Looking Glass Accessories

This wood telescope is coming along very well. Here is a photo of the scope before paint and varnish to show how much of the scope is new woodwork.

Since that photo, I have done a few modifications:

I rebuilt the focuser holder out of a piece of 1/2 inch ply wood.

I painted and varnished all the pieces of the scope.

I cut an inch and a half from the height of the scope.

I built a primary mirror cover for the lower box.

I built a new brace system for the top of the primary mirror box.

I sewed a secondary mirror cover

I sewed a container for the trusses for transport.

I modified the white nylon cover I had built for the HyperLightbridge and it now fits Looking Glass very well.

OK. Now I need some clear, dark skies after full moon. Lets put the request in.

Introducing Looking Glass II

A couple nights of work in the garage was transformed into a new telescope housing for my 16 inch Lightbridge. When I bought the scope last summer, I originally knew that I wanted to use the optics to build a new scope.

But wanting to get the scope in the field led me to a project to do a partial rebuild to correct the two main problems that I knew about with the Lightbridge. I was able to move the center of the altitude bearing up a couple inches and was able to reduce the weight of the base.

But this never really left me satisfied. I knew that I wanted to build a StarMaster type housing for the optics. I wanted to build in wood. I wanted to put something of myself in the design.

So this last weekend, I began the process. I stole some of the woodwork that I had done for the Looking Glass project - one that I called the Hyperlightbridge base.

I finished the woodwork on Tuesday evening and had a first light celebration. Last night I finished the wood with a combination of varnish and black paint.

There will still be a couple improvements. I need to build a mirror cover. I need to find a good way to transport the scope. I need to make a new cloth cover for dew.

The nice thing about building something myself is fearlessness in modifying it!

Long nights

I was able to finish up the mechanical part of the scope rebuild last night. It is about 2 inches taller than the previous version. Maybe I can adjust that. First view was the Orion nebula at 11 PM. It works!

It was harder to put the mirror cell back on the cast iron base plate than I had imagined it would be. I put the mirror cell box on my saw horse and laid down under it like a car mechanic. That allowed me to see where the springs were to finally get the first screw in.

After mounting the mirror in the base, I was pleased that the balance point was right at the top of the box, and that is with Telrad, finder scope, and eyepiece attached.

I'm thinking through paint schemes. I am thinking about black braces on the secondary housing, black trusses, a black interior to the mirror cell, black altitude bearings (half moons) and blonde varnish on most other pieces.

Anyone know a good way to paint a half moon on the half moons? Tole paining techniques might work, if I can find a good pattern to copy.

Rebuilding Looking Glass

This last weekend, I have begun to design and build a total make-over for my 16 inch Lightbridge. In this design, all the hardware outside of the spider, focuser, and optics are replaced.

The mirror cell is mounted in a square box. Crutch-like trusses will be attached to the four sides of the box. And a new and lighter secondary housing replaces the original metal design.

This is an almost all wood design, with even the truss pieces made from wood dowels.

Attached to this post, are construction photographs of the overall design at the stage I was figuring out how long to make the trusses and a photo of the secondary rings.

Gear Case with Foam Insert

Over the last couple weekends, I decided that I needed to come up with a better way to carry my Telrads, eyepieces, and other "stuff" that I use for every star party and every astronomy event.

I had been using a brown cloth bag, designed as a tool bag, and all those things were rattling around in the bottom of the bag. (The eyepieces were in their own pocket.) But I almost always found that the Telrads had been knocked around enough so that their on/off switch had rotated to on. Fortunately, a Telrad runs for a long time with its switch in the On position.

I built a wood case and bought some camera case foam. I built the foam "jig saw" shown in the photo from a 3 amp 12 volt transformer and a piece of nichrome wire.

Here you see the result of my project. If anyone in the San Antonio Astronomical Association needs some foam cut for a box, I now have the right tool for the job. Just let me know.

Dark Skies,

Risk

November Night in the Hills

Last night, after an early supper, my sweetie and I headed for the Hill Country State Natural Area. A cold front had swept through the area the night before and the sky was as dark a blue all day as I have seen for a long time. We got to the observing area a half hour after sunset and I had plenty of light to put the scope together and collimate it.

After taking a peak at Jupiter and watching a few satellites go by, I set about my Herschel List. I opened the O’Meara book to November and started running the objects. The first three nights were all in Cassiopeia. Each object was a small open cluster. The only one I recognized was the ET cluster, NGC 457. Wow! There are a lot of clusters in that small constellation.

Most of these Herschel objects were recorded by Caroline Herschel on November nights about the time of the US Revolutionary War. King George the 3rd, our war adversary, was sponsor to her brother and herself. Maybe the old codger was not so bad after all. He may have had the tea tax all wrong, but at least he supported astronomy.

After recording my Herschel observations on my recorder and enjoying the Milky Way galaxy for a bit, Diane and I headed home and were sitting in our living room by 9:15. During the summer, at 9:15 we were still waiting for the sky to get dark in a field somewhere!

It was so pretty on this moonless night, that I think I will have to go do it all over again tonight. I have four more “nights” of November to run through in O’Meara’s book.

**************

I did go back on the 17th. Beautiful night again, though it got cold. John E and I were there just after sunset and I stayed until a little after 9 PM. John still had an object he wanted to sketch before leaving.

I was able to finish up the remaining 16 Herschel objects for November. There were some nice open clusters, but it was mainly a night of searching for dim galaxies.

On the way home, a deer ran part of the way across the Texas 16 and I reacted with a hard pull on the steering wheel. My right two tires left the pavement at 60 mph. I got back on the highway without rolling the truck. Uhhh.... That was not the way I had planned on reacting to a deer.

But I got home without a scratch on the truck or the scope. Needless to say, it was not hard to stay awake after that!

Dark Skies,

Rick

Binocular Box For The Eyes of Texas

Ever since I built the Couch Potato Telescope chair, I have wanted to get a larger binocular. For a discussion on why, the patient reader may want to go back and read my blog titled “Binoculars” in June of 2009. I have looked at several different binoculars since that time and finally decided to get a medium priced 80mm binocular. Two weeks ago, I was quite pleased to see that the price of the Celestron 20x80 binoculars with braced mounting had gone from the mid $200 range to $130. At that price, the binocular was a steal!

The binocular arrived this week and a quick back-yard check of its optics was impressive. So I decided to give it a welcome home present. I should give it a name too – and what would be better than “The Eyes of Texas.”

The Eyes of Texas are upon you,
All the live long day.
The Eyes of Texas are upon you,
You cannot get away.
Do not think you can escape them,
At night, or early in the morn'.
The Eyes of Texas are upon you,
Till Gabriel blows his horn!

The binocular came in a cardboard box, with foam padding, not Styrofoam. That offered the possibility of building a good looking and practical wood instrument case for the binocular. The foam padding could be recycled as the instrument case padding.

In my building the eyepiece warming box the previous week, I had learned a couple lessons about plywood. The main learning point was that I needed a hollow ground blade for my circular saw instead of the all-purpose blade I had made the previous box with. I was tired of the badly frayed edges on some of the plywood cuts.


I wanted to dress the box up a little, so I went to the local hardware store (Home Depot) and picked up some brass colored hardware. I chose a pair of hinges of reasonable size, two bail latches, a handle, and a set of eight brass corners.

After measuring the foam block, I set about designing the box sides from ½ inch hardwood ply. I joined the sides with countersunk brass screws. Because I wanted the lid to be a little like a briefcase lid, I put a lip on the top 1-1/2 inches deep.

To the two rectangular box pieces, I screwed a top of ¼ inch Luan plywood. I varnished the wood components inside and out and set it out to dry for a couple hours. Unfortunately, there was a thunder storm at lunch time on Sunday and it took a little longer for the pieces to dry than I wanted. I was impatient to get the hardware on the box.


I put the hinges, latches, and handle on. Lastly, I screwed on the corners. This ended up being a very handsome box for The Eyes of Texas and she seemed to enjoy it.

Last night, Matt R and I went out to Hill Country State Natural Area and did some star gazing in a dark sky. Conditions were not perfect – there was a lot of moisture in the air – but I had a couple involuntary “Wow”s after I attached the binocular to the rotating binocular chair. I don’t believe I have ever seen M31 to the extent that I saw it through that binocular last night. M110 was easily visible in the same field along with M32. I scanned through the Messier objects in Sagittarius and the Milky Way above it and was quite pleased with my purchase and with first dark sky light on those Big Eyes.

Warm Eyepiece Box

When I was at the Eldorado star party last month, I listened to a talk on dew heaters. It was appropriate because the dew at this party was hard to deal with. This was the first time that I needed to break out my hair dryer for optics.

One of the problems I had was the new mount for my eyepieces on the side of the Looking Glass scope. The eyepieces, sitting there radiating all their heat into a clear sky cooled very quickly and began to collect dew.

I was able to cope with that a little by laying a clean sock over the top of eyepieces with a hand warmer in the sock. However I knew there must be a better way. So I began to think of options.

Two weeks ago, I finally sat down to build a small box that can hang on the side of my scope. It has room for my three most often used eyepieces and the three-hole receiver can be removed so that a hand warmer can be dropped into the bottom of the box.

I have used the box several times now. I have not had to use a hand warmer, as the dew has not been so bad again, but I have discovered that I spend less time watching folks at public star parties. Having those eyepieces in a container makes me worry less about them.

It’s a Big Galaxy Out There

Last month, I was trying to remember how far away an open star cluster was. I was showcasing NGC 457 at a state park star party. This cluster is a cute appearing cluster in Cassiopeia. It is called the ET cluster or the Owl cluster. For kids these days, I call it the WALL-E cluster.

Since I could not remember its distance, I came up with something that seemed like it might make sense. I said that it was probably a couple hundred light years away. Boy was I wrong. I should have just said that I could not remember. Now there are maybe a dozen kids and parents roaming the world thinking that ET is a lot closer to home than he really is…

Of course, hundreds of light years away is still a long, long way.

Here is one way of thinking of these distances. It is about 3000 miles from the east coast of the US to the west coast. The circumference of the earth is about 24000 miles. Light travels at about 186000 miles in one second.

That means it would take about 1/7 of a second for light to circle the earth. 1/50th of a second is all it would take for light to make it from the left coast to the right coast of the US.

The moon is about 240,000 miles from the earth on average. So it takes about 1-1/3 seconds for light to travel from the moon to the earth. The sun is about 93,000,000 miles from earth. So it takes about 500 seconds or 8-1/3 minutes for the light from the sun to reach the earth.

Jupiter is hanging high in the evening sky right now. It is about 484 million miles from the sun. That is five times as far as the earth is from the sun. One way to talk about distances in the solar system is to measure in Astronomical Units (AU). One AU is the average distance of the earth from the sun. Jupiter’s distance from earth ranges from 4 AU to 6AU. In light minutes, Jupiter’s distance from the sun is about 41 minutes. But when I look at Jupiter right now, the time it takes for light to leave the sun, travel to Jupiter, reflect off the clouds and come back to my eye is closer to 80 minutes – almost an hour and a half.

I was pointing out Neptune to one of our club members from the light polluted city streets of San Antonio last week. Neptune is 4.5 billion miles from the sun. That is about 6.7 light hours from the sun. When I was pointing out Neptune, its light had been traveling for more than 13 hours since it left the surface of the sun. Another way to think of Neptune’s distance is that it is about a million times as far away as the distance across our country.

But that’s just peanuts.

The second nearest star is about 3 light years away. That’s 2000 times as far away as Neptune. Sirius, the brightest star in our sky is about 8-1/2 light years away. Star clusters are much further away. The Pleiades are a close cluster and are about 440 light years away. Maybe that is what I was thinking when I told my listeners that the ET cluster was several hundred light years away. As it is, the light from the Pleiades left those young suns about the time that Galileo was born.

But the ET cluster is a lot further away. When I finally looked it up while hiking yesterday, I was taken back when I read that this cute little open cluster is about 9000 light years away. The light I looked at the other night started heading this way about the time that people first began writing in Mesopotamia and the Chinese began making wine.

That’s a long time ago, and the galaxy we live in is a big place.