We will be open tonight at about 9:30pm.

The exact time might be a little later depending on how the faac Dearborn astrophotography meeting goes tonight.

I could open earlier but I'm probably going to attend the meeting and also will likely eat a snack before opening later. The sky is supposed to be clear tonight, but it will be cold and we will wait and open up a little later than we could to let Jupiter rise higher in the sky. It looks really good. Foe those who can brave the cold in a dark sky site you may see meteors streaming from a meteor shower tonight as well.


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Backyard EOS AVI capture of Jupiter from last night.

We were open briefly last night. Four of us were out. Mike, Tim Dey, Rick and I were out at the observatory.

Around midnight I captured an AVI and processed it. This was captured using backyard EOS. A nice program for those with canon dslr cameras and live view mode. I had the canon EOS t1i hooked up to the c14 for the capture of Jupiter. Had shutter speed set to 1/80 of a second. Captured 2000 frames. Stacked and processed the AVI file using Registax 6.

Backyard EOS provides 5x video zoom capture from the t1i. The capture of the video was at native f11 focal length of the c14. That being 3911mm. But the 5x digital zoom capture makes it five times closer. So this would be what a 5x Barlow lens would show for a mounted camera looking at Jupiter.

So what is 3911 times 5? That's the focal length of this shot for a t1i. The t1i uses a 3/4 frame chip as well, so it's a little closer than a full frame chip or 35mm film negative would show.




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Observatory will be closed Monday due to bad weather

We are still waiting for clear skies for a Monday scout troop tour.

Weather looks bad tomorrow, so we won't be open for a tour.

Astronomy seems to be a hobby where you truly meet fair weather friends, at least when it comes to observing the stars.


Greg


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A quick summary on NTSC video and pixel aspect ratios using Stellacam camera

The Stellacam camera is a video camera for astrophotography.

It produces a video signal for a video monitor. We can record that NTSC video into a video editing program using a card like a Dazzle card and create an AVI file to get images from. This can work well for images like planets and other images as well. We can stack that video and get an image of a planet or the moon, or some other astronomy object and see more details, basically improve seeing by using hundreds of exposures. We do this with programs like Registax. These programs will analyze and select only the in focus frames of an AVI movie or some of the higher quality frame images and stack them or put them together.

The results can be nice, but there can be some problems. One problem is the recording software or Registax may not account for the NTSC video pixel aspect ratio. That is there may be stretched pixel conversions that can appear. This is due to the television and video standards of early television using Non-square pixels, that is pixels that are stretched. Here is what would typically happen.



Round images which use square pixels will be displayed on an NTSC monitor which is not using round pixels. Since the pixels in video are not round the resulting graphic would be stretched and would not look round. People doing graphics on a computer trying to display those graphics would have to use Computer Graphics programs that could calculate and stretch the graphics to display on a stretched pixel format, making the image appear correctly on the NTSC monitor which is not using square pixels.

Now consider what would happen if you took a video camera and made it sensitive to low light for astronomy and wanted it to display it's pixels and images on a tv monitor, that is using an old school monitor and you wanted the image to be correct and display correctly on a video monitor. You would have to add a function to convert and stretch the ccd sensor pixels to NTSC or elongated pixels, so they would display correctly. You would stretch the pixels so they would look correct on video.

The top chart below snows this. Because the tv monitor is not displaying square pixels we stretched them, in the hardware so they will look correct, and the round circle for example the shape of a planet or the moon would look round on the tv monitor.





But wait a minute. What happens when you try to digitize that video signal using something like the dazzle board. The ntsc signal going out the cable is stretched for the long pixels on a video monitor. That video if its not interpreted correctly will end up looking like longer pixels and this will mean that pixels that are supposed to be 1 dot wide will be 1.33 dots wide for the dazzle board to see them.

The software that captures the video may not have aspect ratio settings that can account for the non-square pixels. It will end up showing a planet that is not round. It looks round on an ntsc monitor, but when its digitized to an avi file, the software may not rescale it.

What youll end up with is a planet that looks oblong.

As you can see below, the programs down stream that use this AVI file will generated a stretched image.

(notice Jupiter looks nice, with good black and white details, but it's stretched a little bit and is out of round.).


The solution is to rescale and reformat the image later on to change it's width back and get rid of the stretch. I'm not showing that step here.

Registax is not expecting non square video sourced files for it's images, it's expecting video from a square sensor, like an astrophotography ccd camera.

How could a webcam work? The webcam uses video and displays and scales it for a normal computer monitor which is using square pixels not NTSC stretched pixels, so the regular webcam video or a camera like the Meade DSI camera would create a video clip with square pixels to begin with.

To make things a little more confusion, Jupiter is actually stretched a little bit in real life, because it's spinning at such a high rate of speed. Liquid and clouds literally fly out around the equator and cause the planet to bulge a little bit. So I wouldn't want to bring it back to a total circle with a perspective correction.

For more information on pixel aspect ratios see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_aspect_ratio

But be aware it's only talking about square pixels being moved to NTSC or other video non square ratios. . . Its not talking about moving from NTSC to digital for digital processing that remains in the computer display realm.

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Jupiter and our moon, in one field of view

The following was taken on 11-28-2012.

This image shows the actual distance between the two objects as they appeared in the wide field of view of the Meade refractor.

We could see these inside the same field of view with a 40mm or 60mm eyepiece.

Because the moon and Jupiter were above and below in their orientation, my Vixen binoculars could not see both fully in the same field of view. Perhaps earlier in the evening I would have seen both in the vixen binoculars. I could only see part of the moon and Jupiter with the vixen binoculars.

This photo was taken actually as two exposures. One was dimmer and showed the moon clearer, the other brighter photograph showed Jupiter but the moon looked overexposed. By layering both photos together in a simple photo processing application, like Filterstorm for iPad I was able to easily put both together and make it look more like our eye would see them.

We could see a few moons of Jupiter while looking through the eyepiece at both, but I don't think that's visible in this photo.

I sharpened the photo a bit in Filterstorm for iPad as well.




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Ever wonder if the observatory is open.

Observatory hotline: 313-444-5850

The above number rings the observatory phone and a couple of phones to volunteers who open up the observatory.

Last week we were open, but I only opened for a couple hours and wanted to focus on getting some photos taken. I invited some of the Faac club regulars but didn't spend the time to announce the observatory as being open as it was a last minute decision to open up.

If it's clear out and we are at the observatory we will answer the phone.

If you call ahead I may be able to tell you if we will be open, but I can't always know for certain with Michigan weather.

As for this weekend which is half over I was unable to open up Saturday afternoon for e brief hours of sunlight we had.

According to the clear sky chart tonic and tomorrow will be cloudy, so we won't be open. Forecasts predict rain, so it's unlikely we will have clear skies. The clear sky chart is actually blank for Sunday night. I'm not sure why it's actually not predicting any weather at all. If it's clear Sunday night we might be open.

I can say if we are open Monday evening it will be for a scout troop and it's still dependent on the forecasts. Right now it doesn't look good for another Monday. Maybe our third Monday night cancellation due to poor weather.

Also we may be open for middle school children Wednesday and Thrusday, all day long, for solar astronomy, but the priority will be with the school children and we probably won't have time Wednesday or Thrusday for any visitors.

So from what I can gather, although we may be open chances are most nights and days for the next six days we will be closed to the public.

I'll try to post more when I know more. . . The weather plays a big factor in this and I have other family things at times that keep me away from the observatory.

During the past week I tried to get a good photo of Jupiter to process, with little success. I did get a photo of e moon and Jupiter in one field of view when they were close to each other. I still have to review that photo.

Greg


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Revisiting a Still of Jupiter with Photoshop.

The day before Thanksgiving I went to the Plymouth Astrophotography SIG group.  It was an interesting meeting, but there was not to much instruction on the basics given to any of the newer people.  I actually missed the first 20 minutes or so of the meeting, so it's difficult to say if they gave any basic instruction.  They usually go over photoshop skills and photoshop demos where we can walk along with our laptops and a test image.  That didn't happen.

There was a showing of a photo being worked on and some work that some of the imagers did.  My images are far less technical and far less detailed as I usually shoot basic images with basic equipment.

There was also a slideshow about a trip one of the members took out west, which was interesting, inside a mirror factory that builds very large telescopes and an astronomy show. . . but I don't have photos of that presentation.

The topics were varied. . . just sitting around and looking at the photos others were working on gave me the desire to open up the simple Jupiter stills I took and play with them a bit in photoshop to see if I could improve them a bit more.

I choose a single still, a JPEG image.  I shot this in RAW and JPEG, but downloaded only the JPEGS to play with.  The Raw image might give better results, but I'm basically just learning how to enhance images a bit and this image is far from perfect in getting a good still image of a planet.  In practice it's better to take VIDEO recordings of planets and process these.  For the planets and moon an AVI file can be processed if you record an AVI file using a basic WEBCAM based astronomy camera on a telescope or use a dedicated camera, like the FLEA3 which can record AVI files which are much better for getting planetary images.

What usually happens at HJRO is I show up with a couple of cameras but not the Stellacam.  I usually have my iphone and Canon EOS t1i, which don't require a computer to control them.  Because I'm not using the Stellacam or the Meade Deep sky camera, I'm not capturing AVI files.  We will setup the HJRO computer for the Meade camera soon and fix it for the Stellacam, but right now I have to haul a laptop with me to control these and capture from these.  So to be quick, and not mess much with imaging, I'm usually not setup for Stellacam imaging.  After all I'm usually opening up for visual observing and imaging is often an afterthought, not a planned activity.  Deep sky imaging requires long exposures with our setups and we often don't dedicate the telescope for images. . . there more details to discuss but I'll spare you that in this post.

So I loaded up some JPEG images and found one that looked to have some pretty good detail.  I decided to tweak the image using photoshop, and we normally use curve controls to bring out details of faint objects.  Curve adjustments can do more than this, sometimes it can balance an image.  The curve filters most Astronomers use adjust the entire picture and we usually adjust the RGB curves all at the same time.  This to have a balanced color adjustment.  We don't want to alter the color balance much, but sometimes some will add color saturation to bring out details.  Most astronomers who post process, won't put in to much saturation or overly push the image, because they don't want over-saturated colors of levels to blow out the image and make it to bright and lose detail.

Most use curves for fainter images and bring up levels.  For a high exposed image, you may use curves that are "negative" which pull down levels.  This is usually suggested to get rid of sky glow, in the "Nebulosity manual" for example.  Most Astronomers don't use negative curve settings much to bring down brightness settings.

In this Jupiter image I used curves at first and then found out as I opened and worked on other images, that the HDR settings for an image offer a lot more control and tweaking ability.  I revisited a curved adjusted image of Jupiter and loaded that back into Photoshop and did some HDR processing.  I found that the DETAILS setting to bring out more details in the HDR filter could work some wonders.

The exported image was quite bright and over-saturated.  I brought down some of the color in Apple Preview and brought down the exposure a bit.  I was fairly happy with the result considering not a lot of detail was going to come out of one single still image of Jupiter.  You have to use many images and stack to get rid of noise and bring out more details.  Since I didn't have an AVI file for REGISTAX to work with I'd have to settle with bringing out detail from this single still.

The resulting image was over-saturated and had more color than some would like to see in a Jupiter image.  The color details bring out more detail that might not be present in a black in white image in this case, so pushing the color information helps bring out interesting features.

The resulting image looked pretty nice and sharp, with some nice details, but it's still far short of efforts others show with AVI recordings through a 2.5x barlow on a C14.  I shot this JPEG handheld using a Canon EOS through a 25mm eyepiece and 2x barlow.  That kind of image will never compare to an image taken in an AVI file and processed in Registax with the same C14 setup and sky conditions.

The final image had a little bit of noise in it that I thought might be cleaned up using Neat Image Noise reduction.  I loaded it up in Neat image and it cleaned up the image nicely.  I made some adjustments.  Usually noise reduction will take out some details in the image, if noise is inside the image itself.  For example the noise that might be in part of the image of Jupiter near the top pole in this photo may be reduced, but some band details might get a bit more fuzzy when that works.  Usually image processing on an astronomy image may reduce noise in the sky that is not the detailed information you have elsewhere in the photo.  I attempted to adjust noise in the planet's detail area.  This made the image a little softer than I would like it to be.  A few tweaks of the many settings in Neat Image Noise reduction and I was able to add back some details, using a detail enhancement setting inside the image program.

Many use softening to soften the noise in a photo of Jupiter or Saturn.  This may reduce fine details in the bands of gas in a Jupiter photo.  I don't like softening the photo to much.   To me Gaussian blurs are usually overkill and reduce detail in Jupiter images, especially near the edge of the planet's disk.

Here's the result.  It's far from perfect, but it gives you an idea of how much detail was visible in the eyepiece.  A human viewer would see an image that had a lot less color, but you would see some color in the eyepiece for Jupiter.

This image looks better on my Macintosh than on my iphone.  The image was over-processed to bring out details and that makes it look a little bit more like a painting than a photo.  You can see cloud band details however that were not clearly evident at the eyepiece.  The seeing conditions, stillness of the air was good enough for brief flashes of detail to appear at the eyepiece, but this was perhaps for only 5% of the time and most of the time the image would look a little more blurry than shown below and you'd catch the sharp image from time to time at the eyepiece.

Will open up for solar at 3:40pm for solar viewing And around 7pm for evening viewing.

We are going to be open tonight.

Last night we were plagued with fog and not open.

Tonight should be much better.

More to follow.

Greg


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HJRO will not be open tonight, at least not by me - Friday report

Friday night viewing report.  

QUICK SUMMARY  - Looked at about a dozen objects under marginal viewing conditions.

Briefly we had four FAAC volunteers show up hoping that some of the HFCC club members might show up.  One HFCC member (Aaron) showed up late.  The others were apparently unable to make it with the late announcement and cold weather.  Perhaps they had to many other plans to show up in the almost freezing weather.   The viewing conditions were pretty bad although the skies looked fairly good down to about 25 degrees above the horizon.  Sky glow and humidity made the sky appear to be hazy near the horizon and when I finally left at 2am a heavy icy mist and more humidity covered the low lying areas of the ground and affecting the sky viewing, making it look like a clear bowl up high, but foggy near the horizon.  

The weather is supposed to be about the same Saturday night, but humidity will be even worse.  Expect a heavy icy dew falling.  Those standing outside will have telescopes and themselves covered with a dew frost that will be cold and of course increasingly thick throughout the evening once the ice dew starts falling.

Because of the relatively light turnout on Friday, and because I'm not feeling very well.  I'm not opening up Saturday.  The other FAAC volunteers at HJRO had enough of the fair viewing conditions and cold and I'm pretty sure they won't show up as they had enough of that poor weather and viewing last night.   I have to hope and plan for Monday's event with up to 40 visitors.  I'm actually hoping that I'll feel much better and we have some decent viewing conditions so we can host the event Monday.  But there is a part of me that hopes the weather is bad for Monday and we can reschedule the boy scout event, because I don't know how well I'll recover by Monday from the cold and a "cold bug" that apparently has taken hold of me today.

NOW FOR THE VIEWING DETAILS  (We had three or four visitors for solar viewing and four volunteers and visitors for night viewing.)

Three people from Lake Erie Metro Park arrived.  They were told we were open by Tim Dey.  We had one visitor a new member (Aaron) from the HFCC club, but actually he has been here before and is automatically a member of Faac.   Aaron arrived late and only saw the late night objects, and others were leaving when he arrived.  I think Aaron was there for 90 minutes to 2 hours.  We talked with him about meteor shower viewing and viewing sites for some of the time.  Rick thought Crosswinds marsh was a good area to view meteors locally.  But I added with the cold weather and late hours required with frost, I thought that would be challenging and not very rewarding for this Saturday night.  I also mentioned I've never attended a meteor shower party or been at one where I felt the view was worth the trouble, but I often view with telescopes and don't view meteors at dark skies, naked eye, which is the way most shower watchers see more meteors.   

Many times showers show as few as half the meteors per hour as they are rated and you won't often see those in brighter skies.  Some locations nearby are darker, but Lincoln Park and HJRO is not one of them.  Tim Dey said he saw about 25 meteors per hour during a meteor shower a couple months back, but he was at a dark sky site.  When I tried to view the same shower for 45 minutes from my yard in Lincoln Park, I saw no meteors at all.  A fellow FAAC astronomer from Dearborn, saw maybe two in the same 45 minutes.

I sent a text message on Thursday, that we'd be open on Friday, to the HFCC Astronomy club president, but didn't know if any of the members would show up.

Last night (Friday) it was cold out.  The 40 degree early temperatures felt much colder with a gentle humid breeze that would later turn to ice dew falling.  It felt like a cross between visiting a humid England, and going up north to snowmobile.  

The icy frost and high humidity didn't help viewing much.  A light breeze made it feel colder outside.

We had four FAAC volunteers who showed up for the HFCC Friday viewing,   Tim Campbell, Art Parent, Rick Arzadon and myself.

Also Mike showed up briefly and was there earlier in the day briefly during solar viewing.  Mike and Tim were out for the solar viewing hour or so that we were out from 4 to 5pm.

We looked at a number of objects, but these were spaced apart due to some being up early and others up later.  Unfortunately the sky was much worse than predicted for clear seeing via the clear sky chart.  We could see clearly but high humidity and some winds probably caused the seeing to be degraded a bit, we could not really see Jupiter very sharp even with the 25mm eyepiece on the C14.   Earlier in the evening we could see Jupiter and the shadow from IO on the surface of the cloud layer, but the moons shadow wasn't tack sharp as it would have been the night before under better viewing.  I could put 12.5mm on the c14 with great viewing on Thursday night, but last night even the 13mm that Tim Campbell had didn't show much beyond a fuzzy mushy large image in the eyepiece, not much detail, just a soft larger image.  The 25mm showed detail but not tack sharp detail.  It was probably sharper with a lower power eyepiece.

7pm
We also looked at the moon before it set, only a couple of us looked at the moon as that was early on.  Rick and I looked at the moon.  Tim and Art arrived in time to get a brief glimpse of the moon.

7:30pm
The four of us also looked at Neptune and Uranus.  Neptune had set by the time other visitors stopped by.

We looked at the Ring Nebula.

We looked at Jupiter early and throughout the evening as well it looked better as it rose, but humidity conditions were getting worse and it didn't look to much better than when it was first visible.

We looked at the double cluster and M45, common open clusters.

We looked at m42 the Orion Nebula.  We also looked at some other objects, M1, some open clusters.  We tried to look for the dumbbell nebula later in the evening, but it was to low and washed out with sky glow.

Some looked at m42 with the 03 filter and also a hydrogen beta filter to compare them.  Tim said the. 03 filter was better for m42.

There were probably a few other objects that I forgot to mention.  We had a lot of discussion at times.  For some of the visitors I told them some quick information regarding the observatory and they viewed a half a dozen objects at most.

I setup the binocular telescope and Big Bertha, and some of us looked through them, but the cold weather made it easier to view from inside the observatory.  Aaron mentioned the HFCC group was thinking about looking at a meteor shower.  The shower is a minor one and would likely require very early morning viewing in the 2am to 4am range.  It peaked this morning, and it's a minor shower with only 15 meteors an hour peak predicted.

You will see meteors with naked eye observing and it's better at a dark sky site.  This means you want to be at a dark sky area, and it should have nice views hopefully with a low horizon to see more of the sky.

The cold frost and icy conditions made the viewing conditions much less than ideal.  Clear, but not decent high powered views were a disappointment.  We had a good time talking but the cold and lack of visitors was a bit disappointing.

It's supposed to be worse today, with more icy conditions with higher humidity.  This means it will likely be cold, frosty with heavy frosts and a bowl like haze near the horizon.  That will make huge sky glow near the horizon near city lights and make low horizon viewing difficult.  HJRO doesn't have a good location for meteor viewing.  I've really never been to a meteor shower party or been much of one to go out and look for meteor showers, I just happen to see an occasional meteor during a viewing event when a shower might happen, catching a glimpse of a stray one.

Members who have done meteor shower watching have missed results, at a darker site it would be better.

When I woke up this morning I felt really sick, like a stomach flu bug or something hit me.  It was probably due to the cold and fatigue of the long sessions during the past two nights.

I can't see the point of opening up HJRO tonight, for a couple of visitors and poor viewing conditions.  The moon might be up early and offer some interesting viewing, but in my experience HFCC astronomy club members often show up late at night so they would miss the early viewing.  For some reason, lately the trend for college age viewers is they show up after 11pm.

If I open up tonight, it would only be for a couple of hours, but I'm feeling to sick to open up tonight and I don't think the other Faac volunteers would show up to lighten the load in running the observatory due to the cold, poor viewing condition and low turnout we'd expect.

So I don't think I'm going to open up the observatory at all tonight.

Maybe I can get one of the other key keepers to open up.

The other problem with opening up tonight is if the weather improves by Monday, I may have 40 scouts and parents arrive at HJRO.  I can't risk getting more ill and being unable to open by Monday because I sat outside at HJRO under frost conditions for six hours tonight.  Especially for one visitor.

I'm really thinking about limiting and budgeting the time that HJRO is open to much shorter time periods and announce we would be open for only a short two hour window, especially during the winter hours.

That's my thoughts today.  I was out for six hours observing Thursday and eight hours Friday, so I think my observing time at HJRO during this cold weekend has hit it's limit.

Greg

We will be open Friday night for observing, hope to see Jupiter as well as we did last night

Single still image using Canon EOS T1i processed a little using preview to bring out details.  This was a still image I took holding the camera up to a 25mm Plossl eyepiece which was in a 2x barlow.  This gave a 12.5 mm focal length.  The power of the eyepiece view can be calculated by dividing the focal length of the eyepiece/barlow combination into the focal length of the main mirror/objective.  In this case 3911mm/12.5 will give us the power.  That gives us 312 power.  So this is what Jupiter looked like (in the camera) looking through the eyepiece.

Naked eye you saw basically the same amount of detail.  The colors may be slightly more bright in this photo than you'd see in the eyepiece.  This is due to the color sensors in a camera being more sensitive to colored light than those in our eyes.  Our eyes are only 5% efficient at getting color information, the camera chip in a typical DSLR is 70% efficient.

For low light photos and even photos of the planets, the camera can show much more color than the eyes will see.  Also with very low light targets that are faint, only our black and white sensors in our eyes will fire from the dim light.  This is why faint objects only look to be black and white.  When we take photos of them with good equipment, we can see color in the photos, but not with the naked eye through the telescope.

In may ways, the naked eye and visual observing is at a disadvantage to photography.  We can't take a timed exposure.  We can't digitally "stack" all the good images and throw away the bad ones that are blurry and moving.  We have a lot of disadvantages.  Also many of the photos you see are timed exposures and show a lot of detail you will never see with your eyes, even through the largest available telescopes.  So some people are disappointed by what they see when looking at faint fuzzy objects that are very dim.   Some items in space, usually the moon, Saturn and Jupiter, may show more details through a large telescope than a quick photo can show.   You may see more detail than a fast, single exposure can show.  This photo is a pretty good example and pretty close to what we could see last night.  It's a little larger than it would appear in the eyepiece.

With higher power, we start seeing the effects of the atmosphere more and detail starts to break down as we are seeing more distortions in the air currents and our weather.   There's a lot more I could say, but I'll keep the post short.

Tonight the observatory will be open and we will be able to look at the moon early on, around 7PM.  Later in the evening, around 9PM we won't be viewing the moon, because it will have set but Jupiter will be getting higher in tonight's sky and we will be able to see it in the C14.  It will look very clear and you should see much detail, like you'd see in that photo above.

The Great Red spot is visible in the photo above.  It rotates around the planet and may be in view or out of view, I have to check some common astronomy programs to see where it will be and they are not on this computer.  If it's out we'll likely see it and hopefully with as much detail as you can see in the above photo.  There is really much more detail being seen in Jupiter lately because it's near opposition, almost exactly opposite of the sun in the night sky.  It will be in opposition, in December.

Saturn is setting with the sun now and not visible in the night sky.   We were looking at Saturn and Mars earlier in the year, when they were higher in the sky.  Mars is somewhat visible early near sunset, but it's getting so close to the sun and sets so close being low, it's not a very good target and it's best viewed with a telescope outside of the observatory, due to it's very low position.  We probably won't see Mars tonight.  Venus can be  seen early in the morning before the sun rises.

We will be able to view Uranus and Neptune as well in the early evening around, better before 8PM.

An early object to look at:
M57 - The Ring Nebula.  Those arriving early in the evening may be able to view the Ring Nebula.  It's a planetary nebula that looks like a faint smoke ring.  It has a couple of faint stars inside it that are about as faint as the minor planet Pluto.  These stars can be seen in photographs, but it's not likely that you'll see them with the C14 visually.  You'll see the smoke ring.  You can even see it with low powered telescopes.  You can see it through my binocular telescope at 36x, but the ring looks very small at lower powers and looks much better at higher powers, that a larger telescope like the C14 can provide.


M42 - The Orion Nebula
The Orion Nebula is always a favorite and bright deep sky object to view.  It will be 13 degrees above the horizon at 10PM.  We are better off viewing it when it's higher over 18 degrees.  So we will probably start viewing it for those who want an early peek at it around 10:30PM.  It will look better later in the evening for those who can stay out.  Some telescopes outside will be able to show it earlier, because they don't have a wall in the way for low horizon viewing. But it looks better as it's up higher in the sky and objects close to the horizon have more atmosphere and sky glow disturbance.
We can also see M42 in the night sky.  It will look better later at night


M45 - The Subaru.  (So popular the Japanese named a car company after it.)
An open cluster also called the Pleiades (seven sisters) is a nice view throughout the evening.  It will continue to be high in the sky.  It's better viewed at really low powers, with binoculars or a wide field telescope.  I'll have Big Bertha out, which is a rich field telescope and can show the entire cluster as well as my binocular telescope which can show the cluster as well.  We can also view it with the Meade refractor inside the observatory.    We may also look at another open cluster, a pair of them called "the double cluster". 

The moon often looks 4 to 8 times better in detail than a "quick photo" can show.  Looking at the moon through a telescope visually is often more rewarding than the "quick" photos I may take of it.

Thursday and Friday viewing at HJRO

I'm planning on opening up HJRO tonight around 9pm for some viewing.

The skies will be better Friday night and I'm hoping to host a Friday night for the HFCC astronomy club on Friday. We were thinking abot being open on Saturday for HFCC but the weather looks better for Friday, so I hope they can change their visit to Friday.

More on Fridays announcement in a future post.


Greg


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Sometimes I'll post something that has nothing to do with astronomy - iPad mini

I haven't been able to observe much in the past couple of weeks due to all the cloudy weather we've been experiencing. This of course is nothing to complain about compared to others who suffered from the latest Hurricane.

What should an amateur astronomer do during cloudy weather?

There is plenty of normal things one can do. I've been doing a bit of shopping trying to knock off some common things and necessities on the todo list. Picking up items that have nothing to do with astronomy.

Astronomers at least the ones o know are into gadgets. I'm probably one of the more gadget addicted in the group of astronomers I know. It can be a big temptation to want to go out and purchase the latest and greatest toys.

I had a non astronomy toy shopping splurge this summer that pretty much tapped out my discretionary budget for this year. This involved a trip.

We can still dream and decide if something will be in the future gadget box. There are so many tools, it's probably better to try to use the toolset and gadgets you already have than go off on some materialism purchase kick.

But along the lines of looking at cool stuff I had to check out the latest iPad mini. I have a first generation iPad 3G that I bought the first day they were out. It only has 16gigs. I've thought at times it would be nicer to have a newer one for a few extra features but these are kind of esoteric. For example the iPad 2 and iPad 3 have cameras on them. That's one advantage over the first generation for blogging photos on the Internet, a quick blogpress post to this blog for example.

Blog press is newer now and requires an update for my iPhone. I can't blogpress from my older os phone right now so I only blog from the iPad or computer. I can blog using safari but what fun is that? I end up blogging from my iPad and email a photo to it from my phone if I'm using an iPhone photo. I can still post jpg images from the canon EOS easily but iPhone posts are slower.

It would be nice to have a camera, but that isn't enough reason to buy a new iPad, at least not for me.

The newer iPad os has Siri which has speech to text. One of the members in our club bought a new iPad and uses it for all his email typing now. He has to speak a little slower and clear when typing, but it works and he has less wear and tear on typing. That would be a nice feature and another reason for a newer iPad. The first generation iPad doesn't have Siri speech to text for emails, etc.

Then we have the VGA mirror mode in the iPad 2 and newer iPads. This is a big deal for large presentations. I'd love to have the ability to present iPad demos on a large projector from time to time or even to record the VGA mirror output for video using a special adapter that can record VGA into Macintosh video. That would be nice the VGA for presentation would only be used a few times a year. So should I update for only a few isolated presentations that may never happen? That's difficult to justify.

Lastly there is my mom who could borrow this newer iPad and use it for her own use from time to time, perhaps watching movies. My mom can't get out and about much due to health reasons. So she sits most of the time and has to do whatever she can from a seated position. It's health related. She has an iPhone 4 I got her, it's pretty cool but sometimes frustrates her. They don't make advanced turned off features in a layered os for the iPhone for seniors. They should but they don't. The iPhone is basically 85 percent computer as far as a replacement. For users who don't program it's closer to 95 percent of what one needs, but it's complicated at times.

One of the things she does from time to time is watch movies or Netflix on her iPhone. It's a small screen. I offered to let her use the iPad, but it's to heavy for her. She has to many other things in her lap and area of her place to have room for a large iPad. A large device on her lap would be a strain and there really is no room for a table.

What about a 7 inch tablet? I've thought of these but I figure the features she is used to on the iPad would be enough confusion for her, why add another os like android to her life? It would be another thing to learn and then I'd have to learn and do android support as well.

If I got her or loaned an iPad mini to her she could view Netflix and movies the way she would now on an iPhone, but she would have a later screen and it might be easier for her to type using voice to speech of Siri. This last feature might not work to well for her. Shed be able to see bigger items and surf better. It would work better for Facebook as well. I could borrow it perhaps for those rare needs an occasional presentation and most of the time it could be used by her. She doesn't need 3G for her iPad, and I probably don't need 3G for it during presentations of astronomy software.

So those are some thoughts. But one can always work themselves up into a buying frenzy when you look at new gadgets.

I decided to head out late today to an apple store at a mall. The one in Ann Arbor is a favorite visit of mine. I went in and looked at the iPad mini's on display. I took a photo of some others at the store and blurred out there faces to protect their identities for this post. I emailed the photo to my email and now I can post it here from my iPad.

Most of the people at the store were interested in the mini but others were there for other items.

They only had 64gig mini's in stock for $549 or something like that, I forgot the exact price, but it's in that official ballpark price. It matched the website. Anyway the almost $600 price tag was a little bit above the base $350 price that might be adequate for a niche iPad. A 32 gig might be a good compromise, but they didn't have those in stock.

It's probably a good thing I can think about it for a while. There is no need to rush. It was funny to see the typical iPad customer, really everyone is a typical customer now. One guy not pictured was there with his first gen iPad just like me, looking at the new mini. I thing some who decided to not upgrade to others from their first generation may upgrade to the mini.

The screen is big enough for personal movie watching and big enough to be much more usable than the iPhone. It's size and weight are really nice and the lightness makes it much better for handheld. For a personal device that you might use alone or with one other person the 8 inch screen is big enough. Thinking about it most may use the iPad as a personal decide most of the time. A small group device the 10 inch iPad works only well with a few people, it's not like it's big enough for six or seven to enjoy as a larger presentation device. So to me the iPad 10 inch is optimized for one two or three people, the iPad mini is for one or maybe two to share and view briefly. The iPad 2 is more convenient. Be sue of this I think some iPad owners may be kind of torn between devices.

I currently own and take a laptop with me a lot more than I need to. The iPad becomes my extra haul device. The iPad is always with me, like a preacher carrying a bible. As a matter of fact you can carry dozens of books so the iPad really can replace your laptop, and your bible or other bookshelf. I don't have to carry a star chart, or moon globe or any of these items as I have an iPad with me.

So the iPad really dispenses of the need for a laptop most of the time. And the iPad mini will even work better for most.

Some of us cheapskates who are older and need a new prescription for reading glasses may find the 10 inch better because of the larger display but it's really probably good enough for many users and will probably supplant the iPad for some users. They may pass the ten inch tablet to others and pick up a mini.

One you are used to the iOS and it's apps you will likely want to stick to the same os. With the new small 7.9 inch iPad mini, you don't have to wait to get an even more portable and affordable high use device.

I think apple came up with another winner.



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Some recent photos of Jupiter taken pretty quickly

I'm not using advanced photo or gathering techniques for these.

They were single images taken and most processed with a $6 iPad photo processing app.

There were taken through the c14 at HJRO and are examples of what can be done when your taking a quick image, with little advanced processing techniques.

Many photos of Jupiter that amateurs take now are of a better quality than these below, because they are using webcams and recording to AVI movie files. They then process these movie files using stacking software. Some use advanced cameras for astrophotography and take movies and stack them as well. The photos below were taken with a Digital SLR or my iphone.

One photo 3 below, was a still of the back of the Canon EOS T1i while it was attached to the c14 with a t mount and using live view at 10x. This would simulate a 20x Barlow lens on a 3911mm focal length (c14) lens setup.



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Solar and lunar observing to start around 6pm today Sunday at HJRO

I might be running a little late, but my goal is to open up HJRO at about 6pm.

I want to observe some large sunspots that are on the the sun right now.


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HJRO will be open tonight Friday.

We will be open for observing tonight.




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Three stills from Eduardo's video. . . HJRO from above.

Three stills from the video taken yesterday by Eduardo at HJRO.

Mike was inside fixing the solar scope.




The Flamewheel hexi-copter can sure get up there.

Below you can see the middle school parking lot, the place for visitors to park when you come by HJRO.



A still from further up notice the remote controlled helicopter is way above the light post looking down.





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We had a visitor bring a helicopter and video camera and take video yesterday at hero

Greg Ozimek, Mike Stamey, Tim Campbell, Tony Godin and his son, Ben Miller and his two sons showed up at the observatory to see the helicopter and meet Eduardo.

Everyone who showed up had a fun time watching the remote controlled hexicopter (six bladed helicopter) fly around. Those who showed up also had a great time talking with Eduardo.

Eduardo sent this edit of the video he shot with the helicopter. See link below. A nice birds eye view of the observatory.

(As you can see Eduardo could add a very dynamic video element to anyone's promotional or commercial video.). He will be offering that as a service in the future, but no word on prices yet. He'll likely be showing a demo in the future and I'll have contact information for anyone who things they would like to enhance their video product from this very special perspective.

(He told me he knows a guy who had some of their wedding video shot from one of these as well. I'm not sure how that was done or what shots were used, it certainly sounds interesting. I actually shot an outdoor wedding myself some years back when I was doing wedding videography and it was in a park. They had a really long procession and walk and this would have been something very interesting to see from a birds eye perspective.)

It was cloudy yesterday, so unfortunately nobody at the observatory was able to observe stars or other objects with good results. Tim Campbell directed the telescope to M13 but the clouds were not thin enough allowing us to see it. Tim also brought by a nice little capture device for the observatory that should work nicely with the Stellacam.

We briefly looked at the sun through the Meade and safe solar filter but clouds hindered the view. Some visitors who stopped by with their parents looked at a far away radio tower through my binocular telescope.

The helicopter was fun to watch, and flew well even in fairly windy conditions. There is all kinds of interesting electronics and fail safe systems on that helicopter. Eduardo flies it really well, under remote control. He actually flies it blind without a live video feed from the helicopter, yet frames the shots very nicely from the ground. There is a live video feed upgrade that he can add to it in the future. My friend Tony, said he was impressed at how fast the helicopter could climb. As you can see on the YouTube video it can fly pretty high and give impressive area views.

Most shaking in the original video can be processed out as you can see in the video as well.


(Here is a brief email and link Eduardo sent to us.)
--------
Hi again guys.
Finally I uploaded a short video to youtube. Many of the scenes were not really providing much so I trimmed it a lot.
Here’s is the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yzts2DrzKSU

I hope you enjoy it!

Thanks
Eduardo


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I did a little bit of wide field observing tonight, but stayed home

Here is a self timed photo that I took.

You can see I'm looking up through some small binoculars. M45 looks almost like a Christmas tree ornament. It is above the tree in a nearby yard. Jupiter is much lower in this photo. The bright object low to the left of the tree.

I'm hoping to do astronomy solar observing at Hfcc tomorrow, so I didn't open up tonight. Clouds were out earlier but the skies looked nice around midnight. Hopefully we will have clear skies for solar tomorrow at Hfcc.



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Today, I forgot it was Sunday. . . took a break from observing

With all the observing happening yesterday. I was out in the daytime for an 11AM observing session that turned into a long observing session and discussion . . . into dinner/late lunch. That solar observing session netted us some photographs, but we were having some problems focusing the cameras on the solar detail with Harold's HA setup on the C14. I think this was due to our cameras being in the well lit environments.

Then in the evening. . . I went out for a short session. Was really tired but went out at about 10:20PM. Met a few observers and we had a nice long marathon kind of observing session ending with Mike and I looking at Jupiter (taking a few stills) and then looking at M42 as it was rising just high enough to view. It was a very exciting night. For some reason when I woke up this morning I thought it was Saturday. . . probably to tired. There were some things to do around the house and I didn't drift off to sleep at 3AM after observing but actually played with some images for a while of Jupiter and ended up turning in at 5AM. Woke up around 11AM. Actually waking up a bit while sleeping as well. So that lack of sleep contributed to a generally non-productive day.

I was held up at home with some things to do and went out for a late lunch/dinner around 4PM. Drove out to the Belleville Michigan area. I ate in that area, and was still very hungry after dinner. About ready for a second dinner. As I started to drive back I felt tired and ready for a nap. Rather than hit I-94 I decided to park and take a nap on a street in the car in Belleville. I actually had drove out and packed my car as if it was Saturday and in case I ended up observing. A short 30 minute nap did me good. Then I decided to check out the waterfront near the lake there and saw the setting sun. Since I had my binocular telescope with me, I decided to do a little solar observing and look at sunspots. I could see two sunspots but the haze from clouds and setting sun in a lot of haze hindered the view and eventually decided to put the telescope away. I had a camera with my so I decided to take a few shots of the sunset and the lake with the Canon EOS. I took a few different exposures with a tripod hoping to play around a bit later with an HDR processing program or Photoshop.

Here's a fairly quick Fusion results from four photos of the sunset. I didn't process this to much differently than Photomatix Pro would do with default fusion settings.

Had a nice but slow time. There was a lot of haze. Ate a late dinner and went to Meijers to run an errand. I actually saw one of the regular visitors James at Meijers as I was heading to the check out and went up greeted him. He was picking up a few things at Meijers as well. As it was hazy out, but clearing and I was tired I decided to not try to open up tonight. I may open up early tomorrow if I wake up early enough and perhaps go by the school and do an impromptu Solar Projection. Right now HJRO is not setup for WIFI as we lost the network connection so any Solar would be "optical projection" of a safe image into the classroom using my Solar Projector setup.

Enough late night posts. . . which hopefully will make sense to the readers. . .

Here's a quick "fusion" of the four exposures from the Sunset in Belleville today.

A Recent Photo of Jupiter, tweaked a bit in photoshop

This was just a quick photo of Jupiter over the weekend that was taken at HJRO. It was taken Sunday morning at about 2:30AM. I processed the image lightly using photoshop. I'm just learning Photoshop and this was just quickly changed a bit using RGB curves to bring out a little band detail. The moon Europa was throwing a shadow near the far right edge of the planet, which is tilted in this photo. The curve adjustment actually brought down the moon's brightness enough to cause it to disappear from the image.

I've been so busy observing at the observatory it's delayed my video edit project

Have the Trace Bundy DVD ready to ship, but I need to get digital assets together, meaning source video clips to include on separate media.

I've been opening up the observatory so much lately and doing star gazing so much, it's slowed down the process of editing.

For three days I observed and opened up the observatory. Last night I had it open from 3 to 6am to look at Jupiter and other objects, but mostly Jupiter and the Orion nebula. Orion rises early in the morning before the sunrise at this time of year. The nebula looked awesome early this morning. I felt like I could see faint color aspects in the gas cloud, but this after photographing it. It's difficult to say if my old eyes were really picking up color in the 14 inch telescope. I was looking at low power with the field reducer in. A c14 at f7 with low power would provide a very bright image, so hints of color may have been showing up with averted vision, but it also seemed to suggest faint color aspects with direct vision. I kind of wish I had a large dob with more light gathering power, something like a Newtonian with a 20 inch mirror to see if I could pick up direct color at 5am this morning.

I slept for a short time this morning and went to Hfcc fir "welcome back days" only to discover they may have been rescheduled. So I woke up early for no apparent reason. Ate lunch, chatted with a friend in the club then went back home to get another nap.

Here is a quick photo of the core of m42, the Orion nebula that I took through the c14 at f10 using a canon Eos t1i.

This was a fairly short exposure, perhaps 15 seconds at iso 3200. I don't recall the exact exposure length but I can look it up if someone wants to know.



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Wide field photo from later in the evening after leaving HJRO.

Here is a photo from last night.

Notice the interesting glow of the leaves of this tree. The top leaves glow at night, probably due to street lights hitting it.

The glow reminds me of some old quirky set from an early star trek show or something. It's noticeable when viewing the stars near this tree at night. This photo is a little brighter than it would appear to an observer due to the long exposure. The leaves of the nearby trees to the naked eye would be a little green and mostly dark, the camera picks up more color. The glow of the leaves is a little less colorful as well in person but still very noticeable at night.

You can see the open star cluster m45 above and slightly left of the glowing leaves in this photo.




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Skies were really nice Monday night.

We opened up at 9pm.

Art, Dan, Mike, Rick and I viewed mostly Messier objects tonight and a very red star in Lyra. Some of us also took a quick glance at Jupiter and M45 through the binocular telescope before we left.

I also looked at Saturn through the Meade refractor at about 8:50. Saturn is so low during sunset it's nearly impossible to see it with the c14 now. I also looked at Saturn briefly with the vixen binocular telescope.

There was another discussion about radio astronomy, specifically a kit NASA shows and has write ups on which allows one to listen to radio signals from Jupiter.

I also very briefly at 7pm looked at the sun, but clouds were interfering with the best views.

We saw the ring nebula, swan nebula which looked really nice with an oxygen 3 filter, and objects like m13, m2 and other globular clusters. We could not see the little dumbbell but could easily see the dumbbell nebula.

We didn't look at planets, other than Jupiter and Saturn. Unless Dan looked at them while I was taking a break getting hot chocolates from Tim Hortons.

We also saw the butterfly nebula with my binocular telescope. The butterfly nebula looked very faint, that is we could see the star cluster pattern but no nebulosity, due to sky glow. It was really low on the southern horizon when we viewed it. Only five degrees above the horizon. It was close to nearby radio tower lights in the distance near Meijers. Transparency was so good you could really see down toward the southern horizon. Of course the butterfly cluster was so low the telescopes inside the observatory would have no hope of viewing it as the wall is to high and the telescopes are limited to about 14 degrees above the horizon. The c14 is, the Meade can look lower but only to the west for the most part due to it's placement high on the tube on top of the c14.

No photos from tonight, but there is a chance I'll take a quick wide angle still of the sky later to tonight while running late night errands.



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Photo of some of us inside the observatory last night

Five of us made it out to observe. We observed, m45, the double cluster, the Wild Duck cluster, a few globular clusters including m13, the Orion nebula, Neptune, Uranus and Jupiter. We didn't stay out late enough to view the moon. We were able to view Jupiter at 110x through the binoculars, but it was so low and rising in the Eastern sky that it offered no more detail than 48 power provided in the Binocular telescope. James and I took a quick look at Jupiter which was still fairly low before we closed up the dome for the evening. We left around 1:30am. The sky was still nice and clear with some haze in the far east, but I was a bit tired from the days activities, so I closed up a little earlier than I might had I been more rested.

There was also a bit of discussion about radio astronomy and other topics. Mike was pointing out where we might put an antenna near the observatory if we wanted to setup a radio telescope kit to listen to Jupiter.

We also talked a bit about Astronomy At The Beach which is a public viewing event that will happen September 21 and 22, 2012 at Maple Beach in Kensington Metro Park hours for that viewing event is 6pm until midnight.

Below is a picture of four of us last night at HJRO.

(One of the visitors, James French wasn't in the frame when this photo was taken.)

Pictured below are Mike, Greg, Dan and Tim (sitting at the computer console).

The red lights we use to preserve night vision was the only light, other than the monitor that provided light.



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HJRO is not open due to clouds, detailed explanation

Here is a response i wrote to an email I just received asking me if I was opening up the observatory tonight. It's Saturday and cloudy out so there is nothing to view.
There might be a few typos in my reply below. Not a perfect letter or post.

Briefly I usually don't open up HJRO when its cloudy out. And sometimes I have opened up for a planned group visit when it was cloudy, but it's better to visit when it's clear out. We can't see through the clouds with the telescopes. And the tour might be a little boring for most without being able to observe. I could I suppose open up once in a while and give an equipment tour or talk, but I try to focus on having the chance to show people the sky as well.

This last week I was at the observatory and had it open Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Each time I opened someone asked me if I'd be open the next day. As it was clear I opened up for others. You can imagine that can take a toll on a persons schedule, being at HJRO four days in a row. And I'm a volunteer. If I'm open so much during clear days, you can see why I'm a but reluctant to open up on a cloudy one during the same week.

We only have three authorized key keepers for the observatory, for security reasons and I usually have the most free schedule and live close by, so I'm already opening up 90 percent of the time. As you can imagine, I'm reluctant to commit to opening up on cloudy days/nights, when I already open up so much on clear nights.

-----
(more details in copy of letter below)

Sometimes I'll announce if the observatory will be open on my blog Hjrobservatory.blogspot.com

I need to work on announcing that more before I open. (Sometimes I'm in a rush and don't post on this blog I'm open especially since my Blogpress stopped working on my iPhone.) You can still call the observatory phone or email me when it's clear out. I'll chat with anyone and answer the requests and questions even when it's cloudy, but right now I don't open up when it's cloudy.

Last week I was open every night from Monday through Thursday. There was a common trait of course. People were asking me to open and there were clear skies.

Right now the skies are overcast. I have not made it a practice to open when it's cloudy, because I usually want to be able to observe visually and show others the stars, planets, moon, etc.

We can't see through clouds. The telescope can see some objects through thin clouds or through "sucker holes", clear parts of the sky in partly cloudy skies.

Sometimes we open up for a small group ahead of time, preschedules openings like club scout groups, If it's cloudy we simply give them a tour and pray for some clear spots to appear in the sky to hopefully observe a little. We have often cancelled group visits, when the sky isn't clear and tried scheduling an alternate date.

Should we give tours in bad overcast weather?
This email request today along with a phone call I received brings to mind a question of where should the observatory go or what should be our future goals be? Should we try to plan bad weather presentations? I could perhaps open up even in bad weather and give tours, but there is little to do or show. I suppose I could make up a list and show equipment and perhaps do other presentations. But what would those presentations be? And would people want to come even when it's cloudy to a very small observatory. Our site is not suited to av presentations as the observatory is small. We usually give small presentations showing things off the iPad, or computer screen. Sometimes we show a video feed from the telescope as well on a small monitor.

As I'm a volunteer, I have to pick my days to open up HJRO carefully. I have limited time to be there, so I choose the best clear nights when I'm available. Some clear nights there are other astronomy events and I may attend those, but this only affects maybe 30 percent of the clear nights. I often will sacrifice a trip to a better darker site for the chance to open up HJRO for others and because it's close by. I feel that I should try to have it open as much as possible on clear nights and sometimes during a clear day for solar.

There will perhaps be more goals of our being open longer in the future on clear nights for Internet broadcasting as well. But I'm not sure how that will be possible without affecting the time I would open up for local visitors. Things may get more complicated, with some plans to show kids in Australia for example the nit sky up here over the Internet. This is one goal proposed by one of our main core volunteers, it will be interesting to see how that may work out, or not work out. Scheduling might make that goal difficult.

Some other dreams which are just dreams right now.
If we had a bigger building, perhaps a display and multimedia room. Like a control room with a mini planetarium or something, right next door to the observatory, I'd have much more to show the public and could have a program that didn't rely on good weather.

I thought, for example, a room that could seat up to 30 people, a small building with multimedia projection and perhaps even a small telescope museum display area with up to 8 telescopes on display would be a good goal. Such a building would have to be close to the observatory. And we'd have to find funding permissions and build it. And there is a drainage field requirement a certain amount of space for lawns around the observatory due to the massive size of parking lots and cement nearby. I don't know if we could get support and funding for this goal and it seems very unlikely right one. We have school facilities, but teachers are not paid to work nits and have a life and other things to do, so I don't think we could open up a classroom for some kind of cloudy night program/presentation. It kind of leaves the observatory in a kind of limbo in a sense. Like a real small one room schoolhouse, to small for a class and without a teacher. Since we are volunteers and not teachers working for the school district it's easier to show adults the observatory than school children. In a sense once you graduate from high school you get better access to the schools observatory as a visitor than when you were a student.

I have thought a little bit on what could be offered as a program to do something when the sky is cloudy. Some have suggested a fixed schedule being open would help others plan; that is true. But I haven't come up with a serious plan as to when we'd be open, and what we would present. Much of what we'd present would be cyber stuff perhaps on the web available from the home. Maybe some PowerPoint or photo shows. We could show video I suppose but the small observatory would only seat a few people for that kind of presentation. Perhaps questions and answer sessions and speaker presentations would be good, but the small observatory is only fit for small groups. There is another problem. That is people will say they are interested and say they will show up, even club members, then because they are busy or distracted, they won't show up. Things happen and they of course put astronomy way back on the back burner. Sometimes I spend an hour or two waiting for a visitor, of course I'll observe while I wait, and they won't show up. So that makes me reluctant to expand a schedule or try to setup times when conditions are even worse out - a cloudy night.

Presentation sessions at places like HFCC college's planetarium need to have volunteers and equipment, videos present shows to the public as well. This may be something that would require more commitment than members in the FAAC club are willing to do. (And we'd be hamstrung by only having three key keepers to open up.)

90 percent of the time I'm the one to open up the observatory and let the public inside. This due to security concerns. There are three key keepers, one is busy with a home business, Tim Dey. The other is in Northville, and has his own observatory. George K. And then, there is me. I'm single so I have more time. Club members know I'm retired as well and at times I will open and stay open very late at night. When other club members, visitors show up.

I can give a 30 minute tour and talk about the history and equipment very easily without sky watching. But I think most would be bored with this.

My goal is to have every visitor look through e biggest telescope we have on site, when they visit. My reason for this is that is what I'd want to do if I visited an observatory. If you can't look through the scope, maybe you won't get a chance to return and maybe you'll never see the view. I went to an observstory, Perkins observatory in Delaware Ohio and when I was there conditions were not perfect and the view would have been bad through the biggest telescope. They had a 32 inch telescope there. Because conditions were bad they didn't let people look through the telescope. They had tons of stuff, a library, computers, displays and a nice tour, so there was a lot to see. The sky was pretty good however and they let us look through a 14 inch obsession Dobsonian telescope. It was cool, but I left wishing I could have looked through the big telescope. Don't get me wrong, the tour of the observatory was really cool, they opened up the huge dome and cold air rushed in. It felt like they were opening up a huge hanger in a Star Wars movie on the ice planet or something like that. Really cool. But I realized I felt disappointed because I didn't get a chance to look through the big telescope, even at a fuzzy less than perfect image.

When I realized that I felt that way, I thought one of my goals should be to insure ever visitor gets a chance to look through our c14 when they visit. Even if we are doing photography when they arrive, the visitor should get priority and we should stop our photography for a while to let them look up. So that is one of my goals, for night viewing. To show every visitor something through the biggest telescope.

I consider the observatory to be primarily a visual place for people to look through the telescope. We have photographic capability and can photograph the sky through the telescope and also take pictures or video of visitors if they want us to and present a number of photo or video memories of your visit.

I need to work on a Menu list of features we can offer, as we have about 20 things we can do. But I rarely have opened up during a cloudy day for visitors. Maybe this should change and maybe I should offer a fixed schedule and program so people can plan a visit?

Let me know what you think about these thoughts. Do you want to stop by to see the inside of a dome and no stars, planets, moon, etc. Just to look at the inside and maybe see a couple of telescopes? Maybe I should work up a plan for a cloudy night tour for folks.

Greg


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A visitor, Harold takes a safe look at the sun using safe solar filter methods.

Photo of Harold at HJRO. Harold is a Faac astronomer who has been in astronomy as a hobby since he was six years old. He is over 70 years old, so he's been observing for over 65 years through telescopes. I think it's safe to say, Harold is the Faac club member with the most astronomy observing experience.





Harold is known by some as "the telescope man", he spent about twenty years setting up in front of the Dearborn police station or library. For a dozen of those years he used a telescope called Big Bertha, which is a large ten inch Newtonian telescope.

Harold sold Big Bertha in 2009 to it's third owner(me).

Harold drove up with his wife in a convertible.

I set up my Vixen telescope in the parking lot to show Harold the new mount setup.

Important info - Safe solar viewing:

I have safe solar filters using Baader planetarium astrozap solar film. We only view the sun using safe methods. Baader film, thousand oaks solar filters, Lunt or Coronado solar telescopes are examples of safe solar equipment.

Beware of unsafe methods, even welder glass.

Just this week a visitor mentioned he used number 12 welding goggles to view the Venus transit. We found out this other visitor was not using safe welding glasses. Number 12 welder glasses are not safe.

You can only use number 14 green glass or number 14 with gold coating welder glasses to safely view the sun.

No other number welder glass are safe; numbers 1 through 13 are NOT safe and even some of the number 14 rated welder's glass are not safe.

You are better off using safe and proven solar products available from an Astronomy equipment dealer. Special filters which always fit in front of the telescope are used to safely view the sun. All other methods except solar projection are not safe

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A busy week

We opened the observatory yesterday during the middle school open house.

We had about 30 visitors.

This was the forth evening in a row that I opened up HJRO.

A pattern seems to emerge when you have a large group of daytime or early evening visitors. Some will ask, "will you be open later tonight?". I often say, yes and stay late. They say, we will try to make it back out, but they usually are busy with the normal household chores of going to bed or watching tv. Probably thinking, we have to get up in the morning for work, etc. And we were already there. So they end up never returning the same evening. It's perfectly understandable. I end up observing wIth no more visitors that night.

After four days opening up, I'm a bit tired out at being at HJRO, so tonight, I won't be there, even if the skies are perfect.

There is a full moon, second one this month which is called a blue moon. It won't be any more blue than normal. It's just a second full moon in the month.

A full moon makes the sky bright. Any moon above the horizon makes the sky bright. That makes it difficult to view dim objects from added sky glow. So many astronomers prefer to view other objects when the moon has set or isn't out as well. So a full moon doesn't mean it's a good time to observe the sky. Observing a full moon is more of a chore as well, you will want to use filters to cut down on the brightness when looking through a telescope and there is no shadow relief from a sun angled at the face of the moon we'd be observing.

In heard from visitors that two people in Lincoln Park came down with West Nile virus from mosquito bites recently. It's a good idea to use bug spray before observing.




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A quick photo of the moon at about 400x, actually part of the moon.

Here is a photo of the moon, using my iPhone. Handheld with 40mm eyepiece. Aimed iPhone through the eyepiece at a part of the moon. That 40mm eyepiece was mounted in a Celestron C14 at 3911mm focal length. So the effective power with about a 4.5 power zoom into the eyepiece was roughly 400x.

The moon actually looked better than this when we looked at it though the telescope. Usually a quick photo, looks at least four times worse than what we'd see at the eyepiece, maybe even worse depending on the photo and techniques used. I sharpened this a bit and removed a bit of red glow from the observatory lights which I inadvertently left on while taking this quick photo.





Below is the sharpen mask I painted in to sharpen most of the photo.

I also used a negative curve on some of the red to remove a red glow, not shown below.



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There was a FAAC meeting at HFCC

The general meetings for the FAAC club are in the UAW conference center which is the building in front of the campus, closest to the street. This building is on the southern side. It's not the cafeteria building, which is also close to the street.

Sometimes after a general meeting we open up the observatory. We have the installation situation of the bleachers and lighting completed enough to start using the observatory again, but I had some errands to help a friend with car trouble. None of the other FAAC core group that would be at the observatory and help run it was available tonight, so I didn't open up the observatory at all.

I had a good time observing when I could away from the observatory. I even wrote a highly speculative piece on observing what appeared to be a 3d like effect in viewing the double cluster. There is a strange optical effect that is repeatable, at least with my eyes, that shows stars in small groups that appear to be fixed and moving in front of other stars, while I move my eyes behind the binoculars. This for the Vixen binocular telescope. It's a visual thing that appears to be happening. I haven't verified that others have seen this, up to this point I have witnessed this effect. I had one FAAC member look briefly at the double cluster and he saw the entire field of view shit, but no stars staying fixed within the field of view. I don't have perfect eyesight and some of this might be due to some kind of optical defect in my eyes. There are other possible explanations, the most common ones the few club members I've talked to have come up with was not the theory I put forth in the newsletter article. I put out a kind of strange explanation that this could be happening due to the construction of the eyes themselves, that perhaps curved parts of the retina are causing a difference in speed at times for different parts of the field of view.

Some others have said that this could be "field curvature" in the optics of the telescope. At least two members think that could be what I was seeing. There are also other optical effects such as Pseudo 3d effects when viewing small groups that have been mentioned by some. There is also some interesting reports on optical effects that different people have seen. One person I talked to on the phone reported seeing a "moving stars in front of background effect, when walking and looking up naked eye without optics at the Milky Way galaxy in a very dark sky site. He said stars moved in front of the Milky way, and seemed to move that way when he was walking and moving. He said this was some kind of optical effect that he mentioned and others at that time didn't believe he was seeing that effect and thought he was joking.

Another member of the club said, he has seen an effect while flying where a star would appear to move in relation to others because after staring at it for some time, the eyes, without a frame of reference will start to move on their own and cause the star to move.

Another member of the club listened to me on the phone and we chatted for some time and he ventured to say that something optically could be happening, perhaps something to do with the different response that one might get from the central part of the eye, verses the side, because we have more cones in one part and more rods in the other. That was an interesting explanation as well. Some of these have agreed at least in some brief discussions that some of the movement I've seen if it's happening would not happen from misaligned optics in the binocular. Something else is going on.

The next step would be to see if others can see this effect. I'd be out tonight especially if I could get other viewers out there to look through the binoculars at the double cluster and survey if they see this effect with their viewing.

I'm hoping to get detailed viewing reports from some club members at next Saturday's beginner's night which will be at the FAAC picnic at Island Lake Spring Mill pond.

I don't know also if some of this is due to specific details in my eyes that may not be common and causing this optical effect. The effect can be altered a bit, certain stars concentrated on and targeted in an optical manner, that may not be apparent at first and these may seem to jump out in front and be "fixed" during this viewing process.

Basically the effect that I'm seeing is some stars remain fixed in the field of view while others seem to move in a field of stars behind those. I'm saying behind because that is what it looks like. It looks like the fixed stars are floating at fixed points in space in front of the other stars that make a blurring like move and change their position. This visual effect can be altered some, that is targeted on certain stars, based on what I cast my vision on, meaning central target of focus in the field of view.

I had one member who has done extensive visual viewing mention that this could be an optical effect from the eyepieces, agreeing with me and mentioning strange side effects of a wide field Televue eyepiece. When I told him that I was using Plossl eyepieces, he felt that the Televue eyepiece of that type would not cause a drastic effect that would resemble what one might see on a wide field Televue. So he kind of hedged his thoughts, it could be field curvature of the lens system and then again it might not be. Another interesting view that sometimes one can see with wide field telescopes is an alignment ring pattern around stars when colimnating a telescope. The stars may have a "dot pattern" inside a ring which should be centered. It may be when you are completely aligned and inside the center of the exit pupil cone of light and the star is in the center of the field of view. In cases where the star drifts to the edge of the screen, the center spot in the star test image, may drift to one side especially if you are near the edge of the optic, and this is more visible with wide field Newtonians. If that is the case, perhaps this would point to field curvature kind of 3d effects that are presenting themselves in the eyepieces as I look at the double cluster and do the "move of my eyes" behind the eyepiece in a horizontal manner.

It's interesting to guess at what might be the cause and try to design some kind of test or set of questions to help explain what this is that I am witnessing. I'm literally seeing some stars remained fixed while others move in the Field of View. And this can be repeatedly viewed (at least by me) and done instantly by relative movement of my eyes to the fixed movement of the telescope and eyepieces on a target. This means I'm varying the parts of the light cone that are entering the eyes. This brings a 3d like (video game like) effect on viewing of the double cluster. The effect is greatly diminished for some open clusters like M45 in comparison. The effect happens in both horizontal and vertical movements. The stars are not moving at all when the eyes are fixed in one spot, and there appears to be no heat or seeing effects that make the stars vary in their position, through boiling atmospheric condition. So the effect is wholly dependent on the activity at the eyepieces.

Binocular vision brings out the effect perhaps 10 times more than you would see without both eyes. Also the edge of the field of view, more toward the periphery of the field of view, seems to move more than stars closer to the center which remain fixed.

The fixed stars in some cases may be fixed, but also move a bit in relation to other fixed stars, distorting somewhat at least their angles, in relation to other stars. This is another perhaps secondary visual thing I've seen when experiencing this for at least one wide field of "fixed stars" that were a little wider apart than some tight and non-moving groups of stars.

The stars that don't move are clearly seen and seem fixed. So other stars look to "move behind them" but I have not seen one star move from one side of a fixed star to another with this effect, which of course proves that this is not a real parallax effect. It's a kind of optical illusion that creates a parallax like view of the "live movement" of the stars.

As this is an optical effect from visual astronomy, it's unlikely and kind of photograph can be taken to prove or disprove various theories or show this "as a recorded thing that happened."

That is enough of a post for now. I'd like to test viewing the double cluster tonight from my brighter sky location, but I'm to tired and it's too late to check on that. I need to get some sleep and rest up for an early morning errand tommorrow.

Had a fun time observing at a dark sky site.

Was out at my friends house in Dexter Michigan yesterday. I arrived there at about 12:30PM and my friend and everyone there had already went to bed. I ended up looking at different objects with my Vixen Binocular Telescope. There are so many more stars and it's great to be under the Milky Way and actually see it with naked eye observing.

I spent a lot of my time with the 25mm TV Plossl eyepieces giving the telescope 36 power.

I spent most of my time scanning the sky without a chart actually. But looked at a few identified objects and used a charting application on the ipad or iphone from time to time. I think I used the iphone for most of the chart lookups last night.

Dew became a problem and my front objectives were foggy. I took the Vixen into the car and dried it out with the heater then returned.

I spent a lot of time looking at the double cluster. It was fascinating. I decided to try to figure out why it looks so 3d in the binocular telescope compared to a normal telescope with one eyepiece. I discovered that some of the stars seem to shift in the field of view, like Parallax shift, not moving much, while others shift more considerably as if in the background. This happens in "real time" while viewing through the eyepiece. How is this happening? I'm thinking that this may be due to some kind of selective almost pincushion like distortion, perhaps with my eyesight, but I think others would see it as well. The way to see this is to set the eyepieces apart far enough to see while looking through both eyepieces. Not to far apart, but a normal distance. This allows a little bit of space to exist for your nose and you can actually move your eyes from one side to the other changing your relative position for both eyes looking through a more Right side alignment but still with both eyes and then with the left side being more closer to your nose. This shifting causes "some" of the stars to move and they appear to be in a background plain, while others end up staying in the same relative position in the foreground. It's an eye popping 3d effect which I think anyone would see with this setup.

Rather than just try to describe this I tried to draw and identify the "foreground" stars that appear to be "in front" of the other more shifting stars in the background. This meant I didn't need to draw all the stars of the double cluster. I didn't have a blank sheet of paper and pencil handy, so I used the iPad with a drawing app. This proved to be a little bit challenging, because the ipad is fairly bright and I spent a lot more time trying to tweak the drawings. My thought at first was I would draw over a photograph of the double cluster in the background of the drawing app, but I couldn't easily locate that photo on my iPad, so I just tried to draw the main foreground stars as best as I could. I ran into a problem of using a scale and not zooming in enough to draw the top cluster and have the second cluster fit on the screen. So I drew a couple of stars that appear like they are foreground stars in between the two on the first drawing and then drew them again on a second one. Figuring I could merge them or use those two "in between" stars as a guide to merge the two drawings later. Unfortunately my scales didn't match, so I may have to scale them to match and perhaps rotate one of them a bit.

They provide a good overview as to which stars would be in the foreground which I could redraw over a photo of the double cluster. I think our photos were taken with normal telescopes which means they are upside down, but my Vixen binoculars show a true perspective.

I don't have a chart or drawing ready to post here. But I looked at the double cluster for a long time and looked around that area experimenting and focusing on different star groups or patterns inside the cluster. Also looking at the cluster from a number of different framings to see how the stars or parts of the cluster would react in relation to their placement in the field of view. It seemed that if I focused mentally on a different small sub-pattern, that that group of stars many times would jump out and not move in the field of view relative to the others. So I could almost depending on the position of the stars and what I was mentally focusing, cause sub patterns of the cluster to appear to be in the foreground. Could it be that by focusing on some kind of pattern I was somehow locking mentally a part of the image in my mind and causing that pattern to mentally shift or be stabilized in a way that it didn't move. This was a very interesting experiment in (at least my) human vision. It's something that I think anyone would have fun viewing to note their reaction and to perhaps see which stars appear to be in the foreground. It could be some kind of pattern matching psychological effect that our vision can flip into.

From a scientific point of view it would seem that optically this would happen more with stars in the middle of the field of view as an optical change in the overall view, that is something like astimatism might occur in the optics. I don't have perfect eyesight so it could be in my eyes optics as well. It might be interesting to see if there was a way to photographically test this, but that would require a different setup and rig than I have as the Vixen is not suited for photography.

There are other reasons I thought in the past that I felt there was a 3d effect, but this is the most significant in my mind and something easy to demonstrate and repeat.

I also looked at M2, , the ring nebula, M45, and finally Jupiter. There was a glow, almost like northern lights that appeared in the wide field photographs but was barely detectable with my vision. These almost looked like northern lights, but also looked a lot like a cloud pattern or vapor trails from jets. I saw a couple jets flying high leave vapor trails during the nights viewing.

Here is a wide angle photo of the stars and clouds which look a bit like Northern lights. In the early morning hours as the sun was rising, it was clear that the clouds were appearing in the photo, not northern lights.


(looking at M45 with clouds obscuring some of the sky)