DaveS

Some of my dreams come straight out of H. P. Lovecraft. You really wouldn't like them.

The group to the right is HCG 56. i too have imaged it with NCG 3718, can it go into my HCG project? I don#t know but with our dearth of clear nights it may have to.

Yeah, watching ep2 it could be said that the crew were killed by protocol and procedure, it made me upset and angry in equal measure.

I hadn't seen the recovered footage of the crew as reentry started, though I did know, from the Scott Manley YT analysis, that some photos had been recovered intact.

Yep, forgotten about that one, should separate the men from the boys (Women and girls too!!) lol, the boys and girls will be able to see more haha.

Back in the day when Acton had Bortle 5 skies I could count maybe 10-12 stars, now I have Bortle 3 skies I barely make it to 7, on a good night.

OK, so that's the star charts taken care of, does anyone have thoughts about the outreach activities?

Ah, thanks Peter. I have Cartes du Ciel on my outboard computers but not the office one.

Embeddable too.

I normally use Stellarium for star maps, but I'm trying to put together activities for our villages so that people can see / gauge the darkness of our sky.

The CPRE has a regular star-count (Not running this year due to the possible election) but I was thinking of others that could run almost as an informal competition depending on time of year. They have to be easy for non-astronomers to understand / take part in.

The ones that come to mind are:

How many stars can you see in the Square of Pegasus? The square should be easily found when people know what to look for.

How many of the stars in and around Ursa Minor (I will call it the Little Bear in the flyers) can you see?

Can you see the Great Globular in Hercules? A real test but I think doable for young eyes on a dark transparent night.

Can you see the Triangulum Galaxy? Another real test, but I have seen it with my rubbish vision.

Others like seeing the Andromeda Galaxy or Praesepe are too easy from here. Any night when you can't see these is too poor for astronomy.

So....any other ideas? Are my suggestions too difficult? And to the crux (No, that's a southern asterism lol) of the post...

Ideas for maps that I can download / print / embed? I know about screen grabs from Stellarium but not sure how well they will print or embed.

Sorry for the long-winded post, and thanks in advance.

OK, carbon fusion ending not starting. Dr Becky put up a video a while ago but plenty of caveats and maybes

And that's my last post on the subject which I think has run its course.

In every which way.

It's not happening anytime soon. Minimum of decades away even if carbon burning has started, and that's not certain.

Clickbait.

Yes, and thought it was pretty good.

PNG posts OK

From what I can see, the BBC are treating the Columbia loss as more of a drama than a scientific investigation , typical Beeb.

The incomparable Scott Manley has a deep analysis on YT

2 hours ago, JeremyS said:

I heard someone say stargazers use refractors and astronomers use reflectors 🤔

I have both, and both have cameras on the end of them.

I think the "CMOS optimised" is just marketing guff, I don't see any difference.

When I specc'd my ODK rig I went for Chroma LRGB and NB, but that was before they went from pricey to stupidly expensive.

I currently have a set of Baader photometric filters in my LRGB wheel, but they have some horrid halos.

Clear skies are a myth.

In casual conversation I will usually refer to myself as "a bit of a stargazer" as it sounds a bit less serious than "mad obsessive astrophotographer".

I saw that video, it's all about NB imaging of fuzzy diffuse nebulae, so not a true test. I would like to see how it stacks up against small faint galaxies with fine detail. M65 and M66 would do as a start.

Total cloud here, but with the devil's lightbulb polluting the sky there would be no point anyway.

It's not going to win any prizes but heigh-ho

5 hours 20 mins H-Alpha on the Crab with the ASI 533MM on the ODK 12 for a totally bonkers 0.38"/Px. Collected 6 hours (36 10 min subs) but only 32 made it through QC into the stack

Stacked in AstroArt 8, Blur Xterminator 2, ArcsinH stretch and Noise Exterminator in PixInsight (I may have been too severe with Noise X) then back to AstroArt for a slight Histogram Stretch.

I won't be getting any othe NB data as I currently have my HaLRGB wheel on the OTA and have no intention of swapping anything until summer, this was just a moon-polluted stop-gap until I can image galaxies again.

Well, I think it's rather fabulous.

Currently -2.8⁰ here. I had a quick look outside, and while it looked clear I could see a lot of high cloud.

49 minutes ago, saac said:

You need a blow torch Dave - nothing worse than wood that won't burn.  My observatory thermometer said it was -4, that seemed a bit too low, though it was really cold when standing in  the wind. One of those nights where you can smell that there is snow in the air.  I'm almost glad that the clouds have rolled in, I'll be pulling the roof back shortly I think.

Jim 

 

I've got a small blowtorch and a proper one in the garage, I think I'll fetch it in tomorrow.

Meanwhile the wood is burning, just about and the room is slowly warming up, just gone above 18⁰.

Sitting here trying to get warm, blummin' wood doesn't want to burn. Utter rubbish. It's only warmer than outside in relative terms.

Almost total high cloud here. I had a look and the moon is surrounded by haze.