MattJenko

Eyepiece arrived in the post yesterday. Baader Hyperion Mk III Clickstop Zoom. Quite a mouthful. Quite an eyepiece as well. All very well wrapped and in great condition (thanks Jim). Managed a late evening view of the moon between the clouds and was mightily impressed. Very happy with it and I now have a decent range of eyepiece strength all to myself for my scope. Happy days. As Rune commented on another post, the equivalent barlow is worth looking into methinks. Finished 'Handbook of Astronomical Image Processing' this week as well. It's one hell of a book, and gloriously heavy duty. Just the kind of low level detail I was after. I will hand it back to the society today at the social meeting, which looks like a clear sky evening as well as a bonus. Will take the Atik 16c software to install on the society laptop and see if we can get it working properly tonight. Also, as my entry into photography, it is clear that I really need my own scope to do this, rather than rely on the society ones. I am coming up to a milestone birthday, so am going to pool resources and get a decent future-proofish mount and a nice AP ready scope. I will keep my Astromaster for casual viewing and learning the skies with my new Hyperion EP. 'Turn Left at Orion' arrived this week as well to help with my sky learning, so its all coming together nicely. The kit I am looking at is an HEQ5 Syntrek (no goto) and a Skywatcher Evostar 80ED. This looks like a decent starter AP kit as well as something I will use as long as it holds together. It has the benefit of lots of users on this forum and around the interweb for support and the mount can be controlled by a humble PC, which is exactly the plan, hence the lack of Goto. This saves me some £££ and forces me to know my way around the heavens a little more. The society has a nice looking Williams Optic triplet refractor I will haven't looked through, so will try and get it setup (with help!) on their NEQ6 tonight to get a feel for how it all works. Still excited about all this and still confused. So much to learn. Excellent.

Thanks Rune. It arrived today and there was a brief moment this evening when the clouds parted and the moon was visible and I was straight out there. I have to say it looked brilliant. I wear glasses so to see such a great image with great eye relief has calmed any concern I may have had about picking this up second hand. I am extremely happy with it. I take your point on the barlow, if it is anywhere near as worth it as this EP, then I can't see myself avoiding it!

And so it begins. The start of what I suspect is a never ending path of incremental upgrading. My humble stock eyepieces that came with my 130EQ were a little shown up by the eyepieces I tried when I took my scope to my society's observatory. As a result I have been looking to get some personal upgrades and got some excellent advice via this very forum : http://stargazerslounge.com/topic/217684-eyepiece-sets/ and other excellent threads started by others. As a result I have been doing rather a lot of window shopping and research and have decided that rather than buying one at a time, I would go and get a Baader Mark III Hyperion Clickstop zoom for now. This allows me to have multiple eyepieces in a single package without having to buy them all. Reviews seemed good and although the Williams Optic zoom lens I tried out in my scope wasn't that great, I understand the Baader one to be a different kettle of fish. Also, it allows a direct DSLR connection on the eyepiece itself which fits in rather nicely with my longer term goals. It should also serve me nicely when I eventually get a different scope, which is certainly on the cards as well as a new mount (window shopping not restricted to eyepieces...) I found a second hand one on astrobuysell and it is being posted today. There are no forecasted clear nights for the immediate future, so will road test when I can. I also have ordered 'Turn Left at Orion', as I have decided that I want to know the skies without Goto while I am not neck deep in astro imaging hurdles and this eyepiece seems perfect.

After my first really decent night's viewing (weather wise, seeing wise, viewing wise) with some good people doing a variety of things, I have some thoughts to record on a slow morning after. Double Stars are great. After seeing Albireo and the colour contrast in my own scope, I think doubles are indeed great. It is worth taking way too many layers of clothes. It gets colder than you think. Zoom lens not as great as I thought it might be. Binoculars are surprisingly well worth it. Have to do some research to find a cheap/decent pair. Need to keep learning way around the sky. Considering holding off getting a Goto for a while longer until I am more familiar. Imaging appears to take a long time and means the scope is tied up for the evening : you can't see anything with your own eyes. One scope for pictures, binoculars or another scope to keep you observing (assuming setting up and running is smooth - I intend to find out). Have a plan. Running out of ideas when tired with great viewing needs avoiding. Iridium Flare and a full pass of the ISS ticked off with aplomb. Worth getting a phone app to give you alarms for these events. Nice way to add moments to the evening. Don't plan on doing too much the next morning. Home at around 3am, in house later (see below) - sleep a while after Don't forget your house keys. Breaking in while trying to not wake everyone (and failing) is quite fun, but not a regular option I feel! All in all, very enjoyable. Learnt a lot, mainly that even though research is great, actual experience is key. Oh yeah - laser pens are marvellous.

I did wonder why it made a difference, but it did. I will have a proper play next week and let you know how I get on.

This has been a bit of a post burst, but its a slow day and after this I am now up to date... The society has an Atik 16IC CCD camera. It doesn't look like it has had much use and indeed when I finally managed to get the observatory PC switched on, none of the ASCOM or Atik software worked. Driver not installed correctly was the message when I plugged the camera in and I was subsequently told that there are lots of connector errors and USB problems with it. I took it home for some TLC. First thing I noticed was that the power supply was a variable voltage one, so obviously not the original power supply. The next thing I tried was downloading all the latest Atik drivers + software from the Atik site. These installed with varying degrees of success on my Windows 7 pro running PC. I plugged the Atik in, the fan powered up and I plugged in a USB port to see what would happen. Nothing. The device was not recognised. I tried a better quality USB cable, same dice - nothing. I installed a different version of the software from the Device manager 'Update driver' windows config screen (Windows is such an evolved mess these days). this found the correct driver and we were back in business. The camera controller application installed is called Artemis it seems. It looks a bit like early garage written VB apps and a bit rubbish, but looks aren't always everything I have learnt, so going to give it the benefit of the doubt for now. I managed to get the camera recognised, and got a nice black screen with a green rectangle within Artemis. Doing test pictures resulted in a big fat nothing. just the same unflinching black screen. I also got lots of USB Error message boxes popping up intermittently. Not good. I checked the specs of the camera online (weirdly not easy to find). It requires a 12V 0.55A power supply. The variable voltage power supply that was in the case was a 1A+ supply, so it was sending way too much current through the camera. I tried a couple of different supplies I had to hand, but basically I had to go and buy a 12V 0.5A supply from maplin for about £10. I plugged this in and lo and behold, taking a quick image resulted in a glorious sea of random variable pixel shades. Happy days. I have not really had more time to see if the sensor has been damaged by the amount of dodgy power sent through the unit, but it does seem to distinguish various shades of white, although concerningly, an image taken with a cover on resulted in a very noisy and worryingly white image. I have no idea what it is meant to do or even how Artemis scales when displaying the images, so this mystery will have to be left for another day. I also got USB errors from the app when the new power supply was disconnected/interrupted, which caused Artemis problems, but an disconnect and reconnect from within Artemis fixed this, it doesn't do it automatically. Glad I managed to get it working of sorts, as it means I have contributed a small amount back to the society and if I can get this camera working on the society PC hardware, then a good deed will indeed have been done. Astro Karma +1

The prospect of imaging those great views of planets, nebulas and far away galaxies in multi colour glory has been brought back down to humble earth rather quickly. This is a good thing in many ways, but means effort is going to have to be applied. Here are a list of things I learnt very fast after my first effort at strapping my Pentax DSLR to the telescope using a x2 barlow and T adaptor combo with my AstroMaster 130. The sky moves remarkably quickly Good focus is an art Stability is rather important... The camera can see so much more than the eye can Light pollution sucks The light from the LiveView DSLR screen is really bright Doing things in the dark is harder than you think. Adding wine to the mix adds more levels of complexity

This is a blog describing the path from a total novice to someone who contributes to amateur astronomy here in the UK. It is by its very nature presumptuous in that I am that total novice now and there is certainly no certainty that I will be able to become what I would like to be in this field. This might be due to any number of technical, financial, motivational or even family constraints, but I intend to document each step and progression in order that others can follow, learn and hopefully take encouragement from, or commiserate in the drawn out crash and burn. My beginnings come from an attempt to understand the workings of camera photography in general, with the family purchase of a Pentax K-500 DSLR. This was bought for fashion photography by my wife, but seeing as this is not my area of expertise I rather optimistically decided to try and photograph the sky. After much fumbling about the internet (and not having found this forum either), I have ended up with a Celestron AstroMaster 130 EQ with a little RA motor, purchased from a little shop in Colchester for £150. The scope is easy to put together, and for my novice eyes looks the business. The controls of the EQ mount had me totally perplexed, but for the first couple of nights I didn't care as I simply moved the scope about manually, not attaching the motor, nor even bothering with the fine adjustment dials, just man handling the whole scope. My amazement at seeing Jupiter and its moons after 20 frustrating minutes of even trying to find it was comical. The spotting finder thing on this scope is rubbish by the way. In order to try and understand things better, I enrolled on the free MIT Optics course : http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mechanical-engineering/2-71-optics-spring-2009/ and printed out the course notes and watched the videos on the train on the way to work. This is brilliant, if a little over the top for doing astronomy. Going through the derivation of Maxwell's wave equations from first principles is quite something for the unprepared. I have also joined the North Essex Astronomical Society. This has turned out to be a great decision and something I think is essential for anyone new to this activity as you can get so much out of it. The society has access to an observatory which is in a darkish sky area with a C11 in the dome and lots of other scopes/mounts/eye pieces and stuff. The main benefit is the people who have been very friendly and helpful and being shown globular clusters, double stars and galaxies by people who know what they are doing has been hugely beneficial and fun. I have taken my AstroMaster there and tried out the eyepieces to give me a sense of benefit they can bring and what I would like for myself. This is a quick summary of where I am currently and as I take on different aspects of this vast hobby, I will write about them.