Things to do when it's cloudy out.

Astronomers can have a normal life, or almost a normal one when it is cloudy out. We don't feel the urge to run out and observe or photograph the stars, planets, and other objects when it's cloudy out.

Our normal life or one that is less dependent on weather related joys of clear skies can resume. We can dream about new equipment, research what we'd like to buy. Perhaps even sell a telescope we don't use much anymore and get ready for the next one. We might even work on building a telescope, but that is often not done as much as it used to be in the old days.

Probably each week I spend a few hours looking or thinking about buying telescopes, cameras, some new mount or other thing that will give me another option to enjoy astronomy. A person can get pretty obsessed with a hobby.

Sometimes I tend to get to enamored with the prospects of new equipment. Since I'm often at the observatory with others and we are able to look through and use a perfectly good c14 telescope there, it's almost never a dream about buying or owning a large 14 inch telescope, but often a more pragmatic thought of getting something that augments the viewing at the observatory. For example a small telescope I can setup quickly and use somewhere else or use at HJRO. After all the big telescope is inside the dome, so I can simply setup a different small telescope outside if we need another telescope for the crowd or to provide a different kind of view to visitors. So I often think of augmenting the view.

I think one of my weaknesses is I'm a bit lazy on the astronomy side. That is I ignore the facts on astronomy a bit too much. I need to read more about the basics and read more about astronomy. There are so many equipment options and distractions now days that it's easy to focus on the equipment more and forget to read up and learn what is going on with astronomy in general. Much of the news is often equipment related and equipment sales help drive advertising. There is also a lot of news that is going on in astronomy that is available over the Internet and with the new gadgets we can look this stuff up. I have an iPad for example and there is a ton of facts about astronomy that is out there on the net or tucked away in programs like Sky Safari. These have tons of reading about various stars, objects, stories behind the shapes and constellations that have been put into the myth portion of astronomy, their history, etc.

A lot of history and facts about the sky doesn't change. Many new discoveries happen that are more current. I read somewhere that something like 80 percent of what we know about astronomy has been discovered since 1980 or so. It's almost tempting to use this supposed fact to ignore older astronomy books. Think about it, if 80 percent of what we know has been learned in the past thirty years, then even if I knew everthing, about astronomy that was written in books up to 1980" I'd only know about 20 percent of the stuff.

It's interesting sometimes to dust off old books or even scans of old books that are really old and read what these scientific texts said about astronomy. Even if the stuff was wrong at that time and some of the facts were off, it's interesting to see how these earlier scientists guessed at what they saw. For example some old books might talk about some nebula as if it was a nebula, but we now know that the object they were writing about is a galaxy and not even a nebula. Some older books from the late 1800s referred to the Andromeda nebula, not knowing it was a galaxy of stars. They thought it was just a dust cloud.

There are some things I need to perhaps do to make it easier on me or easier for visitors sometimes when they are at the observatory to make their visit more enjoyable, I think one of those things is to create a small menu of options and use this as a list of things they can do or experience at the observatory. This involves equipment lists and options mostly. The objects in the sky may change and some of this of course is limited by what we have at the observatory at any given time. Some of these options could vary from night to night, but to just have a list of these things would be beneficial to be able to go over them. Sometimes we end up looking through the c14 and everyone who shows up gets to look though it and of course wants to look through it, but there are so many other options, which can vary depending on how we setup to observe. I suppose the more you visit the more things you could experience or see at the observatory.

Many visitors may just be happy to look at a couple objects, maybe Jupiter or Mars or the moon and then go on their way. Others want to see as many objects or certain objects and they may bring a request list of objects or just ask what we are looking at.

Sometimes I have a small telescope setup to show what smaller telescopes can show or excel at. We have three telescopes inside, but other telescopes can augment the viewing experience.

I'm going to chat about the list in the next few posts and put this list out more like a list. Kind of like a scratch pad of options that I'm working on. This way others might have an idea of things they would hope to take away from their visit.

These options aren't just what we can do to look up but also how would we document your visit. For example sometimes we take low light exposures of people looking through the telescope inside HJRO, and other times we take long exposure photos of guests or members of the club while they are outside either looking through the telescope or even posing just standing near the observatory. These can be nice things to have to remember your visit. So it's time to at least work on that list. Because sometimes I'm just having so much fun looking through the telescope that I easily forget to mention the options we have for visitors. I think an option list can make things fun and perhaps make your visit more memorable.


Okay now for a few things for the list these being easy:
- Show the original mirror and talk about the original telescope and restoration. This being the tour of our small observatory.
- Show photos on the wall. This isn't often done at night because we keep it dark inside the observatory.
- Show how we open and close the shutter and rotate the dome.
- Wide field view through the Meade refractor.
- Views of the sun through the Meade refractor using the white light solar filter. We only use safe filters for viewing the sun, don't look at the sun unless you have an astronomer explain and verify you are using a safe filter.
- view the sun through the solar scope hydrogen alpha viewing.
- View through the c14 a nighttime object.
- show you one of the ways we take photos of the moon, planets or other objects through the telescopes. There's more than one option.
- show you the way we take movies through the telescopes of objects for later processing using the Stellacam or Meade camera.
- Show you how we use laptops to take images using a camera to control a camera.
- Show you how we can choose an object using the sky software on the observatory computer and point the telescope to find an object.
- show you how different focusers work on telescopes. This of course happens during observing.

There are a lot of things we can show you at our observatory. We can chat about this stuff for hours and hours and still just scratch the surface of many of these topics. I guess having a list might be a good idea. Most of the things above can be done easily by the club members giving tours with equipment that is owned by the school system and available to all of us. The next post will be more about some specific options that are available, but more dependent on extra stuff we bring along to the observatory.




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad