A bit of clear skies is not enough for tonight because of daytime work pressures

Unfortunately I still have a lot of work at my day job and that means I have to go to bed early. I didn't see the clouds clear away until later tonight although it looks like some clouds threaten viewing. The observatory likely still has some snow on the shutter which I still need to address.

I'm really looking forward to the new year and the chance to be away from the old day job grind. The last days before one retires should be pretty easy and fun, but I have a ton of stuff to review and turn over to the other members of the team yet. A lot of distractions and some computer changes at the last minute, caused my day job retirement to go a little less smoothly than I expected. But nobody is really ready for a retirement experience, it's kind of like getting that first job, it's a new experience.

I have ONLY two more days at work, this year and permanently, at least for a while. This means I'll be able to focus more on astronomy and other hobbies and just taking it easy for while. Some members of the club think this is great because I'll be able to stay up late all hours of the night and have the observatory open a lot more. . . We will have to wait and see about that.

My First vacation this year -
I haven't had a real vacation in the last five years. So I'm really looking forward to my early retirement. It always seemed there was one more big project to finish at work and "vacation could wait". Now that I took an early out the real vacation can begin.

The sky looks really nice a clear tonight, where there is breaks in the clouds. Really cold and crisp. I didn't even take out my binoculars however, because of the cold and I didn't want to get tempted into looking up and staying out late. Tomorrow will be a big day to get rid of most of the stuff left in my cube at work. Also I will have to fill out about eight exit forms with information that looks like exit interview stuff, technical debriefing, etc. If I'm lucky I'll be able to spend my last day at work, Wednesday saying goodbye to the few who are working at my workplace during the holidays.




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We will be trying to do some observing at the observatory tonight

The sky is pretty bad with a lot of clouds out but we are heading out to view the lunar eclipse outside the observatory. We won't be opening up the dome, due to ice and snow buildup, but we have a heater inside. There is snow on the ground and around the observatory and enterence must be through the large gate, not the small one.

Dress warm if your going to arrive. We may not be out there the entire time. The eclipse event happens until 4am. We will likely be there until 3am. You may want to check this blog again before heading out if you head out late to visit. Wear boots and warm clothes.


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I knew today the viewing would be decent

But of course it was so cold and windy out with the winter weather, even an old snowmobile enthusiast like I couldn't muster up enough courage to get out and star gaze.

It gets cold in the observatory and the wind and snow would not have made it a good night to star gaze at HJRO.

I took a quick look at the sky at about 9;30 when I went out for a late night errand. There was some interference in the viewing due to the atmosphere and possibly wind and ice crystals up there. The sky looked clear and the stars bright. It was very cool and very crisp and windy. Subzero wind chills.

The stars twinkled, and that means conditions were not ideal for imaging objects in the sky. It was a good winter night if you were St Nick being pulled in a sleigh. But not the best for star gazing. Astronomers take what they can get sometimes, but I've been out enough to not want to brave frostbite to get in a little more viewing.

A lunar eclipse is going to happen later thus month and I hope it's clear out and I can have the observatory open at that time.

I woke up late at night tonight after getting a few calls about a medical issue and wrote this late night posting at about 3:30am.

I'd look out at the sky tonight. . . Hang on a minute while I peek out of the window.

There's an astronomer who build unusual telescopes one which was a refractor with a flat mirror mounted in a mirror box that fit in a window. The mirror rotates and it movement allowed the fixed refractor to view different objects in the sky. That's the kind if telescope to have in a night like this. Some kind of refractory with a moving flat mirror. There would be some optical sacrifices with the mirror and who knows what kind of thermal problems one would have with a refractor exposed to the cold on one side and the warmth on the eyepiece side. It would probably have to be heated with major dew heaters on the objective side to keep condensation and major dew point problems from happening within it. And perhaps dew heaters on other parts of the PTA as well, which is my guess.


My guess is a nice wide field doublet and a good flat mirror which would be expensive would be a good place to start if you wanted to build one. Maybe.a Williams optics megrez doublet.

Such are the stuff of astronomer dreams as I start to fall asleep again. . . But first to look out of my window.

I can still see stars.

For now the blog readers will have to settle with a photo from my workplace window. It's too cold out there and my ears have a minor ache already.

I'm posting this at 3:45 am outside conditions are clear and bitter cold. I'm heading back under the covers before the inner astronomer decides to run outside.



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I almost made it out last night, but clouds won the race.

I was tied up early Friday, doing a little bit of training for an application I used for newsletter production last night. Jennifer and I had a nice discussion about apple pages and newsletter production. She's the new editor for our faac newsletter. But that's another story.

I arrived at home at about 10:30pm, friday and the sky was fairly clear but it looked a little hazy in spots.

I called George Korody to see what the skies looked like where he lives, and also see if he knew what the forecast would be for the late evening. It was nearing 11pm and the clear sky chart didn't look promising with it's forecast, but sometimes it's wrong.

George directed me to the accu-weather site.

Things would cloud up at midnight according to the clear sky chart which is a separate site and not accuweather's site.

I called one of the other facc members and said I might go to the observatory. Art Parent normally calls when the sky is clear, but he was busy. The satellite on the accu-weather site seemed to show we might have a chance for some viewing for perhaps a few hours.

I grabbed some gear(eyepieces and my laptop) and started toward my car and looked up while on the phone with Art.

A line of cirrus clouds almost like a vapor trail appeared. Clouds were moving in and the sky seemed to be growing worse by the minute, as I headed to the car. The clouds were arriving and they made much of the sky look hazy. I had taken too long to plan. I wasted to much time and missed a short window that I may have had to view.

I settled with a quick view through my 10x50 binoculars. I looked up for less than five minutes and then return to the warmth of my house.

The accuweather satellite maps show good cloud animation and as a plus they work on the iPad.

This is the link I should look at when on the run. Planning is okay for extended open invitations, but sometimes it's better to get out and look while you can and not spend to much time chatting and planning, because you might miss a short viewing opportunity.

As you can see it's cloudy out as I write this.



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I went out for five minutes

Sky was nice with some clouds.

It's cold out but I can't tell how good conditions are with low powered views.

I grabbed my 10 by 50 binoculars and looked at the Orion nebula, m45 the pleidies and the double cluster,

Then I grabbed my f4 four inch telescope, built in 1977 and did sone quick observing of m42 the Orion nebula and m44 using the 25mn eyepiece and a 15mm for Orion and the 25 for m45.

I didn't spend any more time but took a photo of the little scope in a mirror.

Now to sample the soup I made and head off to sleep.




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I wanted to open up the observatory bit I was too tired

There was sone clear skies tonight but I was tired from the results of a painful day and night from the dentist. And I had a ton of work and meetings to do today at work. So I vegged out a bit at home and cooked some homemade soup.

I'd like to take a quick look, but will probably just grab my binoculars and take a peek at the sky at my house and then head to sleep.

Maybe tomorrow night if the weather is better and I have more rest and an easier daytime with less work.

My job at work is waning a bit, but I gave to still work at transferring the work and there is just the effort at cleaningup the cube before I leave. We have a freeze period on software in deember and that makes the month slow for programmers. This is due to heavy holiday workloads. It's amazing that heavy workloads slow the programmers workload down, but that is true where I work.

Astronomy pictures of the day, the NASA site has had some nice pictures and there has been a lot of nice photos on that site.

There was a lot of solar activity on the sub lately and the NASA site has mentioned this. I saw the sky was sunny part of the day but was too busy tobreak away and head to the observatory during lunch. I had a short lunch break and no time to visit HJRO.




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The old tube was removed

I don't know if I put out a post about this. I have to read my own back blog posts. The old telescope tubes were going to be thrown out. I took them home and decided to save them from the scrap heap. I may rework and restore these over time on my own. I may actually rework the mirrors as well, but I think I'd prefer to have them polished and refigured by a professional.

As this would be my personal project, it would cost me some money to do this. It's really not "economically feasible" to do a restore when looking at it from a dollars and cents perspective. If you have "history" with an object, and some history in using it in the past you may have some good memories and feelings about that old object or piece of creation. In the sense that the club built the old blue tube telescope and so many worked on it, it has extra value for me. I was there when it was built. I remember looking through it with other club members. I remember building it. If I was just looking to get an affordable scope I could go out and buy one of many telescopes on the market today that have higher performance and are lighter and frankly look a lot better because they are new. But they are built in China or maybe partially outside this country and partially in California. And they are of course new and have all the bells and whistles. But there is something special you feel when you are looking through a telescope that has history and was built by people here. I know the history, at least part of the history of the blue tube telescope.

The blue tube telescope was spray painted Sky Blue. We called it "sky blue" because it sounded good at that time, back in 1977 and it was a nice sounding name for a color. However the blue we selected was actually "powder blue" when I first described the color I was pushing for when I was the Astronomy Club president. I wanted "powder blue" because that matched the color of my father's Powder blue 1975 Newport Custom. That old Newport Custom was a huge car and had a great ride for cross country road trips. I wanted the telescope to be powder blue, but the terms were quickly changed to "sky blue" which sounds a lot more astronomical.

So when I brought the telescope tube home, I looked at the old tube, it's worn out. It had a lot of grim and dirt on it. Even rust on the straps that were metal and painted that held the tube in the homebuilt telescope yolk mount we made out of wood. The telescope tube looked pretty bad yet. I took out some soap and water and rags and started cleaning it up. I cleaned it up with mostly water and rags. I used sweat equity and mostly just worked on it for a few hours. It was cleaned up pretty well. I left some of the decay on the telescope, to show some of it's age and abuse it had in sitting around all those years. I didn't get rid of all the rust on the straps for example. There are some light rust stains from these on the surface of the tube as well. There's some flaws and separation in the cardboard portion of the tube as well. These look bad, but you don't see them in the dark when you are using the telescope. You won't even notice all the dirt and grim on the the tube that was on it for the most part when it's dark out.

The telescope is still not usable. I removed the tube from the mount. The mirror was removed and sits separately. We checked the mirror out. It's okay, but of course it needs to be repolished and figured. A professional quote for refiguring the mirror from one of the best mirror makers in the country is about $600 maybe more. That's before we even recoat the mirror.

The spider broke a bit when I removed it from the tube. I need to fix the spider and perhaps need to replace the secondary mirror as well. I'd almost be better off with a new spider. I may fix it eventually.

The thing that makes this difficult is from a practical standpoint, this is not actually the best application of dollars for a telescope. I can buy a 10 inch dobsonian telescope for under $500. I can buy a dobsonian Orion telescope and it's less than the cost to fix the mirror. But projects aren't always based on cost.

And a F5 8 inch with a great figure and optics is still a very nice scope to look through. And I'd have the history and know that I'm looking through a telescope that the club built in 1977. There's a special feeling you get when you use a telescope you've built. Maybe it's a bit of pride and something we shouldn't worry about building up to much. I like to think of it as appreciation for all the work that others put into building the earlier instrument.

Fine instruments have this craftsmanship perspective that guys can feel and appreciate. Some items, I'm not going to go into all the kinds of items, but some items have a lot of careful construction and care put into them. A person who has a homebuilt motorcycle or custom motorcycle may feel more appreciation for that than a store bought one. Because it's unique, it has a story and a history. Of course we are not supposed to become overly attached to objects and get to tied up with them. You can check out the extreme example of loving things to much, even junk in a cable show called "Hoarders". "Hoarders" shows people who get so attached to things and so attached to owning things that they end up with a huge collection of junk and decaying items in their house. There house becomes a junkyard and a dumpster. Old folks tend to get into junk collecting and end up holding onto a lot of stuff that has history. Hoarders end up getting a bunch of junk that they haul home and they cannot throw it out because they are to attached to the "value" of the object and "reusing the object" even if it's total garbage. They go to the extreme. You can take reuse to an extreme. They say one man's junk is another mans treasure, but often that second man may be a hoarder. In the old days, I'm talking about a long time ago, people experienced very difficult times and items became scarce. This happened in the Great Depression and during some of the sacrificial years of WWII when items were hard to find. Some in some cities that were under siege in war, or who experienced major economic problems, saw the value in "items" and reusing them or saving them. Because when dollars or currency becomes worthless, then the only value left is in the actual items and bartering may happen. So some people get into this collecting mentality and it actually works at times of extreme need. The problem is some get old, or become mentally unstable and put to much attachment into the value of things and they don't have time or can't muster the energy to mentally reject things and throw them out. They have more that they are collecting than they are throwing away. Older folks buy items and pay a lot for them as well and over time the items become worthless, at least many of these items will. And these things are useless, but they will see the item as if it was new, and remember all the money they spent on it. They may just have "depression" mentality and think that they are getting ready for the next depression. Or they may be kind of an odd junk collector of sorts. So they will start to hoard junk items.

Older folks get into this. And older families can get into this habit. How do you break free? You have to decide to go through the things you own and look at the real practical value of these things. Can they be easily replaced? Have you used this and can you really use this? Will you use it, or is it just some useless memory item. Some old items, like old magazines for example have little value but people will keep them even if they are largely worthless. The collector will always have some excuse. If they are a hoarder, they will find or have a complex set of beliefs that puts a lot of value on the junk. They become emotionally attached to it. I'm not talking about a family heirloom, I'm talking about crap you may even pick up out of a dumpster, someone else may have some low quality crap they throw out, and it's worthless. And you'll pick it up, figure it can be fixed, when it can't and haul it home and add it to your heap. Old folks get into this more than younger ones.

Kids may have this tendency to, but usually with toys. They have to have more and more and soon they have a room full of junk. A healthy parent and child may end up having some kind of criteria or formula to give the older toys away to keep the clutter down. The value isn't in the item, it's being able to use something or not use it. And also there may be more value in giving something to someone who has nothing, than keeping it and hoarding it for yourself.

Some popular materialistic sayings are really based on a hoarding mentality as well. Think about it? He who dies with the most toys wins. . . ? What does he win? Toys don't really make winners. But we think this in a our modern life. Greed can at times end up creating things like the feeling that we can expand and produce nothing, we can profit and everyone can get richer and richer. We did this to some extent in the past 20 or 30 years with the boom years and credit bubble. We thought we could buy more and more and our jobs would pay more and more and the middle class would move to China and we'd all be rich and we'd make money off China's emerging class in a world economy. It didn't happen. What happened, was raw materials and fuel prices increased. We moved production offshore to other countries and we couldn't produce anymore. We created false economies built on ever increasing leveraged growth, that couldn't be maintained. We hit a resource and possibly a "conspiracy" limit. It's difficult to say what all the causes were. But everyone wanted to haul home a boatload of toys from big box stores and fill up huge new houses with them that had large mortgages. Then the markets started to fall. On the downside, and as the economic crisis came apart, all that need for new toys and big houses, didn't solve any problems. Some of course lost their houses and all their junk from China was thrown on the lawn. This is the end result in hoarding and greed. The final result of "he who dies with the most toys wins". Things are not as important as people, but we don't hear that very much in America. It's used as a slogan to fund raise, but not much else. Well I've strayed off into values and greed discussions instead of astronomy, so it's time to get back to the column.

I'm hoping I'm not showing hoarding tendencies toward old telescope junk. Maybe that's a weakness of astronomers.

There was some good solar activity going on a couple of days ago

According to the Nasa site. You can see some of this on the internet.

With the bad weather we were unable to look at the sun during the past week or so. We have no good updates or invites to present at this time. Maybe the weather will change for the better in a few days. One can always hope.

I heard a report that we will have a lot of cold weather like we are experiencing now for the next few weeks. This may mean we'll have few cloudless viewing nights or days up through Christmas.

Sorry about the lack of posts

I've been very involved with my daytime job. I work as a computer analyst for the state of Michigan and will be retiring soon. You would think retirement would allow me more time. It should, but it causes more work at work as I scramble to get things setup for those who will have to take over my duties at work.

The observing conditions have been poor lately and that has kept me away from the observatory. Additionally I'm trying to get rid of time deadlines in my personal life and get ready at least initially for some vacationing and getting into some projects that may take a lot of time. This means I'm trying to get rid of a few responsibilities yet help those who will be taking them over. For example I'm giving up the job of editing the faac newsletter at least for a while. The new editor hopefully will be able to edit and do a better job with it and I'll help her with it but try to remove some of the deadline pressures I felt. It seemed at times I was trying to open up the observatory on a clear night for visitors just before a newsletter deadline and I needed to edit the newsletter and also felt a desire to open up the observatory. I live close to the observatory and I try to keep it open and provide access for club members and the public, so it's a priority for me.

Well you would think that giving up the newsletter editing job would provide me with more free time, but that's not the case at first. Because I want to provide some hints and even photos for the new newsletter editor. Help them get into the swing of things without many hassles. So I'm keeping busy getting some training material and reference material ready, and I lost a disk drive through an accident and it had about 3 months worth of recent photos stored on it. I'm not even sure how many photos I lost.

The new newsletter editor has a Macintosh to edit the newsletter with. I use a Macintosh as well and we both use Pages. This is a big advantage for the transition because I already have figured out the little shortcuts and quick things you may want to do in Apple's Pages application. I'm actually using a program called "ScreenFlow" that can record a Macintosh screen session and create a video of any program I have on the Macintosh. I can record the editing of the newsletter inside Pages, and show and tell all about the shortcuts and hints I've learned in editing and throwing together a newsletter. This will save the new editor hours of experimentation and provide a better quality product. If things go well, I'll hopefully be able to provide her with an article or two and they will be better than when I was the editor, because I'll have more time to write and refine the article, rather than write and edit the newsletter. I'm hoping to provide better content and take better photos and video of activities in the club and the observatory and provide better content that's current event related.

So I've been doing a lot of stuff behind the scenes, but not posting a lot about the observatory. I also of course have many other little things to do, but hopefully I'll have a lot more free time after the new year and that will mean I'll be able to focus and help out the club and the observatory in different ways that may be new and unique and provide a better overall experience. Maybe even help out with gathering more in the realm of stories and photos for the newsletter. It's tough to edit a newsletter and try to create content. I tried to do both and that was difficult. To many hats and to much to do. The quality will suffer when a person tries to do to many things at one time.

There are a lot of little projects and probably more when it comes to writing things and drafts that go on behind the scenes and I never bring them up here. So much to do and so little to post at times on the observing blog.

I've really had very few observing sessions in the past few weeks due to the weather as well. I tried a new heater for the winter observing sessions. This heater throws ir heat and heats the person or object directly rather than heating the air. It heats via radiate energy from ir radiation. This is more efficient and causes less heat to build up and escape from the shutter. Having hot air inside an observatory will cause thermos and interference with the best seeing conditions. The best way to observe is bundled up and keeping heat sources away from the telescope and away from the front of the telescope. This even means heat sources out a ways from the telescope that may be throwing up heat. The heat from a warm sidewalk after sunset may throw off thermals for some time. For this reason astronomers who are hoping to get a better view will seek sites with more ground around the telescope and less building, pavement or anything that gives off heat. Die hard astronomers and imagers who do astrophotography will even tell you the construction of an observatory can cause problems. Block walls provide security of course, but they hold a lot of heat and may radiate thermals into the sky if they are heated up. The best observatory color for the outside walls is white. Black walls would be a heat sink and heat up much more. Light thin walls are also better because there is less thermal mass. But of course in today's modern environment, you cannot have super thin flimsy walls, especially when you consider security of the equipment from bad weather or uninvited guests. So most observatories are just big buildings, but ideally you would have a flimsy building out in the middle of a tropical island to observe from.

As you can see I'm starting to talk about vacation islands, and I haven't even retired yet.

More to follow.

In news regarding the observatory one of our faac members is working on creating a flyer for libraries to advertise the observatory. George Korody is working on this and he asked me for photos. In the rush to get my computer reorganized I actually dropped a critical disk drive and lost a lot of photos. That put a bit of a damper on my thanksgiving vacation.



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