It's been a fun week. Observed at HJRO three nights, but not tonight

Tonight it's snowing. . . looks like a blizzard out right now.

We had 100 to 200 visitors Tuesday. A lot of people seemed to enjoy touring HJRO and also chatting with different FAAC astronomers. It was really cold out with ten mile per hour winds whipping up a really nice wind chill. The clouds prevented much viewing. Tim Dey mentioned we'd be opening up the next night, Wednesday as it would be clear. I was able to open up Wednesday and we had nine visitors show up on Wednesday. Some called the observatory line to see if we were out at the observatory. It was supposed to be clear out Thursday as well so we decided to open up a third evening. I also hoped to get a photo of Venus and Uranus in the same field of view. They were so close the 9th of February (Thursday) being .3 degrees apart a telescope could show them with a low to medium powered eyepiece. We were able to see them both with the F7 Celestron C14 configuration and a 25mm Plossl eyepiece. The C14 is F7 with a field reducer on, which means it's wider field. I hoped to get a photo of both with the C14 and the Canon T1i T mounted on Thursday. We also saw both planets briefly on Wednesday, but it was only a brief appearance as I didn't look for them early enough in the evening and clouds had moved in.

Could I see them with the C14 and the field reducer and take a photo. The Field reducer doesn't allow the light cone to reach out far enough for the Canon T1i camera to operate, with the diagonal. I don't know if there is a better setup and some way to use the field reducer with the T1i with another adapter. If there is, we don't have that adapter at HJRO. So I decided to try to get a shot of both planets through the wider field F6 refractor. The Meade 80mm refractor easily provided a wide field of view with the Canon t1i, so wide that the planets looked really small and not as close as we could see them with a barlow. I decided to try a barlow as well. The barlow allowed me to get an image of them closer. Thinking about this now as I write this, it doesn't make sense that I took a good picture with the barlow and the F6 and didn't get a picture with F11 in the C14. It may have been that I missed a chance to get a picture with the C14 because I didn't even try it without the field reducer.

The immage looks pretty good. I'm going to post a copy of that image, but Venus is blown out in the exposure and you will not see the crescent shadowing of that planet. With one exposure, you can either expose the photo dark enough to pick up Uranus or set it for the brighter Venus and not see Uranus at all. Of course most of the time I choose to set the camera to take a picture showing both.

I tried to take some fainter exposure photos to later blend the two photos together. But it seems on viewing the images now, that I didn't set the exposure fast enough or dark enough (through ISO settings) to get a nice exposure of Venus to show the crescent features and shadow. I'm still pretty happy with the photos I was able to take.

I also tried using the Meade camera, but had problems getting it to communicate with the observatory computer. It might have been the cable which is very long and goes to the computer through a conduit under the floor. I didn't have a second cable handy and didn't spend the time trying to control the Meade camera with my laptop.

I spent more time with others looking visually at a few objects and didn't spend as much time with the photographic equipment as I might have, had it been warmer out and I was perhaps more alone without others present at HJRO. HJRO is primarily a visual site when visitors are present. We don't spend a lot of time playing with photography when people come out and want to look through the telescope. We are there to show the students and public the skies and that primarily means letting them look visually. If you ever get a chance to tour and observatory and you find it's being used for photography and you can't look through the big telescope, you may be disappointed as a visitor. We don't want to just have people stand around and look at a camera on a telescope when the sky is clear, we want them to be able to experience getting some light from the stars thrown on their eyeballs.

I found that when I was touring the Perkins observatory although it was clear, they didn't have good conditions, the sky was too poor to look through their biggest 32 inch reflector. That is understandable with poor seeing, larger scopes may give bad views and your better off with a smaller telescope when the seeing is poor. But it seemed like a big disappointment to me at that time. I went to the tour and saw the big telescope under the dome. Being a star gazer and liking telescopes, I wanted to look through the big telescope, even if the view was bad, just to have that experience. That tour taught me a lesson. If a person is visiting HJRO and I'm there to give them a tour, if they have any chance at all to look through the biggest scope present, I'm going to make an effort to make sure they are able to look through it.

Normally on a slow night or when we have time, we may have more telescopes setup outside. I like the idea of having some small scopes outside and perhaps have visitors look through those first and then work their way up to looking through the larger C14 inside the observatory. That will give a nice build up in the observing part of the tour and it's a goal I have most nights for those who visit. This is just a few comments on how I approach showing off the observatory. We can't always go through all the information and tell everyone the entire history of the observatory and older clubs. The least we can do is hope to give them a few views through different telescopes and hopefully answer a few questions and share a few facts about star gazing and astronomy.

Greg.

Picture of Venus and Uranus to follow in the next post.