A Dam Good Friday

It didn't look like it was going to be much of a night last night. The sky was full of crud, and every time an airplane flew over, it left a contrail that just fattened up until it covered a big stretch of sky. By about 11:00 most folks at the dam were packing up to go home, but I wasn't ready to give up just yet. There was a general clearing in the west, and I suspected that the reason those contrails weren't going away was that we had a pretty steady upper atmosphere, which would mean good seeing.

I'm glad I stuck around, because by 0100 the sky was completely clear. There was no wind, the temperature was reasonable enough to not require a jacket, and the dew was just holding off, mostly.



So here's the boring side of Jupiter, with Io just peeking around the edge. Unless I modify my camera, I don't know any technique I'm not using to get the most out of my setup. Collimation? As good as I know how to make it. Focus? The WO focuser is working well, and I've been bracketing my shots to try to find the sweetest spot. Seeing? I can't control it, but last night was as good as we've seen in a long time. Jupiter's altitude above the horizon? It's just 39° up at this point, but even at transit it'll barely top 43°. It's just not going to be a great summer for shooting Jove this year.

Anyway, here's a three-frame animation shot in just six minutes. The big guy moves fast!

The Military Life

I came across this curiosity today and thought, I didn't spend but a month sleeping on a rack like that and I didn't find it very much fun at all. This is a toy?



Then I wondered if I could get a little R. Lee Ermey doll to go with it.



It turns out you can.

2006 LKY Ranch BBQ & Spring Frolic

The wind blew 30 mph all weekend, so no astro pics, but the rest of the photos and a short video are here.

Jupiter & Ganymede

Patience finally pays off. At 2:00 this morning Jupiter was 40° up, which is about as good as it's going to get. I could see the seeing rippling across the disc, even with 3/5 seeing. Red Jr. is just visible at around 2:00 on the image.

A couple of guys driving a 1970 Camaro and 67 Mustang stopped by looking for their dog. They both looked at Saturn, Jupiter & the Moon and were suitably blown away. It's funny--sometimes I think astronomy is about the geekiest hobby possible, but when 20-something hot-rodders proclaim the view of Saturn "the coolest thing they've ever seen," well, maybe it's not so geeky after all.

Star Hoping

That's when you point the telescope at the sky and hope you see something.

Like last night. I didn't want to set up the LX200, so I took the little 6" dob into the back yard with my red flashlight and Star Atlas. I did pretty good on M81 & M82, but totally failed on the Leo Triplett. To be fair to myself, the transparency was only so-so, 6 inches isn't a whole lot of aperture, and my star-hopping skills are practically non-existant.

Meanwhile, here's a new design at CafePress!

Damned If You Dew

There must have been at least 25 telescopes out at the dam last night for maybe the best night so far this year. I was late getting set up, but got nice views of the Leo Triplet (M65 group), and a whole mess of galaxies in Virgo.

I planned on staying out until 0200 to shoot Jupiter. The Great Red Spot was coming around and seeing was holding up pretty well. What I was unprepared for was the cold. By midnight it was in the 30s, and one fellow's thermometer read 34° at 0100. I held on, mostly by hanging out in the car or in front of Bryan's dam heater, but the iBook crapped out. I'm guessing it was a combination of the cold and dew, but the NexImage image was filled with the same herringbone noise I saw last time it was cold.

I got as far as focusing, but was geting so cold and miserable myself I decided to pack it in and wait for a warmer night.

So--imagine a nice picture of Jupiter here.

Saturn Variations, pt. 2

Brad Carlson, aka RedIrocZ-28 on the Cloudy Nights forums did a nice job touching up the latest Saturn:



CSC is forecasting 4/5 seeing for Friday night, turning to 5/5 early Saturday morning. Who needs sleep?

Saturn Variations

CSC said 3/5 seeing, but it may have been better. I shot 2k-frame streams, and stacked about 1500-1800 in Keith's Image Stacker. 10" LX200, 2.5x PowerMate & un-modded NexImage.


Nice view of the Crepe, but low contrast on the planet.



Same shot with highlight contrast enhanced. Kinda crunchy.



High (low? opposite) gamma capture. Sharpest of the lot, but no sign of the Crepe.

Spacewalker T-Shirts

I've put up a new CafePress store with this original illustration.

Gassendi & The Crepe Ring

Sounds like a great name for a band.

Mare Humorum: "On the north 'shore ' is one of the most beautiful and intensively observed lunar formation, the walled plain Gassendi, about 55 miles in diameter. It has a curious lop-sided appearance and its walls are quite high and complete except on the extreme south where there is a gap. It seems that in the remote past the fluid material of the Mare Humorum destroyed this part of the south wall of Gassendi and flooded the south part of the floor. At the center is a splendid group of mountain peaks, the highest of which rises to 4000 feet. On the south-east part of the floor is the remnant of what was probably once a nearly concentric interior ring. Gassendi is notable because of the variety of details on its interior, among which are about 30 or 40 clefts. Two of the most prominent of these diverge from the central mountains over the floor in a south-west direction. Associated with these are two craterlets that are very bright at full moon. These and other clefts in the south-west part of the floor are easily visible in a four inch telescope but the others that are on the east half of the interior need large apertures to be seen. They criss-cross or run parallel in a complex manner and cannot all be seen on any one occasion. Good seeing, the right angle of illumination and favorable libration are essential for their successful visualization. The cleft system has been charted by different observers and there is a strange diversity among the different delineations. In fact, it has been said: "Every Man his own Gassendi". The north wall of Gassendi is intruded upon by the crater Clarkson and just to the east of the wall of Gassendi is sliced through by two prominent gaps that continue across the floor as two parallel clefts. On the east wall is a curious crater-like depression from which extends on the outside in a south-east direction the Percy Mountains defining the north-east border of the Mare Humorum." The Moon Observer's Handbook by Fred W. Price.

I shot this on a breezy night at the dam with pretty good seeing (3-4/5) using the LPI in the LX200 with the TeleVue 2x barlows. I compared the Meade LPI side-by-side with the NexImage, and for lunar imaging the image differences are too close to call. The LPI does have a different pixel size, so it has less apparent magnification.

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I finally captured the "C" Ring around Saturn, aka the Crepe Ring. It's a pretty low contrast feature, so I turned the gain up on the camera much higher than I had been. The down side is that the image is noisier than usual, but that's OK.

Truth is, I was pretty disappointed when I was shooting this since the capture was so noisy. I was sure that the whole thing was going to be sucky, so now I'm extra pleased.

NexImage/LX200/TV 2x barlows. 600/1000 stacked in KIS, final processing in Photoshop.

Twenty Years Ago

And sixty pounds lighter.


This must have been the summer after my freshman year--1984. Clint's old boat on Lake Conroe. David took the picture.


David took this one too. Spring semester 1985, sophomore year. I was living on campus at J324 Prather Hall, and my phone number was 495-DUMB, but I don't remember my roommate's name that semester. (Marc?) I do remember he kept sweat-soaked hockey gear in the closet and was a cheapskate moocher. Anyway, I must have had a really repulsive personality, because if I couldn't get laid with body ...

Pants on Fire

It's not my fault that politics is so interesting these days; CNN keeps lobbing up these softballs, and I'm compelled to swing at them.

"He lied so the plot could proceed unimpeded," Robert Spencer said in his opening statement. "He lied, and 3,000 people died."

Is Spencer referring to A: Admitted al Qaeda member Zacarias Moussaoui, or B: George W. Bush?

Not Too Shabby

CSC said 3/5, so I went for it. Dropped the frame rate on the NexImage from "best" to 5 with interesting results--the image is actually noisier. I took a minute to tweak collimation beforehand too, and it may have helped. If it was out, it was a very close, as I just barely touched it.

Will the Real Patriot Please Stand Up?

OK, one more political post. I thought it was ironic that this moron said this while discussing renewing the "Patriot" act:

"Civil liberties do not mean much when you are dead," Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Kentucky, told the Senate.

Looks like we've come a long way from "Give me liberty, or give me death."

Religious Freedom in Texas

I was renewing my vehicle registration today when I came across an insert urging me to purchase these religious license plates for my car:




It struck me as being awfully close to the State promoting religion, a specific religion, namely Judea-Christian monotheism. I doubt we'll ever see Texas plates expressing "Allahu Akbar" or respecting "the Goddess" (which is ironic if you look at all the pentacles around Austin these days).

I even looked it up in the Texas Constitution. Article 1, section 6: "... No preference shall ever be given by law to any religious society ..." That's pretty clear to me. And we all know about the First Amendment to the US Constitution, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion."

So what's the deal? Am I off-base here, or is the State?

Three Weeks Later

Finally, a clear night. This is a pretty typical shot it seems. I'm so close, but still not quite where I want to be. I'm going to try again to collimate, but I'm not convinced that I'm not simply battling the atmosphere itself.

I'm trying to get a pier built in the back yard for a more permanent setup. I'm learning about concrete almost as fast as I am about astronomy.

My Exciting Life

I finally fixed the freezer door so we once again can get ice by pushing a cup into the slot. Which is fine, but I'm not looking forward to the boy learning about it.



In other news, I'm thinking about getting one of these for the back yard. What happened to trying to decide which bar to go drinking at?

Winter Olympics

I still love watching the downhill and the bobsledding, but my new favorite Winter Olympic sport has to be snowboard cross. Which is weird, because I've never gotten into the whole snowboard "scene," preferring regular skiing. (I always claimed it was because I didn't have a goofy hat.)

A Mild Rant

I'm a member of several mailing lists, and I see this sort of thing happen way too often. Someone has a problem, and asks how to fix it. Today was, "I've stripped a screw head. How can I get the screw out?"

So I go to Google, type in "remove stripped screw," and in 0.21 seconds I've got 363,000 results on how to remove a stripped screw.

Is it really that difficult for people to do their own searches?

I worked with a woman at a job years ago. She was moaning and carrying on about how she couldn't find the lyrics to some song. Fifteen seconds into her rant, I was reading the lyrics aloud. Pissed her off mightily, but I didn't care.

Dam Astronomers

I opened a Dam Astronomers Cafe Press store with this design:




Please buy lots of stuff!