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.

AT80EDT First Light

Last month my buddy Daniel gave me a Meade LXD650 German equatorial mount--basically the GEM version of the LX200 mount that I already use. Catch is, it doesn't work right. I dig into it and find the problem, a gear is turning on a shaft where it's not supposed to. I get that repaired, and $35 later I have a working* mount. But what am I going to do with it? I could de-fork the LX200, but it's non-trivial to get it back onto the forks and aligned. Or I could find a scope that's portable and designed for photography.

So that's what I did. I started researching apochromatic refractors. I've been getting nice shots with the big SCT, but it's limited to smaller targets due to the long focal length, so I'm looking for something with less focal length. I'm also trying to not spend a whole lot of money. So the Tele-Vue NP-101 that I really like is out: $3,700 is way out of my league. The Orion ED80 is a popular choice, and at $600 it's right in my sweet spot. But Barry has one, and while it's a very nice telescope, I want something different. The Meade Series 5000 ED APO triplet looks promising, but I never found an entirely positive review. Finally after a lot of research, I decide on the Astronomy Technologies AT80EDT. It's a triplet design, which means it uses three lenses instead of the usual two. It has a two-speed focuser like the one I added to the LX200, and comes in a nice case.

One Astromart "wanted" ad and a week later I'm the new owner of a nearly new AT80EDT. She's a beauty--white finish with grey, gold and green accents. The views through her are sweet, too. She rides just fine on the big LXD650 mount too. Here she is lit by the first quarter moon:



Friday night was the big night. Barry talked me into going up to the Eagle Eye Observatory for an overnighter, and what a night it was. Fridays are public night at the EEO, and there were about 40 guests there. The observatory operator had his hands full, so Barry & I took up the slack. He had his 10" LX200GPS going, while I put the binoviewers in the AT80EDT and aimed it at the Moon. I love it when someone looks into the scope and exclaims, "Oh my God!"

After the guests left and the Moon set, I hooked up the camera and went to work. I don't have the mount set up for autoguiding yet, so these are kinda rough. Each one is 40 x 30 seconds for just a 20-minute total exposure time. They're enough to get me really excited about imaging with this telescope though. Up first is M31, the Andromeda Galaxy:



Then there's M45, the Pleiades. I somehow managed to pull out some of the blue nebulosity even with the short exposure:



And last is M42, the Orion Nebula. Always a crowd-pleaser: