It's really clear out right now. Kind of cold. Good for imaging.
I've been working on video editing today and we have a medical appointment tomorrow here in this house, so I can't plan on being out and observing tonight. The skies are great. It's cold out however.
I may go out and observe and do a bit of imaging anyway. Now that most of my brief video editing is complete for this band video I shot earlier this summer. I've been putting off editing for a while with other distractions.
I feel like going out and imaging a bit at HJRO to get some deep space long exposure test images and also to get a glimpse of Ison in an image or visually. This would be at 5am however and I've spent a lot of the evening watching cooking shows on Create tv and doing a bit of video editing.
I'd like to get a nice image of comet Ison, but it's further away from Mars and the Leo triplet so I can't get those images in the same wide field exposure. I might be able to get some test images of jupiter to play with as well.
I've been spending about half my free time reading up on computer mounts or thinking about building a tracking mount for my binoculars. Kind of like a dobsonian tracking platform, but this would be for a tripod. How would you create a tracking platform for a tripod. Well I have some ideas, but one thing is likely, it would need to have q positive tracking gear, kind of like a typical gear on a telescope mount, but the gear would have teeth or a gear that is curved that allow the tripod to rest in a fixed state and not move much when the alt/az was activated. A kind of locking design a bit like the tripod spreader my bino tripod already has. The tripod would likely only need to track for 1/2 hour so 7.5 degrees of movement would be enough. Many dob tracking tables move 15 degrees and track for an hour. I think the tripod would have to be low and the northern table would actually be split and have two gears one for each northern tripod leg. The southern part of the tracking spreader, would be for one leg. The tripod would not likely be fully extended but quite low for a low CG, something more geared toward a seated position, than standing. This would give the CG a lower position. It might make viewing near the zenith a challenge because the binoculars would be quite low.
I'd like tracking binoculars for solar and public events. I know I won't have anything constructed by this Tuesday.
The other half of my time or free time has been spent thinking about new video and computer equipment for video editing. Not astronomy related. It's mostly dreaming. I have a pretty cool video edit system already, but it's limited for massive camera video from many bands at q music festival.
It's almost 3am. I'm not sure if I'll try to open up tonight for the image test or not. I hate missing good observing opportunities, but the other stuff going on around here, keeps me away from HJRO maybe half of the good nights.
Below is a really bad example sketch of the tripod spreader tracking concept, taken from tracking table design ideas, shown on the right.
It's not scaled or drawn well, more for internal thoughts.
The tripod legs would have to be captured somehow so they could not easily be lifted from the base and the base would be a kind of table connected, but not with a solid base, more like a spreader. It would still rotate the base like a normal table would to allow full EQ adjustments to the rig.
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