Risk's Wildly Successful Astronomy

Several Astronomical League Certificates

2011-08-26T16:05:00.002-05:00

It has been a successful summer in completing AL clubs. San Antonio has had mostly clear skies, and the time I have spent in Ohio has also had great viewing opportunities. After moving back to my Ohio home, I have been tickled pink to discover that Beavercreek Ohio has some pretty good skies. At the zenith, I am easily able to see magnitude 4.5 stars. I occasionally catch hints of the Milky Way. I may have seen the Andromeda Galaxy naked eye - at least I think that with averted vision I can see it. This is not as good as the Frio Cielo Texas property we bought last year, but considerably better than my house in Helotes, TX.

Over the last few months I received my Herschel List certificate, my Master level Outreach award, and the Sunspotter club certificate. I now have 29 hours of meteor watching in the log, toward the 36 hours necessary for the certificate in that club.

Once the Meteor club is done, I will have the ten clubs necessary for my Master Observer award - something I have been working toward for several years now. These are the clubs I have or will have:

Required clubs:
Messier Club
Binocular Messier Club
Lunar I club
Double Star Club
Herschel 400 Club

Optional clubs:
Binocular Deep Space club
Outreach Master Level club
Sunspotter club
Caldwell club
Meteor club, 36 hour award

That will give me the prereqs for the Master Observer Club

Other clubs I have plans to work on in the coming year:
Asteroid Club
Urban Skies Club
Galileo Club

Thanks to everyone who has helped me along the process.

Dark Skies, Risk

Herschel 400 Complete

2011-05-31T14:56:00.000-05:00

Well, that was fun. I just confirmed that I have now observed all the objects on the Herschel 400 list.

Over the weekend, I was able to get two long observing sessions in at the Frio Cielo starfield. Both sessions started at about 90 degrees at 945 PM. On Friday afternoon, it had gotten up to 105F at the ranch. On Saturday it reached 107F. That weather was a "polar opposite" to the sessions at the end of January and March that both got into the teens by morning. I remember my fingers getting very stiff and painful on those nights. This weekend, I only had to deal with an incessant wind.

My single spaced, typewritten log of the objects is 47 pages long. In creating that log over the last two years (I began at Garner State Park in June of 2009) I have learned a LOT about star hopping and have been impressed, over and over, how huge cosmos is. The H400 contains hundreds of galaxies. Some so tightly spaced that there are more galaxies than foreground stars. Each of those galaxies contains in the neighborhood of 100 million to a trillion stars.

Every item was found with my trusty combination of Telrad, finder scope and telescope. All were found by star hopping. Most of the objects were seen with the 16 inch Meade mirror, though the design of that telescope changed three times during length of this project. I used the wonderful Stephen O'Meara H400 book to be able to have a good photo and a rational order for seeing the objects. I believe it is the best tool there is for finding the objects.

Like I said, all objects were found by star hopping. In the beginning, I used the star hopping diagrams of O'Meara's book. For the last half of the list, I used an iPad with StarmapHD, a great program by Frederic Descamps. It was much easier for me to star hop with this tool than with any other atlas or set of diagrams.

My thanks to SAAA club members who have followed my progress through this list. For those of you who listened for hours as I mumbled into my voice recorder, paying scarce attention to your companionship, I apologize. That goes double for Diane who bore most of that concentration, and also to Matt who was often with me as I was working my way through the list. He is good! On several occasions, we would race to an obscure object by star hopping, and he would find it first.

Caldwell Club Observing

2010-11-02T18:52:00.000-05:00

This last weekend, I finally put the finishing touches on my astronomy shed in the Texas hill country. I even had a few minutes to sit down and plan an observing night. There is a special pleasure in opening books, and beginning to find a way to work through a major list of objects.

The Caldwell list is 109 objects chosen by Patrick Moore, the British observer par excelence. It's only been 15 years since he formulated the list, but it has become quite popular in the astronomy groups I frequent. Its about the same spirit as the Messier list - lots of famous objects, but was chosen to be excellent targets instead of comet imposters - as Messier intended. The Astronomical League rules on this club are simple and clear. Observe 70 of the 109 objects and you get a certificate. Observe all 109 and you get another pin. The catch is that to get objects 80 - 109 you just about have to be south of the US. South America or Australia would do quite nicely!

Because Moore chose these objects on purpose, it would seem appropriate to to spend some time figuring out why they were chosen and what is interesting about them. And the AL makes that part of the club as well. Descriptions of the object should be written so that "the detail should be sufficient to convince your society's awards coordinator that you did in fact expend the time and effort to find and, hopefully, appreciate the reason that Sir Patrick selected the object for a place of honor on his list."

I began the process with Steve O'Meara's excellent book about the Caldwell List in hand. Steve does a great job of essay on each object, and this makes it much easier to quickly learn about the marvel or mystery of the object in hand. So far, I have not found it possible to read the entry on each object while observing. Some of that is done beforehand, and some is done afterward.

Though a number of the objects on the Caldwell list are also on the Herschel list, I decided to make fresh observations for this club. For one thing, it is rewarding to go back to an object seen in the past and see it with fresh (and more experienced) eyes. For another, I intend to write longer descriptions of the Caldwell objects than I did when I worked through most of the Herschel List.

For my first night, I star hopped through about a dozen objects. Several, like the Helix Nebula and the milkweed seed galaxy were real "wow" experiences. I had not seen either of these in any other list I have worked through. Each was very beautiful in its own special way.

So now it's time to reduce my recorded observations from that night to the log and start planning for this coming weekend.

Herschel Weekend

2010-08-02T08:45:00.002-05:00

A dry cap of air settled into southern Texas on Friday, bringing clear skies. It is still a week from new moon, but that means that the early night hours are free of the moon. So astronomy was on order for the weekend.

Friday, I packed up my camping supplies and the Looking Glass 16 inch scope in the back of my pickup. I had a firm intention to get back to the Herschel list which I had last worked on in January. (We have had WAY too much cloudy weather in the San Antonio area.)

I arrived at the White Tail Run Starfield about 5 PM and weed wacked a living space in the grass about 40 feet on a side. I got the scope out and set up, finding that I was not missing any critical pieces, books, or equipment I needed.

My plan was to do some testing of two technologies - using an iPad with StarMap HD software for finding Herschel objects and an OFF Clip-On mosquito repellent device to act as chemical bug net for the year's bumper crop of mosquitoes.

I had seen the advertisements for the OFF Clip-On, and had heard some good words at star parties from people who were using the blue device. I looked up the technology and found that the insect repellent was methofluthrin - accepted by the California toxicology studies. (Just don't get the device in water with fish!)

This chemical was first introduced in a DeckMate product and gives area protection. The difference with the Off product is that there is a motor blowing air through the impregnated paper. The device can be worn while around a telescope and can be open without the motor for sleeping in the back of my truck.

The chemical was very effective for astronomy purposes across the weekend. I was able to be still next to the scope for several hours without mosquitoes around my head. (Even though DEET keeps mosquitoes from biting, it does not keep them from buzzing around my ears.) In addition, I was able to keep mosquitoes out of the back of my camper shell with the device - even with the motor not running. I was able to sleep with my legs and chest exposed to the night air without any DEET and I did not wake with any bites! That is good stuff!

The second technology was the iPad software. This was more than sufficient for finding the objects on the Herschel list. I found 40 of 40 objects I was looking for. I almost never needed to refer to the star hopping charts in Steve O'Meara's excellent book on the Herschel list. The big advantage of the software is that the chart is right side up on the dome of the sky. There is no having to orient the chart to the horizon in an uncomfortable way. I did find that there is an annoying shine of mostly white light at almost a 90 degree angle to the screen even when the program is set for night vision. I need to get a sheet of theater filter to make the light redish.

Over the two evenings of the weekend, I was able to log about 40 objects I had never seen before. The sky was about mag 6 for viewing and the seeing was fairly stable. I am now done with July through December on O'Meara's month by month compilation of the Herschel 400 objects. Is it possible that I will be able to complete the list by next spring? For the fall, I think I may start to concentrate on the Caldwell list.

In the middle of the other activities, I had a great night on Saturday when Diane joined me for camping, we had a nice dinner with friends near the starfield, and several folks came by for a 45 minute star party.

It sure was nice to be able to see the sky again in dark skies!

Stargazing 101

2010-07-30T08:05:00.002-05:00

Last evening, Diane and I drove to a suburban parking lot that happens to have expansive horizons and moderate light pollution. We hoped to sit for a while and watch for meteors after the sky began to darken.

The sky was clear when we left the house, and on the way we decided to buy a couple of the new electric fan type of mosquito repellent devices. By the time we arrived at the park, Venus, Arcturus, Spica, Saturn, and Mars were obvious. A close look further west revealed Mercury to be a naked eye object just above the treetops.

The placement of Mars, Saturn, and Venus is quite pleasing now. Diane mistook the Mars-Saturn pair as Gemini. Its been so long since we have been out in the summer sky at sunset that I hardly blame her for mistaking the planet pair for a constellation that set well before sunset.

We had a few moments of fun trying to decide if we could tell Mars from Saturn by the color difference. We both decided ("final answer") that the lower of the pair was reddish and therefore had to be Mars. We were correct. Its color was also very similar to Antares in the Southeast at the focus of the Scorpius triplet.

Very high cumulus moved in from the West as the sky became darker, reflecting the light pollution of San Antonio and making the sky less than ideal for meteor watching.

The experiment with the mosquito repellent devices was a failure, for lack of bugs. It must be one of life's unwritten rules that when we buy an electronic repellent for bugs, the buzzing mosquitoes suddenly quit bothering us. Its probably just a special application of a broader lesson we have seen before.

After enjoying the light breeze and moderate temperature of the evening for a spell, we put the chairs back in the truck and headed back to our house - more enriched with our time together than we would have been with another hour behind our computers or in front of our TV.

Un-degenerate matter

2010-06-11T08:29:00.001-05:00

I was reading about the compressed matter of white dwarf stars in Burnham's Celestial handbook. It occurred to me that there could be situations which could add enough energy to such systems that their degenerate matter could expand back into normal matter. Maybe a collision between such stars at high velocity? Maybe a focused beam of cosmic energy from a black hole jet? Maybe a nearby supernova?

Maybe some of the heavy matter our solar system is composed of comes from this process instead of all of it coming from supernovas themselves?

I was also considering his case of cooled dwarfs composed of degenerate matter as a component of the dark matter the universe requires. I'm not sure I have seen that discussed in any of the few articles I have read.

Oh well, back to more mundane work.

A pleasing sky refresher

2010-06-08T17:42:00.000-05:00

South Texas has been under almost constant threat of rain since mid-winter. My plan to keep up with the Hershel List fell short in January and I have been clouded out more times than I can count since then.There have been very few clear nights in the favorable window for deep sky objects when the moon is not washing out the black sky.

All of this weather wash out has occurred while I simultaneously searched for a small piece of dark sky property. In January, I thought I had found just the piece I wanted. But there were a couple problems I could not get worked out and that fell through. A second slice of dark sky property fell into my lap in the intervening months, and Diane and I now have a little camping spot with a water spigot 75 air miles west of the edge of San Antonio.

The last two weekends I have camped at the ranch star field and have been able to get about an hour of observing in each of the weekends. The first weekend was cut short by the moon rising a little before midnight. The second was cut short by a quickly developing haze which opacified Into a solid cloud deck.

I was joined the first weekend by my friend Matt. As we sat around waiting for the sky to turn dark, and the few clouds to evaporate, we began to find the bright planets as they popped out of the evening sky. Venus was first and she made a good target to refine the aiming of our TelRad finders and finder scopes.

Each of us has a severely modified 16 inch Dob that started life as a Meade Lightbridge. The scopes have moved down paths away from the original version according to our individual tastes.

Soon Saturn was visible and showed us that seeing was very good indeed. High power (in my case, a 10mm Radian eyepiece on the 1800 mm scope) resulted in a crystal clear image of the rings and the dark line of their shadow on the southern side of the rings. 5 moons were easily visible, three dimmer moons to the west, and bright Titian and an out-of-plane moon to the east.

After just a little while longer, the field stars of the major constellations became visible and we started our search for Messier objects. M13 in HER looked for all the world like a pile of salt on dark paper. That led me to think about Omega CEN which was visible in break in the trees to the south.

We tracked down 6 galaxies from UMA and CVN, Messier objects 51, 101, 81, 82, 63, 94. The last two were a memory stretch for me and I found myself pulling out my StarmapPro to find them in the big black sky.

About that time, friends who were spending the holiday weekend on their own property in the country arrived for a little star party. For the next 3/4 of an hour we were able to share our recent familiarization of these objects with folks that appreciate the sky but don't yet know their own way around in it very well.

After those friends left, Matt and I sat down in lounge chairs while the moon began to lighten the sky. He remarked how it was nice to become familiar with the summer sky again. I agreed. It was frightening how much of the summer sky I had forgotten, but it was nice to realize that it all came back quickly.

The following weekend, the Saturday night forecast was for severe clear, with the moon rising about 3 AM. Diane and I headed for the ranch star field with high hopes. However the closer we got, the more high cirrus developed.

The early evening was similar to the previous week, with Venus and Saturn stealing the show. I was able to share all the objects with Diane, that Matt and I had observed the previous week. She practiced finding them on her own.

It was about this time that I decided to take a look at the "Tonight" feature of the SkymapPro program. It was a good memory jogger for some very obvious Messier objects which I had forgotten. M3 and M5 are especially good summer targets with Arcturus overhead.

Unfortunately, just as I was getting into this as a technique for finding other less obvious targets, the stars began winking out due to clouds and my laser beam grew as fat as a telephone pole in the moisture near the ground.

This coming week is new moon, and I already have plans to continue my search for a clear dark sky. May it come quickly Lord!

IPad usefulness for the astronomer

2010-05-23T14:00:00.000-05:00

Today, I want to explore using the iPad for astronomy. I recently bought the new Apple device and want to share some of what I have learned about the sorts of things
I do with it for astronomy.

First, a couple parameters: I am using the least expensive of the iPad models. The 16 gig iPad without 3G connection. I already carry an iPhone that allows connection with the phone system, so I decided to get the iPad to see what it would do by itself.

I'm presently typing this on the iPad using the Pages application. I could have typed it directly onto the blog entry box, but I wanted to see if the Pages app gave any more flexibility in spelling correction and formatting.

So far, the word processing app does not seem any better or worse than typing directly. However I am also aware that I will have a semi-permanent version of the blog post available to me.

I have chosen to type this in the profile format with two thumbs instead of the landscape mode with many fingers. I find that it is almost as fast for me to type with my thumbs as with several fingers. Occasionally, the self corrector gets confused. Somehow, at the end of the previous sentence it changed fingers to Gershwin!

All the iPhone apps I use for astronomy work fine with the iPad. Significantly, this means that GoSatWatch, ProSat, StarWalk, and Starmap Pro all work. The Starmap program is a very powerful planetarium program that has almost all the faint fuzzes as well as the moons of the planets charted for any time. Unfortunately, the pro version is not yet available on the iPad. However the iPhone version does work well enough on the iPad.

These programs work well even when there is no connection to the Internet via a WiFi connection. There are other programs that are often useful on an iPhone which suffer in the field without connection. Weather programs like Weather Bug have much better displays, especially of radar and cloud maps on the iPad version, but they don't display current weather when disconnected, of course. The same is true of solar reports on the Space Weather site.

PDFs of books are easy to read in their native format, straight off the scanner. There is a kindle app that allows all the kindle books to be viewed at greater resolution than on the original Amazon device.

So that is a pretty quick rundown of what I have seen so far in the sorts of uses that I have put the iPad through with astronomy in mind. I'd strongly recommend the device over a laptop computer for astronomy amateurs who do not need the specialized programs used by imagers.

Oh, did I mention that the battery lasts for about 10 hours? That was the best discovery!

Review: Human Vision and the Night Sky

2010-03-29T17:21:00.001-05:00

Human vision and the night sky
By Michael Borgia

This great little book has much to recommend it. Not since reading Astronomy Hacks have I come across such a good list of observing projects.

While the deep sky projects are worth persuing, it is in the extensive set of solar system projects where this book excels.

As one example, nowhere else have I seen such good descriptions of finding the smaller moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

Published in 2006 as part of the Patrick Moore Practical Astronomy Series, the book is a little out of date on the most recent Hubble findings. It is full of observing notes that would have been mote interesting before 2010 and I think most of it was written about 2003-4. .

The photographs and photographic techniques seem pretty old and out of date. They do not represent techniques of 2010.

But the approach to simple visual astronomy will speak well for many years to come.

My thanks to Matt and Tina Rottman for letting me read their copy of the book. I think I will attempt to find the book on used book shelves.

Moon in Pleiades

2010-03-21T17:59:00.003-05:00

Last night, I had a nice time watching the moon glide through the Pleiades. I had set up my binocular chair, with a pair of Celestron 20x80 tubes mounted on the A-frame above my seat.

It first seemed to me that the moon might occult Merope, but as the moon began to cross the open star cluster, it soon became clear that Merope would glide past the north pole of the moon without being covered. That meant that all the major stars would be spared the embarrassment of being covered by our moon -at least as seen from San Antonio, Texas.

Further south, it is possible that some of the sisters may have been covered by the moon. However, further north, the stars would have been even further north of the Moon.

Attached to this blog is a Cartes du Ciel image of the Occultation from about 930 PM. It is about the same time as a fellow San Antonio Astronomer took a great photo of the passage. She had that photo published on the Space Weather.com website today.

Messier Marathon II

2010-03-17T09:02:00.004-05:00

The new moon near the end of March is the best opportunity to take a tour through the Messier objects. At this time of year, the small slice of sky occupied by the sun is placed so that none of the 110 Messier objects are obstructed by Sol. Last year, I ran the list of Messier objects with my 10 inch reflector scope. While I was doing so, John E, a fellow club member at our local club ran the list with his large binoculars. We each saw almost all the objects

When I experienced the Couch Potato Telescope (CPT) rotating support for binoculars at the Texas Star Party in April 2009, the concept of observing all the Messier objects with binoculars began to grow on me. I built a CPT from a kit the same weekend that I came home from the TSP. Then, this last fall, I purchased a large binocular. The Celestron 20x80 pair was stable and easy to handle on the CPT. The plan was coming together.

This last weekend, Diane and I joined friends at Ft McKavett, north of Junction, Texas for a weekend of astronomy. It had been a dreary week, but as the weekend drew closer, the weather cleared after a cool front passed.

So, after a year of thinking, building, and dreaming about a Binocular Messier Marathon, it came to me sitting in my CPT on a cloudless evening about 130 miles away from the nearest large city.

The evening stars began to pop out of the darkening sky. Mars was first to make an appearance. Then Sirius, Rigel, and Betelgeuse. Before long, the guide stars of the western horizon became visible. Cassiopeia made her appearance in the northwest, and then the pointer stars of Andromeda. Finding M31 was easy, but M110 was not yet visible. I could not yet see M33 or any sign of the more difficult M74 and M77.

I swung the chair toward Orion and plucked the two objects from his sword and one from just above his belt. Yep! even that blush of nebula above Alnitak was now visible as the sky darkened.

Before I forgot it (again) I swung by the Pleiades and enjoyed the placement of that cluster in my binocular.

A check of M74 and M77 again revealed nothing. I rotated the chair further north and looked again at M31. AhHa! M32 was clearly visible now. And even M110 was now visible. M33 shone as a ghost out of the darkening sky as well. Overhead, the Milky Way was beginning to be visible.

I knew where M74 and M77 should be, and their locations were drawing closer and closer to the horizon. Fortunately, the sunset horizon was flat and unobstructed. A quick check of M77's location was fruitless. Same for M74. I went back to M77's nest and looked at my charts again. I gently tapped my binocular to see if I could use motion and non-central vision to catch a glimpse of the object. Yes! is that it? Yep! It sure is. M77 is in the bag.

Now back to the M74 location. Not there. How about scanning left and right and coming back? Do I see it? Hmm. Maybe. Come on - its not for sure. Scan back to M110 and M33. Then back to M74's location. [I am remembering that M74 was the only object I was not able to identify last year.] What! I think that IS it. Quick! Scan away... then back. It is there! Good! Great! M74 is in the bag.

OK. The hard evening objects are done. Now begins the more leisurely approach to the objects in CAS, PER, AUR, GEM, and the rest of the first shift of objects. Then it is time to get up from the chair and see how Diane is doing with our 16 inch Looking Glass. She seems to be having a ball. Good. Others on the observing star field are having fun. At least three other friends are trying to make something of a Messier Marathon. They are doing well too.

Then after a drink of water, its back into the chair. Leo has risen far enough, and the sun has dropped into the night deeply enough, to attempt the Leo galaxies. The Zodiacal light shines all too bright all the way to the zenith, making it harder to see the really dim fuzzies. The two groups of Leo galaxies are spotted and bagged. The obvious clusters in Cancer are also remembered. (I forgot the Beehive one night!) Rotating my chair toward the big Dipper, the larger group of Messier galaxies in and about UMA are found one (or two) at a time.

It is finally time for bed and a nap at about 1030 PM. Everything that is reasonable has been tagged. Spica is just up over the eastern horizon and the Virgo cluster of galaxies is too low to work on right now.

At 1230 AM, I am up. It is getting cold, but there is still not a cloud in the sky and the slight breeze is keeping dew from forming. I wrap up tightly, put a hand warmer in each pocket, and go out to work my way through the torturous path of the Virgo cluster. I warm up on the two outliers to the east of the main cluster and then enter from the tail end of Leo.

The work I have done this year with my 16 inch scope on the Herschel list really pays off now! Last year, I might not have been able to see these faint blushes of stardust that make up some of the Virgo cluster Messier objects. I know that there are many other objects in here that I can see with more aperture, but with my binocular I am nearly at my limit for some of the galaxies. However, I am able to walk my way from galaxy to galaxy by using my chart and the stability that the CPT gives me. It is really nice to have the binocular pointed at a galaxy and be able to drop my eyes to a chart and then go back to the same spot in the sky!

After an hour of observing, I have gotten through the newly available objects and go back to bed for another two hour nap.

All too soon, it is 330 AM. The early morning objects are coming into view. To top of Scorpius is poking its head out of the horizon. M4 is visible. The swan and the lyre are up. 45 minutes of chilly observing lets me go back to bed to warm up next to Diane for another hour.

Then it is 5 o'clock. I put a hand warmer in each sock and wear gloves with a hand warmer in each palm. Sagittarius is fully up and the full trail of objects in the steam of the Milky way is visible. The little globulars in the base of the teapot are not much more than star sized points, but at least the horizon is free of clouds and the dew is being kept away by the cold breeze.

I find the kite of Terabellium 1 and 2 that allows me to find M55 and M75. M72 and M73 are finally seen. The remainder of the Morning objects come into view and are seen as I move my chair a little further out into the field to bring the horizon down a little.

Finally, I find myself looking exactly at the right spot to see M30, the last of the Messier object to see for the night. The sun is brightening the eastern sky by the moment. Hope is lost. It will not be seen. The Marathon began a little too easily with the evening objects too high in the sky to make the last morning object visible.

A sense of accomplishment washes over me. I really did quite well in this binocular marathon. 109 is not shabby at all! Along the line I saw Venus, Saturn, Mars, and the very very old moon with lots of earth shine. I shared the starfield with friends and had a good time with my wife as she observed a lot of the sky on her own.

But, as the sun began to rise ever more strongly, it was time to lie down for a nap until breakfast!

Effectively Sharing the Sky

2010-03-07T08:55:00.002-06:00

Two examples of sharing the sky came to my notice this last week. They have some similarity and remind me of lessons I want to remember about helping others.

The first example was a friend who is relatively new to finding sky objects. He bought a telescope this week and was having fun under a clear sky with a first light celebration. I was trying to figure out (again) where the guide stars are in the western sky for the beginning of the Messier Marathon. So I was only listening to the excitement in the background.

My friend was getting help from enthusiastic knowledgeable friends. But I heard him say something about how he wanted to start from the beginning and find the object himself. And he did. object after object.

Another friend visited his grandchildren in another state. They had received a telescope gift from grandfather and had (I'm sure) all the problems of a new astronomer. It was an important moment. Either they were going to figure out how to see something or they were going to pack the telescope in the back of the closet. I've seen it many times before. It happened to me twice in my life.

This wise grandfather had the kids do most of the work of selecting some objects to look for in the clear night sky. They developed a short list of beautiful objects appropriate to the scope and the sky. M42, a double star, and a star cluster would do nicely for such a list. Practicing putting the scope together in the warm living room and in the light would make that chore less frustrating outside in the dark and the cold.

Then grand-dad watched as the kids toted the scope outdoors and set it up themselves. They were able to find the objects with a planisphere or atlas in the night sky, and then aim the scope at the objects they wanted to look at. As the earth rotated, they moved the scope themselves to follow it.

This business self directed exploration is such an important goal! In much of my public star party sharing I have given folks the opportunity to be wowed by sky objects. But only infrequently have I had the opportunity to go the next step and help someone through the necessary steps of becoming an independent sky observer.

These examples are fresh in my mind. I really need to do something about them while they still weigh on my consciousness.

Dark Skies! And may we all learn something new this month...

Details on Mars

2010-02-02T08:02:00.001-06:00

Matt and I set up my 16" modified Lightbridge to look at Mars on Saturday night near San Antonio.

I was using my 10mm Radian eyepiece at 180X.

With no filter, Mars appeared as a rather large disk with no features that I could see. It was a big red version of Uranus which I had seen many times over the summer. However we ran my set of filters to see what might emerge.

With a yellow filter, I was able to see a bright lenticular shape on the north end of the planet. This was the first time I had ever seen planetary detail on Mars. Just like with double star observing, North was determined by seeing which way the planet fell out of the eyepiece field upon waiting a minute. The direction that the planet moved was West. North was therefore 90 degrees counter clockwise from that direction.

An orange filter did not add much more detail than the yellow provided.

A deep red filter was useless for me. All detail seemed to have disappeared including the ice cap.

With a green filter, not only was the ice cap visible, there were some smoky smudges on the disk. I especially thought I saw more of this toward the west and a little north of the Martian equator.

A Lumicon Deep Sky filter showed little detail, though the ice cap could be seen.

A Lumicon UHC filter showed both the icecap and almost as much smoky detail as the green filter.

The scope sat outside all evening before we observed at about 930 PM. However, there was still considerable thermal activity on the mirror observed in a star test. I was able to see the polar ice cap about half the time I was looking at the disc. The smoky areas, with the green filter, seemed to be present about 1/3 of the time.

It was interesting trying to filter out my own eye floaters from the image my brain was trying to interpret. The disc is just small enough that a floater which passes over the disc calls attention to itself as though it might be a planetary detail.

Rick

Ruminations on Astro Sketching

2010-02-01T09:08:00.000-06:00

I think one of my central problems with drawing is that I want to draw
more detail than what I see.

When I sketch a tree, or a landscape, I have learned by experience that
the secret to making it represent what I really saw is to include less
detail than a photograph would.

I think I need to start thinking about astro sketching the same way.
Maybe I should - like John E - go back to sketching a constellation.
Accurately putting each star that I can see in its place, but not
worrying about getting every star into the drawing.

Instead, my impatience too often leads to unfortunate results when I get
tired of drawing what I see and suddenly create a mass of close dots to
represent an area of cloudiness. In the end, it is a sense of rush that
leads me to ruin what I have put time into drawing.

Working on the Herschel List

2010-01-10T09:49:00.002-06:00

It was very cold last night for southern Texas, well below freezing. I took the opportunity of a clear moonless sky to drive to the Hill Country State Natural Area and find a few more of the Herschel 400. This expedition took me halfway through the January objects as listed in Steve O'Meara's "Herschel 400 Observing Guide".

I really like the approach that O'Meara takes in this book. His organization of the objects keeps my scope pointed in about the same area of the sky when that is possible. His organization so far (and I have completed the September through December chapters) organizes the objects for when they are closest to the thin overhead portion of the sky.

For something different, I thought I would post the notes I made on these objects. They are organized by the time that I observed them last night (local time). I made the notes with a voice recorder and then transcribed them on computer afterward.

Here are my observations:

1647 OCl Tau
Date: 9 January 2010 Local Time:2003 Seeing: 5.0 magnitude Aperture: 16” Power: 56X 90X
Note: At 90X, this is a medium bright OC with dozens of bright stars and probably hundreds of dimmer stars in the background. This is an easy cluster to find and observe. It is almost naked eye at this site.

1817 OCl Tau
Date: 9 January 2010 Local Time:2006 Seeing: 5.0 magnitude Aperture: 16” Power: 56X 90X
Note: Many dozens of stars in this cluster. Not as bright as 1647, but this cluster has a more uniform appearance than the previous. There is central gathering of these stars as though I am looking at a large fourth of July starburst. Though this cluster is in Tau, it is more easily found in relationship with the stars of ORI.

1664 OCl Aur
Date: 9 January 2010 Local Time:2015 Seeing: 5.0 magnitude Aperture: 16” Power: 56X 90X
Note: At low power, this OC is relatively dim and poor. There is a “home plate” shaped asterism in the center of this cluster. There are 20-30 reasonably bright stars in this cluster. Though there is some central tendency of this cluster, the asterism is relatively empty of stars at its center.

2126 OCl Aur
Date: 9 January 2010 Local Time:2024 Seeing: 5.0 magnitude Aperture: 16” Power: 56X 90X
Note: Easily found by starhop. Quite dim OC with one bright star near it and then the rest of the cluster is a background blush of stardust to the west of the bright star. Poor cluster with some central consolidation. Best observed with averted vision.

1857 OCl Aur
Date: 9 January 2010 Local Time:2033 Seeing: 5.0 magnitude Aperture: 16” Power: 56X 90X
Note: A very small and very dim OC, dominated by a central star which appears reddish. This is a very poor cluster with few individually discernable stars. There is not quite enough of it to determine if there is central consolidation.

1907 OCl Aur
Date: 9 January 2010 Local Time:2036 Seeing: 5.0 magnitude Aperture: 16” Power: 56X 90X
Note: Small but reasonably bright OC next to M38. It is easily seen with my finder scope. At low power it appears mostly as a blur with a few individual stars. At 180X there are 30-40 stars seen with central consolidation.

1931 C/N Aur
Date: 9 January 2010 Local Time:2040 Seeing: 5.0 magnitude Aperture: 16” Power: 56X 90X
Note: Small nebula which is quite bright and easily seen. At low magnification it appears almost circular and like a planetary nebula. At 180X it is not round. It has a lobule of brighter material to the west side and a flat side on the eastern side of the nebula.

2281 OCl Aur
Date: 9 January 2010 Local Time:2045 Seeing: 5.0 magnitude Aperture: 16” Power: 56X 90X
Note: This is a cute OC, east of AUR. Clearly visible with finder scope. With low power appears to have an asterism that looks for all the world like a capital “S”. The cluster is moderate in richness and has central consolidation.

2169 OCl Ori
Date: 9 January 2010 Local Time:2048 Seeing: 5.0 magnitude Aperture: 16” Power: 56X 90X
Note: Small but bright OC. At low power appears as an offset trapezoid with about 15 members. There is a bright trio of stars in the shape of an equilateral triangle near the center of the OC. They are remarkably the same brightness and remind me (minus one) of the central quadrilateral in the Orion Nebula.

2194 OCl Ori
Date: 9 January 2010 Local Time:2058 Seeing: 5.0 magnitude Aperture: 16” Power: 56X 90X
Note: A small, dim OC found easily with its relationship with 2169. It is poor, with 10-12 members and has central gathering of its stars.

2186 OCl Ori
Date: 9 January 2010 Local Time:2105 Seeing: 5.0 magnitude Aperture: 16” Power: 56X 90X
Note: Very small and very dim OC. No central consolidation. Appears as a haze on top of other unrelated stars in the foreground and background. This is one of those objects that takes great imagination to call an object at all.

2022 PlN Ori
Date: 9 January 2010 Local Time:2115 Seeing: 5.0 magnitude Aperture: 16” Power: 56X 90X 180X
Note: Finding this planetary required a medium length starhop. Appears at high power (180X) to be a dirty snowball. It is not starlike. It is reasonably easy to pick out at low power as well.

Astronomy Resolutions for 2010

2009-12-31T07:45:00.002-06:00

Here are my personal astronomy goals for the coming year:

- Complete the Herschel 400 list (I have about 300 objects to go)

- Complete the Master level of the Outreach club of the Astronomical League (about 70 more hours of star party fun)

- Learn how to do more sketching at the eyepiece (Maybe this means the open cluster club, Asteroid club, or the Lunar II club?)

- Attend the Texas Star Party for the second time.

- Find at least 3 more dark sky sites I can easily access within 2 hours of San Antonio including one with low horizons.

Dark Skies to all

Risk

Sunspots are back

2009-12-29T07:36:00.005-06:00

Several times this December, I have taken a look at the sun with my 10 inch scope and a Baader filter. The filter works fairly well in seeing sunspots and other white light features of the sun.

Yesterday, I tried taking a few photos with my phone camera through the eyepiece. Most of the images were not very good. A few were worth looking at. The image attached to this post was taken through a 10mm Radian eyepiece at a magnification of about 120X. The cropped area is about 1/20 of the original photo. It clearly shows the two pairs of spots which I saw visually.

I have read that sunspots always appear in pairs, that the spots are the two points where a local magnetic field line crosses the visible surface of the sun. In this photo, there are two nearly equal pairs. There is an inner pair of small spots and an outer pair of larger spots. Also, spots appear in pairs that are parallel to the sun's rotation, which is approximately parallel with our rotation around the sun. These pairs did move leftward in my reflector, so the west is to the left and the east is to the right. South is up and north is down in these views.

Dark Skies, Good People

2009-12-21T07:43:00.001-06:00

We had nice weather in San Antonio over the weekend too. Saturday evening was a club outing to a dark sky site. The weather and the company were great. I was able to finish off the December portion of the Herschel list, as O'Meara has it programmed. I am now up to date, having finished up September to December. There were some long star hops in the December list.

I spent the rest of the time in my binocular chair, doing a mini Messier Marathon of the available objects.

By morning, what had been a moderate dew, had frozen solid on my dew covers.

All in all, a nice observing night.

Cleaning a Primary Mirror

2009-12-18T13:27:00.001-06:00

After a summer/fall of frequent observation and two major rebuilds of the furniture for my 16 inch Lightbridge optics, there was a fair amount of earthy dust and even more saw dust coating my primary mirror.

I had a good long conversation with the owner of a 24 inch StarMaster scope at the Texas Star Party about cleaning mirrors. Before forgetting all his advice, I decided to do a full baptism of my mirror last weekend.

I removed the mirror cell from the base box like I have a number of times in my building project. Taking it out is never a problem. (Putting it back in is not quite so simple. It takes a steady hand, carefully placing the mirror cell on three springs without knocking the springs over. )

Next, I removed the three mirror clamps from the periphery of the cell. That does not release the mirror, because there are four places on the periphery where black RTV calk was used to further hold the mirror in the cell. I took a sharp knife and cut through each bead of calk next to the mirror. (Marking the mirror to know what rotation angle it was in the cell is a really good idea.)

I then was able to slide the mirror out of the main cell casting. It came out with the rear-of-the-cell spider pieces attached. There are three independent supports that make up this “spider”. Each support consists of two three cornered plates on a balance beam. Each three corner plate had one sticky pad attached to the mirror with double sided paper tape. After fiddling with these tape pieces unsuccessfully for a few minutes, I just pulled the triangles off the mirror, leaving a paper spot on the mirror in 6 places.

I then took the mirror to the back porch, placed it mostly vertical against the house, and hosed the mirror off. That took most of the contamination off the mirror, I am quite sure. But I wanted to go a little further.

I filled up a roll under the bed Tupperware container about half way. This was a new container I bought for this purpose and hosed out. These containers have a bottom which is just a little more than 16 inches by about 27 inches. I put a couple drops of dish washing detergent in the water and used the hose to spread that out.

I put the mirror in the water bath with about an inch of water over the top of the mirror.

I had previously obtained some cotton balls that were 100 percent cotton. There was no way to verify that they did not have any softener in them, like surgical cotton. But they were called 100 percent cotton and did not list any other ingredients.

I used a cotton ball and gently ran it from the center of the mirror to the edge. I threw that cotton ball away and did the same with another ball just a half inch or so from the first one. I continued in this manner around the mirror – one pass of each new cotton ball from the center to the edge. My intent was to have the smallest risk of collecting a scratching grain and scratching the mirror over and over with it.

After this cleansing, I took the mirror out of the bath. I put it vertically next to the house again, and rinsed it with a quart or so of distilled water.

Almost all the water drained off the mirror leaving it without drops. There were a few drops and I collected them with the corner of a piece of toilet paper.

After the mirror had finished drying, I saw that I had missed a few places on the mirror where I had evidently not used a cotton ball. There were some small streaks of dusty appearance between my radial strokes - but there were not many. Evidently, using the cotton balls had removed a layer of dust that had remained adherent during the spray cleaning and the immersion.

After the mirror dried, I was able to put the rear support beams with triangular plates in place, and then to slide the mirror back into the cell so that the cut surfaces of the RTV calk exactly matched. I put the three mirror clamps back on. (Remember not to do this tightly.) Then The mirror cell was bolted back in the bottom box of the scope.

It was all pretty simple and the mirror was obviously much cleaner after the operation. Even just a spraying with a hose would clean the mirror a lot the next time round.

I don’t think I would do this more than every year or so, but it is nice to have a clean mirror again.

Failed Astronomy

2009-12-16T09:59:00.003-06:00

Some nights, things just don’t work out. I had one of those nights on Sunday.

After a long week of cloudy skies, Sunday daylight broke with hints of sunshine on the top of a fog bank. As Diane and I sat in Starbucks having coffee and coffee cake, my spirits began to rise with the glucose and caffeine levels in my blood stream.

Confidently, I said that the clouds would burn off by noon and we had the potential of a clear sky for the evening. That was a nice thought because we were very close to new moon and the Geminid meteor shower was scheduled to peak before midnight.

I set about to cautiously think about an observing evening. Maybe the night would turn out well.

As I worked around the house during the afternoon, I was overjoyed to see that the sky was bright blue. The recent rain had pushed out haze and left the sky cloudless.

I looked up Hill Country State Natural Area on the internet and saw that a public hunt was scheduled to start on Monday. The park would be closed at 10 PM. That was good enough for a nice night of Herschel observing, but it was a little disappointing that the park would not be open for the peak of the meteor shower.

I called the park office, intending to let them know that I would be at our observing site that evening, and that I would be out by the 10 PM closing time. The nice ranger on the phone told me that the park would actually be closed beginning at sunset, not 10PM. Not wanting to argue, I thanked the ranger and started to think of other options.

“Oh well”, I said to myself. “I have observed from a pull off on the park road before”, and I decided that I could do it again. Yes, I knew that I could expect to have 15-20 cars with bright headlights come by, but the rest of the time I would have 5.5 magnitude stars visible. It could be a nice night of Herschel observing (maybe I could finish the December list in O’Meara’s book) and then I could settle down to watch meteors toward 10 or 11 PM. The drive home would be 10 minutes shorter as well!

I arrived at my observing spot about 6:30 PM. Diane begged out because she had some work to do as Santa’s Elf. No one else answered my email on the San Antonio Astronomy Yahoo group when I posted that I would be out near the park. I planned on being by myself. I was.

When the sky turned dark enough to see the “faint fuzzys” on the Herschel list, I pulled out the O’Meara book and reached for my trusty digital recorder. But that recorder was back in my house in Helotes, 40 minutes away. Oh Well! I looked at a couple of the objects, but lost interest fairly quickly, knowing that I was not set up to record my observations. I looked at a number of Messier objects with my 16 inch scope. But I was a bit bummed out.

About that time, I realized that the rising Orion constellation was dimming noticeably. I looked straight up. The Milky Way had disappeared too. I looked further west, and Jupiter was shining brightly and those constellations were all present.

So it was just a local cloud.

Except that about 15 minutes after the sky cleared, there was a general dimming of all the stars and then they all winked out. They stayed that way. It was 8:45 PM. I never saw another star.

On this little trip, I had experienced loss of an observing field to a “hunt” on the State Natural Area park lands. I had to set up where bright car lights spoiled my night vision every 10 minutes or so. I forgot to bring a little recorder which spoiled my ability to run the list I had intended on. And finally I was shut out by a thick bank of clouds that suddenly formed from a perfectly clear sky. The sky has stubbornly remained cloudy all week long, ever since.

I just thought I would post this, to remind me how special it is when everything works out splendidly! Surprisingly often, the weather, the moon, the place, and the gathering of friends are all perfect. As I sit here today, I am planning on that all working out for this Saturday evening.

Wishing you Dark Skies and a Merry Christmas,
Eternally the optimist,

Risk

Simple dew shields from "Fun Foam"

2009-12-07T11:17:00.003-06:00

I went to Hobby Lobby last week to buy a few sheets of 2mm thick black foam rubber. I found them in the children's education part of the store. I bought the foam to make a backdrop for my secondary on the ring structure of my new Looking Glass.

While I was there, I bought a couple more sheets to play with. Nearly simultaneously, Matt R. was there and working with the foam. He kindly made me a pair of dew shields for the Eyes of Texas, my 80mm binocular. He also cut a sheet for my Telrad.

From my scraps of Fun Foam, I built a simple wrap-around dew shield for my 50mm finder. I built it so that I could put a hand warmer packet inside the ring if I desired.

Last night, in my observing session at Hill Country State Natural Area, the dew was pretty heavy and early. (On the way home, there were blankets of radiation fog in every valley.) I had put the finder scope dew cover on and it kept that objective clear of dew all evening. I ended up needing to wrap a hand warmer around the eyepiece of the finder with a rubber band. that worked, but I was late in choosing to do this and had to deal with occasional dew on the eyepiece.

The Telrad cover was attached by wrapping rubber band around the long axis of the Telrad base. The cover was held nicely in place by the rubber band. This kept the Telrad remarkably free of dew without sacrificing the utility of the finder.

I was finally done in for the night at about 830 PM, two hours after I began to observe, by dew forming on my secondary. I forgot to bring my hair dryer for that. With a hair dryer, I would have been able to continue for a while longer, until fog formed in the observing area.

For just a couple bucks, these "throw-away" dew covers are extremely easy to make and work very well. Their outer surfaces were *covered* with dew by the time I packed up, but the optics were nice and clear.

Best telescope for Christmas

2009-12-04T11:14:00.004-06:00

It seems to be the time of year to help out folks that are thinking about a Christmas telescope. Let me help out some more. This is going to be simple.

If you are part of a family or a single person who thinks that looking at stars would be fun and that you want a telescope to do so, then read this blog post.

If you have read other folks say that it really would be wise to get a planisphere and you *have* to have a scope for Christmas, then read this blog post.

If you have considered a pair of 10x50 binoculars and still *must* get a scope for Christmas, then read on.

Don't go to a department store to get your scope. You still have time to get one in the mail from an internet sales place. Unless you really know what you are doing, don't go to Craig's list - and if you really knew what you are doing, why would you be reading this blog post??

What you want is the Orion XT6. It is a six inch dobsonian scope with no bells and no whistles. It comes with one eyepiece and a red dot finder. That should be all you need to find hundreds of objects in the Texas sky. It will fit in the back seat of almost any car.

If you search well on the internet, you should be able to buy it for less than $300 and get most of the shipping for under that number too.

After placing your order, the most important thing you should do is to find an astronomy club to help you find out how to use the scope. In San Antonio, do a search for the San Antonio Astronomical Association. We will help you. You will have fun.

Next most important: buy a copy of the Sky and Telescope Pocket Sky Atlas. It will be your map to the sky. A planisphere will also help. So will a pair of binoculars.

Dark skies to all, and to all a good night!

Risk

Comet Sweeper

2009-12-03T15:27:00.002-06:00

I just finished a very nice book about Caroline Herschel by Claire Brock. The Comet Sweeper follows Caroline's rise to fame in the late 18th century. First as an assistant to Wm Herschel and later to her nephew John, Caroline had a large number of her own accomplishments of her own. The NGC catalog was mostly her organization of the o servations that the siblings made.

As a finder of comets, Caroline ranked in the upper tier of discoverers of her time. Entirely self taught, Caroline taught herself math, singing, and astronomy. When she was provided a yearly stipend by king George III she may have been the first professional female scientist and was certainly the first female professional astronomer.

For readers in the San Antonio Astronomy club, I will be making the book available at a meeting soon.

Best of the Best

2009-12-02T08:30:00.000-06:00

As I was sitting in the back yard the other night hoping for clear
skies, I started to think about what would be on my list of the best of
the best objects in the night sky. I thought that a list of 5 might be
harder to come up with than a list of 10.

The list I came up with was:

Moon
Milky Way
Saturn
Jupiter
M42 - Orion Nebula

Next on my list might be:

M45 - Pleiades
M31 - Andromeda Galaxy
M13 - Hercules Globular Cluster
M9 - Lagoon Nebula
M57 - Ring Nebula

My 11th would be the Crab Nebula, M1.

What would be on *your* list of the 5 and 10 top night-time sky objects?

Next question I have for myself is how much do I know about these
objects? What class of object are they? What has been their history?
How far away are they? What was going on in history when the light from
them started this way? For the deep space objects, who discovered them,
and when?

Looking Glass Accessories

2009-11-29T20:04:00.004-06:00

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

2009-11-26T11:43:00.003-06:00

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

2009-11-25T07:38:00.003-06:00

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

2009-11-24T08:43:00.003-06:00

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

2009-11-24T08:33:00.003-06:00

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

2009-11-17T07:55:00.004-06:00

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

2009-11-10T07:25:00.003-06:00

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

2009-11-10T06:51:00.002-06:00

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

2009-11-08T20:06:00.002-06:00

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.

Astronomers look out for themselves

2009-10-16T08:05:00.005-05:00

I've been at the Eldorado Star Party for the last couple days. The weather has been nice, with clear skies and pleasant temperatures. There was some rain in the last week and that has made dew a bit of a problem, and hair driers are frequently heard on the starfield at night.

Last night, Matt R. And I began the Texas Hash list. It is a lot harder than most of the TSP lists I ran last spring. We got through 15 objects we attempted last night, with only one object we could not find. We have another 10 to go tonight if we decide to proceed with the list.

It was sometime yesterday, while cleaning up camp to leave for lunch, that the title of this post occurred to me. We were talking about the fact that astronomers were a pretty honest crew. Nevertheless, it is never a good idea to leave expensive items lying around. We were cleaning up, "Because astronomers look out for themselves."

I laughed at the appropriateness of the words, because that is exactly what we do. Instead of looking at pictures of stars in books or the Internet, we stay up late at night to find and admire those objects ourselves. That is why it is about.

National Night Out

2009-10-07T08:07:00.002-05:00

Last evening, I remembered that it was our Texas version of National Night Out (NNO) when I saw the 6PM news coverage of some events near San Antonio. Some months ago I had decided that the NNO might make a great time to have a neighborhood star party.

I walked to the front of the house and saw that the sky was relatively clear. We have recently had a lot of clouds, and I was a little surprised that there were few clouds in the sky.

It took almost 5 minutes to set up my Orion XT10 in the driveway and focus it on Jupiter. With a 10 mm eyepiece, the magnification was 120 times and the brightness was such that the bands of Jupiter were clearly visible.

Three star-like moons were arrayed to the right of Jupiter, toward the East it turns out. Jupiter would slip off the left side of the field of view every couple minutes. The fourth major moon of Jupiter was not visible behind its disc.

The top equitorial band (the southern one) had a great lump in its top edge. There was a small dark spot just to the right side of the lump within the band. In moments of clarity and improved seeing, I could make out the internal border of the Great Red Spot. Over the course of the evening, that Red Spot moved leftward (westward) until it seemed to be falling off the left side of the Jupiter "marble".

During the two hours I had my scope up, different groups of my neighbors that had been at the formal celebration of NNO at our pool walked past the house. I genially called them over to take a look at Jupiter. One group of kids, with their mom, spent quite a bit of time learning how to readjust the scope to put Jupiter back in the center of the field of view.

They had lots of good questions. How big is Jupiter compared with Mars and with Earth? How far away is it? Why are the moons in a line? What causes the bands on Jupiter and the Great Red Spot?

I had done some thinking since a couple recent star parties, and decided to try to answer the questions with the purpose of helping them to think about the process of science instead of a science text book. The same way that I had helped them learn to find Jupiter when it slid out of the field of view, instead of doing that myself, I wanted them to think about the answers to their questions.

So I helped them think through their questions instead of giving them textbook answers. How could one find out how big Jupiter is? How would it be possible to find out how far away Jupiter is? How long does it take for light from Jupiter to get to the earth? Why would you believe my answers when there are good ways of finding out answers?

It was interesting to see their reaction. They clearly expected to be told the answers to their questions - just like I was some kind of encyclopedia or Google search engine. But when I started asking questions in return, they either took it well or did not. Some were interested in the guy with the telescope that asked questions and some were bored.

I hope the effort will encourage some kid to get a little more interested in science questions. Maybe they will become interested enough to take a little more science than they were expecting to take in school. Maybe they will make a little better citizen or jurror in a case that involves scientific testimony. Maybe one of them will invent the cure for whatever disease or injury is going to try to do me in 20 years from now - or one of my children or grandchildren.

It felt good to challenge my charges a little.

Dark Skies!
Risk

Astronomy and Fitness

2009-09-22T21:48:00.003-05:00

Over the last eight or nine months, as I have become more and more interested in astronomy, I have taken less time to hike and walk and ride my mountain bike. Unfortunately, I found that this had an effect on my weight and my waistline. My weight rose from about 185 to 215 pounds. At first, my 36 inch waist pants got tight and then intolerable. I moved to 38 inch waist pants and then they got tight too!

It is time for me to become a shadow of my present self. I need to weigh less. I need to be in better shape.

This week, my wife persuaded me to start joining her in regularly attending a health club. She has been very good at getting exercise for most of a year now, and finally I am on the way back to health too. I thank her for the encouragement and inspiration.

We decided to plunk down the money to join the local Spectrum health club after visiting the local clubs. Spectrum was lighter, a little less crowded, and smelled better than the other club we visited. It is close enough that I can get there after working my day job, instead of just wishing that I could drive to Lackland AFB to use their gym for free. Yeah, it was also a little more expensive.

So, here I am a few days later with some soreness of my muscles and I’m slowly starting my way down the weight loss path again. (I am reducing portion sizes and abandoning all snacks too.) I know it will take a number of months to get back down to fighting weight, but the journey has started.

Astronomy is a great activity, but the problem with it is that there is not much activity to it. If you are having as much fun under the dark sky as I am, maybe a review of your other activities is in order – like it was for me. We want to enjoy the sky for as many years as possible. Staying in shape and staying healthy is part of that equation.

Huff and puff,
Dark skies too,

Rick

Free Tools – Cartes Du Ciel and Virtual Moon Atlas

2009-09-13T19:23:00.003-05:00

One of the premier tools available free to the amateur observer is the planetarium program that goes by the French name “Cartes Du Ciel.” True to its name, this program is a Sky Chart system that incorporates many of the features of full feature programs costing hundreds of dollars.

I have a number of sky charts that I find to be very useful in book form. When I am searching for a double star or a Messier Object, I really like these bound versions of sky charts. However, for some purposes, a software program is very handy. That is especially true when trying to track down comets, planets, and asteroids. The planetarium program can be set for today, or for next week when I will be out at a dark sky site. It can give different magnification levels, and I can create both right side up views for my finder scope as well as upside down and backwards views for my Dobsonian scope. Fact is, the program will also create right side up and reversed left right views for SCT scopes too!

For planning a Messier Marathon, the program is a great way to create a set of star hopping charts or to add to a published set, as I described in my Messier marathon piece last winter.

My preferred set up is to use a black on white format. It prints very well. With a red filter on a laptop computer it is also easy to read in the dark.

One of the ways I use the program is to print out a full sky chart to use instead of a planisphere for a certain time/place/and date. It is a little easier to show constellations to folks with this round version of the sky than a squished planisphere version – it also is more accurate than most planispheres for my south Texas observing location.

One of the things I like most about the Cartes du Ciel program is the ability to scale to any magnification and to add or subract star detail. This allows me to create simple charts and detailed charts on the fly. If I am interested in seeing very dim stars near where an asteroid is to be found in an eyepiece view, I can do that. If I am interested in seeing the overall picture of a full constellation, I can do that too.

Switching gears, I might as well mention the lunar equivalent of this planetarium program. The “Virtual Moon Atlas” is a great tool for locating almost all the small objects that one might be interested in on the lunar surface. It is a searchable atlas, and will identify any crater or feature that I click on the picture of the moon. There are several levels of complexity of the moon atlas. I have always used the biggest version. I really don’t know how limited the other versions might be.
Again the cool thing about this atlas is that it follows the libration of the moon, the phases of the moon, and the visible portion of the moon from any observing location. The view can also be adjusted up/down and left/right for any sort of scope.

Both programs can be downloaded from the Internet. Google search for them, download, install, and enjoy.

Astronomy Picture of the Day

2009-08-21T08:53:00.001-05:00

While I am an incurable fan of looking at my own personal set of photons given off by deep sky objects, I can also be attracted to beautiful photographs of the same sky objects. I grew up with black and white versions of long photographic exposure time pictures that showed much more than I can see with my eye. These days, color photos and false color photos are all the rage. They are beautiful.

Sometime last fall, I decided to take an online course offered free by Robert Nemiroff (Michigan Technical University) from the upper peninsula of the state. It was an online collection of the lectures used for a college course. They were offered completely free as long as no college credit was needed. Dr Nemiroff is one of the editors of the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD). This is a NASA hosted site where one photograph or piece of art is featured each day. In the course, the students were responsible for knowing something about each one of the APODs for their testes.

I started taking a closer look at the descriptions under the pretty pictures. It turns out that the writing about the photographs is as well done as the photography. Here is a recent example:

“Why take a picture of just the Badlands when you can take one that also shows the spectacular sky above it? Just such a picture, actually a digital stitched panorama of four images, was taken in late June near midnight, looking southwest. In the foreground, the unusual buttes of the Badlands Wall, part of the Badlands National Park in South Dakota, USA, were momentarily illuminated by flashlight during a long duration exposure of the background night sky. The mountain-like buttes visible are composed of soft rock that show sharp erosion features from wind and water. The South Dakota Badlands also contain ancient beds rich with easy-to-find fossils. Some fossils are over 25 million years old and hold clues to the evolutionary origins of the horse and the saber-toothed tiger. Bright Jupiter dominates the sky on the left just above the buttes, while the spectacular Milky Way Galaxy runs down the image right.”

When I take a careful look at this prose, it is as illuminating as the photograph it described. Here is another recent description from the APOD site:

“Sprawling across hundreds of light-years, emission nebula IC 1396, visible on the upper right, mixes glowing cosmic gas and dark dust clouds. Stars are forming in this area, only about 3,000 light-years from Earth. This wide angle view also captures surrounding emission and absorption nebula. The red glow in IC 1396 and across the image is created by cosmic hydrogen gas recapturing electrons knocked away by energetic starlight. The dark dust clouds are dense groups of smoke-like particles common in the disks of spiral galaxies. Among the intriguing dark shapes within IC 1396, the winding Elephant's Trunk nebula lies just right of the nebula's center. IC 1396 lies in the high and far off constellation of Cepheus.”

I like the idea of the nebula sprawling across the heavens instead of many more prosaic ways of saying the same thing. I might have written something like “IC1396 I several hundred light years in diameter.”

I got into the habit of looking at the APOD each day while I was taking the course last fall. I keep a link to the APOD on my blog site. It is one of the great internet archives of both beautiful photographs and instructive descriptions of deep sky objects. There is a lot of cosmology to be learned just by reading the descriptions from a month’s worth of the APOD library. Enjoy them.

The daily APOD can be found at

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/

Risk Management in Astronomy

2009-08-16T11:35:00.002-05:00

One of my nicknames is Risk. Hence, “Risk’s Wildly Successful” series of helpful insights. The way I came across that nickname was my function in an Air Force laboratory as the champion for Risk Management.

Life would be pretty boring if risk was always eliminated or minimized. My goal has never been to eliminate risk, but to control it – and to never let risk control me. I enjoy the heart pounding experience of pushing my limits on a mountain bike, teeth chattering as I descend a rocky trail. I enjoy the experience of standing in front of 300 people with a brand new talk, knowing that a few of those people may know more about the subject than I do. I enjoy reading people’s faces and knowing whether I am talking over their heads, or whether I am being dreadfully boring. These sorts of things are the spice of life.

Something happened this weekend which brought back to my mind the necessity of practicing Risk Management in Astronomy. We were on the way back from Hill Country State Natural Area. My son was in the pick-up with me and his fiancée was in our Corolla with Diane. It was about midnight.

Somewhere on Bandera Highway, Diane fell asleep for a moment. She was driving the car and drifted left of the yellow line. Ashley was sleepy but awake enough to know that Diane was not playing a joke on her. She quickly woke Diane and both of them drove the rest of the way home with a fresh pile of adrenaline in their veins!

Its not that our family is unaware of the dangers of driving sleepy. I personally think it is now more of a problem than “driving drunk” for our society. Driving drunk may have been more of a problem in the past, but most people now know the severe penalties for driving drunk and avoid doing so.

That brought to mind the kinds of risks that we astronomers need to control in our sport. We all know the risk of looking at the sun with a telescope. It will instantly and permanently ruin eyesight to look at the sun with aided optics. But how many of us are very careful when moving a scope around during the daytime? I remember one time this summer when I happened to glance down the tube of a reflector to see how much dust was on the mirror. The sun’s reflection hit me hard in one eye! Stupid, stupid, stupid! It took 5 minutes before I was convinced that my eye was not damaged.

Driving around at night, we not only run the risk of falling asleep, but we have to stay on the alert for large animals in the roadway. Here in Texas, that means deer and pigs. Driving back from Hill Country, Diane and I have counted up to 17 deer next to the highway.

We have to be careful about heavy scopes hurting our backs, tripping over tent stakes, and letting large scopes crush fingers and hands. These are not idle threats. As I have written, the reason I got a nice camping spot at the Texas Star Party this year was that a fellow tripped over a tent stake going to a restroom and broke his leg.

We need to be careful about being alone in lonely places. The only people who have bothered me while observing at the side of the road have been policemen. But other observers have not been quite as lucky. We need to be ready to defend ourselves while in lonely places. We also need to make sure that we have permission to be observing. One significant form of my risk management is developing friendships of folks that are willing to allow me to observe from their property instead of stopping along lonely roads like I used to do.

But learning to only drive while awake remains the most important risk management technique. There are two means of controlling this problem. The first is to learn how to stay out all night. This takes some equipment and experience. The second control mechanism is to learn to stop driving whenever I get sleepy – before getting so sleepy that I nod off. It does not matter if I am 10 miles from home or 1 mile from home. There is ALWAYS someplace where I can pull off the road and take a short nap. Even a 10 minute nap will give me many more minutes of awake time. It is always OK to stop to sleep. Dad is not at home looking at his watch. Go to sleep after the wheels stop rolling. Really. Please.

Satellite Observing

2009-08-16T10:59:00.002-05:00

Sometimes it is a challenge to find something to do after the scope is set up at a remote location and before the sky turns inky black. One thing that an observer can do while waiting for regular observing is to look for low earth orbit satellites. The activity can be done alone or with groups. Diane and I find it especially nice to work together. We share the tasks: reading a list of times and azimuths for satellites that will come over, and recording times when the satellite passes celestial landmarks. We also compete with each other to be the first to see a satellite.

There are several tools available for finding satellites. All of the tools I use involve computers and internet resources.

One easy source for finding out what bright satellites can be seen is Heavens-Above (http://www.heavens-above.com). You tell the site where you are and it will tell you what bright satellites will be visible in the coming evening and morning. Heavens-Above lists both the satellites that are on the publicly available lists and other satellites which are not published. Most of these are the so called “spy satellites” put up by our country and others. They are often big bright satellites, the size of the Hubble Space Telescope, but aimed at earth instead of at the stars.

I have an Ipod Touch. One day I will have an Iphone if I am good and have enough patience. These devices have a couple “apps” that are handy for satellite observing. I downloaded the free ISSLite program from VosWorx. It downloads orbital information from the web and helps folks that want to watch the International Space Station and any Progress spacecraft or Space Shuttle passes. The program lists the passes that will be visible for a location for the next week and it gives two views of the orbital movement of the spacecraft. One view is the traditional view seen at Houston mission control – the sinusoidal wave of the space craft position. The other view is a 3-D rendering of the earth (and the earth can be spun around) which makes for a pretty good tool to explain the traditional view.

Having up-to-date information on satellites is important. Their orbits change over time, and sometimes the change is rapid. Orbits are defined by a series of numbers – there are several that are important to plug into equations to allow calculation of the satellite’s position in space and the viewing angle from an observer’s location. Fortunately, the computer programs that I am writing about here know how to import the numbers – officially called orbital elements or Keplarian orbital elements – and work the advanced math necessary to calculate where a satellite may be visible. As an observer, I need to tell a program where I am on the surface of the earth, and I need to download a current version of the “keps” which are also sometimes called the NORAD Database or the “els”.

There is an advanced version of the ISSLite program that will follow a much larger group of satellites – amateur radio sats, and bright visual sats among the group. That program is also distributed by VosWorx and is called ProSat. It cost about $10 to download. It is worth every penny IMHO.

There are also programs available for laptop computers. One that I have been using recently is Earth Orbiting Objects or EOO. This program, written by Steve Boucher, allows download of recent keps, allows one to store multiple observing locations and does everything that the ProSat program does. It goes one step further. It allows me to see a view of the sky with the simulated satellite going past the starry background. That is, it contains a planetarium program which shows the movement of a satellite across the sky. It can be set up so that it will show in near-real time where a satellite is. That is really good for both finding a dim satellite and for replaying a satellite passage to remember the pass with greater accuracy.

One activity involving satellites and telescope has been a real challenge for me. It is an activity for the nimble observer. On a space station passage, try following the station with a telescope at about 120-150X magnification. For me, it took using a Telrad, a finder scope, and quick reflexes. I was rewarded with a series of views of the station with enough resolution that I could see a distinct rectangular shape and a different color for the station’s wings than for its central occupied core.

A second activity can be done either at dusk/dawn or sometimes in bright sunlight. That is the observation of Iridium flares. The Iridium satellites (used by the global telephone system of the same name) have very bright mirror like sides and they can “flash” an observer with surprisingly bright flares of light. At a maximum they may reach -8 magnitude – much brighter than Venus. The best source of information about Iridium flares for me has been the Heavens-Above site mentioned at the top of this piece.

So, next time you see me with my scope all set up and the sky not yet dark, if no one has engaged me in an interesting conversation and you wonder what I might be doing with all those pieces of paper, my iPod, and a voice recorder… well now you know the rest of the story.

Observing Chair/Step Stool

2009-08-12T18:35:00.003-05:00

When I get sawdust and plane curls going in one project, it often leads to another.

Having just finished the base for Looking Glass, I decided to solve the problem that Diane had looking at M13 the other night. Hercules is nearly at the zenith in the evening this time of year, and My first mate was not quite tall enough to see through the vertical scope and that led to contortions as she tried to keep her toes on the rungs of my observing stool, holding onto my shoulders to not fall over.

I remembered a chair that I had taken at the Texas Star Party, made by StarMaster. My neighbor at the TSP had a used one for sale and I thought the idea was clever.

I thought about that design and decided that I could make a similar device for about 5 dollars in materials. I made the two "ladders" from 2x2s. The total lumber was four of these inexpensive boards. I had a scrap of 3/4 inch plywood from the scope project, and that made a good platform.

The step can be moved to any of the "rungs" on the seat. That allows Diane to stand on a low step for a quick observation. The same usefulness will probably be enjoyed by kids at public star parties. The four foot height of the rails may give them something to hold onto instead of the scope too. But the design is also an observing stool with multiple levels.

My thanks to the folks at StarMaster who built the version that I saw. I recommend their design as a great way to show people wonders and for the observer to sit down and enjoy an object.

HyperLightbridge Base

2009-08-11T10:02:00.001-05:00

Last week, my Meade Lightbridge (aka Looking Glass) arrived in Helotes, TX. I had ordered it with the plan to rebuild it, and this weekend I had the chance to do so. I had previously practiced building some of the design features on the Resurrection scope – large diameter altitude bearing and a small base. So, on my way home from work on Friday I picked up a 4x8 sheet of birch plywood ¾ of an inch thick with great expectations for construction.

I had drawn up a sketch of my idea and a cut plan for the sheet of plywood:

Sketch

Cut Plan

On Saturday evening, the first thing I did was to cut out the two three-foot-diameter semi-circles with a router and a circle cutting jig. This jig was a piece of Masonite cut and drilled to fit the base of my router with an arm that extended out toward the operator. (I got the idea for this by searching the Internet for “router circle cutting jig”.) I measured from the inside edge of a straight router bit to a spot 18 inches down that arm and drilled a hole that would be the center of my 3 foot half circle altitude bearing. I screwed the jig ¼ inch from the edge of the plywood and 18 inches from one end. I then cut through the plywood about a quarter inch at a time around the arc.

After cutting these two half circles, I cut a strip of bumpy fiber reinforced plastic (FRP) ¾ of an inch wide and as long as the half circumference. That was about 57 inches (pi*18). I coated the back surface of the FRP and the round surface of the altitude bearings with two coats of contact cement. After about 10 minutes of dry time, I began at one end of the strip and pressed the strip on the edge. After getting the whole strip on, I used the floor to press the strip on very securely by rolling the semi-circle against the garage floor. Then it was time for a night’s sleep.

The next morning, I used a plane to trim the width of the FRP to the width of the plywood, which is actually 1/16 of an inch under ¾ of an inch.

Then I set about cutting the box pieces to hold the sides of the light bucket. I unscrewed the mirror cell from the bucket walls and lifted the top of the bucket off the mirror cell. I put the mirror cell in the house, away from saw dust. (I also took this opportunity to adjust the mirror holding brackets so that they do not press too firmly on the edges of the mirror.) I measured the diameter of the bucket several places and decided that it was very close to 19 inches. I added the width of my plywood to that and came up just below 19-3/4 inches. I knew that I wanted four identical pieces of plywood 12x19-3/4. I also needed a base and a ground board.

I very carefully measured and drew cutting lines on the plywood. First, I cut the plywood with a circular saw so that I had a 48x48 inch piece. I then divided that into two 24x48 inch pieces and then two more cuts gave me four 24x24 inch pieces. Two of those pieces I cut to 19-3/4 inches long, and then each of them was divided to one foot widths. I put the two remaining 2x2 foot pieces to the side until I discovered exactly what size the base would need to be.

I routed the long edges of each of the box sides, top and bottom, with a round off router bit. Then I drilled and countersunk three screw holes on one end of each of the box pieces. I assembled the box, making sure to drill a pilot hole for each of the 1-1/4 inch drywall screws.
I removed the aluminum altitude bearings from the light bucket. Then I slipped the box over the bucket and secured it to the bucket with a ¾ inch wood screw through two of the holes which had held the aluminum altitude bearings.

My plan was to have the center of my 3 foot diameter altitude bearing at the center of the upper edge of the box. I knew, from the collected wisdom of many owners that the scope was bottom heavy. I confirmed this on my scope when I attached a radian eyepiece, a Telrad finder, and a finder scope to the secondary housing. When my Looking Glass approached level, it wanted to nose dive. I also knew from the collected wisdom of the group that moving the center of the altitude bearing an inch up would make a world of difference. That was where I attached the box – with its upper edge an inch and a quarter above the center of the factory bearing. I also attached a third screw to the topside (opposite the seam in the bucket) to reduce rotary movement of the scope in the box.

I attached the half-round altitude bearings to the box with home made knobs and tee-nuts. I made the knobs by threading three 1-1/4 inch diameter ¼ inch fender washers over a 2 inch long 1/4x20 hex bolt and tightening them down with a nylon insert nut. I drilled ¼ inch holes through the bearing and the box in locations which spread the load and which gave me room to work between the bucket and the box. Then I drilled the box holes to accept a 1/4x20 Tee-nut and drew that Tee into the wood with a hex bolt and a washer. This makes it easy to remove the two altitude bearings from the light bucket without tools. A minute or two is all it takes to install or remove the large bearings. Of course, the bearings were oriented so that they allow both vertical and horizontal use of the scope.

I measured the width between the outer edges of the altitude bearings to make sure that they were parallel. They were just a little under 22 inches from side to side at three locations – ends and middle. That was very good news. All my careful cutting had paid off. Now I was able to build the base.

The width of the base would be the same as the width of the altitude bearings. I cut both the remaining 2x2 foot boards to 21-7/8 inch squares. I rounded off the corners of the ground board by using a varnish can to trace ¼ circles at each corner.

Next I needed to know how high the base needed to be at the center. I measured how far the corner of the light bucket extended outside the altitude bearing. It was about 2 inches. Allowing room for the center screw on which the telescope would rotate, I decided to make the center 3 inches tall. I marked that height at the 11 inch center of a 22 inch piece I was drawing on the part of the plywood from which I had cut the two three foot circles. I used an altitude bearing to draw a curved upper edge so that the bottom center was 3 inches tall and the sides were even. It ended up being about 6-1/2 inches on each side.

At this point, a bunch of routing was done to round off edges. The bottom edge of the rotating base board was routed. The outside corners of the two supports (with the concave rounded edges) and most of their round surface was rounded. Both top and bottom of the ground board were routed. The full edges inside and out of the altitude bearings including the FRP was rounded – the FRP only slightly.

A 5/16 inch hole was cut in the center of the base and ground boards. (To do this easily, place a straight edge from corner to corner and draw an X in the center. A 5/16 Tee nut was placed in the bottom surface of the ground board after that hole was drilled one size larger.

The side supports were screwed to the base from below with countersunk drywall screws. A brace was cut for both the front and the back of the base, adding strength to the support sides. The front was cut to length from one of the 4-1/2 inch wide pieces left over from the cutting of the box sides. The rear brace needs to be a little shorter to allow the swing of the telescope. 3 or 3-1/2 inches tall works pretty well. These braces are screwed to the sides of the supports and to the base. All holes are countersunk.

Only a little bit of work remained. I used the lazy susan azimuth bearing from the stock base, except that I also placed three felt furniture pads just outside the circumference of that bearing. I cut about half the thickness of the pads off so that the azimuth bearing is smooth, but does not turn in the wind. I attached square furniture glides on the upper rails of the supports. (I left small areas which were not routed so that the full width of the rail would support the furniture glide.) I also attached pieces of 1” aluminum bar, cut 2 inches long and drilled to be attached to the outside edges of the supports.

I cut triangular braces for the box, one for each corner, 4-1/2 inches wide. This is to strengthen the box so that a handle can be attached. The handles make it much easier to carry the light bucket. They also allow two people (I’m not strong enough to do it by myself) to lift the scope from the base after it is assembled.

I put a handle on one of the braces for the base, and it can easily be carried on one hand while carrying the bearings or the secondary housing in the other hand.

I really like the feel of the scope now. It is much easier to move around. The light bucket with mirror attached is still a heavy item. My only recourse if I had to move the scope a long way by myself would be to use a hand truck or to remove the mirror cell from the light bucket. That is not too hard, but it would still be a bit of a pain.

Resurrection Scope

2009-08-07T15:40:00.002-05:00

A month ago, there was an announcement on our local astronomy group’s web page about a telescope that had been found in the garbage. Was anyone interested in seeing if it could be rescued? I responded right away because I had in mind a project that required an optical tube.

I made a call and got directions to come pick up the relic. The scope was rescued from the trash by a friendly fellow. He got a bike that he wanted and he knew someone in the SAAA and found out how to post a notice that he had this “partial telescope”.

When I went to collect the scope, I learned from the neighbor that the scope had been in a lady's garage since 1985. She had recently died and her extended family had thrown out several things that were considered useless by them. The home was off Ingram Rd just inside 410 in San Antonio.

The scope was originally put together by her son, I learned. He was 16 years old when he went to China on a youth missionary trip in 1985. He contracted an infectious disease and died there. His family was unable to even bring his body back to the US because of fears of the infection. I was told they eventually got him buried in Hawaii. If anyone ends up knowing anything about this unfortunate telescope builder, drop me a line and I will update the entry here.

The scope was about a dirty as could be expected from sitting unprotected in a garage for 25 years. It was the optical tube from a reflector telescope. There was a 1.5 inch sighting scope screwed into the tube next to a broken down focuser. The secondary hung by a wire from the focuser and bounced back and forth like a scared kitten. The mirror was labeled on the back as American Optical and had a focal length of about 67 inches.

I disassembled the finder scope and cleaned the lenses. It was usable, though the mount was not of the modern type that fits into a base. The tube had a strange collection of nuts all strung out on an unreinforced two inch long 3/16 inch bolt at about the balance point. Maybe it had once been attached to a tripod by that bolt.

I removed the mirror cell and then the mirror. I submerged the mirror in a tub of water with a little detergent. After soaking, I gently removed the accumulated crud on the mirror with a series of surgical cotton balls. I used each one for a very short cleaning stroke. After cleaning the mirror in this way, I rinsed it with water out of my Culligan filter and then touched the corner of a paper towel to each water drop that did not run off the mirror surface when it was hung vertically. There was one small flaw in the mirror coating about an eighth of an inch in diameter and my work did not seem to have introduced any scratches in the coating.

I reassembled the mirror cell with double sided sticky tape and checked out the optics. Even though the focuser was very difficult to use, and the secondary holder bobbed around, I was able to see that it would focus and give me a decent image.

So I set about doing what I had intended from the beginning. I started building a large diameter altitude bearing dobsonian mount.

I designed the altitude bearing to be two feet in diameter and wrapped the tube in a box a foot long. I made the altitude bearing half moons to be removable with knobs made from bolts and washers. I built the base from two round circles 20 inches in diameter. All these were made from ½ inch hardwood plywood, with the altitude half circles made in double thickness, an inch thick.

I made the bearing surface of each axis from fiber reinforced plastic with sliders made from pieces I cut out from a kitchen cutting board.

I designed a saw blade spring secondary spider to replace the original bouncy secondary holder. The new one is rock solid. I also bought an inexpensive ($40) 1-1/4 inch focuser from Orion.

The project cost about $45 in wood, $45 in hardware, and $40 for the focuser. It ended up being a reasonable deal for a pretty nice 8 inch scope. It also helped me to explore several technologies I needed to understand for my project intended to replace the stock base of a Meade 16 inch Lightbridge.

The photograph shows all the pieces. I had taken them apart to varnish all the surfaces. It was a good photo opportunity. All edges were routed to make them approximate a half round. The bearing surface of the half circles was also routed but not as deeply.

First Light – Looking Glass

2009-08-05T08:57:00.004-05:00

I enjoy the tradition of celebrating the first time that a telescope is pointed to the sky. Yesterday I had the privilege of assembling my new Meade 16 inch Lightbridge telescope and (miracle that it was) the sky was clear during the evening hours.

The scope went together easily. The directions were clear enough and no pieces were missing. It took me a few minutes to discover a way to easily mount the focuser/secondary ring. But once I learned that a case wedged between the base and the light bucket holds the bucket at a 15 degree angle, putting the top ring on was much easier. I replaced the screws in the secondary with a set of Bob’s Knobs.

I made the scope a little welcome home gift while I was waiting for the sky to turn dark. I made a shroud to cover its bare midriff from 1-1/8 yards of black bathing suit liner. The stretchy material was on sale at Hancock Fabrics, so the shroud cost less than $10 and fits better than a shroud sold by the manufacturer – for ten times the price. It took about 10 minutes at the sewing machine to complete the project and thread a couple bungee cords in the hem at each end of the shroud. (Thanks to the Starmaster folks for this idea on the construction of a shroud.)

I discovered that the oversize reflective cover that I bought for my 10” Texas scope at the Texas Star Party fits this larger scope just about perfectly.

Then, finally, it was dark enough to begin to look around the sky. The moon was near full and I was in my semi-dark Helotes (Texas) neighborhood, so it was not a night for deep sky observing. First object was Vega. I wanted to adjust the Telrad and finder scope for this scope. I did not hear any strains Contact or Jodi Foster's voice as I was collecting those 20 year old photons. Next up was Mizar, the visual/telescopic double in UMA.

As it grew a little darker (and several satellites later) I went back to Vega and took a left turn to look at epsilon Lyrae, the double-double. I ran through my eyepieces, including the supplied 2” 26 mm that came with the scope. It was easy to split each of the pairs with all my usual eyepieces except the 36mm Plossel, as expected. I pushed right and found the Lyrae pair at the end of the constellation. I set the cross hairs of the finder scope to the position of the Ring Nebula. Despite the washed out sky, the Ring was quite pretty. With my 10mm Radian eyepiece, it appeared to have some color. In a dark sky this may be a very pretty sight.

Luna finally rose above my neighbor’s roof top and I experimented with a moon filter. At 180X, my view of a number of mountain peaks along the terminator was pretty good. Not great, as the San Antonio heat was still warming the air near the roofs and the view was not steady. After looking around at high power, I put the 2 inch lens in and looked at the whole moon. It looked so pretty that I decided to get my simple digital camera and take some pictures with it, up next to the eyepiece. The photo at the top of this column is one of those pictures.

At 11 PM, Jupiter was above the housetops and the Great Red Spot was turning the bend toward the west. I looked in vain for evidence of the recent comet impact with Jupiter. I went to bed for a while and woke about 1 AM just to go outside and take a look at Jupiter again. Still no sighting of the comet impact. (Well… without taking a look at my computer and seeing when that impact spot would be visible, one can’t expect miracles.)

It was a great evening with a new scope. I woke this morning just a little tired from the loss of an hour of sleep. It was worth it. As I thought about a name for this scope while I was taking my shower, several names came to mind. Big Bertha seemed apt, because I am overwhelmed by the size of the mirror. But I have seen other scopes that REALLY are big. This one is just handy-large. I thought that Big Momma, my name for UMA could be right – after all, the second object I looked at was Mizar. Big Ben or Gentle Ben were good names. But then I thought about why I had ordered this scope – to better see the dim Hershel list objects. It was about this time that “Looking Glass” came to mind. Along with that name came Alice and her Wonderland. Those happy thoughts persuaded me. “Looking Glass” it is.

Building a Telescope

2009-08-03T19:11:00.002-05:00

The hardest part of building a telescope is beginning.

Fortunately, I had a good reason and a good example late last winter to take on this project. There was a competition fostered by one of the forums on the CloudyNights website to build a telescope that cost less than a hundred dollars. Matt, my San Antonio astronomy friend, posted the details on our local Yahoo group. He mentioned that he had found a place to buy a 4 inch mirror and a diagonal for $40 including shipping.

On a whim, I ordered the mirror and started thinking about how to build a scope. I decided that my goal was not only to design an inexpensive scope, but one that would be easy to build too. Maybe a family or a school science club would take up plan and build one of their own.

After the mirror had been sitting in my hobby room for a month or more, I began thinking of actual plans for building a scope. It seemed like I needed to divide the project into several areas: Optics, Furniture, and Mechanics.

For the Furniture portion, I thought of different ways that I could build a simple Dobsonian scope with as little use of wood working equipment as possible. I knew that a base could be constructed much like the base of my XT10. I needed to think about a way to build an optical tube. After scouring the local hardware store, I came up short on tubes that would fit the mirror, without being way too big. I decided that the easiest way to create the tube was to make a long box with open ends using standard lumber.

Next, I started working out the optics. On a clear night with a bright moon that shone nearly overhead, I put the mirror on my driveway, just in front of my garage door. My garage faces south, so I was able to find the moon’s reflection from the concave mirror on a piece of paper that I held along the door frame. I moved the paper up and down until the image was in focus on the paper. When it was, I made a small mark on the door frame and then measured the distance from the surface of the mirror to the mark. It was 36 inches, and I knew that the optical length from the mirror to the underside of the eyepiece needed to be very close to that distance.

The mechanical distance needed to be the distance from the eyepiece to the center of the secondary mirror plus the distance from the center of the secondary to the surface of the mirror itself. Knowing that distance, I knew that the optics needed three pieces of machinery. I had to find a way to hold the secondary mirror, a way to move the eyepiece in and out to focus, and a way to columnate the secondary mirror.

For focusing, I decided that I would use the oldest and cheapest focus trick: I would have a friction fit between the optical tube and the eyepiece so that I could move the eyepiece in and out for fine focus. How would I achieve such a fine tolerance? By applying just the right number of layers of duct tape to the inside of a hole cut with a 1-1/4 inch hole saw.

For the secondary mirror, I borrowed an idea from the web: using hack saw blades to spring fit a spider into the optical tube. However, with a four sided tube as I envisioned, I would need to have a spider with four legs, each leg resting in a corner of the tube. To make the spider, I slotted a piece of PVC to receive two crossing hack saw blades. I measured the distance from corner to corner and cut each hack saw blade an inch short of that measurement. I fit a piece of dowel into the PVC pipe with a 45 degree angle cut at its end. I used some clear silicon bathtub calk to attach the secondary mirror to the angle cut on the dowel. That gave me a platform that I could move around in the tube to have the secondary under the eyepiece, and in which I could rotate the secondary to correctly reflect the primary into the eyepiece.

For the eyepiece holder, I elected to make the eyepiece hole in one corner of the optical tube box. I used a hole saw to make the hole, making sure that it was pointed straight at the far corner when I was cutting the hole. After measuring twice, I cut the hole about 2-1/4 inches from the open end of the optical tube.

I jumped past the primary mirror cell construction in my description, though it was actually the first thing I made. I cut two pieces of 2x6. One was square and one was just a little longer, so that it could be attached to the sides of the “tube” made with 1x8 standard lumber.

For the cell, I suspended the square by counter sinking 1-1/2 inch bolts in the floating square, and then placing a spring between the floating square and the cell frame. I used wing nuts to adjust the floating mirror holding square from the bottom of the scope. For the springs, I obtained a screen door spring and pulled the spring until it came a little “unsprung”. I cut the spring at three coils for each of the adjusting bolts.

The tube itself was four 1x8 pieces of lumber 3 feet long.

The base was created from several pieces of 1x12. The two rotating base boards are 11” square. I originally used an old record as my turning device, and later found that it worked even better to use three furnature glides on the bottom board turning against the record. There are two vertical pieces to the base, braced by a piece of 1x6 on the forward end.

The tube turns in altitude on two 4 inch PVC pipe caps.

A piece of pipe can be used to aim the scope, or perhaps a red dot finder can be added to the set-up.

That is a building history for the wood box scope. Since I came up with the idea in Helotes, Texas, I began calling the design the Helotescope.

My friend Matt did mostly the same design. He added a used focuser instead of my friction device. That works very well too! The picture at the beginning of this blog shows our two scopes at a meeting of the San Antonio Astronomical Association this last winter.

I have taken this scope to several public star parties. It never fails to attract some young men that look carefully at the scope. I can see the wheels turning in their minds. However, I have not yet seen the third Helotescope.

Texas Star Party

2009-07-11T14:44:00.002-05:00

April of 2009, I had the opportunity to go to my first Texas Star Party (TSP). The setting, as it has been in recent years, was the Prude Ranch near Ft Davis, Texas. I was working my day job the first part of the week, but I managed to take two days off. I hopped in my pick-up truck at the end of work on Wednesday afternoon.

My pick-up is set up with a simple camper shell. My Orion XT10 fits easily in its soft case on the right side of the bed of the truck and I fit nicely on a camping mattress on the left side. The arrangement lets me stop at a campground or a star-field and quickly set up my gear.

I drove west on I-10 for five hours and arrived at the campground at Balmorhea State Park. The sky was dark there, but it was completely covered by clouds. I slept well and when I got up the next day, I went to the famous spring-fed swimming pool and rinsed off before driving the 40 miles up to the Prude Ranch.

I got to the “center of the universe” at about 9 AM. I checked in and got my tent pass at the ranch-house/dining room. I found an open slot along the road side of the middle observing field. As I was setting up my equipment, I found out from the fellows on either side of me that this spot had been occupied until the previous day. The previous occupant had broken his leg walking to the bathroom in the dark. (He tripped over a tent guy rope.) They wished me a good stay at the TSP and hoped that I did better than the previous astronomer.

For the rest of the morning and early afternoon, I wandered around the observing fields. There were easily several hundred telescopes set up. Many were under shiny metallic covers. There were counterbalanced binocular stands. I greatly admired the Couch Potato Telescope (CPT) and was able to meet its designer, Sim Picheloup. (Before the end of the TSP I had bought a kit from Sim to build my own CPT)

After lunch, I wandered up to the vendor area and looked through the booths. I bought a book by O’Meara on how to approach the Hershell 400 List. The Hershell list is a group of 400 mostly-dim deep sky objects. All of them need to be found to get the Hershell 400 certificate from the Astronomical League. More than that, the Hershell 400 certificate is the hardest of the required certificates for the Master Observer certificate. Receiving the Master Observer award is a goal that I have set for myself over the next couple years.

I brought the book and some information about the CPT back to my truck and settled down to do some reading and napping for the rest of the afternoon. It was warm, but I was able to get in a couple hours of sleep.

Late in the afternoon, I went to the meeting hall where Mexico Doug (one of the guys I camped next to) was giving a talk on collecting the meteorites from a large meteorite that fell south of Dallas earlier in the spring.

After I came back from the meeting hall, Doug introduced me to a group of observers who were hanging out under a couple shelters under a shade tree about 40 yards down the field from where I was. They kindly offered me a cold beer and a chair. Before the end of the TSP I was a member of the TSP Shade Tree Gang. (http://tspshadetreegang.com) I think my membership was assured when I showed up on Friday with a couple cold six packs for the group.

That evening, the sky turned mostly clear. The photographers were not pleased with the conditions, but it was a fine evening to run the 5x5 list and the Globular Glory list with my telescope. After I got that accomplished, I turned in for a nice rest.

Friday was another day of discovery – seeing what sorts of equipment folks had brought. I bought a hardware kit for the CPT binocular chair from Sim Picheloup. I also persuaded him to let me use a chair with my binoculars that night to run the TSP binocular list. He was very gracious to agree to my request. I bought a silver colored cover for my telescope to keep it out of the sprinkles and the sun – both of which came through the ranch that afternoon. Just before setting out for the McDonald Observatory for a great tour, I got my 5x5 and Globular Glory pins from a legend at the TSP. John Wagnoner was sitting in a folding chair outside the Meeting Room at one PM and he wanted to see my log. There was not much conversation, but I felt honored to have him look at my logs.

Late in the afternoon, clouds rolled into the ranch, so I rolled into the meeting hall with the majority of the other observers. The place was packed. It was the awards and rewards part of the meeting that most people were there for. But we had a great talk by a former ISS crew member. He had some great pictures of cities at night. It reminded me how much problem we have with light pollution and how special a place like the TSP is. I stuck around the meeting, listening to really bad jokes, and without surprise left without having won anything.

The sky was covered from one horizon to the other with clouds when I got out of the meeting hall. I went to bed and checked the sky about 1 AM. It was remarkably clear. Almost no one was observing. A couple guys doing astrophotography said that the sky was absolutely great for imaging. The cloudless part of the sky only lasted a couple hours, in which I was able to run the TSP binocular list from Sim’s chair. It was handy that the list only required finding half of the objects – because about half the objects were hidden by clouds.

By the next morning, the sky was mostly cloud covered and the forecast was for continued cloudy conditions through Sunday. Most of the folks that had vehicles began packing up. I was packed and on the road by about 10 AM. I stopped again at Balmorhea to take a dip and wash off sweat and dust. I was home by mid afternoon.

I unpacked my truck and sent John Wagnoner a letter with a copy of my binocular log. He was nice enough to send me a pin in the mail. These few days ended up being a simple, inexpensive trip that pegged my fun meter for astronomy for about a month.

I will be going back to the TSP. It is a nice time to get to know others, learn new tricks, and have fun observing in a great dark sky site.

Moon Questions

2009-07-11T09:12:00.003-05:00

A week or two ago, one of my friends in the San Antonio Astronomical Association asked some interesting questions about the moon. He wanted to know how the moon would appear from the poles, from the Arctic and Antarctic circles, from the Tropic lines of Cancer and Capricorn and from the equator. Here is my slightly edited answer. I am interested in comments, as this is just the result of a thought experiment on my part. I have no experience seeing the moon from those areas.

Hunter,

Not many have worked on your puzzle. However:

In Australia, which is about the southern hemisphere opposite of us here in Texas, I have posted previously that the moon (and the sun) behave pretty much oppositely to what we experience.

The moon still rises in the east and sets in the west, but as one looks toward the horizon under the moon, one is looking north. So the moon rises from the right and sets to the left. Here in Texas, it rises from the left and sets to the right.

When the moon is young, the left side of the moon is lit up down there, instead of the right side like we are used to seeing. And when looking at the moon with binoculars when it is at its highest (north), the South Pole of the moon is at the top of the field of view and the North Pole is at the bottom.

The next questions depend on a fact that the moon's plane of revolution is near the plane of the ecliptic, not the plane of the earth's equator. That is to say that the moon's plane of rotation is pretty much in the same plane as the earth's (and venus and Mercury and Mars...) plane of rotation. (It is actually about 5 degrees out of that plane, which makes all that follows an approximation)

Those circles of latitude you talked about are mainly used to describe the motion of the sun across the seasons. Because of the tilt of the earth, the noon sun is directly overhead at the equator on only two days a year. They are the equinox days in March and September. On all other days, a point either north (late March to early September) or south (late September through early March) of the equator has the sun directly overhead at local noon.

In fact, to a pretty close approximation, the entire equator has its local noon directly overhead on the equinoxes. A circle of points north (or south) of the equator has its local noon directly overhead on every other day. On June 21st or so (depending on how close to a leap year we are), that circle which has its local noon directly overhead is at the Tropic of Cancer - about 23-1/2 degrees of north latitude -- just a little south of us in San Antonio. On Dec 21st or so, local noon is experienced directly overhead along the Tropic of Capricorn. (Remember that Capricorn is south of Cancer in the sky).

Starting from the spring equinox, when the North Pole is tipped toward the sun, the sun never sets at the north pole until the fall equinox. As spring progresses, there is an ever larger circle of earth surrounding the north pole in which the sun never sets at any time during the day. It rises higher and lower, but never sets until about an equivalent number of days the other side of the equinox. The furthest south this ring works its way outward from the North Pole, on the day of the Summer Solstice is a ring of points that are called the Arctic Circle at about 66-1/2 degrees. The same sort of thing happens the other half of the year inside the Antarctic Circle around the South Pole and surrounding what we call the winter solstice.

The other half of the year, there is an equivalent area in which the sun never rises around one of the poles. It has the same area as the area in which the sun never sets on the other pole of the globe.

What does the moon do at the far north and far south? Assuming that the moon is really in the plane of the ecliptic (and that is off by a little bit) Then there is a point near the north and south poles for each day of the year where the moon does not set for the first time that year. That day will be the day that the sun first stays up all day and the day that the sun first stays down all day.

For the north pole and the south pole, that day occurs only twice a year, on the equinoxes. For points on the Arctic Circle and the Antarctic Circle, it will occur only on the solstices. For the rest of the points on the pole side of the Arctic and Antarctic circles, that will occur 4 times a year. The places on which it occurs each day will describe two circles which are parallel to the Arctic and Antarctic Circles.

On the equator, something akin to the sun occurs regarding the moon. For an observer on the equator, and near the summer solstice, when the North Pole is tipped toward the sun, a full moon will appear to be nearer the north horizon than at any other time. During the rest of that lunar month, if one looks toward the north, the moon will rise in the east to the right. The left portion of the moon will be lit in the early evening when the moon is young and the moon's south pole will be up in a pair of binoculars. (In my original post I had some of this backwards.)

Near the day of the winter solstice, a full moon will appear to be nearer the south horizon than at any other time. During the rest of that lunar month, if one looks toward the south, the moon will rise in the east to the left. The right portion of the moon will be lit in the early evening when the moon is young and the north pole of the moon will be up in a pair of binoculars.

Near the day of the equinoxes, the moon will pass nearly overhead. If it is a full moon, at these times the moon may pass through the earth's shadow and a lunar eclipse may occur. If it is a new moon, and the geometry is just right, a solar eclipse may occur.

On other days, there is a circle of points on which a full moon will pass directly through the zenith, directly overhead. The furthest north this circle will move is near the tropic of Cancer, as the summer solstice approaches. The opposite is true as the circle approaches the tropic of Capricorn as the winter solstice approaches.

All of this is complicated further because the moon is not really in the ecliptic, it is in a plane slightly off set from it. That really messes up the eclipses, because the moon can be anywhere in a ten degree arc north or south of the positions I have described above as the “ideal positions” The movement of the moon up and down with regard to the ecliptic can be described in longer cycles called saros cycles. And that is beyond the scope of what I can do in my head.

Dark Skies,

Rick

Thanks to Matt Rottman for the photograph of the moon.

The Dance of the Bears - July

2009-07-08T08:28:00.004-05:00

As we look into the sky tonight, we see the big momma bear chasing the little baby bear around the pole. The baby has its tail wrapped up tight and stays just a little ahead of his mom. What junior does not know is that a big dragon had worked its way between them and Mom has just finished driving it toward the hero, Hercules. He has his foot on the dragon's head.

But the dragon had its eyes on others. There is a king who is protecting his prissy wife. He’s below the belly of the dragon and Cassiopeia is just peeking over the horizon east of north. Fortunately the strong hero, Hercules, is not letting the dragon get loose. But Hercules is busy with another project too.

He is about to try to charm the dragon with his guitar that he calls his little Lyra. The strings have this cool pick-up microphone on them called the ring nebula. And two birds have gathered to listen to the music. The swan, whose name is Cygnus, is flying south and further East is the Eagle. Someone has let an arrow fly between them.

Look! It must have come from that farmer, Ophiuchus. But he has forgotten his arrow since he is now fighting with a giant snake.

Down toward the horizon, the farmer has conjured a teapot which is pouring hot water on the tail of a scorpion. The steam from the tea pot, as you might see if the sky is really dark, is blowing along the horizon and is getting in the eyes of the swan. Later on, you may see that it is messing with the vain queen’s hair. Seriously, that spot where the steam is rising from is the center of the galaxy we live in. Downtown Milky way is a hot-time-space place, so for steam to rise from there makes sense.

Near the top of the sky is a bright star that can be found out the curved arc of the Big Bear’s tail. Arcturus is the heart of the shepherd king Bootes. The Bible calls the shepherd king David. And his crown is right between him and Hercules.

If you speed over to Spica with me, you are looking at a pretty girl named Virgo. She is threatened by that Scorpion, but the scales of justice (Libra) will do their best to protect her. Below Libra is a great Centaur, right out of the Harry Potter series, and his heart is a great globular cluster called omega Centauri. We can see it in Texas, but northern astronomers cannot. It is a great secret. Don’t tell them about it.

By the way, did I tell you that the strong man, Hercules had a globular cluster for a heart as well?

Under the Virgin girl is a square of stars called the crow. It is raising its voice to try to scare off the big water snake which is about to be swallowed up by the western horizon.

More directly West is Leo the Lion. This month he is standing on Saturn which is brighter than his regal heart, Regulus. Both Regulus and the lion’s eye star (Algeba) are pretty double stars.
And that takes us pretty much right-around to where we started with the dancing bears.

I hope your dreams are pleasant tonight as you think about these beasts and heros dancing over your heads. Maybe you will fall asleep thinking about the bears chasing each other round and round and round...

Messier Marathon - Late March 2009

2009-07-06T08:43:00.003-05:00

After the practice all-nighters I had in January and February, and the “Third Quarter” practice two weeks before the club’s Messier Marathon, I felt ready to tackle the challenge of my first Messier Marathon. I felt some outside pressure, as I had given a talk at the San Antonio Astronomical Association “Beginner’s Forum” in March. In that talk I had explained my approach to the marathon – everything from charts to naps to timing. So it felt like some people were watching me to see how I actually did on my first marathon.

The field was open on Friday night, even though the marathon was going to run on Saturday night. Friday afternoon was cold and windy, temperature in the high 40s and expected to go down to about freezing overnight. I was set up with my pick-up next to my scope and with a camper shell on the back of the pick-up. I would have a retreat from the wind, if not from the cold.

The sky was severe clear all afternoon, but as the sun set, the few of us that had chosen to spend two nights at the star party saw a bank of clouds in the west under the thin crescent moon. These clouds continued to advance toward us, and by the time it was beginning to get dark enough to see stars, they had covered all of the difficult western objects. It was disappointing to not have a chance to identify these, since it had been a month since I had the opportunity to do so and they were now 30 degrees closer to the horizon than when I had last practiced on them.

The rest of the sky was nice and clear, and I was able to easily see the 5.6 magnitude stars in the Little Dipper. I found a number of galaxies, starting with the Leo triplets and the Big Dipper and moved on to the Virgo cluster of galaxies.

But the cloud bank continued to roll in from the east, and by 2330 the sky was mostly covered by clouds. I decided the best thing was to get into my down sleeping bag and see what the sky looked like later. When I awoke about 1:30, the sky had cleared. But oh! Was it windy! And it was cold!

I rolled out of my sleeping bag and spent an hour with the middle of the night objects, following them down to the top of Sagittarius and Cygnus. I had a cup of hot chocolate in the warming booth that Hunter Scott, our host had made available in the tree line surrounding the field. (By the way, he did an incredible job preparing the field and making snacks and hot drinks available for the event.) And then I went back to bed to wait for the pre dawn hour and a half .

The pre-dawn went well. The season had progressed and more of the constellations were available in the East than the last time I had practiced a few weeks before. I saw all those Messier objects that I had not been able to see in the preceding months.

After a nap that lasted until the need for a late breakfast woke me up, I got up and commiserated with the others that had spent the night on how cold and windy it had been. Some wondered, as the day progressed and it got no warmer, whether many folks would come out for a cold night of star watching.

However, as the afternoon wore on, the field filled with cars and scopes. One estimate made before the sun went down was that we had 40+ scopes on the field and over 70 folks using them. We had Rudy’s BBQ catered, which probably increased the crowds. But it was still windy. The prayer over the food included a supplication that the sky stay clear and the wind die down. (And that is what happened.)

The sun set as anxious astronomers sat down at their scopes to take a look at the thin crescent moon 30 degrees above the horizon. When the stars began to appear, I worked hard to try to find the evening objects in the glow of the sun set. I was able to find most of the sunset objects quickly. M78 was not easy, but I finally spotted it as the sky grew darker. M74 turned out to be too hard to find. I had a pointer star to give me reference, but it was almost lost in the warm red of the fading sunset and I could see nothing above it at all – above in my eyepiece, which was closer yet to the horizon.

The night proceeded, pretty much according to plan. I was able to see all the other Messier objects, including the nasty hard ones in the early morning. Added to this, I saw several comets, several planets, and was able to stay warm all night. Compared with the night before, Saturday night was easy as far as the weather was concerned.

I felt like my preparation time for the marathon was just right. I was disappointed at missing M74, but in that I did not feel alone. Many astronomers better and more experienced than I am have had the same problem. I came in second for points for manual scopes in our club – I did not get as many of the extra credit comets and asteroids as Mike did. I had not planned that part of the marathon very well and only had large scale charts of the position of those objects.

Would I do this again? Sure! Getting ready for the Messier Marathon taught me a lot about the sky. It trained my eye to see faint fuzzies quickly. It helped me to organize my observing time. It helped me to grow in my appreciation of dark sky sites and as the months rolled around the sky, I learned even more about the progression of the sky through the year.

What’s next? I think I might be headed toward a binocular Messier Marathon in the future.

Observing Neptune and Uranus – July 2009

2009-07-04T14:12:00.001-05:00

I woke at 0430 in the early morning of Friday the 3rd of July and thought of a recent post on the Starynights Yahoo group on observing Neptune. I dug the page out of the Sky & Telescope website that shows where Uranus and Neptune are for 2009, and went out into the front driveway. Venus and Mars were down the street to the East and Jupiter was above my neighbor's house across the street (south). The lights of nearby San Antonio did not obscure the majority of the stars in Pegasus, but none of the stars in the circlet of the fish between the square and Jupiter were visible by naked eye.

I pulled my XT10 out of the back of my camper shell covered pick-up and set it up with a 10x50 finder scope. Before long I had identified Neptune just to the north of Jupiter as a blueish dot in my 10mm Radian eyepiece (120X).

I then set about finding the circlet in my finder scope. Before long I had it identified and two of the stars led me to the pale green disc of Uranus.

It was the second time I have seen Uranus and my first sighting of Neptune. I put the scope back in its case and dropped back into bed at about 0545. Great morning! It will be fun to show these off at star parties as they get closer to evening events as the summer moves into the fall.

White Light Solar Filter

2009-07-03T19:55:00.003-05:00

I mentioned to the San Antonio Astronomical Association that if anyone had any of the filter film, I would like to make a solar filter. This last week, my friend Keith Little gave me a gift. He is making several solar filters and had purchased a sheet of Baader filter film. He was able to cut me a 4 inch diameter disc.

I obtained a couple sheets of foam core board for this project. I cut two pieces about 3 inches bigger in diameter than my scope’s opening, and then a couple pieces that would make up a stack of rim pieces. I cut an opening 3-1/2 inches in diameter and situated as close to my secondary mirror as I could make it without the secondary blocking the circle cut.

I taped the piece of Baader film to one of the large discs across the cut-out. Then I taped the second disk to the first and the rim pieces to these two pieces.

I used a piece of malleable wire to create a safety device to assure me that the filter cover cannot blow off my scope while I am looking at the sun.

All together this project took about 2 hours and it works great. If we ever start having sun spots again, I’ll be able to look at them now!

A Simple Dobsonian Telescope

2009-07-02T09:54:00.001-05:00

In the late months of 2008, I bought the telescope I should have bought first. I bought it for the right reason. I wanted to know about the sky.

All my telescopes have names. Maybe it comes from the habit of all my sailboats having names, but it was influenced by David Levy’s writing about his scopes having names. That first Meade SCT is Virginia. She is a refined package and was purchased when my family lived in that state. The Celestron 4se is “GT” which is short for GoTo and seems like the sort of name that a computer with a telescope strapped onto its frame should have. The Orion XT10, a ten inch commercial version of John Dobson’s volkscope, is Texas. It is big and it was bought in San Antonio.

As the summer and fall of 2008 marched along, I learned about the deep sky from little GT. I reacquainted myself with celestial mechanics when I refurbished Virginia. With Texas, I fell headfirst into the inky black sky of southwest Texas. During the winter months of 2009, I began to prepare for the Messier Marathon to be held in the last weekend of March. Texas was just what I needed for that task.

A Dobsonian scope is a very simple version of a Newtonian reflecting telescope. It is characterized by a large primary mirror near the ground and an angled secondary near the top. The mounting system is super simple. There is a central pivot in the base which allows the scope to be rotated in azimuth and there are large bearings on each side of the optical tube assembly which allow the scope to be moved in altitude.

I started with a simple, unmagnified finder, the Telrad. That meant that I needed to learn where something was in the sky and point the scope by hand at that area. For almost all the objects I was interested in observing, I could not see the object with my unaided eyes. That meant that I needed to learn about the constellations. Then I needed to find some relationship between the stars that I could see and the object I could not see.

I use two major techniques for finding objects in the sky with a Telrad.

- The first is to use the concentric circles in the Telrad. They have diameters of 1, 2, and 4 degrees. If an object is near an easily observed star, perhaps within a degree or two, I can place the correct Telrad circle on the star and have the central circle oriented toward another star. Then looking through a low power eyepiece (I use 32 mm for 38X magnification) I find the object of interest.

- The second is to use two stars and to imagine the object of interest as part of a triangle of a certain shape (right, isosceles, equilateral) or if the object is directly between two stars, I estimate the position as half-way, 1/3, ¼ etc of the way between the stars. An example of this last technique is in finding the ring nebula, M57, between two stars in Lyra. A second example is M13 in Hercules.

Those techniques are sufficient for double stars and Messier objects. For the Hershell list that I have just begun working on, I have added a finder scope to refine the area of interest after initial pointing with the Telrad. The spotter allows some initial star-hopping across dim stars.

The medium aperture “dob” is a great scope for many purposes. There is no scope which can so quickly teach an observer about the sky – to learn where objects are and how they are related to the stars around them. A dob with a primary mirror between 8 and 12 inches in diameter is reasonably easy to transport, not prone to going out of adjustment, and requires no on-site calibration or alignment. (When I pull my truck up at a public star party, it takes me about 2 minutes to pull the base out and place it on the ground and then the scope goes right on the base. I have a stool which is good for sitting on for prolonged careful observing or for kids to kneel on if they are not tall enough to see in the eyepiece.) I am often showing folks the wonders of the sky well before some of my friends are able to see stars to begin their alignment.

A dob, especially at a power between 40X and 50X. is intuitive for beginners or children to use. When they point it somewhere, that’s what they look at. No mystery, no gears, no computers, no alignment. A dob teaches folks that the stars have a constant and incessant travel from east to west. A dob is perfect for hunting for pretty objects, scanning for comets, finding Messier objects, and with investment in a good 8-10mm eyepiece, for looking at planets and the moon. It is short enough for many children to use on their own. It is easy to transport in the back seat of almost any car. It’s not perfect, but it is pretty close.

I have begun to recommend a scope like this as the best family telescope. It is heads above the scope I bought for my family in the 1980s and a lot cheaper. I will probably begin to look for a dob with a larger mirror, that’s called aperture fever. But it will take some looking to find a scope that I like better than Texas.

Setting Circle Telescopes

2009-07-01T08:19:00.003-05:00

The first telescope I bought, 25 years ago, was a setting circle telescope. It was a Meade 8” LX and was built about 1983. This scope folded the light in mirrors twice and then through a diagonal. The light entered the front of the telescope through a plate of glass, bounced off a curved primary mirror at the back end of the scope, which focused the light on a curved secondary mirror in the center of the glass plate. After reflecting off the secondary mirror, the light passed through a central hole in the primary mirror, reflected off a diagonal and then into an eyepiece.

This type of design is known as an SCT, short for Schmidt Cassegrain Telescope. Another design, the Maksutov Cassegrain has a more radically ground corrector on which the secondary mirror is mounted. The Celestron NexStar 4se scope that I have written about in another blog is a Maksutov scope.

What I really want to get around to talking about here is the mounting that my scope had, because that has something to do with learning about the sky. But first I should mention a couple other mountings that scopes I had played with as a young teen were fitted with.

The table-top refractor my parents brought home had a swivel and a fork. This type of scope is still sold in grocery stores just before Christmas. Such scopes are bought by the thousands and most of them are carefully packed in the back of a kid’s closet until they move away for college. They are cheap. They are hard or impossible to use for any real astronomy purpose. They are the equivalent of the $20 guitars which are sold in the grocery stores next to the telescopes. They are guaranteed to frustrate the kids who receive them. But I digress… The swivel and fork mounting is formally called an altitude/azimuth or alt/az mounting. Such a mounting allows the telescope to be swung in a circular direction to every part of the horizon (azimuth) and to be raised to some portion of the sky (altitude).

The second scope I got to play with had a “german-equitorial” mounting. This was a much more complex mounting, and I had some idea of how to use it back when I was in high school. (The problem with that scope was not so much the mounting as the optics.) To set up an equatorial mounted scope, the direction north needs to be known in azimuth, as well as the altitude of the north celestial pole. Just like the alt/az mounting, which rotates in two planes and can point in any direction, the equatorial mounting can move in two planes and point in any direction. The difference between the two mounting systems is that in an alt/az mount, the pivot rotates around a vertical pole, as though it came from the center of the earth and aimed toward the highest point overhead (the zenith). An equatorial mount has that pivot rotating around the line that connects the north celestial pole and the south celestial pole – and that is a line that is very close to the line formed when I point a laser pointer at the north star. Rotating around that line, the 360 degrees of rotation are measured NOT in degrees, but in hours!

I know. Those astronomers are crazy. But there is a method in their madness. Describing the circle in 24 hours makes sense, because the sky actually moves around that circle in … 24 hours. We call it a day. Before you get all excited, let me deflate your expectations some. The 24 hours in the sky have almost nothing to do with the time on your watch either where you are or at Greenwich or anywhere. An hour and minute of Right Ascension (RA) simply marks out a north/south line which starts at the north celestial pole and ends at the south celestial pole. All the stars on a single RA line stay there, month after month and year after year, for all practical purposes. It is like knowing the longitude of a city on the earth.

Since RA is like longitude, there has to be something like latitude to give an address for a star. That second number is declination (dec) and it is measured in degrees north and south of the “celestial equator” which is the circle equidistant from the two celestial poles.

So do I have your head spinning yet? It was a big concept for a 16 year old kid to figure out before the days of the internet. Back then we had encyclopedias for that purpose, and I am sure that I spent time with the Encyclopedia Britannica and a lot of pacing to figure this all out.

Well, it was one thing to see how it works, and another to get it to work. Like I mentioned, the first thing one needs to do is to aim the pivot axis toward the north star. (Actually a little off from the north star, but for a 16 year old the north star was pretty close.) The required pointing north and adjusting a joint to the latitude of Cincinnati, Ohio – about 39 degrees. That accomplished, a kind of magic could now operate. When I pointed the scope at a star, and the star began to move west out of the field of view, all I needed to do was to very slowly turn a gear that drove the RA adjustment in order to follow the star.

I saved that for the last – maybe to surprise some of you. The only reason to have an equatorial mounting is that wonderful advantage. If a scope has an alt/az mounting, the observer needs to constantly adjust both the altitude and the azimuth as the object moves through the heavens (well… as the earth rotates). If you have ever been to a star party and the scope host needed to readjust the scope to point at an object you experienced this. But with an equatorial mount, only one axis, RA needs to be adjusted. Dec for the star stays the same all night, all month, and all year.

Fast forward to my first purchased scope, the pretty Meade 8 inch SCT. It had an equatorial mounting and a super cool new feature. The RA adjustment had a clock driven motor that kept an object in the center of the field. Now that was the height of cool! It required that I set up the scope near an electric outlet or next to my car, but I was free from having to constantly correct the RA adjustment. Maybe I would even be able to take a photograph as the scope body stayed locked to a particular part of the sky.

In the end, that scope was both a great piece of optics, with lots of light gathering power (4 times as much as my 4” computerized scope) but it also taught me the celestial mechanics of how the stars move in the sky and why.

When I got interested in astronomy in the summer of 2008, I took that Meade telescope out of the closet, had a little work done on the secondary mirror (it had begun to lose its coating) and still use the scope occasionally. I was able to find dozens of Messier objects in it once the computerized scope showed me what I was looking for. I will probably have it forever. It is practical and it has sentimental value.

But my SCT is not my favorite telescope and it is not what I would recommend that a new astronomer buy. That story will need to wait for another blog entry.

Lunar X Sidewalk Astronomy

2009-06-29T20:54:00.003-05:00

This evening, I knew that my home astronomy club, the San Antonio Astronomical Association, was going to set up scopes at a bookstore to see the Lunar X. Just for something different, I decided to set my scope up on my driveway and see if I could attract some of my neighbors to see this sight.

The Lunar X is a pattern formed on the moon near the first quarter when sunlight just touches the top of several craters at the terminator. It is fun to find, because it is visible in the evening for only a few hours every other month.

In the image to the left, south is up and west is left. The lunar X is near the bottom of the photo and the V is near the top.

On this night, I knew that the right time to observe was from 515 PM to 830 PM local time in San Antonio. The sun did not set until the end of the window that was open for observation, so the operation in my front yard was more shade tree astronomy than a star party.

I was able to persuade 18 folks to come over and take a look through my scope in the three hours I was set up. I met several neighbors I had never had the opportunity of meeting. So the sidewalk astronomy was good for neighborhood friendliness too.

(As an aside, other members of the club, set up at the bookstore had over 300 visitors! They worked hard in the 104 degree heat. I napped and had relaxing conversations with my neighbors as they occasionally came by. Each place had its pluses and minuses.)

To prepare for the evening, I set up a table with a large scale map of the lunar surface and printed a photograph of the Lunar X. I used my 10mm Radian eyepiece for a 120X view of the moon.

I quickly discovered that the easy way to get people to look at the right place was to describe three nearby craters as "the two eyes and the open round mouth below them". Once the visitor had that in sight, looking just right of the rightmost eye located the X. As time went on, I also could see the Lunar V just above the X in my dobsonian scope.

As an experiment, I took several photographs through the eyepiece with my little Stylus camera. After cropping the picture, I have posted that cropped version with this entry. It is pleasantly blue colored, just like the image appeared in the late afternoon blue sky. I tweaked the contrast about 10 percent before uploading.

I also logged my sidewalk adventure in the night sky network to give my home club credit for the visitors I reached. Big Fun. Several of the neighbors told me to give them a call the next time I was out looking at objects in the sky. I think I will.

Garner State Park Star Party

2009-06-29T13:21:00.001-05:00

Diane and I had a great time at Garner this weekend. Diane was especially popular with the crowds pointing out two different double stars. I think she got hoarse telling folks about the telescopic doubles. She was impressed at the reception she got from women who lined up to see the sky. Mothers with kids in their arms were especially appreciative of our club's efforts.

I had fun showing folks the moon in my binocular chair. I discovered that I could help them see the moon by having them sit down with their head back on the back of the chair and then bring the binocular down to their face so the white spots of light lined up with their eyes fairly well. This was the first time that I had successfully shown folks something with the chair.

The two of us closed up shop for the crowd about 1130 PM and I spent a while with Diane having her find several Messier objects. After the moon went down at midnight, I began to run the Astronomical League Deep Sky Binocular list. Since each entry requires a description, I logged descriptions of the objects with my voice recorder. After I got home, I listened to the recording and wrote up the entries.

For the binocular list, I logged 34 objects and still have 26 to go. All but one (which I inadvertently skipped) will need to wait for the fall, after the winter constellations rise.

I decided at 4 AM to make a start of the Hershel 400 list. I am using O'Meara's book, and I did a "single night" of observing - with five objects found. O'Meara's book is written up with about 5 nights of observing per month. The objects were dim, but not impossible. Unlike Messier objects, careful star hopping is required to find these little
smudges. Well that's one percent of the list, with only 395 more objects left to go. Sigh...

I think that given a good night, it will probably be possible to run a couple month's of objects in a long night of observing. Maybe that will be my project for our next trip to Garner.

Computerized Telescope

2009-06-27T11:38:00.003-05:00

I have a love/hate relationship with computerized telescopes. For me, a computerized NexStar 4se Celestron was the best and the worst thing that happened when I got interested in telescopes again. To explain that, it might be good for the reader to know some of my history with astronomy.

I have had an interest in telescopes for a long time. As a youngster, I had a 2” refractor on a table-top mount. My dad got interested in astronomy for a time and he bought a 4 inch Newtonian reflector which we never really figured out how to use. (We probably had no idea how to collimate it.) I don’t remember seeing anything except the moon and Jupiter with those scopes.

Skip forward 15 years, and I was a father with young school children of my own. I decided that I really should show the sky to my kids. I bought an 8” Meade SCT scope (don’t worry about what that is for now – I’ll cover it in another chapter/blog). It was a great scope, but without any help to learn how to use it, I became frustrated trying to find anything except Halley’s Comet. I remember a particularly painful night twenty years ago. After laboriously orienting the scope, I finally found exactly one globular cluster. I still remember thinking that using this scope was too hard to be practical. If I did not have the patience to spend hours outside on a cold night to see one object, how could I expect them to? (It would have been very useful for me to have joined an astronomy club at that time – clubs are great at helping folks that are clueless to become experts. And my problem was that I was truly clueless.)

Skip forward 25 years, and my youngest child was 19 on our last family vacation before he moved away to school and engagement and thinking of his own family. This was the summer of 2008, and we chose to do some hiking and relaxing at the Ft Davis State Park in the Big Bend portion of Texas. One of the bulletin board announcements in the lodge said that there would be a public star party at the McDonald Observatory on Friday evening – the next night. We went, saw Saturn in Leo, the ring nebula in Lyre, a couple globular clusters, the double double of epsilon Lyre, and generally had a blast.

I came home and decided that I had to get a telescope and had to find some places to see the dark skies of Texas. (Note, I was still pretty much clueless.)

I looked on the internet to try to get ideas and I went to a local telescope shop. I bought a used Celestron NexStar 4 which was about 5 years old. It had a thirty day “no questions asked” warranty from the shop. The scope had no tripod. I took it out into the countryside, about 20 minutes outside San Antonio. I had it sitting on a couple plastic bins. It was not a sturdy mount, but I was fascinated at the way it could figure out where objects were in the sky after I showed it where three stars were. But I knew I needed to get a tripod and some other things if I was going to be able to do much with it. The cost of a brand new NexStar was only $150 more than this used one, and it came with a tripod. So I returned the used scope and bought a new Celestron 4.5 inch NexStar.

The new version of the software was much better at finding itself in the sky. All I needed to do was to point it at three bright objects. I did not even need to know which ones they were. Once that process was complete – taking about 10 minutes or so, I was delighted to find out that the scope would point quickly at many objects that I could not see at all. Finally, I was able to access the many beauties in the night sky!

I remember one great evening of viewing in August. I was thrilled to see a dozen Messier objects in an hour and a half of observing. Really thrilled. I mean, completely overwhelmed and elated and amazed. This was FUN.

I could see Saturn and Jupiter and Messier objects and I began to see how all this might be more than a month’s diversion. It might take me a year or more to see everything in the sky. (Still clueless.)

There was a book written about using the Celestron NexStar telescopes. I devoured it. There was a website where people shared hints about the scopes and what they were doing with it. I discovered that there was a list of 50 objects which were good targets for the scope. Some of them were only visible from the southern hemisphere, but more than 40 of them could be seen from San Antonio, and there was an award for logging 40 of the objects. I set about the process of logging 40 and was able to complete the list by observing summer objects in the evening and as fall approached, to get up before dawn to see many more of the objects that were normally visible on winter evenings.

It was about this time that I found the local San Antonio Astronomical Association and joined its ranks. It had a Yahoo group, and I was able to share my successes and learn from sage comments by others. I could ask questions that had been bothering me for 30 years. I began to grow quickly in my understanding and appreciation of the sky.

That is the love part of my story. But there was a dark side of this relationship with the computer-aided scope. Somewhere along the way, I became aware that I had no real idea where the scope was pointing when it found all these pretty objects in the night sky. I strapped a laser to the scope so I could see where the scope was pointing. I tried to use the red dot finder to see where these objects were, but I realized that the red dot or the laser were pointing toward mostly empty and invisible things in the sky.

I felt a little like I was in a zoo, surrounded by pretty butterflies. I had a guide book that had pretty pictures of butterflies that were kept in the zoo. But I had no idea where all those pretty butterflies were hiding – since I could not see any of them when I looked around me.

The computerized scope had gifted me with the knowledge that there really were a great number of objects to be seen, and it had shown me what a galaxy and a globular cluster and an open cluster looked like. But I was still painfully clueless. I needed to know more about the sky.

Finding North in a Telescope

2009-06-24T15:43:00.001-05:00

One of the Astronomical League observing programs I am working on is the double star club. It is not very difficult to find most of the stars, especially in a dark sky. And once the star is found, 120X is usually plenty to resolve the pair of stars. But the instructions for the observing program say that each double star needs to be sketched. The two points of light with relative distance and the celestial direction are the required elements for each drawing.

When I started thinking about how to find the celestial direction, I went through a long process of thinking about where the north south lines would be in the part of the sky I was looking at. These lines can be seen on planetarium programs if I set the program to show them. Then I needed to be able to remember how my scope turns the light upside down and backwards.

It was not really complicated, but I wanted to make sure I was doing this right before finding a hundred stars and drawing them. So I took the chicken way out. I posted a note on my local astronomy club and on an observing yahoo group and asked if I was going about this right.

I got a great set of answers back. Boy, am I glad that I asked the question.

It turns out that for a non-tracking scope like my dob, finding the celestial direction is very simple. After centering a star at a reasonable magnification like I mentioned above, all I need to do is to wait a minute or two and watch the direction the star tries to head out of my eyepiece. That direction is west. Of course it is. No matter where in the sky I am looking, the celestial globe rotates directly west all the time! Then to find north, all I need to do is to rotate counter-clockwise 90 degrees for my reversing telescope optics and that is north.

Now, I understand it is a little more complicated for a tracking telescope like a clock driven or a computerized scope. Turning off tracking is not all that practical when the plan is to observe a couple dozen stars in a night. Who wants to reset the tracking all those times? So for a wedge mounted scope, a practical method mentioned in the answers I got was to rock the fork slightly northward while watching in the eyepiece. If the tube is moved slightly northward, the star in the eyepiece moves southward. OK, so a direction is found. If the scope has a diagonal eyepiece holder, the view through the scope is probably right-side up and backwards. So if north is known, then west is 90 degrees counterclockwise from north.

For a computer driven go-to scope with alt-azimuth mounting, good luck. I think I’d go back to my complex way of looking through the scope and knowing which way north is to be found in that part of the sky where the star of interest is found.

I guess that is another good reason why a new amateur astronomer like me should be glad to have a manual dob as my primary scope.

Binoculars

2009-06-23T22:20:00.003-05:00

In astronomy, it pays to go easy on equipment. Equipment makes it possible to see things that are impossible with the naked eyes, but it can also lead one away from the beauty of the sky. A good way to bridge toward fainter objects is to invest the time necessary to learn about the sky with a pair of binoculars.

I know the purists would like to say that the device I’m writing about is a binocular. Well, if it makes someone feel better, that is correct. It is just one thing, and it can be held with one hand. However, I’m not one to stand in the way of clear communication or to try to make someone feel insecure about their use of common language. I’ve always called ‘em binoculars, or a pair of binoculars. If you feel better about it that way, you have my official permission to keep calling them that too. (Yeah, I guess that kind of attitude is a little red neck of me – but you get what you get.)

What’s the big deal about binoculars? Why do they help a sky observer to see more? Well, it is a matter of physics. When I look up at the sky toward the Andromeda Galaxy from a dark sky site, what is entering my eye are photons that left that galaxy about 20 million years ago. Those photons cause chemical changes in my retina and my brain perceives it as light – a really dim light – that is spread out across an area larger than the size of the moon.

The cross section of the receiving area is the area of my cornea above my open iris in each eye. How big is that area? You may remember a little math from high school that says that the area of a circle is pi*r^2, or in words “pi r squared.” Pi is a constant that is about equal to 3.14. The radius of a pupil when it is dilated may be about 3mm. So the area of the pupil is 3.14*3*3 or about 28 square millimeters.
For two eyes, the area is about 56 square millimeters.

When I pick up a pair of astronomical binoculars, like the Orion Scenix 10x50 binoculars I bought on line for $100, those numbers mean that the binoculars magnify the image by 10 times and the lenses in the front are 50 mm across (almost two inches for the metrically challenged.) If the diameter is 50 mm, then the radius is 25mm and the area of the lens is 3.14*25*25, which is about 1963 square millimeters or 3925 mm^2 for the pair of lenses. That is about 70 times the area of my pupils.

The effect of this is to funnel 70 times as much light through my pupils from an area of the sky that has been magnified ten times. And the main effect of that is not so much seeing things bigger, as seeing more things! Stars that were not visible to my eyes are now easy to see. If the Pleiades are up, I can see six stars in the open cluster in good sky conditions. With a pair of binoculars, I can see more than fifty.

There only two real problems with binoculars for looking at sky objects.

First, some objects are not large enough to make out enough detail to make them interesting. That is especially true for objects in our solar system. Ten times magnification is not thrilling for the moon, Jupiter, or Saturn. It is about what Galileo had in 1609, and with it I can see the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, and craters on the Moon. This lack of magnification is not as much of a problem for many sky objects. In fact, many deep sky objects are beautiful at low magnification if you can get enough light into your eye to enjoy them. And that is what binoculars excel at doing.

The second problem is a real bother. Binoculars are really hard to hold still. If I try to see the moons of Jupiter with a pair of hand-held binoculars, all I see is a bright dot swimming in front of my eyes. To get the most out of all that optical power, I need to find a way to hold the binoculars still.

I’ve tried holding binoculars against a tree, against the back of a chair, and I’ve tried to hold my breath to hold them still. None of this works very well. When I was out at the Texas Star Party in April 2009, I came across a device for holding binoculars called the Couch Potato Telescope. Designed by SIM PICHELOUP, this is a rotating platform that holds a beach chair and an adjustable frame to which the binoculars clamp. While I was out at the TSP, I bought a kit from Sim and built it when I got back to San Antonio. It makes binocular observing a dream! (If you want your own Couch Potato Telescope, Google the term and write to Sim.)

There are a number of special observing lists devoted to binocular observing. They are all worth spending the time to find the objects on that list. So Far, I have gotten the TSP binocular list done, and the Binocular Messier list of the Astronomical League. I am hoping to do the AL Deep Space Binocular list this summer and fall.

Maybe I will invest in a larger pair of binoculars for the Messier Marathon this coming spring. A friend of mine was able to see over a hundred of the Messier objects with a pair of 80 mm binoculars across a wonderful night of observing. Of course those 80 mm lenses are bigger than mine and collect a lot more light. 3.14*40*40*2 is 10 square centimeters or two and a half times more light than my binoculars gather. Sounds like a nice Christmas present, Diane.

Star Party at the Hog Plum Ranch

2009-06-22T20:15:00.005-05:00

I've been able to participate in a number of public star parties sponsored by the San Antonio Astronomical Association this summer. This is a simple way to spread the love of the skies with the next generation. The outreach events I have been in on have included schools, parks, and this last Saturday evening a summer family outing sponsored by a couple SW San Antonio school districts.

For a change, this star party was held at a great dark sky site, far from street lights. The Hog Plum Ranch is outside of Karnes City, TX. It was very nice to be able to see a range of Messier objects as well as the standard views of Saturn, double stars. A walk through the constellations was easier with so many stars to see.

Some of our club members had not seen omega Centauri before, and it was nice to show it on the southern horizon, as well as the ring nebula of Lyra and the great globulars in Scorpius.

For the main part of the star party, it works best to have each scope focused on one object, with no two scopes showing the same object. That keeps the kids from getting bored as they go from scope to scope. But after the crowds began to thin (there were 83 visitors at this star party and 8 telescopes) then it became possible to do a little more wandering around the sky.

After the visitors left, the astronomers began to thin out too. But I had the opportunity to spend the night at a dark sky site for my own observing program. Whoo Boy! There were others who thought of staying, but I ended up being the only observer left at midnight. It was me and the dog and a couple kittens.

There were bands of clouds that rolled in through the night, and I took advantage of those times to get an hour's worth of sleep. But there was enough time with clear skies to draw 37 double stars for the AL double star list. That pretty much catches me up until late summer or early fall, when I can get in the rest of that list.

I left at about 450 AM and drove an hour home to drop into bed for a good Father's Day morning sleep. My wife was pleasantly surprised that I was not trying to get her up before breakfast. So it was a good time for all.

Thanks to Matt R. for the photos!

Summer Solstice Telescope Project

2009-06-22T09:38:00.006-05:00

I have spent some time over the last week trying to figure out how to find some of the magic plastic laminates that make dobs azimuth bearing work better.

I have a 10 inch Orion XT10.

I looked around for the black magic laminate called ebony star - the "-50" version - but found no laminate at all in the local HD and Lowes.

When I was nosing around in the new Lowes out on I-10 at 1604 this morning, I was able to find the next best thing, a sheet of FRP - fiber reinforced plastic. I bought a 4x8 sheet for $32. (Ebony star when it used to be available cost upwards of $80 for a sheet.)

I also picked up a can of contact cement and a few chip brushes.

The first thing I did was to replace the LP record bearing in my "Helotescope". The FRP with stick on furniture glides worked so much better than the record!

Next project was a little bigger. I decided to apply a ring of the FRP to the underside of the round board on my 10 incher's bearing.

I took the central bolt off and cleaned up the under-surface of the board and the teflon like bearings. I used the bottom board to trace a circle on the FRP and then cut the circle out with a jigsaw.

The bottom of the board has several bolt like hardware pieces that I may want to take out someday, so I cut the center of the circle out with the jig saw. In addition, they stick out of the bottom of that board by a fraction of an inch and covering them would be difficult.

Afterward, I figured out that I could have cut the outside and then the inside circles with my router and made an even neater job of it. All that would have required was building a little circle cutting jig - plans available on the internet. Well, I used the jig saw and especially the inside edge is not very pretty.

I applied contact cement to both the circle I had cut and the baseboard where the two pieces needed to be joined. I allowed the glue to dry for 5 minutes in our 100 degree heat and glued them together. Maybe next time I will put two layers of glue on the pieces. That works a little better. After the glue had set well, I used my router to give a smoother outside surface to the white ring.

The results are promising. I set up the scope this evening in my back yard and Saturn was much easier to follow at high power by hand. This is a technique I will probably use when I build my next scope.

Third Quarter Starlight

2009-03-16T08:37:00.002-05:00

Last night was an opportunity to enjoy a perfectly clear evening without moon or clouds. It was my last real practice before Messier Marathon weekend for those sunset objects. Diane and I took off for Hill Country State Natural Area, near Bandera Texas.

Before leaving for the observing session, my wife and I had watched the Space Shuttle blast-off at about 6:40 local time. A fellow amateur, Brian, from the San Antonio Astronomical Association, had sent out an email reminding us that we would probably be able to see the Shuttle at the end of its first orbit from the San Antonio area. (Brian is el presidente of the club.)

At sunset, I was setting up the scope at Hill Country. I had my satellite spotter (Diane) with me and she had first view of the Shuttle at about 815 almost due north about 30 degrees high. 45 minutes later, another bright satellite passed just below Orion's belt, just above M42, also traveling SW to NE. Space Station? We saw a dozen satellites, and several shooting stars. One dim satellite passed reasonably slowly (high altitude I'd guess) through Andromeda galaxy about 845 when I was finally able to see M32 and M110.

I got a good practice on M74 and M77 two weeks before the marathon. M74 sure is hard, though I believe I was able to see it with averted vision.

With the rain of the end of last week, the ground was wet and the dew was early and heavy. I ended up having to cover my Telrad and eyepiece with a piece of cloth between observations to keep them warm enough to not fog. By 945 when I was done for the night, the outside of the tube was covered heavily with dew.

The open clusters of Gemini and Auriga were bright and easy with binoculars with the limiting magnitude of 6 - normal from Hill Country.

I had to pull the plug at about 9:45 because of work the next day. The deer on the way home were numerous and we even saw deer along Bandera Highway. I had previously seen a lot of deer on Park Road, but not on Bandera. Total deer seen on the way home... about 18. None actually ran onto the road in front of me, though a couple thought about it as they listened to my sudden braking.

Selling Short our Children's Future Dark Sky

2009-03-09T17:38:00.011-05:00

I remember looking up at the sky from my suburban home and seeing the Milky Way shining like a silvery belt across the moonless night. I remember being spellbound by the thousands of stars and asking my father how many there were. After years passed, I remember the pride I had two years ago when I moved into Helotes, Texas and found out that the City Council had passed a plan to bring the dark sky back to my neighborhood.

Unfortunately, I am now deeply disappointment in the city where I live. This pain began when I found out that the City Council had quietly passed a new lighting ordinance last month which guts the 2006 measure and eliminates the hope that we will again be able to see the Milky Way from our Helotes back yards.

The July 2006 lighting ordinance had programmed a generous schedule during which businesses and home owners had years to replace their outdoor lights so that glare would not be directed upward into the sky (and into each other's back yards). The city had grandfathered existing lights, only requiring that they be replaced with lights that comply with the ordinance by 2012 - six years from date of enactment.

As of 2009, the only lights affected had been fixtures on new commercial construction. Only those who had installed new outdoor lights since 2006 were required to meet the standards - essentially a standard which said that the light would not have a direct beam of light shining uselessly into the sky. Unfortunately, there have been a number of new construction projects erected along Bandera highway the last two years which did not meet the standard. But, instead of enforcing the standard, our Council chose to replace the ordinance with one where ALL existing lights are grandfathered FOREVER.

The new ordinance does not simply "clarify and simplify outdoor lighting requirements" as stated in the draft minutes of the last meeting of the City Council. The new regulation abandons all effort to achieve dark skies in Helotes. The new ordinance does NOT "continue dark sky compliance" as reflected in the minutes. It eviscerates the ordinance in a way that dark sky compliance can never be achieved.

Helotes occupies important space between the light sensitive neighborhoods surrounding Camp Bullis and the Government Canyon State Natural Area. The protected habitat of these areas is adversely affected by urban light pollution. Why would City Council choose to take steps backwards away from light control at the very time that surrounding areas are trying to discourage light pollution? This makes no sense.

2009 is the International Year of Astronomy, for heaven's sake! I am a member of the San Antonio Astronomical Association, the Astronomical League, and the International Dark Sky Association. One of the reasons I live in Helotes has been our stance to protect the night sky. I have been proud to hold up Helotes as a model city attempting to bring its lights into compliance with the goal of every lighting fixture being a full cutoff light. However, I now find that all mention of private homes has been eliminated from the new lighting ordinance. No longer are Helotes residents encouraged by the ordinance to have full cut-off lighting. I am outraged at this abandoning of example and responsibility.

I feel deeply wounded and ill at what our Helotes leadership has decided to throw away. From correspondence with Benjamin Jones, the young man who worked so hard for years to have the 2006 lighting ordinance passed, I know that he is sick at heart to hear what the Council did when they abandoned our future.

I have published this critique in my Astronomy Blog, highlighting the irresponsible action taken by our city of Helotes during this Year of Astronomy. Instead of increasing protection of our dark sky, we now embrace fresh light pollution. I intend to bring the city's action to regional and national attention. I will be transmitting this critique to National Geographic magazine which had a recent cover story on Dark Skies. I will be contacting the Discovery Channel to make them aware of the new stance of the Helotes City Council on Dark Skies. I will let the International Dark Sky Association know of the new Lighting Ordinance and how the City Council believes this new ordinance "continues dark sky compliance." I will contact the Sierra Club and the Nature Conservancy regarding Helotes' stance and the effect on threatened bird species. I expect that the San Antonio print and television news groups will continue their interest in Helotes dark skies.

I grew up believing that "The truth will set us free." I also grew up knowing that good never came from pretending. This action by the City Council will see the light of day.

What can be done? I encourage the City Council of Helotes, Texas, to reinstate the July 2006 lighting ordinance and begin to educate builders in our city how they can comply with that ordinance. I encourage the city leadership to help people understand how they can improve our sky and why that matters.

The way forward is not to abandon good effort to make our sky dark once again - it is to make the requirements of the ordinance easily understood. Train us. Don't abandon the cause as hopeless. Help us all achieve the goal! Don't tell us that our only path is the path of failure.

I dream that one day our children will once again look up at the Helotes sky in awe. The Milky Way will be clearly visible. The children will be looking at thousands of stars instead of a couple dozen when they ask their parents how many stars there are out there.

School Star Party

2009-03-01T16:27:00.002-06:00

When I pulled up outside the elementary school on the west side of San Antonio, there were large groups of kids milling around with "Young Astronaut" printed on their school tee shirts. It looked like a rainbow because each school had their own individual uniform, and there must have been a couple dozen schools represented.

I found that my friends in the San Antonio Astronomical Association were set up behind the elementary school. We had six scopes between us and about 8 or 9 volunteers. I learned that the kids, who were going through a number of activities that evening would come out to our astronomy field in groups of about 100, and we would have about 7 groups. Each group would try to get through all six scopes in the fifteen minutes they had, before a whistle sounded and we got a new group.

I was there with the Helotescope, a home-made, wood-box scope that the reader may have read about in these pages. The 30x scope was pointed at Orion's great nebula - M42. I usually had 5-10 kids or parents lined up waiting to take a little look at this wonder all evening.

My jingle ran about like this, "What you are looking at is the Great Orion Nebula. If you see the three stars of Orion's belt, the telescope is looking at the tip of the sword that is hanging from the left side of his belt. When you look through the eyepiece, you will see a group of three stars - and here I held my hand up so that the palm was cupped toward the ground - in a shape about like my left hand. If you look really close at the star that would be here, at the base of my thumb on the left side, you will see that it is actually a group of four stars. They are in a cloudy bit of dust that makes them look misty. What you are seeing is an area where stars are being born. If you can see those four stars, it is a little like looking into a basket with four newborn little puppies in it."

I repeated my monologue about 4 times per group of students, and the students changed out four times an hour. I also told the kids and their teachers/parents that their club could build a telescope about like this little one.

About nine out of ten of the students saw what I was talking about and I frequently got "wow!" as the comment. A few kids struggled to see the image through the eyepiece. A few of the kids were much more interested in being outside in the dark than in seeing through the scope. They were kids, after all.

It gave me a little warm feeling in my heart to have been out there showing a lot of kids that had never before looked through a telescope what a star nursery looks like. Other members of the SAAA were pointing out open clusters, the crescent Moon, crescent Venus, and later on - Comet Lulin.

This is the sort of activity that I would have never figured out how to organize on my own. As it turns out, a couple of our members are wonderfully talented at getting into schools to show them the sky. It takes marketing, persistence, dedication, and organization. Certainly I would not be able to get out occasionally if Don And Keith were not working the issue all year long. This is one of the great parts of being a member of a local club.

While this sort of activity does little to increase my understanding of the sky, I think it is useful in the long run in molding young people who have known the importance of the sky since they were kids. I may need them to vote for a space telescope one day, or to get the parking lot lights turned off at the neighborhood McDonalds. Kids that know something about the sky are good kids.

Anyway, it made me feel a little better about life to know that I had done just a little to help some school children be exposed to the sky. After all, someone who calls themselves a "young astronaut" should have a memory of looking up and seeing the stars.

The Number of Stars

2009-02-24T08:23:00.002-06:00

It was a cold winter night with a dark sky and the milky way was clearly visible over our heads. I was in Boy Scouts and my father was helping to orient me to the night sky. I was working toward the Astronomy Merit Badge. Dad had Peterson's Field Guide open to a star chart. He had used some of my mom's red nail polish to paint the bulb of a flashlight so we could look at the chart without ruining our night vision.

As a good parent, my father was trying to point out constellations and the names of certain stars. Like children all over the world have asked for millennia, I just wanted to know how many stars there were. It is not for nothing that the Lord God told his people that their descendants would be more numerous than the stars in the sky. There were a lot of stars out there to see.

Skip forward about 40 years, and I am standing on the back deck of a friend that lives above a quiet valley near San Antonio. (If you are reading this years from now, it was a time before the national Dark Skies movement began, when streetlights and security lights still lit up the night skies and made stars disappear.) As I look up, all I can see from his porch are stars that are second magnitude or brighter. There are not many of them. Here and there in the sky, I can see a star. I can see about half the sky from where I am - what with a house and some trees nearby - but when I scan the sky, all I see is about 5 stars. The kids that come out to the back yard to look through my telescope are fascinated by the view of Jupiter, but it probably never occurs to them to ask how many stars there are... They can easily count to 5 if they have any interest to do so.

Astronomers break down the brightness of stars into "magnitudes". This has nothing to do with the actual brightness of the star, as it would be seen from a standard distance. It has everything to do with the brightness of the star as seen from earth. The magnitudes range from quite bright to very, very dim. It might seem strange, but the brightest stars have the smallest magnitude numbers. Think of first class, second class, third class, to get the idea of what first magnitude, second magnitude, and third magnitude stars mean. (There are even a few stars that are brighter than first magnitude and they have negative magnitude numbers less than one.)

As the sun is setting and the sky starts to get darker, the brightest stars are visible first. Sometimes a planet like Venus, Mercury, or Jupiter is visible first, because they are oten brighter than the brightest of stars. But then the stars start appearing. The first magnitude stars are the first to be seen, then second magnitude, and so forth. If the sky is very dark (far from city lights, and the moon is not out) then most people can see stars down to about magnitude six.

But with bright city lights, or nearby streetlights, the magnitude of visible stars is reduced. At my friend's house, even on the darkest night with no moon, his sky is limited to second magnitude stars.

I became interested in finding out how many stars can be seen at different magnitudes. It turns out that (like almost every question I ask) an answer can be found on the internet. The source I used for answering this question is from: http://www.stargazing.net/David/constel/howmanystars.html.

It turns out that in my friend's sky, when I could see second magnitude stars, there were about 93 stars that that can be seen world wide that are second magnitude or brighter. (Some of these are only visible from the southern hemisphere.) A persistent Boy Scout could memorize that number of stars. That is the reason that for the small slice of the sky I could see from my friend's back porch, all that I could see was a few.

My house is a little further out in the country. From my house, on a moonlit night, I can just barely see third magnitude stars. But that raises the number of visible stars to almost three hundred - three times as many as my friend can see.

When the moon is below the horizon or near new moon, I can see fourth magnitude stars. With the additional darkness I can now potentially see about 900 stars. (Remember that a portion of this number are never visible from Texas - they are too far south.)

If I drive fourty minutes from my home to the Hill Country State Natural Area, incredible stars are visible. From my house, I can never see the band of the Milky Way. But from Hill Country the Milky Way is quite brightly obvious. When I look at the little dipper, I see 9 or more stars. I am in true sixth magnitude dark skies. In this darkness, almost 9000 stars are visible. It is incredible to see how constellations which were too dim to see in town are now like signposts in the sky. I can follow the outlines of the stars and find many more dim objects than I could in brighter skies. It also means that with a telescope, I can see objects that wash out into bright background light in my back yard. In the constellation of Virgo, for instance, there are about a dozen Messier object galaxies that are pretty easy to see in dark skies but which are completely invisible to me in my own back yard.

As I look back across the years to that astronomy session with my dad, I know I must have been looking at a very dark sky with a brightly glowing Milky Way. That is the reason that I was overawed by the number of stars. Thousands upon thousands of them crowded my eyes. I only hope that we find some way to preserve what dark skies we presently have and find ways to bring dark skies back to our cities. Children deserve to be awed by the sky. We all deserve the right to know how small we are and how enormous the heavens are.

Magnitude Cumulative Number of stars
-1.50 to -0.51 2
-0.50 to +0.49 8
+0.50 to +1.49 22
+1.50 to +2.49 93
+2.50 to +3.49 283
+3.50 to +4.49 893
+4.50 to +5.49 2,822
+5.50 to +6.49 8,768

Learning the Deep Sky with a Messier Marathon

2009-02-22T17:14:00.005-06:00

I have been trying to see all the Messier Objects on and off for many years. I read about folks getting together for a Messier Marathon. But it was not until I joined the San Antonio Astronomical Association (SAAA) that I ran square into a group that said they were going to get together as a club on the Messier Marathon weekend for a night of observing.

A number of years ago, staying up all night to look at the stars was one of those things that was "way too hard". That was back when I slept better. These days, in my mid 50s, getting up a couple times a night is just normal. Last fall, with my love affair with the stars just starting, I tried mixing my nocturnal wandering with a star observing session in my back yard. I found two things that early fall morning. First, my neighbor across the back fences never turns his back porch light off. Second, the sky sports a different set of stars in the wee hours of the morning. Of course, I knew that fact with my head. But I had never experienced the fun of looking at the morning stars that would be evening stars many months hence.

One roadblock to the idea of an all night marathon was licked. I found that I could have fun looking at stars in the middle of the night and early in the morning.

But, could I really find all the Messier objects in a night? Last summer, I was thrilled when I was able to identify a dozen Messier objects in an evening of observing. I watched amazed as my new computerized "go to" scope slew its way from one object to another. After a while, the noise of the motors got old as I waited with less and less patience for the scope to move from this object to that one - sometimes turning in a maddeningly slow, nearly full circle just to go from one half of a constellation to the other half! When I converted to a setting circle scope and brought along a long printed page of settings for the evening's objects, I was able to speed it up just a little - but my maximum number of objects for a night was still under twenty.

I found that the secret to going from one object to another quickly was to a) know where the Messier object was, and b) use a Dobsonian reflector with a Telrad finder to point the scope at each part of the sky that contained a Messier object. It was late November when I got this together and began finding objects quickly with a new Orion XT10.

When I joined the SAAA at Thanksgiving, there was already talk about a Messier Marathon in March. I decided I would make a go of it and continued getting my skills and my mind ready for the event.

The first skill was to get good at star hopping from stars that I could see to a piece of sky where there was an object that I could not see directly with my eyes. A great practice object was M1, the Crab Nebula. Even with my urban backyard sky, I was able to find it quite easily. The Ring Nebula (M57) in Lyra was another good easy practice object.

But some of the Messier objects required seeing background stars that were dimmer than third magnitude. Fourth and even fifth magnitude stars are really helpful if a star hop is to be easy and fast. That means practice in an area with dark skies - where 5th magnitude stars are visible. It also meant finding observing times away from the bright moon - for the moon makes all those dim stars disappear even in the best dark sky location. The astronomy "Mecca" I found was Hill Country State Natural Area, ten miles outside Bandara, TX. It was only 40 minutes from my house, and the sky was very black except for a low dome of light in the east caused by San Antonio and maybe Bandera. In the little dipper, I could see stars down to 5.7 magnitude. That meant that the background sky was dark enough to see dim objects, like galaxies - and there sure are a lot of galaxies in the Messier list.

There are other great places within a reasonable drive from my house to see stars. Garner State park is 80 miles away. And if a long weekend presents itself, Big Bend or Ft Davis are only 6 hours away. I also received invitations to two private locations with very dark skies. That is one of the great benefits of meeting fellow amateur observers in a local club.

I have just gotten back from my third overnight during which I practiced the Messier Marathon. I did two practice runs near the new moon in January, and this latest one in February. For each one, I needed to spend the night out in the observing field. Making provisions to camp - or at least to take naps is important to me - I still can not contemplate staying up all night without sleep. I have used a camping hammock twice and last night I slept in the bed of my pick-up truck. Sleeping in the truck has the advantage that I am next to the scope and can get up for a half hour of observing and then jump right back into the warmth of my down sleeping bag.

For last night's session I went to a private field near Fredericksburg, TX. A couple of fellow observers were already set up for the evening when I arrived. This photo shows Yogi with three of his telescopes. As the sun set, we talked about what our goals for the evening's observing would be. (Yogi is the source of the photos in this blog post - thanks Yogi!) After talking for a bit and looking at a very pretty crescent Venus through the white refractor, I went back to my observing area and started finding the evening Messier objects as soon as the twilight let me begin.

I have learned a few lessons about running the Messier list over these practice sessions. First, it is important to have a specific plan for going from one object to another. Having specially constructed charts with Telrad circles already marked on them really helps. Fortunately, a great set of charts has already been created for the Messier Marathon and it can be downloaded directly from the Web.

What I am using is the Star Hopping Guide to the Messier Marathon by Rob Hawley. This can be found at http://www.robhawley.net/mm/. Rob has been producing a version of this file specific to that year's Messier Marathon for several years. As I have used that set of charts (actually last year's version) I have learned a few tricks for finding objects. I have added some lines for triangles that Rob did not put in his guide. I have added a couple eyepiece views for hard to find objects. In short, I have personalized the guide.

However, as I have practiced the marathon my skills have increased. I still remember the thrill of getting all the way through the Virgo cluster of galaxies with firm identification of all the Messier objects. I have learned how to nap for a couple hours and then get up and do an hour's worth of observing a number of times during the night. I have learned to log my findings on a digital voice recorder instead of paper. And mostly I have learned where in the sky all those 110 objects are.

In last night's practice run, I saw 103 objects. That was all the objects that I could see until sunrise interrupted my session. Of the six objects in the Messier list that I still needed for an Astronomical League pin before the session, I was able to log five. That means that I have now seen 109 of the 110 Messier Objects. Whee! In another month, the sun will allow me more of those early morning objects (though it may keep me from seeing a couple of the evening ones that are easy now...) All the SAAA needs to do now is to lock in crystal clear weather for the marathon.

Astronomical League Observing Clubs

2009-02-15T18:18:00.003-06:00

One useful tool I have found this year for expanding my interest in the sky is the collection of "Observing Clubs" sponsored by the Astronomical League (AL). During the last year I became a member at large of the AL after looking through their website and seeing the wide range of activities they sponsor.

Just as a bit of history, the AL is a national organization of local astronomy clubs, associations, and organizations. The league has been around since dirt was young and is a known voice in promoting amateur astronomy and especially amateur observing. The observing clubs, and there are a couple dozen of them, are proposed by local groups and often administered by the local astronomy organizations. The observing clubs all have the general framework of a set of requirements that need to be met to be recognized as having met those requirements. For an old boy scout like me, it seems a lot like the merit badge requirements of the Boy Scouts of America.

This means that an individual who is a member of the AL can set out to show that they have accomplished the requirements and then be awarded a certificate or pin to show they have done so. That is a refreshingly simple idea in a world which is dominated by achievements that require political machinery, gobs of money, or overwhelming popularity. It is a simple idea - no competition, no election, no investment of money - just set out to fulfil the requirements and the award will be mine.

Another aspect of the observing clubs that reminds me of the Boy Scouts is that the different clubs tend to draw me into astronomy on a wider scale than I might be interested in on my own. There are clubs that encourage observation of deep sky objects, planets, double stars, variable stars, and even naked eye observing. There are clubs that focus on use of binoculars, quite a number that require telescopes and dark skies, and there are those that require astrophotography. The chasing of comets, asteroids, and meteors all have their separate clubs. There is even a club - the master observer - that honors amateurs that have earned awards in a number of clubs, including some of the most difficult.

It has been said that there are many observing lists on the internet for the interested amateur to pursue. However, the observing clubs of the AL are a diverse group of clubs at a moderately difficult level. They have the advantage of helping a new observer like me to set some goals with the reasonable chance of achieving those goals.

Over the last 8 months I set out to see the Messier Objects. So far I have seen all but 6 of them. I am looking forward to sending in my logs and get recognition for having done so. Along the way I observed 60 of the Messier objects through my binoculars. That is another club. I am working on the Urban list which is designed for the observer who has less than optimal skies available. I have begun to look at two of the advanced observing lists - the Caldwell and Hershell lists. There are open cluster lists and double star lists and variable star lists that I am thinking about.

One thing that pursuing the AL Observing Club lists has done for my observing is to make me begin to record my observations in a much more rigorous manner than I had before. I think this has improved my understanding of the sky and will be a lasting treasure for me to review in the future. I am now following several of the lists in a spreadsheet on my computer and keeping a logbook entry with a page for each object that I observe for the first time. It has been fun to see that log book getting thicker as the year has progressed.

All in all, I think that the AL observing clubs have made me a better amateur observer in the following ways:

- The clubs have given me goals to focus my efforts to learn more about observing
- The clubs have widened my interests and my knowledge of sections of astronomy that I might not have otherwise been drawn toward
- The clubs have improved my record keeping and this has increased my enjoyment of the sport

The Stars in their Constellations

2009-02-14T14:09:00.003-06:00

The stars of the sky are pretty. Looking at the sky from a dark site while the moon is below the horizon and the sky is clear is enough to amaze the most jaded observer. The Milky Way stretches from horizon to horizon and there are more stars in the sky than a person could ever count. But after a little while, looking at the pretty stars is like looking at pretty flowers. It can be superficial to just stare and say "wow" or "pretty".

The richness of the sky is like the abundance of a large library. When I look at either, I know there is lot there, but start looking more closely requires a system. There is nothing wrong with looking at the sky and saying - "Hey! that little group of stars looks like a baseball diamond. That group looks like a tree." There is nothing wrong with telling your pretty wife that there is star named after her - that bright one right there. But most of us also know that there is a standard set of groups of stars in the skies.

Almost all groups of people have had names for parts of the sky. In historical time, all the great civilizations have had different names for groups of stars. The constellation names we use are actually a lot more recent than is commonly known. The names of many of the stars we use come from arabic sources. The names of many of the constellations come from Greek mythology. Many of the constellations of the far south were named by european astronomers in the 19th century. But it was not until the time of my father's boyhood - the 1930s - that the sky was carved up into boundaries named after the constelations.

It turns out that the boundaries are very useful. Suddenly, with the institution of those boundaries, I can decide to take a closer look at one part of the sky. For me, it's a little like going from an overall appreciation of a field of dasies to the beauty of one individual plant.

Let me give an example. Knowing that there is a constellation called Lyra in the summer sky, I can decide to take a closer look at that little group of stars. I may want to take out a pad of paper and draw the stars in the constellation - just like with dasies, I may want to draw one of the plants or one of the blooms. I might be interested that the bright star in the constellation has a name - Vega - and that it is one of the brightest stars in the summer sky. I can see just a few other stars, but out one end of the constellation is a pair of stars that are about the same brightness - and they have names too - beta and gamma Lyrae.

Just as I might be interested in looking more closely at a daisy with a magnifying glass, adding a little magnification and light gathering power to look at Lyra is fun too. With binoculars, the bright main stars of the constellation are easier to see, and a host of other dim stars can be seen as well.

It also turns out that if I have more magnification and light gathering available through the use of a telescope, that more can be seen. This further study of the constellation yields a beautiful pair of stars visible in binoculars, each of which is a double star (and that division can only be seen with a telescope). This is Episilon Lyrae, the "double double", and it turns out that it is only one of many interesting double stars in the sky. In addition, the constellation holds a beautiful light cloud called the ring nebula right inbetween beta and gamma Lyrae. And the ring nebula is only one of a large group of fuzzy light clouds that are collectively the Messier objects.

This is the reason that I have taken the time to get aquainted with the "official" names of the constellations. Those name and the recongnition of the constellation in the sky is the index to finding all sorts of other beauty.

Here is a list of constellations that are easy to see in the evening sky this time of year (February) Orion is the most recognizable with his belt of three stars, and dangling from his belt are jewels worth looking at with binoculars and telescopes. Canis Major, (big dog) is below and to the left of him. At the heart of the big dog is a beautiful open cluster of stars that can be seen with binoculars and is a marvel with a small telescope. The oval ring of Aurigua contains three pretty open clusters of stars. At the foot of the Gemini Twins is another pretty open cluster. Cassiopeia is a small W or M of stars now in the western sky at dark, but it is chock full of wonderful objects to find - including a little version of the "phone home" ET (or the owl if you like). There is a group of 6 or 7 sisters and an arc of stars between Cassiopeia and the sisters that is full of wonders to behold. One of them, a rogue named Algol, winks down in brightness every 3 days for a few hours and has been doing so for thousands of years.

I hope I might have spurred someone to go out and look at some of the constellations and begin learning a pattern of stars that is unfamiliar. I am still learning some of the dimmer constellations and learning how to find objects in relationship to their dimmer members. It remains ultimately fascinating.

If I would recommend one book for the study of constellations, it would be "Stars and Planets" which is a Smithsonian Handbook. This book has a number of great resources, but among them is a section on each of the constellations and some wonderful items to look at in each one.

Observing the Heavens with My Eyes

2009-02-05T08:14:00.005-06:00

Great peace and great joy come from settling down and gazing at the heavens above. Sunrises, sunsets, slivers of brand new moons, showers of meteors, and brightly shining planets have been favorites of mine since I was a boy.

I have gazed with great contentment at the milky way on moonless nights from the tops of mountains when hiking the Appalachian Trail. I have woken in the middle of the night in my camping hammock and looked up to see that the stars of the big dipper had moved counter clockwise nearly a half circle around the north star since sun down. Seeing that let me know that morning must be near. I have counted the days of a hike, not by the days of the week, but by the phase of the moon. This use of the sky is part of what I have come to call trail time - the relaxation of modern time constraints that allows abandoning a watch and calendar - substituting the signs of the heavens for the minute by minute accuracy of modern life.

The more I use the sky for trail time, the more interested I become in it. The more I live in trail time, the more personal the sky is. The moon's names for its great month long seasons have become important to me. Looking at the traditions of many cultures, I developed names appropriate to the time of year a moon encompassed. A moon begins with a sliver of a new moon just after sunset and waxes (grows) to first quarter and then to full. The first quarter moon is South at sunset and the full moon is East at sunset. It then wanes to third quarter which is South at sunrise and ends with a sliver to the east just before sunrise - a cycle that takes about 28 days.

There are a number of magical times of year for me. First green grass of the spring and apples ripe on the trees are two of my favorites. Longest day in June and longest night in December are also on the top of my list. So it made sense to name those moons green grass, apple, long day, and long night moons. Planting moon, following green grass moon is when tender tomato plants can be set outdoors without much risk of them freezing. In Ohio green grass moon was April and planting moon was in May. Harvest moon followed apple moon, and hunter's moon followed harvest. (In Texas, this system is all messed up, as I plant tomato plants in early March and I never find apple trees in the woods. The grass often does not turn green until late July when the rain starts. All of this has knocked me a little off center as I try to adjust to Texas moons.)

Planets are quirky sky objects that move at their own speeds through the night skies. Venus and Jupiter are very bright - usually brighter than the brightest stars. Mars is a pretty red dot and Saturn a reasonably bright star-like object that wanders slowly from constellation to constellation. Venus slowly moves eastward away from the setting sun to an altitude above the western horizon of several spans of my hand, and then approaches sunset again as the evening star. Then it rises before sunrise earlier and earlier and then approaches the sunrise again. Mercury escaped my notice until this last year. I had mistakenly believed it was a very hard planet to see in the brightness of the sunrise or sunset. Instead it turns out that Mercury is very bright and easy to see either to the East or to the West for several days every six weeks.

Next: Observing the stars, studying the constellations.

Location, Location, Location

2009-02-04T07:39:00.005-06:00

are the three most important factors when it comes to success, according to many wise counselors.

Location certainly matters when it comes to success in observing the sky. In my back yard observing area, I can only have partial success. I am limited by the trees of the back yard and the roof line of my house. I am limited by the amount of urban light that limits my best unaided observations to magnitude 4. I am limited by the intrusion of light from my own windows and from backyard lights of my neighbors. I am limited by the heat that rises from the shingles of my home, roiling the air with turbulence.

But my backyard location leads to increased probability of success too. My least obstructed view of the sky is to the south. That is good, because as the seasons change this area gives the most chance to see new large swaths of the sky. My urban light problem is much less bothersome as that of friends that live just 15 minutes away toward the center of San Antonio. From their beautiful perch looking over downtown, I can seldom see anything dimmer than second magnitude stars. They have great sunsets, but pretty poor conditions for seeing any of the galaxies on the Messier list. Another great advantage of my location is that by driving an hour west or northwest, I can move below some of the darkest skies in the United States.

My location in near San Antonio also means that I have access to a large number of objects which are not visible from further north. It's true that I can not see the Big Dipper during winter evenings, like I grew up being able to do in Ohio. However, the full tail of the scorpion is very obvious in the summer, along with its treasure trove of Messier objects. From further north this part of the sky is much closer to the southern horizon than it is here.

Observing from a location in the northern hemisphere certainly gives me a different view of the sky than my friends in Australia have. Obviously, I can not see the constellations furthest south and have never observed those two close galaxies associated with the Magellanic clouds.

Another aspect of the northern hemisphere observing location recently occurred to me. A decade ago I needed to find a way to teach my son how to identify the waxing and waning moon. I remembered a scene from Karate Kid - a movie he had seen - in which the master taught his apprentice how to strengthen his arm muscles by waxing his old car. "Wax on - Wax off" with the right hand and then the left was his mantra. I taught my son that the "Wax on" motion with the right hand could remind him that the waxing moon was lit up by the sun on the moon's right side looking south or southwest, and that the waning moon would be lit on the moon's left side.

This fall, as I was looking through different telescopes at the moon, I was trying to determine whether I was looking at the moon's east or west on the right side of the eyepiece and whether the moon's north or south pole was at the top of the eyepiece view. It was clear that with binoculars, the Moon's north was at the top of the view and the moon's east was to the right, just like in a map of the United States. That view differs with different telescopes - a topic complex enough that it is worth writing a blog on the subject sometime in the future.

However, from my backyard it was clear that the first quarter moon was to my south at sunset. As I looked at this waxing moon, its right side was lit by the sun. The moon's north pole was up and its eastern side was to my right.

I asked myself the thought experiment question, "What would I be seeing from Perth, Australia at sunset today?" The answer surprised me after I puzzled through it. I would be looking north at the first quarter moon. This waxing moon would be lit by the sun on my left. The moon's south pole would be up and its eastern edge would be to my left. Everything about the view would be completely backwards from my northern hemisphere viewing area.

This understanding may be completely obvious to southern hemisphere observers. They are used to having to translate texts to their point of view. But it was an understanding that had escaped me for the first 55 years of my life. It was a good feeling to finally come to a new understanding of a very basic idea.

The Sun, the Seasons, and the Day

2009-02-03T08:06:00.004-06:00

I enjoy a good sunrise.

After a long winter night in the woods, seeing the sky begin to lighten and then seeing the sun rise above a hill to warm my bones is a fantastic time - linked in my mind to birth and resurrection. The beginning of the day is the beginning of life all over again. Daybreak is the resumption of goals and the fulfillment of the dreams dreamed the night before.

A few years ago, I realized just how different sunrises are as the year progresses. Sitting in my east facing office, the sunrise of late December is two spans (the hand held at arms length - the distance from little finger to thumb, with the fingers spread) south of East. The sun follows an arc that appears makes the same angle with the horizon no matter what time of year, but it begins further south in the mid winter. That makes the day shorter and the height of the noon sun lower at this time of year than any other time of year.

On the day of an Equinox, the first days of Spring and Fall, the sun rises directly to the East. The day is longer, the sun at noon is higher, and the average daytime temperature is rising. At the Summer Soltace, the sun rises two spans north of East and the day is at its longest. I have watched this progression from my sun room in Ohio and from my office in Texas. For me, it is a rite of yearly passage to observe the rising of the sun.

I also enjoy the daily passage of the sun from its rising to its noon to the south and back to its setting. A couple years ago, I enjoyed almost daily trips to a tipi in my Ohio backyard. I had it set up with the door facing East. In the winter, I would often traipse down to the tipi before sunrise and start a fire in the central fire ring. Then as the sun rose I opened the door flap and enjoyed the fresh sunlight streaming through the doorway onto the figures I had painted on the tipi liner. It was a quiet time that encouraged me to pray and to think about the day to come.

In that peaceful time, I came to appreciate the daily circle of life. The brilliant red rays of the sunrise became linked to the East and with the beginning of life as well as a day's occupation. Almost automatically East became linked in my mind to spring and the beginning of the year's cycle of growth and harvest. As the sun traveled southward toward noon, I thought of the South as being the place of warm summer, adolesence, growth, greenness, and summer. Sunset in the west reminded me of the accomplishment of adult life and the Fall of the year. I thought of the moon as being born to the West, where each new moon begins. North became the place of night, rest, the respect of elders, a time for reflection, dreaming, and planning for the day to come. North was a time for the brilliant stars that slowly wheel their way across the sky.

Southern hemisphere readers will realize that all these illusions are all exactly backwards for observers south of the equator. If you have tipis, you are welcome to come to your own conclusions and reminders of the lessons of life in your own way.

Coming back to astronomy in the years of my elderhood seems natural. It is a time to appreciate the night more and to think more about the eternal. It is a time to discover what has remained hidden during much of my life. It is a time to revel at the enormous beauty of the creation and to think about the wonderful hugeness of the creation and my small and fleeting part of it.

Comet Lulin - Beginning of February

2009-02-02T20:47:00.005-06:00

There is a comet in the morning skies which is within the reach of anyone with a telescope. This is the first bright comet which has wandered into the inner solar system since I became interested in astronomy again.

I first picked up Lulin when it was just above the left two stars of the fan of three stars above Scorpio. (Scorpio is one of the few constellations that I think looks like its name sake.) It has now moved further up in the sky and is approaching one of the brighter stars in Libra. The comet is moving faster and faster against the starry background as it approaches earth on its way back out from the sun.

Just the other day, I did a drawing of the comet. Here is the diagram showing where the comet was that morning:

And here is a drawing from the eyepiece of my telescope. Everything in the telescope is reversed, up for down and left for right. If I turn the drawing around, it would look like a binocular view (which is right side up and correct left and right.)

By the by, the way I made these drawings was to make a drawing with white paper. I made the stars very black with a Sharpie marker and the rest of the writing and drawing was done with a pencil. I took a photograph of the drawing and then used Microsoft Paint to reverse the colors. It is a simple way to make drawings which are correct for black and white.

The motion of this comet is somewhat unusual in that it is traveling in the plane of the planets, but backwards. That is, while all the planets and most comets are traveling around the sun one direction, Lulin is bucking all that traffic. There is still some debate about why this might be, and I will be interested in seeing how the astronomy community comes to an understanding of this unusual comet.

I saw a very nice photograph of the comet on the Astronomy Picture of the Day site this morning. It clearly showed the dust trail on one side of the comet (it was on the left) while the particle trail was being streamed out in the opposite direction (toward the right) beyond the comet.

I have observed the comet from my Helotes backyard a number of times with my 10 inch reflector. I have not been able to see the comet with binoculars from there yet. When I was up near Fredericksburg early Saturday morning, I thought that Lulin was getting brighter, and with the dark skies there I was able to see the comet with binoculars.

The last time I went outdoors to see a comet was Halley's comet back in the mid 1980s. That comet was an easy visual one. There have been a number of very nice visual comets since then, but I was involved in other hobbies and projects and never took the time to find them. Given that, it has been fun to follow this comet through the morning skies. I am hoping that it reaches naked eye visibility within the next couple weeks before it starts fading later in February.

Dark Skies Begin at Home

2009-02-02T08:19:00.006-06:00

Recently I wrote to my city of Helotes, Texas to find out what the lighting ordinance might say about lights in my neighborhood. This all began because, in my small backyard observing area, one of the neighbor's lights shines into the back yard over my fence every night of the year. I wondered if there was any legal basis for my asking that neighbor to shield their light.

I was surprised to find out that in the summer of 2006, the city had passed a very well written ordinance requiring compliance with lighting standards that are friendly to dark skies. All new installations after that date must be in compliance - which essentially requires full shielded lights. All grandfathered lights must come into compliance by 2012.

Like most houses on my street, I had clear glass "carriage light" type fixtures at my front door and above my address marker on the front of the house. I thought that it would be interesting and perhaps important to change out my fixtures. If I was not willing to take the time and shell out the money for new fixtures, there was no hope that I could get others to begin taking this challenge seriously.

I looked through the offerings at the local Home Depot hardware store. Though they had scores of outdoor fixtures displayed on a large wall, only one seemed to meet the fully shielded requirement. I brought this to the attention of the supervisor of that section of the store and he said that their buyer would be meeting with them later in the month and that he would push for more fully shielded lights. I think that is a good idea, because by the lighting ordinance, any lighting fixtures purchased to be installed in Helotes are already required to meet the requirement of the lighting ordinance.

Next, I drove to the nearby Lowe's Hardware store. Here I found about a half dozen fully shielded lights and several others that meet the requirement if they are installed under an overhang, such as the alcove at my front door. I bought two fixtures. One, pictured at the beginning of this entry was less than $20 and is fully shielded. I think it works much better than the light I replaced for the purpose of making my address visible after dark. It does not shine any light outside my property lines.

For the replacement of the light under my front door overhang, I chose a fixture which shields horizontal light. It does not meet the requirement of full shielding above the horizontal, but with the roof above it, it meets standard and no light is transmitted above the horizontal. (This fixture could be brought into compliance with the fully shielded requirement by installing a baffle in the upper portion of the light to restrict upward light.)

My next projects to work toward dark skies will be to contact my Home Owner's Association to get the broken street light on the corner nearest my home replaced with a fully shielded light. The swimming pool lights a block away are of the old-fashoned barn light design. I will talk with the Association about those lights too.

Some new construction in the city has lighting which does not meet the lighting ordinance. Worst among these lights are "pack lights" installed on the side of the buildings which radiate very intense light horizontally. I plan to talk with the building inspector about these lights.

Maybe I will find a way to invite my neighbor over to my backyard observing site and politely mention his bright white-blue light that shines in my backyard all night every night. God give me the grace to be nice and friendly.

Observing at Cat's Meow Star Field

2009-02-01T20:01:00.002-06:00

What a fantastic night I had on Friday evening and Saturday morning!

At Hunter Scott's invitation, I drove up to his place on Friday afternoon for a night of Messier Marathon practice. I knew the moon would be up until about 11PM, but most of what I wanted to observe was going to be up after midnight.

Despite his commitments to his arriving overnight guests, Hunter took time out of his late afternoon to show me the observing field and make me feel welcome. Ron Weber had also given me permission to use his trailer on this cold night. My intent was to outdoor camp, but it was nice to know that I had an escape plan if I started to get cold on a night that was forecast to drop to the mid 20s.

I found a great place to hang my hammock 20 yards off the end of Ron's camper between two oak trees. First dibs claimed on this place during the club Messier Marathon in March! It was a great place to get some shut eye on and off through the night.

I also took a long walk around the star field, judging how high the trees were above the horizon. I took a look at a far corner of the property, where Hunter said he may put an observatory one day. In the end, I chose a spot closer to the center of the star field. I set up my Orion XT10 and parked my truck with the tailgate near the scope to work as an observing table. I put the cover over the scope to keep dew and birds off the optics.

The sun was still up as I cooked my noodle dinner on the picnic table and settled down for a winter's nap about 5 PM. The sun was still up, but trees shaded my camping spot and I had not had an afternoon nap. So I was able to get right to sleep.

I woke at about 0130 Zulu time (730 PM) with the moon still way above the horizon. I spent a few minutes planning how to find the Andromeda galaxy and a few other early marathon objects only using landmarks over these objects. (I usually use the great square of Pegasus to find the Andromeda Galaxy, and instead found a way to use Perseus and Algol to point to the Andromeda and M33 pointers.) After a half hour of goofing around with these, I went back to bed.

My next observing session began about 0545 Z and lasted until about 0730. The temperature had dropped to about 30, but fortunately there was no wind. The sky was in perfect shape with no clouds and very easy magnitude 6 viewing. The eastern light domes were all very small and easy to deal with. The western constellations were just about where they will be at the beginning of the marathon. Even though it was about midnight local time, I could not see M74 or M77 through the thick atmosphere, despite knowing that I was looking at exactly the right spot. (I had seen them earlier at my evening observing session.) M31, M32, M110, and M33 were all easy. I began working my way through the evening MM list and had no difficulty with the CAS objects, the objects near ORI, TAU, GEM, and AUR.

The open clusters of CMA and MON worked out very well. I had puzzled through them at Garner SP the week before. I forgot M48 when I thought it was part of the M46-47 group. That was the only object on the list that I should have easily been able to find and did not log for the night.

For the second time, I used a dictaphone recorder to do logging. It was much easier than trying to write my observations, especially in getting details down about objects.

By the time I had gotten to this point, my toes were pretty cold and I wanted to wait until UMA and LEO were further up in the sky to continue. So I set an alarm for 3:30 AM local time and laid back down in my hammock for another winter nap. It took a long time to warm my feet up in the sleeping bag as it was about 28 degrees. My set up was plenty warm for sleeping, but rewarming was not easy. I found myself warm in my core, but my feet stayed cold. I even took my socks off and used my legs to warm my toes. Any way, by the time my alarm went off I was toasty warm and ready to get up and see more stars. But for some additional help with warming, I turned on the gas heater in Ron's trailer before starting the next session which lasted an additional two hours.

This session was from 0930Z to 1130Z. During that time, the largest part of the observing was of faint galaxies. Before starting the galaxy sweep I warmed up with the two open clusters in CAN. Then I went to the faint fuzzies with with the LEO quintuplet and then moved on to the 12 Messier objects in the big dipper and CVN. All but M40 are galaxies. BOO next got my attention with its trio of objects, and the globular clusters M3 and M53 were a little odd after all those faint fuzzy galaxies.

Of the 19 objects in the VIR, COM and HYA area, only one is a globular cluster. Using the excellent eyepiece charts by Rob Hawley, I was able to make my way through the Virgo cluster of galaxies another time without a hitch.

THen I picked up the "early summer objects" that I could - including M13, M93, M5, M12, M10, M14, M57, M58, M29, M39, M80, M4, and M107. By then I was cold again and I retreated to the trailer to warm my toes next to the hot air vent for about 20 minutes.

Dawn was approaching, as I could see the sky beginning to get lighter in the east at 1200Z. In my rush, I tried to see what else I might be able to see. I picked up M27 and M71 through a break in the tree line. M19, M62, M6, M7 (in the tree line) M8, M20, M21 were seen with binoculars. as I hurried the last few minutes of reasonable seeing. I could have seen M23, M24, M16, M26 and M11 if I had not been so time pressed with the dawn. And so it finally was over.

I ended up seeing 90 Messier objects, none of which were new for me, but 14 objects that I saw with binoculars were new on that list. I now have well over the necessary 50 binocular messier objects to apply for that Astronomical League pin.

I retired to sleep another couple hours until the sun was lighting the whole world all around me. It was about 8 AM.

Then it was just a matter of packing up. I turned off the gas and the thermostat in Ron's trailer, packed up my camping gear and scope, and as quietly as I could I drove out Hunter's front gate. In Fredericksburg, I stopped for some coffee and breakfast and then drove home for a hot shower.

Fun? You bet! Rewarding? Oh yes!.

Again many many thanks to both Hunter and Ron for their invitations. I hope I left everything pristine and looking like I had never been there. I want to get another invitation after all.

Dark Skies,

Risk

Garner State Park Observing

2009-01-26T19:56:00.002-06:00

A night for observing

Friday, the sky in San Antonio was partly to mostly cloudy, with a forecast for continued partly cloudy. I decided to drive the 80 miles west to Garner State Park for some hammock camping. I took my astronomy gear on the chance that the skies would clear. My main goal was to do a practice sweep of the Virgo Cluster for an upcoming Messier Marathon. I had previously tried to see the galaxies in the cluster from my urban skies in Helotes (TX), but the mag 4 observing had not proved to be quite good enough for a newbie observer.

I set up in a campsite in the Shady Meadows area (#127) and staked out a spot across the road for my observing site. With me, I had "Texas" my Orion XT10 10 inch dobsonian and a pair of 10x50 binoculars. I had preprinted a set of Messier Marathon charts and had them in a notebook. All my finding would be with a TelRad finder. I have no finder scope. I also wanted through the night to pick up a few more Messier objects on my binocular list.

Going in, my Messier count stood at 75 previously observed Messier objects and 38 on the Binocular side.

The sunset was pretty, but there were still a lot of clouds around. But as the twilight gathered, the clouds began to clear out and I was left with a great view of the milky way. There was just a tiny dome of light to the east, though I don't know where that originated. My view was restricted below about 20 degrees to the south and about 10 degrees in other directions.

I warmed up on the open clusters in Auriga and Gemini, took a look at Venus which was just on the waning side of first quarter, then began seeing what I could see.

It was still pretty light in the West, so I turned to the Andromeda cluster and was easily able to pull out all three galaxies. M33 was just on the other side of the Andromeda pointers.

I looked west as it became dark and realized that I could still pick out M15 in Pegasus, but I did not see anything else worth finding West of the beginning of the Messier Marathon list.

So I began the task of working my way through the Messier marathon order with M74 and 77. I have run the fall Messier list pretty well previously, but I did discover a couple that had fallen through the cracks. I worked through the Puppis and Monoceros clusters, forgetting to pick up the two Cancer clusters before hitting the sack for a few hours of sleep.

After I laid down in my warm hammock (no tarp up tonight - I wanted to watch the sky) clouds rolled in an completely obscured all the stars. A north wind began to blow more than it does most Texas nights and the temperature dropped about 20 degrees from 50 to about 30.

Just in time, probably about 3 AM, the clouds rolled away again, revealing Leo almost overhead. Saturn makes the constellation look a little strange this year.

I put on my coat and balkava and went back to the scope. I ran the Leo Galaxies and the UMA and CVN area. Then I went to work on the Virgo Cluster. That proved to be a lot of fun. I was able to run the whole cluster first time. A set of eyepiece diagrams made this MUCH easier after I had picked up 49 and 61. I began with M98 and was able to run the whole crowd without a hitch. I then picked up the HYA clusters and galaxy and looked East. I was able to pick up M5, 13 and 92 just above the trees.

I saw that the fan of Scorpius was visible just above the horizon to the East and looked and again found comet Lulin. It was a lot clearer than it is from my backyard in Helotes.

By now I was just about frozen and I retreated back to sleep for a little nap. I got up 45 minutes later, still cold, and looked around a little. Not much new was up above the horizon. I could see Vega through the trees, but the ring nebula was only just above the horizon really through trees. I looked at what I had available and went back to bed, sleeping til sunrise.

Over the evening I was able to log 69 objects. The whole VIR cluster was new for my Messier list and by the end of the night I am only 6 Messier objects from logging the whole list. My Binocular Messier list is only 4 from the magic number of 50 to report to the Astronomical League.

It was a successful trip. The clouds were much better than I ever dreamed they would be. I probably should have had a heavier coat and a pair of gloves. Using the Telrad and finder charts worked like a charm.

Seeing the comet was an added bonus.

Dark Skies,

Risk