Jims Orion XT10 Astronomy Blog

20x80 Binos

For the first May bank holiday weekend my wife, the dog and myself took ourselves away to the Lake District for a 4-day break. Before going I had checked the weather forecast which predicted a pretty poor weekend for the whole duration.

As we packed everything ready to go away, I looked at my giant binos and thought, “There hardly seems any point as its going to be mostly cloudy, wet and dismal all weekend“.

Silly me! It doesn’t take much to pack binos and a tripod.

Once we were up in Cumbria, we had just one major downpour on the Saturday afternoon, but otherwise lovely clear starry views between some light cloud on the Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights! I even saw a couple of meteors.

I guess we just get so used to poor viewing conditions in England, that we kinda give up sometimes.

Moral of the story: Never trust the weatherman!

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Listed in Astronomy, Observing

I received an email from Joao in Mexico, who has just purchased an XT10i, and had a question for me about the Intelliscope unit supplied with his new XT10i telescope. He was confused because the Intelliscope altitude encoder board supplied seemed to be too large when he came to install it on the side panel. The board was larger than the pre-drilled mounting holes allowed for. I suggested this sounded like it might be that the wrong Intelliscope unit had been provided, and when Joao discussed the problem with his supplier, it transpired this was exactly what had happened. They had supplied the Intelliscope unit intended for the XX14i, instead of for the XT10i. Thankfully they are sending him the correct unit.

Much of my astronomy recently has been focused on my Celestron C6-SGT Goto scope on an EQ mount, mainly due to my interest in astrophotography with a modified webcam. Anyway, prompted partly by Joao’s question I decided it was high time I got my XT10i out again and enjoyed some nice bright views of the night sky with the XT’s larger aperture. English weather has at last abated and given some nice clear nights, so last night I took the XT10i out for a long overdue spin.

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Listed in Collimation, Observing, XT10

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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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