Serial converter adaptor), it is simply a case of starting Stellarium Scope and connecting to the telescope, then selecting an object to view, then press CTRL-1 to slew the scope to the object. A crosshair target also appears on the Stellarium screen to indicate where the telescope is currently pointing. Oddly sometimes it gives a blue message box saying “Already slewing”, but pressing CTRL-1 a second time has the desired effect. Pressing CTRL-2 will “sync” Stellarium currently selected object to the current pointing position of the telescope mount hardware, and CTRL-3 is emergency stop slew.

I like it, and I’m very impressed by this control in a free piece of software. Stellarium just looks so nice and is very easy to use, whereas Carte du Ciel (also free, and with telescope control) I can never remember how to use it.

Observing

By now its 1am, and time to get a hot coffee, some whisky, my ski-jacket, and Ben dogs bed/blanket so he’s a bit warmer on the ground (he refuses to stay indoors when I’m outside).

With the telescope under control of the laptop, I slew round to Mars to get a view, and see its disc. With the Moon so close there is a lot of glare, and the background  is a pale bluey grey. I can only just make out markings on Mars, and although its Moons shoud be within the field of view, they are not visible. I try a variety of eyepieces, including my Hyperion 13mm + tuning rings + 2xBarlow which gives the maximum magnification I can achieve. Its ok, but not great. Perhaps if my SPC900NC webcam wasn’t in bits (I’m trying the Steve Chambers mod for long exposure), I might be able to get some imaging to reveal more.

Likewise the Beehive cluster, normally a beautiful cluster of diamonds, are fine pin-pricks against an even more washed out lighter background as this is much closer to the moon.

The Moon itself is blinding, so after installing a moon filter to make it more comfortable I slowly scan the surface and edges taking in the view. I love the fine control using the CG-5 handset to move the scope. My XT10i dob is fantastic for bright clear views, but it can be a bit unwieldy sometimes when trying to make fine pointing adjustments. Even the moon is a little disappointing when this bright and full - there is little contrast, no terminator to give shadows.

And finally my dew controller drains the battery to the point where the Goto fails to slew properly, drawing the session to a close at 2.30am.

Well probably not the greatest first light for 2010, and perhaps in retrospect I would have got a nicer wide-field view with my 20×80 binos, but enjoyable nonetheless for learning new things and getting back into the swing of things.

It was nice to think of poor little robot explorer Spirit up there on Mars surface, stuck fast in the sand with only 4 of his wheels working, yet despite this he is still to be used as a stationery observatory to track wobbles in Mars orbit, and dig deeper in the soil around him. I think its 6 years he’s worked now, when planned for just 3 months originally, what an amazing achievement. Well done NASA.

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Listed in XT10

Happy New Year to all my readers.

My last blog post was back in April when I had used my XT10i telescope as a theodolite measuring levels for my new pond.

Hooray - The last slab has been laid

Blimey, after a whole years work on our new koi pond and patio I am only just getting back to doing some astronomy. My favourite hobby has been sorely neglected during the summer months, with us regularly not finishing work on building the pond until 9 or 10pm at night after cleaning and putting tools away. And then by the time we’ve had supper I’ve been just plain too knackered to start getting my telescopes out.

Pond complete - Morning after the opening party

To celebrate we had a grand pond opening party to which all our family, friends and neighbours were invited, and about 60 people turned up. This had become a bit of a community project with regular visits from people interested to see how it was getting on. Some days we had 6 people helping, lugging bricks, blocks, cement or making tea!

The stepping stones

Here are the kids trying out the stepping stones, the morning after the party in November. We had lots of booze, lots of fireworks, and quite a few hangovers the next morning.

My XT10i Telescope was also the centre of attention at the party later in the evening. Lots of people saw it in the conservatory and begged me to set it up for them to  look through. They were amazed at the view of the moon, Jupiter, and Orion nebula  which were nice easy, and pleasing objects for them to see, so I felt I did a little bit for 2009 Astronomy Year!

Standing on top of the underground filter housing

Here are the grand-children at the waterfall and filter end of the pond. Lara is standing on top of the lid which opens up to reveal the pump house and filters, to allow maintenance on the pond filters. Behind the wall is a 500 litre  water tank which stores waste water from the pond for watering the garden.

My wife Barb, and son-in-law Brian

Above: Brian and my wife Barb enjoying a coffee break in the sunshine, sitting on the newly created steps that lead up to the pagoda.

The pillars for the stepping stones

The picture above gives an idea of the depth of the pond, and the sturdy construction of the stepping stones. And below is the underground filter pit which houses the bio-filters, water pumps, air-pump, ultra violet clarifier, electronic blanket weed controller, sump-pump and water level float switches, and the various electrics to control it all.

Inside the pond filter pit

So now that my koi and other fish are happy in their new bigger pond, I can hopefully get back to updating my XT10 website and tell you about some of the other things I’ve been doing related to astronomy.

For instance the improvements I made to my 20×80 binoculars to make them easier to use.

20x80 Focuser Key Bolt

And the electronic dew controller I have built for my Celestron C6-SGT scope.

Dew Controller electronics

DIY Dew Controller

And applying the Steve Chambers long exposure mod to my SPC900NC webcam.

That’s it for now, but more details about these things very soon.

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Listed in Astronomy, C6-SGT, XT10

Just lately I’ve been too busy with a completely different kind of project for me to do any astronomy, hence the rather long delay between my previous blog post and now.

We have been completely absorbed in the evenings designing a new pond for our fish. Basically the original pond (at 400 gallons) was too small for the number of fish (golden orfe, sarasa comets, shubunkins and ghost koi) which have after 5 years far outgrown the size of pond. The biggest fish (the koi) are about 16-18 inches long, and very fat.

Also we have been wanting to create a new patio area in the garden, part of which is in a darker part of the garden, which I plan to use for viewing the night sky! Yes, a cunning plan with an ulterior motive too.

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Part of the design work has been to use some landscape design software (Realtime Landscape Pro) to show a 3D view of the house, garden and pond/patio area, and of course this entailed accurately plotting the levels and contours of the ground which slopes to varying heights across our back yard.

Well, since I didn’t have a laser-level or theodolite to hand, I decided to use my XT10i for a new purpose other than observing the night sky! By levelling the base carefully on level ground using a spirit level, and aligning the main telescope tube exactly horizontal using a spirit level, I was able to defocus the 9×50 finder scope (which has cross-hairs) close enough to be able to focus on a 2 metre long piece of wood held vertically, to which I attached a clearly marked tape measure, with zero point on the bottom of the piece of wood. The main scope would not be able to focus this closely, nor do I have any eyepieces with cross-hairs which are essential for accurately reading off the dimensions. The nearest I was able to focus was just within about 5 metres of the finder scope.

By swinging the telescope around in azimuth only (being careful to ensure the altitude adjustment was locked tight and the scope kept horizontal) I was able to view different parts of the garden and align it on the measure held at various places around the plot. I could read off the measurement to ground level, and so work out the different levels above the lowest (”zero”) point of the garden. Once I had these measurements I entered them into the height grid contour points feature of the software, and so plot the contours of the land in the 3D view of the garden.

With this done I could carefully plan the position and necessary level differences and heights of the new patio and pond. The pond project is well into construction, and the new home for our fish will be 2100 gallons capacity.

See - my trusty XT10i telescope serves me well in the strangest ways! And saved me the cost of buying or hiring expensive (one use only) levelling equipment. And when the patio area is finally complete I will have a better location for observing the heavens. Perfect.

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Listed in XT10

After my previous attempts at getting some AVI captures of the star clusters in Auriga M36, M37, M38 and M35 in Gemini, with my webcam (which is not yet modified for long exposures) with my C6-SGT, this picture of M35 was the best out of them, although I admit it still pales in comparison to what could be achieved if the webcam were modified to allow longer exposures. (Click for full size).

M35 Cluster

The other footage of the Auriga clusters were not really bright enough, so did not make the grade!

Even in the above shot, only the brighter stars have come through, with the bulk of the cluster just too dim to have made any impact at such short exposure times. I used 5fps, and 1/25th sec exposure, with maximum Gain, and Gamma brightened slightly, and about 100 frames stacked. Then processed in K3CCDTools to align, stack and enhance, followed by further post-processing in Photoshop. I know I have overdone the Unsharp masking and curves, etc. resulting in a bit of a cartoony pic, but this was necessary to make the result worthwhile and get rid of the background noise, and I consider it more of an exercise in understanding the capabilities of the webcam as it is.

I was surprised to see the colours come out, and the two red stars helped me identify which part of the cluster I was seeing in the photo.

So the lesson learnt is that it certainly is possible to grab a cluster, but if I am to expect better photos, my SPC900NC webcam needs to be given the Steve Chambers long exposure mod. Good, it all adds up to more experience, and makes me appreciate the limitations of the gear I have, and a better understanding of what the next step must be.

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Listed in Astrophotography, C6-SGT, Observing