theropod

Stacking is great, if you can use it! Meteor hunters are left out in the cold here. Mostly all of my shots are wide angle deep field single shots, and sometimes I catch a meteor. Why I would want more streaks throughout my images baffles! I would prefer a sky free of all such space trash, but rarely get what I want, so I settle for what I can get. Nothing has changed, just rich folk doin a thing because they can.

Johninderby, I have given much thought to the sun funnel design, and it is appealing. A simple scope, if all metal and glass, is best so as to not melt down during solar observations. I have my scope all set up and ready to go at a moment’s notice, and my work goes on, but thunderstorms are causing me havoc. It’s raining right now, no not hard but raining. My solar observations, and all else, may have to wait a day, or more.

...or project your image and be done with filters and such. Dangerous if not done properly! Worked a treat during the eclipse of 2017 here in the USA. I plan on doing it bigger and badder than ever before for the 2024 eclipse, and may project the image on to the side of my house! I have a fist surface mirror, and need little else, to make my house a projector screen. Experiments go on, with both my tracker and my EQM 35 Pro. I want ALL the light I can get coming out of the ep.

Exactly, and thank you! That visible part of the spectrum is what concerns me. I see no reason to let Hubble just burn up, mostly, on reentry. Especially so considering the tech available now as opposed to the date of Hubble’s first use (not on station, but actual use). We the people of the USA have a good deal invested, and it makes no sense at all to just throw it away, when the Hubble could be saved. I’d assume a very small portion of the costs above and beyond my current taxes on social security.

scotty1, I understand LP and am highly sympathetic to your endeavors. My meteor efforts took most of one summer off, and LP was my main obstacle to success. I still captured meteor falls, but long/bright meteors barely registered. Good thing a short drive puts you in the dark. Some folk have to schedule time off work to enjoy such. Poor delusional owls! Retired old dude here, with no interest whatsoever in working for a paycheck again.

Two heart attacks and a GIST induced small bowel resection have taken a step or so. Good thing I don’t need much to gaze at the sky. When that stops being fun I’ll stop doing it (sky watching). I imagine creeking older me sitting out at night, hell I went out with a broken ankle BEFORE surgery to fix!!

Good work! I really should put together a series of meteor falls I captured with my iPhone. Your work inspires me to go put the phone out, but as usual, increasingly cloudy skies are expected, leading to rain off and on for a week, for us in the mid south USA.

Understand that my barn door is made so as to have east/west and up/down pivots, which are made by moving nuts on curved 1/2” allthread rod against a hard point for each. I’ve posted a pict of it here before. It’s ran from an Arduino Nano, Easy Driver, some gears from a dead VCR, curved allthread 1/4”x20 and a stepper motor salvaged from a inkjet printer. I’ve posted my “no delay” code before, and uses 6 lines of instructions. After SEVERAL step speed adjustments I ended up able to do 5 minute plus wide angle “meteor hunt” shots almost as well as my iOptron SkyTracker Pro. The little iOptron is just so much easier to use in almost every way, even with the bran door left out all the time(sans electronics). I still have the barn door ready to go, and during the Perseids I might have two wide field rigs running.

When I had my barn door in a permanent setup I used drift alignment to get mine real close to polar alignment. I fiddled with a scope on a rail and tried dozens of times to visually put Polaris where it needed to be, but only using the drift alignment method gave me nice sharp stars.

I started attempting to capture meteor falls about 6 years ago with my iPhone 6 Plus running the app NightCap Camera (actually call NightCap Pro then). About 18 months ago that phone died and my service provider insurance replaced it, but with an iPhone 6s Plus. That little “s” really messed up the wide field shots. Apple hardware limited the open shutter time by 1/3, which makes meteor trains look like airplane strobes, and the camera has such tiny sensor dots/pixels it takes lightening to activate them. Faint little spark meteors I see just didn’t register on the sensor. While comet NEOWISE was out back in late summer I had that 6s set up on my little SkyTracker Pro and a long duration bright gold meteor crossed the frame. It looks like a 737 passing by, and the comet just left a smudge. Frustrating to say the least. Solution: a brand new old iPhone 6 (no “s”) from fleaBay has been charged and NightCap Camera installed and ready. The SkyTracker is out and ready for polar alignment, with ball head and phone clamp set to look at Polaris. Maybe those low noise star fields will come back! I paid far less for a brand new old phone than any other solution I could come up with, and I’ve managed over 200 captures with the old phone. Even if I don’t catch a meteor tonight I’ll post a sample of how the new phone works. I’m confident the quality I’m used to will return. It’s also supposed to be stupid clear here tonight with dew points down around 18° F. I’ll be warm and toasty in the house while the phone/tracker do their thing. A state wide (Arkansas) freeze warning has been issued, so I might get lucky with the new old phone on such a rare night. Just a touch warmer and the mount would go out too. It’s silly to go on about such a odd way to do something, but meteors really trip my hammer.

Idea: Use the driver’s seat of a high end SUV, with adjustable positioning in several aspects, and most importantly a heating system for the back side. Rig up a joystick to make the seat follow your mount/eyepiece, throw a blanket over the lower half and lean into a long cold night. As long as the power held out. Sure, probably only feasible in an observatory proper, but wrecked vehicles have these oh-so-comfy seats crushed/ripped to shreds every day. Think about it. A seat that can track around, sort of, and has a backside warming function. Just cobble together some sort of base to mount it on, maybe cog belt stepper driven for yet another axis.

From what I read the Webb will be an IR telescope, and that will in no way replace the part of the EM spectrum Hubble can gather.

The article above implies the Webb will replace the Hubble. Isn’t the Webb a non visual wavelength telescope?

About 30 meters from my front door. We live far out in the forest in the Ozark mountains of Arkansas, USA. The nearest town is about 17.7 kilometers away, and it’s a tiny little burg. A sizable hill stands between us too. On those special nights it’s very dark here. Some nights starlight alone illuminates things well enough to walk around.

Images like this highlights the need for a “wow” emoticon.

The above. Copied to text file. Sounds doable. Thanks!

Great post. Will you please start, if you haven’t already, a thread to document what you did? It would be a good archive and informative to interested parties short on clairvoyance. Heh, like me. If there is a means by which I can make my EQM 35 do this I will reach nirvana. Frankly the synsan handset alignment on specific stars is a a royal pain. Even after using an illuminated dual crosshair eyepiece, and nailing the stars, the mount is several degrees off. Yes, my polar alignment is spot on. When I try a goto operation without the 3 star alignment it’s almost the same as if I did. If my situation doesn’t call for a touch more tech I can’t imagine one that does. Please expound on your adventures into Pi land.

That really is some top shelf work! It makes me feel like I’m looking out a viewing port on a space vessel much much closer than we are.

Yes! I’ll show my wife this post. I agree entirely. Celestron Star Sense springs to mind. A good choice or is a better solution out there?

I’ve got the green light from the wife to use her laptop to download the mount software, drive the mount and run Sharp Cap with my little SV105. I’ll get this figured out. I just need more nights not smooth cloudy and or raining. I already found that Sharp Cap can synthesize a dual crosshair for those 1,2-3 star alignments, which will help. Yep, if it was easy it really wouldn’t be any fun. Besides, this scope centric stuff is secondary to my main love of night skies, with my primary drive to capture meteor falls with a camera. I can have my meteor hunting rig running while I gander at the faint fuzzies, if I can figure out my mounts quarks.

The folks that approved of these low orbit sats should be forced to watch that video for 12 hours straight.

This seems to be a trend spreading across the pond, without the customs house involvement. I ordered a solid brass adapter to use .965” eyepieces with my 1.25”. My plan is to use this with my DIY refractor so that I can use some all glass and metal eyepieces for solar projection. This was bought on fleabay back in January and still hasn’t arrived. Tracking shows it went from California to Florida. Each is equidistant from me. This is entirely on the USPS. I’m trying to set up a tracked projector so the 2024 solar eclipse can be blown up to the side of our house size. I have a first surface mirror and the plan is to build a bracket I can adjust to keep the projected image where I want it. A small clamping ball head and holder for the mirror that clamps to the eyepiece ought to work. Anyway, this was ordered January 17th, and arrived in Florida yesterday. I’m only a week or so away from what I should have had in less than a week.

I’m beginning to think I will need to install ASCOM/EDMOD on my wife’s laptop and stop fighting the post polar star alignment. I went out last night for the first time since early December, and fought with the damned mount yet again. Even after getting those 3 stars locked down any target I pick is off by several degrees. I’m very frustrated as I bought a new 9X50 RACI finder, which is a dream come true, but the goto function seems screwed up to me. I honestly think that with only a handful of nights spent with the mount to be the real issue, but I thought I was doing everything right. Apparently that thinking is in error. I’ll figure it out, but this is frustrating. I’m convinced there is plenty of room for improvement in the synscan system/menu tree, and a big motivator to figure out a solution. Hopefully the laptop driven mount software will lower the frustration level. The mount tracks like a dream when I finally get a target in the eyepiece. I watched M42 drift across the sky for a couple hours and the view didn’t change at all over that time. Trying to find M1 via goto was a total waste of time, and I ended up star hopping until I finally put the little smudge in the EP. about that time some very high thin clouds started infiltration and I broke down the entire rig slightly angry. I had high hopes that the Crab would just lock in instead of some empty hunk of sky. Almost beginning to think the whole goto idea is a farce, and some sort of black magic. Maybe I need some goats to sacrifice to the astro gods...

Help! Is there a way to “tune” the synscan on the fly? What mean is when I enter a goto target, the mount slews and is just slightly off, is there a way to “teach” the mount that it was off and the correction then stored in the system? My DIY 60 mm refractor does very well, but I need a dang finder for it too. Ah, the list just never ends does it?

Well, I’ve had a misunderstanding about unipolar motors for a while. Thanks for the info. I’ll go off and educate myself more deeply now.