NGC 2903, A Spiral Galaxy in Leo

No way was I going to let such a beautiful night as last night go by. A little sliver of moon, but not enough to wash out this galaxy. I shot this last year--I'm glad I went back and shot it again. Experience shows. =)

25 x 180 sec, EOS350D, 10" LX200 @ f/6.3, guided with PHD/DSI/ST80

Orion

Here's a quickie wide-field shot of the Orion constellation. I piggybacked the Canon on top of the LDX650 mount and snapped a half-dozen or so shots. Focus was a bit off--I was just eyeballing it--but not a terrible shot in the end.

WorldWide Telescope

M44, The Beehive Cluster

I have tried, but am still not totally enchanted with most open clusters. But if you like 'em, here's a shot of M44, the Beehive Cluster through the AT80EDT with the unmodded 350D for your enjoyment. 25 x 120 sec (out of 40 in the blowing wind!) @ ISO 800. Spikes from Astronomy Tools PS.

This famous cluster, Messier 44 (M44, NGC 2632), is also called Praesepe (Latin for "manger"), or the Beehive cluster. It is also one of the objects easily visible to the naked eye, and thus known since prehistoric times. Some ancient lore is associated with it: Greeks and Romans saw this "nebula" as the manger (Greek: Phatne) associated with two asses who eat from it, Asellus Borealis, the Northern Ass (Gamma Cnc; Spectral type A1 V, mag 4.7, distance 155 ly) and Asellus Australis, the Southern Ass (Delta Cnc; Spectrum K0 III, mag 3.9, distance 155 ly). Erathosthenes reported that these were the asses on which the gods Dionysos and Silenus rode into the battle against the Titans, who were frightened by the animals' braying so that the gods won. As a reward, the asses were put in sky together with Phatne. Aratos (260 B.C.) mentioned this object as "Little Mist", Hipparchus (130 B.C.) included this object in his star catalog and called it "Little Cloud" or "Cloudy Star." Ptolemy mentions it as one of seven "nebulae" he noted in his Almagest, and describes it as "The Nebulous Mass in the Breast (of Cancer)". According to Burnham, it appeared on Johann Bayer's chart (about 1600 A.D.) as "Nubilum" ("Cloudy" Object).

Stargazing Tips From the Onion

Stargazing tips from the Onion.

Some may scoff at the hobby of astronomy, but sitting in an empty field in the middle of winter is a great way to see tiny little dots.

Third Saturn of the Year

This one's a keeper. 2000 frames LRGB in the DMK in the LX200 @ f/25.

Eleventh Mars of the Year

Same scope setup, and shot just minutes after the tenth Mars, but this time in LRGB with the DMK21AF firewire camera. Much cleaner. Both were 2000 frames and processed in Astro IIDC. Sure, LRGB takes a little longer, but the results speak for themselves. I'm very happy with this Mars shot.

Tenth Mars of the Year

Getting much smaller and distinctly gibbous two months after opposition. Shot with the SPC900NC at f/25 under pretty steady seeing, 3/5.

M81 & M82, Bode's Galaxy & Cigar Galaxy

Shot this from the Eagle Eye Observatory in the AT80EDT on the LXD650, guided with the ST80. 25 x 150 seconds. That's the irregular galaxy NGC3077 in the lower right.

A little nicer than last time, but shooting with the moon just three days past full didn't help.

Plato and the Alps

(Sounds like a 60s band.)

Not quite as nice as the last couple, but still better than anything I've shot until now. This is the last of an imaging session last week. 3 x 3000 @ 60 fps in the 10" LX200.

Is It 2009 Yet?

We interrupt the lunar imaging for another political observation:

Speaking in Kigali, Rwanda, President Bush said Tuesday that the resignation of Fidel Castro “ought to be a period of democratic transition” for Cuba, and said the country must hold free and fair elections to pick a successor after half a century of Communist rule.

“And I mean free and I mean fair,” Mr. Bush added, “not these kind of staged elections that the Castro brothers try to foist off as true democracy.”

Mr. Bush continued, "Cuban elections should be more like American elections, where your Dad seats members of the Supreme Court, which then decides that you win the contested election in the state where your brother is the governor."

Tycho to Clavius

I may have surpassed my previous best.

Gassendi Again

This may very well be the nicest shot I've made of the Moon. Compare with this version from a year ago.

650/3000 frames with the DMK @ 60 fps, green filter, 10" LX200 @ f/10. CSC said 2/5 and the wind was moving things around. Used 26 alignment points in Registax.

Theophilus to Tranquility Base

Three-shot mosaic from Theophilus to Tranquility Base. 2000 frames each, stacked in Registax with 10-20 alignment points each. Assembled in PS CS3 and high-pass sharpened. Not quite Alan Friedman quality, but I'm pretty happy with my progress.

Atlas & Hercules

21 alignment points in Registax. Still not as smooth as I'd like.

Apollo 17

More of that 2/5 seeing. Aligned in Registax using 9 alignment points. 2000 frames at 60 fps with the DMK21AF04 and a green filter. 10" LX200 at f/10.

Linus & Lucy

Second Saturn of the Year

FInally some better seeing, maybe 3/5. Not perfect, but it'll do. Still trying to learn all about LRGB imaging, but I think I'm making progress.

M42, The Orion Nebula (Modified Camera)

My buddy Daniel brought his new EOS 350D over last night. His camera is different from mine in that on his, the IR cutoff filter has been removed, so the camera is much more sensitive to the red colors in many nebula. Here's a stack of 20 (10 x 30 sec, 10 x 90 sec, 10 darks) of M42, the Orion Nebula with the AT80EDT. Compare the color to this version with my unmodified camera. This was also my first attempt at auto-guiding the LXD650 mount, and it looks like I need to adjust the settings a bit.

Water Treatment Plant

Drawing in progress for work.

"We can't show that to the client! The labels are in the wrong font!"

How Fights Start

I rear-ended a car this morning.

So there we are alongside the road and slowly the driver gets out of the car, and you know how you just-get-sooo-stressed and life-stuff seems to get funny?

Yeah, well, I could NOT believe it . . . he was a DWARF!

He storms over to my car,looks up at me and says, "I AM NOT HAPPY!"

So, I look down at him and say, "Well, which one are you then?"


The doctor assures me the swelling will go down in a couple of days, and my voice will return to normal at the same time.

Eighth, Ninth Mars of the Year

First light through the DMK21AF04.US using the Orion LRGB filters. All I can say is, it ain't the same as the SPC900NC! Getting the color balance is trick-ee. I'm driving the camera and processing with Astro IIDC.

We're on the back side of a cold front right now--temperature's dropped 15 degrees since sunset so you can imagine what the seeing is like.


This second stack is a little better. It's noiser--I kept the shutter fast to try to "freeze" the poor seeing, and so had to boost the gain. It's a trade-off, I know, and I'm not sure which is the better way to go.

A Picture That's Just Begging To Be Altered

The Photoshop possibilities just boggle the mind. Especially if your mind is in the gutter.

The Central Texas Nebula

Shot this last night, but it could have been anytime during the last two weeks. This nebula is huge--no way can I fit in the field-of-view of any of my scopes.

Dartmoor Pony

Ian made the front page of the Dartmoor Pony Registry of America web site! I'm sure it didn't hurt that his Aunt Linda runs the site. =)

Aristarchus

One of my favorite lunar features, but I still haven't made a decent picture of it.

Seventh Mars of the Year

Or as Linda calls it, The Martian Chronicles.

First Saturn of the Year

Shot this while Saturn was just 33° above the horizon. I was freezing and the scope was frosty, so I didn't try to wait until it rose higher. Notice how much the rings have closed since last March.

An Astronomical Commercial

This ad has generated a lot of discussion over on CloudyNights.com, mostly positive:

Separated At Birth?

We'll get back to astronomy soon, I promise. Meanwhile, here's an interesting thought:

Christmas 2007

Christmas 2007 pictures are here.

Sixth Mars of the Year (Dam Mars)

Shot this one through Barry's 10" LX200GPS at the dam last night. It was dam cold with the wind blowing.

Fifth Mars of the Year

Almost didn't stay up to shoot this, but I'm glad now that I did. Best one yet.

Fourth Mars of the Year

Mars' closest approach to Earth was this week.

I was feeling bummed about this picture, thinking I should be getting more detail until I looked at this simulated view from Calsky of Mars through a 10" telescope:


I guess mine's not so bad after all.

Third Mars of the Year

Shot this at 1:20 a.m. when Mars was directly overhead. The forecast was for poor seeing, but I think it was probably between 3/5 and 4/5--not perfect, but much better than I had hoped it would be. 1500 frames with the SPC900NC in the LX200.

Horsehead Nebula

Not the definitive image of this object, but definitely one of the more difficult things I've ever attempted. The red cloud that provides the background for the horsehead is composed of ionized hydrogen, and glows in a specific color that the stock Canon Digital Rebel XT is almost blind to. That means I had to stretch this image like salt water taffy to get it to show up. On the other hand, the Flame Nebula to the left looks pretty good.

Shot 30 x 3 minutes through the AT80EDT piggybacked and guided with the LX200. Had some trouble with the declination guiding (should have just turned it off) so I tossed out about a third of the images. Now that I see what I can get from my back yard, I really want to shoot this again from darker skies.

Second Mars of the Year

Better seeing, but I just couldn't stay up late enough to let Mars rise overhead. It was just above 45° altitude when I shot this.

First Mars of the Year

Not the best ever, but you can tell what it is. Seeing between 2/5 & 3/5. I was hoping it would get better as it got later, but it didn't. I still like the SPC900NC, and the new version of EquinoX worked better than I thought it would.

Repairing the Meade LX200 RA Drive

Finally, we've gotten some good, dark steady skies. Just in time for the 10" LX200 Classic to go belly-up. Well, maybe not belly-up, but it wasn't happy. At start up, when the RA drive is turning to align the worm gear, I was getting an awful "clackety-clackety" sound. Then once the drive setteled into RA tracking, it would skip or hiccup every 7 to 9 seconds.

A couple of months ago I had disassembled the entire RA assembly and re-lubricated it. I had been getting a high-speed vibration while tracking that I was attributing to "old grease." (Now, I'm not so sure that was the problem, but it's nice to have the worm and RA gear re-lubed anyway.) When I heard the noise, my first thought was that I had somehow made a mistake when I reassembled everything. Didn't seem likely though, as the scope had been running just fine. Then it occurred to me--this latest problem only showed up after the weather had gotten cold. Just the same, I removed and reinstalled the RA motor/gearbox assembly. No change. But blowing the hair dryer on it for a few minutes would cure it! Auugh.

So it's off to the internet and the Meade Advanced Products User Groups (MAPUG) archives, where I find a description of exactly what I was experiencing. Hooray! The fix? Adjusting two potentiometers on the motor control board. "No problem!" I thought. Then I read where the job requires a dual-channel oscilloscope. Drats.

But I kept reading. A little further down the page I found a link to Bruce Johnston's Astronomy Pages, and his instructions on repairing the LX200 drives using just a multimeter. Hey, I have one of those!

A short trip to Radio Shack for a few bucks of supplies, and I was off. I was getting pretty good at removing the motor assembly by now, and soon I had it sitting on the kitchen table. I followed Bruce's instructions and connected two batteries and the multimeter, and sure enough, the numbers were out of whack. Adjusting the two pots was simple, and after disconnecting all the wires, I reassembled everything back in the base of the scope. Guess what?

It works! Just as soon as I finish this, I'm off to the observatory to attempt making this year's first Mars image. Wish me luck.

Not A Creature Was Stirring

Another Thing That Bugs Me

The sign on the front door to my kid's school asking "Got Your Driver's License?"

Mac Developer Wanted

Are you a Macintosh developer? Do you know XCode and QTKit? Would you be willing to help me develop a new webcam capture application for Leopard? I have a good idea what it should look like and exactly what I want it to do. I'm thinking open source, but shareware would be fine, too. All I want is my copy and any updates free.

The goal of the app is a small, streamlined capture application for USB-webcams using either macam or IOXperts drivers. The camera settings (gain, white balance, etc.) must be accessible. Specify the file destination in a standard save dialog or have a preference to date-stamp filenames and save to a designated location. Must be able to specify the number of frames to capture in a dialog and display a running count during the capture. Full-size (640 x 480) live preview. Zoom-able preview nice, but not necessary.

Let me know if you're interested.

Curses, Foiled Again

It must be a conspiracy.

First the time changed. Falling back is supposed to be easy, but for whatever reason this year it totally screwed me up. It's hard to do astronomy in your sleep, and when you're going to bed at 9:00, well, you know.

Then it was time to travel. First we visit my sister's new place on this side a Brenham. A real house, with a real bedroom--yay! The sad part is it's much closer to town than the previous place, so there's no real reason to set up a telescope there.

Then it's off to Dallas to see the mother-in-law. Since she's in an apartment in the middle of town, the same thing applies. Never mind she lives in a scary complex.

Now we're home, and I've upgraded the trusty MacBook to Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard. I like the new version, and it does a lot of neat things, except it broke both EquinoX, the application I use to image with the webcam, and Nebulosity, the Canon imaging app. Sigh. Nebulosity gets updated pretty quickly, just in time for the clouds. I worked with the developer to beta test a new version of EquinoX, and was going to try it out on the moon tonight. I got about 60 seconds in when the clouds start rolling back in, just long enough to see that the fix isn't going to be a good one. Fortunately, I cloned the hard drive before I installed Leopard, so I can still boot from the previous version from the small external drive.

And so here we sit, back under solid clouds. Imagine if you will in the space below a decent shot of Gassendi and maybe a blurry Mars.

Still, the evening wasn't a total loss. While I had an eyepiece in the scope Ian came out in sat in my lap. He looked at the moon in the eyepiece and exclaimed, "Cheese! Let's go there. Gromit will help us make a rocket. Where's the alien?" I love that boy.

Make My Logo Bigger

Every once in a while I'm reminded why I don't miss working in advertising all that much.

Comet 17P/Holmes

The astronomy mailing lists exploded yesterday with reports about Comet 17P/Holmes' unexpected dramatic increase in brightness. Here's the story from space.com:

A small and very faint comet has surprised observers around the world by overnight becoming bright enough to see with the unaided eye.

Comet Holmes, which was discovered in November 1892 by Edwin Holmes, in London England, was no brighter than magnitude 17 in mid-October—that's about 25,000 times fainter than the faintest star that can normally be seen without any optical aid. In order to view an object this faint, one would need a moderately large telescope.

But the comet's brightness has suddenly rocketed all the way up to 3rd-magnitude, brightening nearly 400,000 times in less than 24 hours! On this astronomers scale, smaller numbers mean brighter objects. From urban locations, a 3rd-magnitude object might be hidden by light pollution, but under rural skies it would be clearly vsiible.

I shot it with all three cameras last night and got the best results with the SPC900C webcam. This is 1000 frames shot through the 10" LX200 @ f/10. It's very close to what I saw in the eyepiece: a bright nucleus, a small fan-shaped "tail" inside a glowing disc. It almost looked like a star seen through dew-covered optics (I checked!). I thought it was sort of greenish in the telescope, but it was yellow to my naked eye, and came out sort of golden here.

Meade In Trouble?

Since I'm not a Meade dealer, I don't feel particularly bound by their dealer website restrictions. Here is the PDF documenting the discontinuance of the RCX400, among other things.

M33, The Triangulum Galaxy

Third time I've shot M33, and each one is better than the last.

AT80EDT on the LX200, 12 x 300 sec, Digital Rebel XT @ ISO 1600

Happy Dog

NGC 6992, The Veil Nebula (East)

Here's why I bought the AT80EDT:



From Wikipedia:

The Veil Nebula, also known as the Cygnus Loop or the Witch's Broom Nebula, is a large, relatively faint supernova remnant in the constellation Cygnus. The source supernova exploded some 5,000 to 8,000 years ago, and the remnants have since expanded to cover an area of 3 degrees. The distance to the nebula is not precisely known, with estimates ranging from 1,400 to 2,600 light years. It was discovered on 1784 September 5 by William Herschel. He described the western end of the nebula as "Extended; passes thro' 52 Cygni... near 2 degree in length." and described the eastern end as "Branching nebulosity... The following part divides into several streams uniting again towards the south."

24 x 300 seconds through the AT80EDT piggybacked on the 10" LX200, Canon Rebel XT @ 1600 ISO

AT80EDT Second and Third Light

Here's M31 a couple of more times, but this time from the Heritage Park Observatory. The AT80EDT is mounted on top of, and guided using the DSI through, the 10" LX200. Now we can make judgments about chromatic aberration (CA, the colored halos around bright objects) and field flatness.

Here's the first go:

Click for the full size and look in the four corners. You can see that the stars are streaks pointing away from the center of the image. That's the field curvature. The good news is the lack of CA--if it's there, I can't see it.

So I added a TeleVue field flattener in front of the camera. It's not designed specifically for this scope, but since it was the cheapest option by two-thirds, I figured I'd give it a try. It increases the focal length by 10%, so I get a slightly smaller field of view.

The corners still aren't perfect, but I'm pretty happy with the results.

I Need One Of These

How have I survived this long without a R2-D2 pepper mill?

Hook 'Em, Cowboys?

Photo from Sports Illustrated

OK, so he grew up in California and played for Arizona, but Dallas Cowboys kicker Nick Folk showed a little Texas spirit when the Cowboys beat the Bills on Monday night.

Okie-Tex

I knew I should have taken off from work to go to Okie-Tex:



Maybe next year.

TeleVue Ethos

If you remember from back in May, I got a chance to look though a TeleVue Ethos, their new 100° field of view eyepiece. They're now available for a cool $620.

Yeah, that's as much as a nice 80mm APO refractor, which is why I'm not likely to own one anytime soon.

I have found what may be a suitable replacement though, and it's much more reasonably priced. I need to check it out under some dark skies, though:

Texas 21, Oklahoma 28

I told my neighbor last night I expected the Horns would get the stuff kicked out of 'em today. I predicted 35–3, OU, so I suppose losing by only one touchdown isn't so bad. If not for one fumble, we might have won. Alas.

Something Is Terribly Wrong With Me

When I saw this Burger King costume, my first thought was how useful it'd be for making really freaky, creepy homemade porn.

A Cool-Looking Little Airplane

Spotted this Van's RV-4 parked at the airport in Nacogdoches.

Twin 80s

Ready for a clear night.