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Hawksmoor

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Blog Entries posted by Hawksmoor

  1. Hawksmoor

    Pantomime Season

    By Hawksmoor,

    Toot an I have just returned from a short tour of Turkey. Part of the itinerary involved very early pre-dawn starts. Looking out from our hotel balcony on the 4th. December at approximately 04.20 I saw what I thought was a comet . Oh no it wasn't, oh yes it was! At first I thought it was a first glimpse of Comet Catalina. It was approximately south east and close to the horizon. The twin tails appeared to be as they should be pointing away from the sun. But then I returned home to Suffolk and viewed Catalina through my big bins. My comet was much too bright and much lower in the sky than Catalina. So either we spotted a new comet or more likely the con-trail from a twin engined jet flying away from us at an acute angle. Oh no it wasn't, oh yes it was, oh no it wasn't
     
    Anyway I managed to photograph what ever it was with my Canon compact camera. You can make your own minds up!
     

  2. Hawksmoor

    Puss in Bootes

    By Hawksmoor,

    The early hours of the 8th of January were not for the faint hearted. Although the ambient temperature was well above freezing the wind chill here on the UK east coast was significant. After a couple of hours outside I needed a hot cup of industrial strength Marmite to thaw out my inner self. On a positive note the sky was clear of cloud and significant moonlight. I thus set foot to first view Comet Catalina through my big bins and then photograph it.
     
    The comet was far too low in the north east for me to use my big refractor- so bins it was. I store my dustbins in a fenced enclosure on the north side of our house, sounds grand but isn't, and so balancing my bins on the bin enclosure fence I discovered that the comet had conveniently raised itself above Arcturus such that said balanced bins pointed straight at the comet. In the past I have not found comets to be so accommodating.
     
    I must say with the street lights off after midnight, my 80x11 bins did a good job of showing the comet albeit quite a small image. With averted vision I could clearly see the spread of light between the two tails. Nice!
     
    I then spent an hour and a bit with fixed tripod, Canon 600D DSLR and EOS 18-55mm lens, snapping away like a good-un! Twenty or so RAW images later, raw- well the wind was, I returned to the warmth of our house. Today I have done what my partner, Toot, describes as 'cheating' using a number of software programmes to collate and enhance my snaps. I have attached the resultant annotated image for your inspection!
     
    The reasons why I like comets a lot!
     
    They are truly exotic denizens of the deep.
    Their astronomical configuration, position and luminosity are constantly changing in real time.
    They are often hard to locate, they disappear and sometimes reappear.
    They are very old but have the appearance of youth.
    Their performance is unpredictable.
    They are sometimes spectacular and always exquisite.
    They travel alone.
    They are evaporated and reinvigorated by sunlight.
    They are driven and destroyed by gravity.
    They might have created all life on earth and may one day end it.
     

  3. Hawksmoor
    I suppose I could take up fishing. Anyway, I have replaced my ailing and recently failing power tank with a 12 volt 5 amp power supply from 'Modern Astronomy'. It is sitting in my shed awaiting a clear dry night- could be some time then. Apprarently and according to the very nice weather-woman on Anglia TV, the weather is to improve on Wednesday. The hail is currently bouncing off my conservatory roof. I have been playing about with some old data and reworked an image of the Horsehead Nebula etc. Will have to have a proper go imaging this next autumn.

  4. Hawksmoor
    I suppose I could take up fishing. Anyway, I have replaced my ailing and recently failing power tank with a 12 volt 5 amp power supply from 'Modern Astronomy'. It is sitting in my shed awaiting a clear dry night- could be some time then. Apprarently and according to the very nice weather-woman on Anglia TV, the weather is to improve on Wednesday. The hail is currently bouncing off my conservatory roof. I have been playing about with some old data and reworked an image of the Horsehead Nebula etc. Will have to have a proper go imaging this next autumn.

  5. Hawksmoor
    Lowestoft weather has been so changeable, breaks in the cloud so infrequent and the comfort of my fireside chair so all enveloping, that I have hardly ventured out with my scope for what seems an age. Pining for some photons, I set up my DSLR on a tripod and photographed Jupiter dodging the clouds and coming within 6 degrees of the Moon. With a bit of ham fisted Photoshop jiggery pokery, I constructed a composite image of the event. Looks a bit 'Macbeth' but I quite like it!
    If the weather stabilises, I would like to take some 'this season' avi- clips of Jupiter and maybe have a crack at a 'guided' image of the Horsehead or Crab nebulae.

  6. Hawksmoor

    Right up Mount Teide

    By Hawksmoor,

    I decided to try the month's free access to the Bradford Robotic Telescope on Mount Teide, Teneriffe. So thanks 'Sky at Night' Magazine! The free trial is limited to a number of given objects and the exposures and filters are all preset, so you cannot go wrong, but all in all I was quite pleased. I am considering investing the less than prohibitive £3 a month inorder to try out the real thing. Seems to me a very inexpensive way of accessing objects near or below my southern horizon with better kit than I can afford under clearer skies. I also can do it without getting cold or staying up half the night. This month in Lowestoft it has been mega-wet and if autumn turns out anything like the summer, I cannot see me gathering many photons in my backyard!
     

  7. Hawksmoor

    Saturnalia

    By Hawksmoor,

    I look forward to Saturn coming to opposition each year or each 378 days to be precise. The sky over our backyard in the early hours of the 24th of May was clear and the stars shone bright. In the east, the stars of Cygnus and Lyra were shining brightly and Saturn was a brightish yellow presence due south over my neighbour's house rooftops. Through the eyepiece its rings shone bright, the Seeliger effect making a clear difference. Sadly, my imaging and images were affected by the planet's low altitude and the turbulent atmosphere through which the reflected light from the planet had travelled. Images taken with my 2.5x Barlow were significantly better than those in which I used my 3x Barlow.
     
    I managed to get some still images of the planet's moons using my Canon 600D DSLR and made a composite image using the image of the planet obtained with my QHY5v camera. I really like placing the planets in a starry background. For me it provides context for the subject of my photographs.
     


  8. Hawksmoor

    Spectrometer Mark 2

    By Hawksmoor,

    After completing my current oil painting blitz, I spent some time today completing 'Spectrometer Mark2' in the 'clean room' or the kitchen as my wife likes to call it.  The primary reason for the redesign is my desire to use either my QHY5v or QHY5-11 as the imaging camera, without dedicating either camera to capturing spectra.  So a modular approach seemed sensible and the ability to experiment with different diffraction gratings was also an objective.  Mark1 was virtually built for 'nowt',  Mark2 has required the expenditure of a few quid mainly on purchasing an extra mounting bracket for the QHY5 (I already had one in my bag of astro bits and bobs).  I made the base from hardwood samples  handed down from my late and great mate Barry Shulver.  The tilt and turn mechanism, for holding the diffraction transmission grating, was fashioned from a camera holder and tripod obtained from everyones favourite country 'Poundland'.
    I used an on-line transmission grating calculator to work out the diffraction angles for different gratings and basic trigonometry to calculate the distance between the gratings and the cameras chips to fit the first order spectrum on the chip.  Hopefully, if I've got it right , it should work ok - so watch this space for my continuing 'Chad Valley' exploits in 'Off World Spectra'!
     



  9. Hawksmoor
    No moaning from me this time! The night of the 22nd and the early hours of the 23rd of April were absolutely splendid. It rained in the morning, knocking the dust out of the atmosphere, then as darkness fell (clang) the sky cleared, there was no moonlight, Mars shone bright and steady and a lone meteor flashed across the sky. The software driving my planetary camera didn't crash and when I looked at the first clip I could see that Syrtis Major was located almost on the meridian, my cup flowed over and after recording about 10 avi clips so did my laptop hard drive.
    I attached my Canon 400D DSLR with a telephoto lens at f =80mm to a homemade bar which I bolt to my NEQ6 mount and after a bit of fiddling about, I managed to improve the polar alignment sufficient to take a number of 120sec exposures of star fields etc. I really enjoy taking wide field photos.
    I also spent a lot of time just looking through my 11x80mm bins. It's so very easy when you get hooked on taking astro-photos to forget the wonder first derived from just looking up and out into space.
    I went to bed at 3.00am a happy old astronomer .




  10. Hawksmoor
    When I was a ten year old kid I used my pocket money to buy job lots of old broken clocks from Maidstone Market.  I would take them home and spend hours in my Mum and Dad’s cellar taking them apart ostensibly to get them working again. They never did but hey I never let failure deter me.
    Nowadays, being happily retired (and no gloating intended), I have many an hour to while away in my shed.  Nothing that I can get away with, gives me greater pleasure than recycling old bits of metal, plastic, wood and abandoned technology - for astronomical functions. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t – so no change there then!
    My latest project, to construct a thermometer for taking the temperature of stars or as it might be described a ‘Chad Valley Spectrometer’, is well under way.  It remains to be tested but what with the transit of Mercury and the sudden outbreak of rain which followed, I await a clear night with mounting excitement. 
    The ‘Starthrotch Analyser’, catchy name ehh, has been constructed from a vandalised Logitech E3500 webcam, a section of chromed tubing, some aluminium plate left over from a DIY yard gully, 3 BRE hardwood samples from my late and great mate Barry Shulver, a piece of galvanised mesh, half a dozen screws, some pieces of black felt, Gorilla glue and lots of Evostik impact adhesive.  I did have to purchase from ‘Edulab Scientific Supplies’ for about £10 - 3 slide mounted 100 lines/mm transmission gratings.  All in all and if it works, quite a‘thrifty’ piece of kit!
    My daughter, Rachel, was quite impressed. She thought the general appearance of the ‘Starthrotch Analyser’ was very ‘1960s Star Trek’, my partner Toot believes it would not have looked out of place in ‘Blake’s 7-the cardboard years’. Praise indeed!
    I will let you know in a future post whether it works or not, although my best guess is it probably won’t! 
    I wonder if I could make an operational ‘photon torpedo’ from a second hand Halfords top box and an obsolete Tom Tom - SATNAV?  Anything is possible in a shed.

  11. Hawksmoor

    Summer Treats

    By Hawksmoor,

    Its a beautiful sunny day on the East Coast. Have been to the hospital to have an MOT on hip and back. Received great service and care from all staff at the James Paget Hospital. The NHS is great!:hello2:
    Having a bit of time on my hands and wanting a sit down, have spent an hour with an old photo of M57 which I took last summer in my backyard. Quite pleased with myself in that I have worked out how to use the de-convolution algorithms in IRIS software. (Probably less than pleased with myself in that I didn't better polar align my scope).:)
  12. Hawksmoor

    Sunny

    By Hawksmoor,

    As it was a lovely day, I decided to follow the advice in the June edition of either 'Astronomy Now' or 'The Sky at Night', sadly I cannot remember which as my brain has gone awol, and set about a little light maintenance on my mount and tripod. Amazing how stained stainless steel can become when left to the ravages of the East Anglian climate. No wonder those gnarled lowestoft fishermen wore heavily oiled waterproofs!
    I also tried out my new transformer which worked perfectly, hopefully passed are those frustrating nights when having finally located the faintly fuzzy or fuzzily faint, my battery - exhausted by aimless slewing - finally expires at the first sighting of my Kodak 'Box Brownie'. Anyway, aiming at the Sun with homemade white light filter securely taped to the fat end of my scope and DSLR in movie mode fixed to the other, I tried a bit of spot and limb photography.

  13. Hawksmoor

    Supernova SN 2014J

    By Hawksmoor,

    The evening of the 9th of March was cloud free and clear and presented a number of photo opportunities, e.g a double shadow transit of Io and Ganymede, obtaining spectra of Sirius and Betelgeuse (with my newly homemade diffraction grating), Supernova SN 2014J in M82, the planet Mars and a small comet in Gemini. Well the moon put paid to imaging the comet and Mars would not get above my hedges and trees until about 1.00 am. so I decided to save them for a better night later in the month. I had an accident two weeks ago and am nursing two broken ribs and a haematoma in my right bicep so did not fancy staying out later than midnight (when the Council turn off the street lights) which meant that in imaging M82 I would have to contend with light pollution from both Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft. Anyway, I managed to capture some photons and am currently processing them. All things being equal I'm quite pleased that I could see and image the Supernova ( at my age I might not get to see another one through the eyepiece). The image was created from 9x30sec lights, 3x darks and 3x flats stacked using DeepSkyStacker and finished using APS. I used a Canon 600d DSLR, a Meade 127mm Apo at F7.5 all on a NEQ6 mount (unguided)

  14. Hawksmoor
    Spent a rainy afternoon recovering a rather blurry photograph I took a year ago in Norway. At the time I was quite annoyed with my self in not obtaining a sharp focus of the Pleiades whilst concentrating on the Aurora above. http://stargazerslounge.com/members/hawksmoor-albums-aurora-picture16089-aurora-above-pleiades.jpg
  17. Hawksmoor
    Joined Breckland Astronomical Society and attended our first meeting this month. Very much enjoyed Prof Carolin Crawford's talk on 'Exo Planets' and received a friendly welcome from members. The snow stayed away long enough for us to get to and from Great Ellingham which is some hour away from our home by car.
    The clouds parted on the thirteenth of March for us to see Comet PanStarrs very low over the marshes. The graveyard at our local church provides a great elevated and unobstructed view west over the Waveney River valley. At 6.15pm we set off for the churchyard with two friends. I fixed my camera on a tripod pointing towards the horizon where the sun had not long set. Between us we had two pairs of binoculars so we took it in turns to search the sky for the comet.
    The crescent Moon was absolutely beautiful with earth-shine illuminating the rest of the disk. The 'dark-side' was so bright that the maria were clearly visible, I don't think I've ever seen earth-shine so bright. We picked up the comet for the first time at about 6.50pm using my 11x80mm binoculars and a little later in 10x50s. Finaly it became visible without optical aid. I managed to get a number of images using 18-55 and 90-300mm lenses. The focus could have been better - guess whose camera hasn't got 'live view' and who forgot to take his spectacles with him?
    Anyway since the 13th the weather has been quite grim and there have been no further opportunities to view the comet or any other celestial treats for that matter.
    Seeing the comet, however, really cheered me up. You can't beat a good comet.
  18. Hawksmoor

    Transformer

    By Hawksmoor,

    Christmas upright Armchair Astronomer 'transforms' into horizontal Settee Astronomer without any visible expenditure of energy as Moon obliges by rising almost directly in front of his sitting room window. I could get to like this 'indoor astronomy' as it offers a warmer winter alternative for the older stargazer.

  19. Hawksmoor

    Transit of Venus

    By Hawksmoor,

    My wife found an old disc from 2004 and low and behold the photographs that I took of the last transit were on it and not lost forever as I thought. With better software available in 2012 I have been able to improve them a bit. So was quite pleased bearing in mind the basic kit that I used at the time. Hopefully, if the weather and my back are OK I will have a second chance to get better images on the morning of the sixth.

  20. Hawksmoor

    Transit of Venus

    By Hawksmoor,

    My wife found an old disc from 2004 and low and behold the photographs that I took of the last transit were on it and not lost forever as I thought. With better software available in 2012 I have been able to improve them a bit. So was quite pleased bearing in mind the basic kit that I used at the time. Hopefully,, if the weather and I my back are OK I will have a second chance to get better images on the morning of the sixth.

  21. Hawksmoor
    Tonight Venus was very close to the crescent Moon with Jupiter sailing above and to the south. I took a quick snap with a compact camera perched on top of our car. Really doesn't do the scene credit. Very beautiful even though in competition with the glare from the street lights.

  22. Hawksmoor
    This has been a long time in gestation - first I built the 3d printer from a kit my son gave me for Christmas 2018, then I had to pluck up the courage to turn it on. The whirring and flashing lights are all a bit much for a man more accustomed to using Crayola 'chubby' crayons than digital vernier calipers. Then I had to get my head round  Sketch-Up, Netfabb, Repetier Host , Slicer3 and how to stop molten filament from blocking up a very small hole in a very hot bit of metal. 
    In my shed I have some 500lines/mm holographic film and a QHY5L-ii mono camera and three telescopes of varying focal length and aperture. Having read a lot of good stuff on SGL from people with much spectrum gathering and processing experience and having read Jeffrey L Hopkins book 'Using Commercial Amateur Astronomical Spectrographs' several times,  I realised that I had the basics for making a very low resolution 'slit-less' spectrometer.  Because the grating had so many lines /mm I had to get the grating pretty close to the imaging chip in order that the zero and first order spectrum would fit on the long axis.  Having crunched the numbers I worked out that if I could print a thin cell to hold the grating this could be sandwiched between camera and  its nosepiece without any un-reversible changes having to be made to the camera. So the game was on Watson!
    Once it was all put together and attached to my 66mm Altair Lightwave on a Star Adventurer Mount I pointed it at Castor as it was fairly high up, quite bright and a class A star albeit multiple. I was going to use VSpec  as it is free and I had managed to use it some years ago but for some reason unknown to me it would not load on my new Windows 10 laptop. It kept trying to link with a chess database on my machine so probably a dll file issue above my pay grade. So I decided to download the RSpec software 30 day trial. This software is not that easy for an old bloke like me to grasp but considerably easier than VSpec. After a lot of pressed buttons and repeated views of the tutorial videos I think I managed to acquire an ok calibrated and Instrument Response adjusted low res profile of Castor.  I attach an image of the result.
    Whilst I was processing the data I noticed that the zero order showed twin peaks which confused me for a while. Originally I thought this was just a processing artifact. Then it occurred to me that Castor is a multiple star system with two class A stars of roughly equal magnitude and although my little refractor could not split them visually perhaps spectrally it could?  Probably deluding myself!
    Anyway this little but drawn out project and 'Covid Lockdown' have kept me out of pubs!
    George next the Sea
     



  23. Hawksmoor
    February the 4th. 2013:
    I get all my kit out, set up and ready to go. My laptop is performing Ok, it doesn't like the cold, and the QHY 5v driver has loaded without a hiccup. I can see Jupiter shining in a rapidly darkening sky. The BBC weather forecast for Lowestoft said clear skies excellent seeing between 17.00 and 18.00 which coincides with the GRS being visible. My cup floweth over! As an extra Jupiter 2 software has informed me that shortly after there will be a transit. Photo opportunity or what?
    Then I notice that Jupiter has acquired a halo, I quickly capture three 2 minute clips and then the planet disappears with the failing light. After an hour my laptop and I take refuge in the warm kitchen. After a further hour I finally give up and disassemble my scope and put all the bits and pieces away. Do my eyes deceive me or has the sky now cleared? Grrrrrrrrr! I think I will give Jupiter a rest!
    The AutoStakkert freeware processing software made a brilliant job of rescuing my clips from the recycle bin and I did retrieve one or two grainy images. I would recommend AutoStakkert to anyone who has only used Registax, its much simpler and quicker to use.

  24. Hawksmoor

    Winter has arrived

    By Hawksmoor,

    Saw the Doc yesterday who said my back was healing well and light exercise was OK. Took this to mean I could catch a few photons. So I went outside into the garden about midnight to see if I could see a meteor or two. Hooray first night without rain for some time. Moon was a bit too bright for meteor watching and was lighting up really heavy clouds to the east. The wind was strong and gusting. Then it started to snow! Then it rained. Astronomy in the UK is not for the faint hearted or for those without a warm wind and waterproof coat. Perhaps tonight?
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