Wednesday night some members of the Faac club tested the auto guiding setup at HJRO. Or a possible future setup. There has been a lot of reconfiguration and testing of new setups at HJRO. Because this involves a lot of debugging and sometimes mundane reconfigurations, we aren't in a position to give many sky tours or talk about the observatory and chat with visitors.
In some ways the timing may seem bad, with Comet Panstarrs being a focus and draw in the last month, but we had plenty of viewing of that comet when it was brighter and near the sun. And it could be more easily seen with small telescopes in urban locations. In a sense that gave me a good break from the observatory and let others work on the new configuration.
I took a lot of extra equipment to the observatory, mostly extra stuff we don't need for the technical configuration. The nice toys were brought by others.
I didn't even widely announce or tell other core Faac members much less the public about this, because these sessions are more about the testing of equipment, and normal observing and chatting can just end up getting under the feet of those doing the work.
Wednesday I was probably more of a distraction than help AR the observatory. It was pretty exciting to see the auto guiding work. It seems each session I over plan and bring to much stuff, and never can get to it all.
I brought some camcorders to the session on Wednesday and just tested recording parr of the session in low light. It was fun to watch the guys work with the programs and George brought a really nice astrophotography camera and took some test images of the new supernova in m65. Mike brought his auto guiding camera.
Mike, George, Tim Dey and Tim Campbell were at the observatory Wednesday. A couple of visitors were invited and a couple Faac members who didn't arrive said they might show up as well. With all the little things we worked on it was probably going to be somewhat boring, to most visitors. Sometimes boring is good, because things worked well. We had a couple of glitches but these were tied to a USB cable becoming disconnected. The mount tracked really well.
Thursday afternoon I received and email that George and a Both Tim's were going to be at the observatory after the Faac board meeting. I could join them and learn some more if I was able to make it. I didn't have tine with errands to return Georges call. I didn't have time or energy to go to the board meeting either. I ended up laying down for a while because I felt like I had a pulled muscle and was aching a bit. So I decided to take a nap.
The sky cleared up and I ended up rushing out and picking up dinner for my father who seemed to need a better meal than he has been having lately. And my mother was complaining a bit and wanted some kind of meal created. She has health issues, and can't cook for herself, but that is another story. I decided to cook her a pretty decent meal and prepared all these special dishes for her. I loaded up the car with stuff, but had two thoughts, one was to head out to my friends house in Dexter and test the Nexstar 4se under dark skies. The other was to go to HJRO and join in on the fun there. Since two of the key keepers were going to be at the test, there seemed to be little need to be there. And I was running late, but I figured I would drop by say hello and perhaps go out t a darker sky site.
Tim and George were taking test photos of a galaxy. And this was faint and difficult to photograph from our bright skies in Lincoln Park. Geroge got a pretty nice shot of the galaxy, which is in Ursa Major. He and Tin were going to test and compare the Canon 60da as well, and I offered to let them use my t1i as another camera to test on the same object. I know the 60da would do better then the t1i but it would be nice to see the difference.
They choose m51 a nice spiral galaxy for the test. Everything seemed to be going smoothly. I decided rather than stick around and watch the photos come in that I could do a quick test out here in the lighter skies of Lincoln Park and test my nexstar again and see hoe it ran and if it would hold sync during a test run. Maybe I could bag a few Messier objects a day before the FAAC Messier marathon, which happens this weekend for Faac Astronomers at one of our observing sites.
I left the guys inside and setup near my car. I was able to get the nexstar to sync and found a few objects, but viewing outside the observatory can be distracting from nearby street lights shining on my eyes and the eyepieces. I didn't have a good polar alignment and although I had a good two star northern EQ alignment, the objects I would search for were not hitting the center of the field of view of m 40mm plossl. I was using the skyfi box and the iPad to drive the telescope. It worked pretty good. I was feeling the cold but had an ac plug I found outside near the bleachers and was able to drive my scope. I noticed George and Tom were not using the ir heater inside earlier, so I returned to grab the heater and use it outside to throw some warmth on me.
Returning inside Tim said, oh we thought you left and went out to observe somewhere else. I said, no I'm outside, but wanted to borrow the heater while I'm observing near my car.
I was able to find a few messier objects, for some reason I choose mostly open star clusters from the software and most of them were easily found. M43 did not show up in the eyepiece however. My cheap crappy finder that Celestron puts on the nexstar was not working, so rather than search for it manually I moved on to other objects. The Celestron red dot, eats through button batteries when you leave it on and it's on switch is to easy to bump and turn on. In addition it's so cheap, maybe this is just my unit, but the on switch only works half the time.
Its just one of the annoyances of a cheap telescope, or one that is in the lower end of the nexstar line. The telescope is optically white good, I have no complaints with the optics, but it's low capacity drive system and finder leave a lot to be desired. The telescope is designed to do a lot of things well and it's nice in a small package. But the little things you get used to that seem to always work on a much more expensive setup don't always work with this grab and go setup.
Clouds were moving in from the north and Tim Dey showed up. I let Tim Campbell know the clouds were heading in and they better hurry with their tests. Then I decided to try to take a quick photo of something, maybe part of an open star cluster with my telescope using my canon t1i. The clouds moved in quickly. I was looking around in my car for my eyepiece bag with my standard set of eyepieces so I could set the focus of the nexstar for my canon t1i. Because the 25mm tv plossl is an almost perfect match for the focal distance of the t1i when it's mounted on the top front viewing eyepiece of the nexstar 4se. There are two viewports on this little telescope. One on the back and one up at a 90 degree angle. A flip mirror directs the light to the upper eyepiece holder or the back eyepiece holder. The back eyepiece holder with an inverter 45 degree prism by Celestron and the 25mm plossl is par focal with the Canon t1i mounted on the top eyepiece holder. So I can focus with the 25mm eyepiece, then flip the mirror and the canon will be in focus. Can quickly frame and focus the object and then take a picture. And the 25mm gives me almost the same field of view as the resulting photograph. This is a Great feature of the nexstar 4se.
But where was my 25mm eyepiece. I left my bag of eyepieces at home. I only had a 40mm eyepiece and a 5mm eyepiece in a different bag and the clouds were really moving in now. So I fumbled a bit with the camera trying to get the image in focus. But I could not see the stars or focus on them at least not the open cluster target I had, m35. So I ended up slewing the telescope with the goto to a bright star. The motors on the drive made their sound as the telescope moved to the next target, but it wasn't in the eyepiece.
The weight of the camera and eyepiece was not balanced enough to allow the Dec motors to move the scope. They were moving the scope in as much as the motors were spinning, but the clutch pressure, was not strong enough for the tube to move. So the telescope thought it was moving to the target, but it wasn't. The motors spun and the computer thought it was looking at the object. The system was still running, but I was out of sync or alignment now. So I never did get a quick photo, because the camera, once I had it in focus would not be pointed to a target in time to beat the clouds.
The other three Faac members decided to leave. They locked up the observatory and started to leave. I said goodbye, then unlocked the observatory to put the heater and my observing chair back inside.
Overall it was a good night. I think a lot was completed inside the observatory, and I was there for a little while. I didn't get much accomplished with the nexstar, but that was just a little test. It's not like I have the time to go out to a Messier marathon hunt anyway. I'll probably stay in this area for the weekend.
James a new member but frequent visitor said on some of the newsgroups that he wants to complete the messier marathon and see all the Messier objects in the next year. That would be a nice observing goal. I tried an abbreviated messier marathon in 2010 at HJRO with Greg Ozimek. We only saw about forty objects that night and we were up until 3am. To see 110 objects in one night would be a marathon. I would guess it would be a challenge for a new astronomer to see them all in one year as well. I don't think James can easily do this in one year, not from Lincoln Park skies with his current telescopes. The reason I say this is we had a difficult time seeing some of the fainter messier objects with the c14 under our skies. We could not see some of the galaxies which were beyond magnitude 9.5 or magnitude 10. If they were fainter than magnitude ten we pretty much gave up on them, with a 14 inch telescope. Why? Because of massive sky glow.
If James wants to see all the Messier objects in one year, his best bet is to get a list of the fainter ones and pair up at times with someone at a dark sky site and focus on the faint ones from there. Getting the bright ones are easy even with a small telescope from bright skies of our city. It's the faint ones that will be problems. I doubt we could visually see all the objects from HJRO with the C14. The faint small galaxies are the hardest to see visually of the Messier objects.
Now a nice ten inch dob under dark skies should make it a lot easier to bag most of them. If your lucky enough to look through one of our members larger telescopes at a dark sky site, then it may be easier to meet the marathon goal.
Thats about it for now. Perhaps this weekend we will be open for some observing. Maybe Friday night. But I'm not sure. My friends dark sky site is still calling me.
Greg
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment