Hawksmoor
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Spent a happy fifty minutes in our backyard before the clouds rolled in. Used my 66mm Altair Lightwave refractor on a camera tripod. When it cools down its a great little scope. When you spend most of your time messing about with your kit to obtain an alright image you can easily miss the beauty of the night sky which straight through the lens observing delivers. I enjoyed some wonderful widefield views of Auriga's open clusters, the Hyades, Perseus, the Andromeda Galaxy, Orion's Dagger and best of alll the Pleiades. I reckon I could clearly see nebulosity around several of the larger stars in the Seven Sisters group. Not too shabby for a small scope with some light pollution and all done and dusted inside an hour.
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Snowed here today. Too cold for astronomising - if you are a wuss! So I've had a lot of warm bread, molten cheese and the best part of a bottle of Chardonnay for dinner. Now sitting happily twixt sleep, a bar of chocolate and TV.
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Yes. Venus is often a bit low and a bit too far west for me using my 127mm. refractor which sits at the rear of our house between our sitting room extension to the west and a tall hedge to the east. Add weather into the equation and Venus is only a viable imaging proposition once in a blue moon!
George
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Well the BBC Weather site turn out to be correct after all. After a day of wall to wall cloud, rain, rain and a bit more rain, it cleared up and I saw stars the moon and astro stuff like that. Tried out spectrometer Mark 2 with mixed failure. Far too many reflections off chromed tubing so today has incluided corrective 'flocking'.
Anyway to cheer myself up I took a quick video of the terminator on a waxing gibbous moon. Quite pleased with the result, bearing in mind the Altair Lightwave Doublet refractor has only 66mm of aperture!
Widefield gives a nice overview, without 'stitching ', of Copernicus, Kepler, Aristarchus and Gassendi.
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Weather wise today we have had a tiny bit of snow, some rain and sunshine. Plus, one of the most striking rainbows I can recall in Lowestoft. At least a double bow and at best and momentarily a triple bow. Physics can be breathtakingly beautiful!
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Easy to miss Jim. It literally snowed in our backyard for a minute. Not enough to make a snowman! Plenty of rain and no stars again tonight. I still haven't tried out my Mark2 homade spectrometer. I guess I shall have to be patient.
George
QuoteCertainly missed the snow but did get the rain whilst down town.
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Lovely image Pieter! -
Nearest I've been to 'imaging' for some time. Balancing my little Canon compact camera on top of my barbecue and getting a shakey mov. video clip - converted to avi and then Registaxed and manipulated to remove any direct relationship with reality. I give you my technicolor version of last night's Moon Venus conjunction, which was a very pretty thing to witness!
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Lovely starry night in Lowestoft tonight!
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When I went for a walk this evening I actually saw some stars! It had clouded over by midnight but I did get to gaze upon my mate Orion and all the other mid winter culprits. As I walked home I was able to watch Cygnus sinking into the horizon with Vega just keeping its head above the trees.
Let's hope we've all been good girls and boys and Santa brings us clear skies in 2017.
Nighty night Stargazers where ever you are.
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Horrid, damp and cloudy night in Lowestoft. Only improved by a glimpse of the ISS passing overhead and by watching the Martin Scorsese Bob Dylan film biographies on BBC Four. Got a new preowned/loved acoustic guitar from my eldest son on my birthday. Have put on a set of new extra light weight strings and have lowered the action. Tomorrow, in our living room and to an audience of one, I will perform 'A hard rain' with nostalgia and uncomfortable contemporary relevance.
I have retired to my bed and await the arrival of Morpheus or Aurora, whichever comes first.
Nighty night everyone.
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Thanks for the information Andrew. I did think this was likely and hence the reason why the Mk3 was in the planning stage. Once Christmas is done and dusted I will move into the production stage. The Mk2 will work with the 100 lines grating (the camera has a reasonably large chip) but will not work with the 500 lines grating as displacement of the first order spectrum will be too large. Thank you for your kind advice. Regards George
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Great looking piece of kit. Quite envious. I have two different gratings -100 and 500 lines- I think both are blazed and certainly the 500 line is! I have made it possible to angle the grating rather than the connection to the scope. Not sure this will work with a grating. It does with a prism. I calculated the necessary angles and grating to imaging chip dimensions to accommodate centring the spectrum for both gratings. Have not been able to test whether this works, as have had a number of friends staying with us and did not wish to abandon them after dark (bit antisocial even for a nerd like me!). If this rig does not work my mark3 spectrometer (in the design stage) will involve angling the camera. Thanks for the advice and sharing the image of your set up. best regards George
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Fireball-meteor: 02-12-2016 between 20:30 and 21:00 GMT. Over Darsham, Suffolk travelling west to east seen from the A12. Went by car to pick up grandchildren from Southend on the way back both my wife and I saw a very bright ball of a meteor pass over the road infront of our car. No noticeable colour. Quite spectacular, quite slow moving and curved down towards the ground at the end of its trajectory before we lost sight of it. Did anyone else see this?
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From the album: Out and About
The recently refurbished Zeiss Planetarium in Berlin with images of the old and new star projectors. Memories of a great show under the 25 metre dome. -
Visited the Berlin Zeiss Planetarium on Sunday. Recent renovation and new projection kit when coupled with a 25 metre diameter dome provides a stunning visual experience. Just as well as my understanding of the German language is zero and the presentation was in German without translation. Would recommend this 8 Euro ticket for a fifty minute show as serious value for money particularly if you are fluent in German. Nice health food cafe almost opposite that does great coffee and a proper cheesecake. Nice!
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Today I stood in front of and looked at the fossil bird Archaeoptetyx from the Solhofen Jurassic lithographic limestone. A lot like the first time I looked at Saturn through the eyepiece. Jaw dropping stuff!
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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'!
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Cheered myself up by designing a permanent pier and removable cover. My partner seems to have given it the tick in the box. Probably will start the build in the spring.
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Wall to wall cloud last night in less than sunny Lowestoft, so no chance of imaging the NEO whizzing past Polaris.......... GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!
Spent some time today in the shed - nice ! - getting on with Spectrometer Mark2, Going to have a coffee then back in 'Shedland' to do a bit of non cloud dependant, oil painting. Having said that, its a landscape and guess what are in the sky- Ironic or what?
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Winters arrived. Frost predicted for tonight and Orion and Gemini visible over my backyard fence before 23:00. A bit of cloud about so didn't get the telescope out. Content with 30 mins with my bins.Quick look at Orion' s Sword, M35 in Gemini, the Double Cluster almost straight up, the Andromeda Galaxy riding high in the sky, M36 and M38 in Auriga the Pleiades and the Hyades in Taurus. Might try a bit of astro photography tomorrow night if the clouds take a night off!
Nighty night stargazers.
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Well eventually, I think I managed to get my 'thinking' head around some of the basics of using Visual Spec software for producing and calibrating a line spectrum of the bright star Vega. About 8 weeks ago, I affixed my homemade spectrometer to the business end of my 127mm refractor and obtained some faint and blurry video of Alpha Lyrae and its first order spectrum. Anyway time passes and after a lot of fiddling about and numerous software crashes, I managed to plot a wiggly line and identify three of the Balmer Series Hydrogen Absorption lines ( well I think I did or it could all be wishfull thinking). The thing is I've ended up with something and hopefully its a calibrated spectrum of Vega. I leave you to be the judge? I tried using Wiens Law and my spectrum to calculate Vega's temperature and was at least half the published temperature of 9600K. I concluded that Vega does not therefore radiate energy as a 'Blackbody'. Anyway this small scientific step has wetted my appetite for spectra and I have some virgin video of Deneb and Altair to play with which at my current rate of progress should keep me busy until Boxing Day. I am also considering a new spectrometer design - using a camera with better controls and a a bigger chip. This could see me undertaking some 'serious shed action' after Christmas. More glue Santa if you please!
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Nice bright aurora over Lerwick. Cliff cam One on Shetland.org worth a look at the moment.
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Went out to the dustbin, looked up and watched the ISS pass overhead. An unexpected treat on a cold and then rainy night.
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From the album: Backyard Astronomy
Nice clear night in September so unexpectedly imaged the 14.5 mag face on barred spiral galaxy IC1296. - 127mm Meade refractor with a x0.8 focal reducer and field flattener, unmodded Canon 600D DSLR all on a NEQ6 Pro mount, guided with a QHY5-11 camera. Image cropped.
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