Jims Orion XT10 Astronomy Blog

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

The new Moon and a reasonably clear night tempted me this evening to setup the Celestron C6-SGT, but with the Moon low in the sky, and between buildings it was a race to get setup in time before it sank below the rooftops. My intention was to setup the scope’s Goto with the serial link to the laptop, and to have a go at using the Virtual Moon software to identify features, and also use it to control the goto of the scope to target items of interest.

I managed to get a brief viewing of the terminator under manual control, with my Hyperion 13mm cranked up to maximum magnification with both its fine tuning rings, plus a 2xBarlow, but I only managed to observe it for a few minutes before she disappeared behind the roofline. Damn.

So I gave up on the Virtual Moon idea, and turned my attention to seeing if I could take up where I left off a few nights before experimenting with using the Webcam plus focal reducer to capture some footage of less bright objects, so as to understand what the limitations of the un-modified webcam would be.

I attempted to view some of the star clusters in Auriga (M36, M37 and M38) and Gemini (M35). I was pleased to get the focal reducer focused on them, but it was quite difficult getting the webcam settings sensitive enough to pick up the clusters. I have taken some footage of each cluster, and content with that I packed up for the night (work tomorrow!), and will see what I can tease out from the captures with K3CCDTools in due course.

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Listed in Astrophotography, C6-SGT, Observing

Quite a while ago I bought a 0.8x Focal Reducer for my XT10i telescope in the hope that I would be able to obtain a wider field of view when taking astronomy pictures with my SPC900NC webcam.

Unfortunately I couldn’t get the damn thing to focus, even with my Low-Profile Crayford Focuser. It may be just that I need to get an extension tube to increase the focal length, or it might be that the focus is actually shorter than the crayford can go even at its minimum. Not sure really.

So for a while the reducer went unused.

However now that I’ve got a C6 SGT XLT as my second telescope I’ve been waiting for a decent night for viewing, and one evening when there was an almost full Moon I thought it would be an ideal easy target for understanding how to use the focal reducer.

Obviously the first thing to do was get the scope setup, and focus in the normal way with the webcam. With this achieved, next I added the focal reducer to the equation, and then tried focusing.

I was amazed at how many anti-clockwise rotations of the focus knob I had to turn! It needed about 5 full turns before it eventually came to focus, and then I was able to see how much more of the moon the view now covered using the reducer.

Since everything was now setup, it made perfect sense to attempt my very first moon mosaic, so I got the best focus I could, made the best adjustment with the webcam for its various settings; gain, white balance, brightness, gamma, FPS and shutter speed, and then went about making a number of 10 second video captures, repositioning the scope target to take the whole surface of the Moon, allowing some overlap from one image to the next.

Or so I thought!

Moon Mosaic Mistake

Back indoors I processed each individual capture using K3CCDTools, being careful to try and use the same settings and enhancements for each AVI movie, and then using Photoshop I set about importing each image and overlaying and aligning them, making adjustments to the levels of each image to make them match up as best as I could.

Of course I didn’t realise until I had done this that some big moon mouse had taken a hefty bite out of the cheese. Bugger it, I really thought I had it covered, so to speak.

You live and learn. I’m quite pleased with the level of detail, but I think there’s a few things I need to improve for the next time. The white balance seems incorrect as the colours of the Moon don’t seem right, although this might have been me overcooking some hue/saturation settings in Photoshop. Also I could use some gaussian blur at the edges of each image to give a smoother transition from one to the next.

Click the image to see and zoom into the full size picture.

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Listed in Astrophotography, C6-SGT, Observing

The last time I took some pictures of planet Saturn was 1 year ago in March 2008. How time flies when you’re waiting for weather good enough to get the telescope out!

In fact these latest pictures were taken with the same webcam, but now with my new Celestron C6 SGT telescope.

Saturn - Rings almost edge-on

You can see several photos from the same observing session on my Astrophotography Photos of Planet Saturn page, demonstrating the the stages of different pre and post-processing techniques using K3CCDTools or Registax and Photoshop to improve on the basic images.

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Listed in Astrophotography, C6-SGT, Observing

Hooray, I saw Comet Lulin tonight at last! First in my 20×80’s to see if I could locate it, then setup the XT10i and used my 38mm SWA EP to get a nice view of its fuzzy body. Using averted vision and moving my eye around the view I could clearly make out its faint tail, which was quite long. I would say I could make out 10 times its width in tail length.

Next I swapped to a 10mm EP, and watched very carefully to see Lulin’s position relative to two others stars. Over the course of 5-10mins I watched the comet move from an acute angle with the two reference stars, until it made a 90 degree angle, then became an obtuse angle. At this higher magnification I was just able to make out the brighter core of the comet.

It’s fascinating to actually be able to make out the movement in such a short space of time.

Also in this observing session I took in Saturn, its rings I can make out even though they’re almost edge on, and even in my 38mm SWA! The Beehive cluster, and M65 and M66 in Leo.

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Listed in Observing, XT10

Clean 10x50 Binos

I’ve just finished writing an article on how I recently renovated my favourite pair of very old 10×50 binos, which had become very stiff and difficult to operate, so that the focusing knobs were much smoother to operate, and so this has now made the binoculars an absolute pleasure to use.

Focusing is now feather-light whereas before cleaning an re-greasing the moving parts, it required too much effort and pressure to rotate the focuser knob, and the Diopter focuser. This would result in small shaking or vibration of the binos while I was holding them, which in turn made judging the sharpness of focus more difficult.

You can read the article on my web site here:-

How to clean/renovate/regrease an old pair of 10×50 Binoculars

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Listed in Modifications

Recently First Light Optics inadvertently delivered two telescopes to me, which was quite amusing, but needless to say I did the right thing and returned one to them.

But as a thank-you for being honest, FLO very kindly sent me a freebie to use with my new C6-S telescope, and asked me what I thought of the gadget.

Rigel QuikFinder Introduction

It’s a red-dot finder scope from Rigel which is apparently a fairly new finder scope on the market. I already own a red-dot finder that I got for use with my XT10i newtonian-reflector telescope, but that one was the ScopeTekNix Multi-LED Reticule Reflex Red-dot Finder that I purchased from Scopes-n-Skies. So I already had a similar type of finder to make the comparison with.

Rigel QuikFinder Red-Dot Finder Scope

My first impressions of the Rigel QuikFinder when I opened its box was that it seemed rather “plasticky” (click picture for larger image), but this was because my ScopeTeknix finder is CNC machined black anodised aluminium, which looks and feels a more professional product than the Rigel, and so I wondered about the durability of the Rigel finder. It looks functional and appears to be fairly rugged.

Constructed of plastic does however mean that the Rigel is very light, so has little effect on the balance of your scope.

The price of the Rigel is very similar to the ScopeTeknix, which surprised me too. I get the impression that your money is going on the electronics, rather than the solid engineering of the ScopeTeknix.

Mounting

The unit is supplied with two baseplates so that you can attach a mount onto two seperate telescopes and swap the finder between them which I thought was a nice touch. Attaching and removing the finder from the baseplate is quick and easy, yet the clipping action is good and firm when in place, and the finder does not move at all, essential once aligned.

Some double-sided contact adhesive strips are supplied to allow the baseplate to be fixed to the telescope, but each baseplate also has a single central screwhole for mounting. I used one of the mounting screwpoints already provided on my C6-S telescope to fix the baseplate, and found that it needed tightening reasonably fast to hold the baseplate firm as otherwise it might rotate when attaching or using the finder.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Listed in Review

Apologies to anyone who has tried using the Music Player on my Orion-XT10.com site recently, it’s been broken!

Adobe brought out Version 10 of their Flash Player recently which has tighter security, and so I needed to update the Wimpy MP3 Player that my website uses to play its music.

Unfortunately even though Wimpy provided a new version to fix the problem, I didn’t notice it wasn’t working for a little while.

Anyway, it seems to be working again properly for Firefox and Internet Explorer, so if you want to listen then go to my Astro Cosmic Deep Space themed choice of music.

Enjoy!

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Listed in XT10

Tonight, Moon spread slow, solar White against Black
Her soft eery glow tween fleeting Wisps track

Cast shadowy patterns, ‘pon glistening carpet herewith,
Reflect ten-thousand-fold pinpoints, honouring heavens Zenith.

The Field dark, and yet strangely alive,
Shows overhead passing. And synchronised
The gray shapes blurred motion; Cast down - No Sound.

Marching from far side to near……..

Eyes downward, sense heightened, and so faint I see

The pulse of Snow Moonlight - so fine and the Hue
Near magical, borders on Aurora Blue,
Each Clouds edge advance the cold ground into View

Again, overhead passing they flee.

English snow, so rare and now such a Sight,
Moon shines ebb, then flow, down up to the Night
This wonder, the quietness, her crisp icy flight

I ponder Mare Tranquillitatis for me?

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Listed in Astronomy, Observing