Tuesday, January 4th / 2011
The winter is the part of the year that offers me the best seats of the night. First of all, the darkness falls faster so I can actually be outside much sooner than any other times of the year. Furthermore, the constellations from early January to the beginning of March has the most spectacular sights! Unfortunately, this all being said, the winter holds a very dangerous enemy for me,... FROSTBITE! It's not really that it's cold out there once all dresse
hi the post finnaly came and a got the disk of which there is 2 installed it 11gb big install.my pc is pent5.2.8 gb and 3gb ram no graphics card. after insatll took a few mins to update and register the software with there website updated to latest version and it runs fine no crashs freezes ect i like it it offers a few more things than sterlluim has not got and the general lay out is great the gui is great theres so much stuff in this that it would take me weks totell you about it but th
I am a total novice to stargazing ..but have an general love of the night sky. So i waited in anticipation for this programme to spark my enthusiasm. I watched 30 minutes and then turned it OFF ...i couldnt bear dara O Briains approach to this subject ...it was awful and not funny and didnt bring any sort of dimension apart from annoying and interupting. What a shame. afraid i wont be watching tonight. what were the BBC thinking of ? Bad choice of co presenter.
im buying a skywatcher 190 mn pro mak newt and an neq6 mount for deep sky imaging with my eos450 dslr, i also want to get a televue powermate and t ring to image planets aswell but im not sure which one is best, and as there a bit expensive i dont want to buy one that to powerfull or one thats not powerful enough. has anyone out there got any advise they can offer, i would be most gratefull
The Romans managed to build complicated feats of engineering that stood the test of time. They had an ability to design systems for transferring water over long distances and Cities that was phenomenal...the humble Aqueduct. I, on the other hand, have spent the best part of a year and a half trying to keep the stuff out of my observatory. I have tried No Entry signs, a system of fines and even shouting at the water from a distance. Unfortunately water is somewhat ignorant, can't read and doesn't
Hi all, For some reason the link to my spectra in the previous blog idid not work :(:( so here is an updated link to it Stargazers Lounge - jsandse's Album: Spectra - Picture cheers John
My partner bought me the go to mount, but I am having a problem. I didn't have a serial port, so bought an adapter to usb. Downloaded a serial driver for it to run on usb. Have also downloaded the ascom platform, and its up date, and the EQMOD/EQASCOM software. Managed to get the mount recognised but when setting up it wouldn't find it on the ports. Thought it might be the serial driver, so tried 2 more but still couldn't solve the problem. Bought a serial port today, and fitted it fine, and sof
I have been teaching in the north for over ten years now. Ever since I have arrived to this remote community, I have looked upon the heavens with a greater respect and admiration! You see, being far from cities has its inconveniences but grants me a remarkable view of the night sky! I have experimented with two different telescopes in the past but n
Hi all, In my last blog I mentioned that you can generate spectra from "man-made" stellar models. In this blog I will talk a little bit more about my experience with these models. Just to rewind a bit say you have gone to the bother of capturing a stellar spectra. So you have this spectra with a number of lines in it. So what? what does it mean its just a bunch of lines - not very exciting...or is it? An example of the spectra you actually capture looks like the ones I took of Mizar in my
Hi every one just came across this software ,as a noob a thought a would get more things to help me locate and find the targets am after,looking at flat sheets of paper with constellations was a bit hard (did i have it the right way up?) any way so this afternoon a found" stellarium "(google it a may include a link) it is a great bit of software it took a bit of working out setting it up and a downloaded a few more things in to it which is all accessible from the sofware its self.
Hello All! I just got a Nexstar 6SE as a gift and feeling really overwhelmed. I am new to stargazerslounge.com and would appreciate any tips and tricks on making my gift useful and painless. I have always been intrigue by our solar system and the exploration of space. I am having a hard time calibrating my telescope, since I do not know my stars by heart. So I am slowly getting familiar with my new telescope. What other accessories is a must to make my star gazing phenomenal? -Apollo75
Welcome to the blog ! At the moment, trying to make the diversion between my main hobby that being photography to my newer one of Solar imaging. Last year I picked up a SolarMax 60mm Double Stacked scope and the views using it have been absolutely incredible. So to be able to capture with a camera what I can visually see through the eyepiece has really set me a challenge and one that unfortunately i now realise I have to save up and get a true imaging system as the DSLR by it's inherent sensor m
hi all well most of last night i spent reading and looking at filters my main area of interest is dso`s and most of the time will be spent at home in the back garden ,street light may be a problem but there's only one that's about 50m from the house any way "filters" i want to look at nebulas and galaxies ect and the odd planet now what would be a good choice a few suggestion would be great is this a trial and error thing with filters i read so much stuff last night i switche
:cool: Hello, well now that I started to get off my dang armchair and start wanting to dive into astronomy i went out last night and saw venus, well i hope i did haha only sad prt was i did it with a 10x50 pair of binoculars i got at a airshow for 5 dollars haha so i could only see a shining star. Hope to get a telescope soon but a budget will hold me somewhat short.
LET THE PREP BEGIN Hi every one just a update have cut the roof of the shed in the snow which was a little wild tried to attach the metal runners there but to no avail the snow beet me to it ,the other down side was "feet in first again" i never took the length and turning circle of the scope in to consideration befor hand this may be a prob some were a long the way when try in to to point in different ways we shall see,still no joy with the delivery
Hi Chaps, I'm new to all this but i need some help. OK bit of back ground... I have a Nikon D3000, which i understand is a good entry level DSLR, I want to buy a new telescope, it's the celestron nexstar 130 slt which again is a good entry level. What i need to know, is there an attachment out there I can get to join the two up. If not i'm going to have to look for a similar but different scope. Any help would be appreciated and thank you, and sorry for my first post being asking for advise.
Despite the almost full moon and several inches of frozen snow on the ground, I decided to get out and see what I could see using the new Binocular tripod mount bracket I'd just purchased from FLO. The snow was crunchy under foot, like someone had sugar-coated the ground. I printed off December's sky map and set my sights for M37, described as 'Very fine star cluster'. After spending some time reading the star map the wrong way around I finally figured out which part of the sky I should be lo
Thought I would take the opportunity to provide some notes of my experiences in astronomical spectroscopy to date with current projects carried out and others I would like to do in the hope it may help/motivate other people. My simple aim when I started out on astronomical spectroscopy was to take spectra and to understand how the spectral lines in stars are formed. So thats two objectives the practical side of doing spectroscopy and the theoretical side of finding out why things are the way the
This is more of a note to myself The focusser was in the origional position (far too close to the primary mirror) so I cut a new hole for the focusser 55mm closer to the top of the tube. After collimating images are quite a bit better. No more vingetting at 0.001 degrees off axis. Seeing was only ~2 arc seconds, Trapesium stars looked about 1:4 size to seperation.. but at low altitude. Straight up was ok still need to get collimation bang on, not 100% happy right now, although a focoult meas
A quick potted history is probably due. The scope is a Fullerscope MKIV mount with a 12" newt on it. I bought it about 11 years ago knowing it need pulling apart and rebuilding, but the price was low, the mount solid and the optics were good.. The bits that were rubbish I could change. The Newt has now been modified with a window so I no longer have diffraction spikes and tube currents are better suppressed. It does however make it rather heavy... I can just about lift it, portable is not
I never wrote a 'blog' before and I didn't really know where to post this - and whether it should be posted at all. But now it's a blog - in bad english. After being assaulted by the dewmonster I consulted the collective wisdom of SGL and constructed a dewshield from a campingmat. The mat is quite... erm.. pink so my always understanding and beautiful wife named my scope 'The Pig'. Nevertheless it works quite well. It also covers the 'truss' part of the scope and I like to imagine that contrast
As a Telrad user, I find Cartes du Ciel indispensable. It has a feature that I have yet to find in any other software - a Telrad that can be placed on the sky chart using the mouse. This option allows me to `practice` finding objects, as I can position the Telrad exactly as I would at the telescope, making memorization a lot easier. Stellarium's Telrad is "fixed" onto the centre of the screen, which means that you have to move the sky instead of the telrad - not very natural! The same goes for
We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue. By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use.
