I was out at HJRO from 2:15am until 3:30am, but sky conditions were bad

There was no need to announce we would be open because clouds that threatened to ruin the view moved in.

I didn't even open up the observatory, but just did a portable test eith a small rig running next to my car.

I tested how quickly I could setup the EQ mount and camera, laptop to run them from the car. It took about ten minutes to setup and three minutes to break down. I took test images and hd fun driving the scope from the iPad while sitting inside my car in the warmth.

I could see images streaming off the camera into the laptop sitting on my dash. I wish the sky conditions would have been better. There was a lot of haze and clouds giving some fairly horrible images. I still toyed a bit taking images hoping for breaks in the clouds, but the clouds and haze was like looking through soup. Early on the sky was a little better, but my first images of Orion were pretty bad so I doubt I'll have any usable images to post. In looked at, or I should say tried to image about ten objects, wide field in an hour. I tried to slew the telescope to the double cluster for the last shot, but the cord came out of the mount. I took an image anyway, but it was so cloudy the image didn't show a single star, just sky glow from clouds. When I locked up I could only see a few of the brightest stars and Jupiter in the mucky skies.




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A non observing report, it's cold, damp and cloudy outside

(I'm up late and about to fall asleep. I wrote a little update)


It's late at night and I'm going to write.

My back is aching, outside it's cold and damp.

I'm writing sentence fragments, to appear poetic, but they don't rhyme.

Sky conditions are typical outside, a bit warm and kind of damp for December. The dampness is a cold dampness, not enjoyable.

The Cumulus clouds are low and moving fast, with other haze above I wish I could observe tonight and look up at the stars.

In a perfect world, it would be clear out, comet Ison would be the comet of the century, instead of a melted promise, and I'd be out observing it. Oh well. . . No use crying over spilt Milky Way.

There so many geeky and relaxing things to like about star gazing. When I go out to HJRO, sometimes I'm so excited, I don't think and plan much, but just open up the observatory shutter quickly and start observing visually. I'll pick the obvious objects first, planets and then work at looking at nebula and star clusters most of the time, I usually save galaxies and colored stars or more obscure objects and requests for later in a session. When others are present, we often observe in an add hoc manner, doing requests and talking.

When the weather gets cold and conditions are calm and clear out, we often get the best observing conditions. Winter nights a boon to the young astronomer, are often avoided as we get older, our old tired bones can't take the cold as well as a young star gazer.

Good cold observing nights are rare in Michigan. To be comfortable, observers you have to dress up warm, against the elements. When it's really cold out, (if you have the setup for photography) there is a great temptation to take photos of the sky or image the sky, rather than visually observe.

With imaging we typically setup the mount, telescope and camera with a computer to control and take pictures. And most astronomers will run inside somewhere warm to sit back while the camera does the work taking photos of the night sky. And that cold weather without dew doesn't hurt the camera or laptop we often may use for imaging. The laptop most astronomers use for imaging won't mind the cold. The computer will love the cold and thrive in it. The imaging chip in the camera will run with less electronic noise, calmer and colder electrons stay where they belong The digital image will look better with fewer stray electrons running about in the sensor creating less stray noise.

Electrons in a modern camera are like restless cattle that won't always stay in line. In the cold, electrons wander off their paths - designed for them by circuit designers. They wander off their paths less because they are cold and less active, like a cold cow will move less and try to save energy, those electrons behave a little better in the cold.

A cold electron environment, or cold dark currents in a camera, will give a cleaner signal.

There's a great temptation to setup a system in the cold weather to do the difficult work in the cold, but it's not the same as observing with the naked eye at the eyepiece. The cold weather can wake you up with fresh air in the lungs, a brisk rush of winter, waking an observer up, under the stars.

If you take decent astro photos, in the winter that can be a plus. One can play with those photos with image software and try to improve them and bring out subtle details the eye can't capture.

The forth dimension, a long exposure of time brings out a lot more details in the image when you use a nice telescope and camera setup. Those long exposures offer a chance to see much more than the eye can see. More detail, fainter objects and often more color as well. When your done, you can have a record of you observing session and show it to others. That's half the fun of observing.

Astronomy is a lot of fun when the skies are clear. I'm starting to feel sleepy now so it's time to post this and get some rest.


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Haven't been posting many openings at HJRO because of early morning comet distractions.

I've been trying to see Ison before it passed by the sun.

I spent some of my time going out to locations down near the Detroit river.

I wanted to take some wide field photos of the comet and other targets. I thought about setting up my four inch f4 telescope on my nexstar 4se mount, but had some issues with that setup. I found a way to quickly mount the scope on the mount, but Ison wasn't something I could easily find because of problems connecting to the mount.

I then decided to get a different setup. I was thinking about a Hyperstar setup, but a full blown hyperstar setup for wide field photography, if I'm using a canon dslr as the camera would be a huge setup and huge expense. I'd need to get a large telescope because a hyperstar setup requires the camera to be mounted in front of the front corrector plate, where the secondary mirror is. It essentially turns the telescope into a Schmidt camera. A Schmidt camera was a setup where a corrector plate holds a film camera in front and center of the telescope mirror. They were created in the old days for film cameras. Celestron invented the fast star setup which allowed cameras and lenses to be used in the front of sct telescopes turning them into Schmidt cameras. This system is now known as hyperstar setups, because a second company makes what are known as hyperstar corrective lenses that your camera would attach to.

In any event the entire setup, for a canon EOS owner requires a c11 which is rather large, and a hyperstar or fast star setup. A nice c11 hd with a cgem dx mount costs a little over $4100, closer to $4400 when it's not on sale, then the hyperstar lens has to be purchased. It costs about $800. Se we are talking about $5000 to photograph wide field stuff and really faint stuff, very quickly. I think a c11 records images at something like 18x, it's been a while since I did the calculations, but it's in that power range.

The photos can be taken much quicker, which would be good for comets of something where you'd like to take quick wide field photos.

Without $5000 in extra cash laying around, I decided to check the other wide field options. The cheap one using my f4 four inch telescope doesn't work very well because I have a lot of coma, elongated stars at the edge of the image. There is a cheaper option of getting a short tube portable refractor. Something like the Meade APO f6 telescope we have at HJRO. That costs about $1000. Or you can get an Ed glass Williams optics 60 or 70mm telescope that is fairly good for imaging and wide field stuff, the Williams optics telescope will cost about $500. Getting a telescope means I'd have to have a nice telescope mount for tracking as well.

A nice mount like a Losmandy gm8 costs $2000 or so. Maybe $2500 with all the goto options. A lesser mount can cost perhaps $500 to $700, that being a cg5, or Celestron VX mount.

A $500 mount and $500 telescope is still $1000 just to take a nice wide field shot in a portable location. It's kind of pricey. I could get a stripped down c8 nexstar for that price. But the nexstar c8 with mount is a different telescope, it's not wide field but narrow field, and f11 telescope with a long focal length. It won't take wide field shots of the sky and a long comet tale. You can get a hyperstar c8 which is only in the $2000 range, but you'd need to buy a nice small ccd camera that would fit on the smaller setup. A small decent ccd astronomy camera would have a lot of advantages and I could use it at HJRO as well. But those cameras typically cost $2500 to $3500 which brings the price of a c8 with wide field capability up to the $5000 price range.

So to get a wide low field of view of a comet would be cheaper with a small refractor telescope and a smaller mount.

But I did not want to risk and spend $1000 on a hyped up comet photo shoot that might not turn out. I knew I could spend money on an expensive rig and do other things, but I just could not pull the trigger on spending a grand or more on this comet Ison frenzy that I wanted to take photos of.

I already have a basic goto mount in the nexstar 4se. This mount can do basic goto and track in an EQ mode using the built in wedge bar. It's a cheap setup for imaging and lacks many features that an imaging system might have, especially for high powered imaging.

What if I could take wide field shots with a telescope that was just a Canon EOS lens. Some great comet shots have been taken with 300 or 400 mm lenses. There are limits to what a camera lens can do compared to a telescope, but these lenses are not bad and as a positive they are light weight.

I know at times my nexstar 4se will not work or lose tracking if it's not balanced well with a dslr mounted on it.

The DLSR and nexstar 4se weigh in at over 7.5 lbs, maybe a pound more, I'll have to reweigh and confirm the weights. But if I mount a dslr and a telephoto lens on the mount I'll end up with a lot lighter load. Just take off the telescope and mount the camera and telephoto lens on the little 4se mount.

I needed a vixen dovetail, but was in a hurry and didn't want to steal and jury rig the one on the telescope for the camera. So I found a block of wood and a camera clamp and a clap. With these three items I was able to mount the canon EOS on the telescope mount.

I did an impulse buy and went to Walmart and picked up a Canon EOS 55-250mm lens. I mounted these on the telescope and tried to get a nice tracking photo of comet Ison closer to the horizon. I wasn't able to find that comet, but I was able to test that combination on other objects in the sky.

Here's a test photo of the Orion nebula and it's surroundings taken with a 80 second exposure using the lens on my little telescope mount. This shot was taken at 8x. I processed this single shot a bit using nebulosity, photoshop, neat image pro noise reduction and even iPad apps. Here is the result.

(Not bad for a quick test photo.)



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Comet Ison was brighter than magnitude 5 on November 20 by my estimate, see photo

The comet clearly looks to be as bright or brighter than a nearby star which is magnitude 4.96.

See images for explanation.













As you can see Sky Safari's estimates are way less than the brightness of the comet for November 20, 2013. This means the comet will likely be even brighter than other estimates in the software, if we are able to see it it should be quite a site in the next few days.



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My all night photo session on Grosse Ille - comet Ison

I setup my telescope, a nexstar 4se and my old home build f4 four once telescope to try to take an image of comet Ison.

Clouds through the evening looked discouraging with some breaks and clearing at times. I had my car next to my imaging setup and tested the camera and telescope on m42 and the moon while waiting, checking tracking.

With a wide field telescope for a comet tracking might not have mattered as much. The telescope was tracking very well, but my searching for the comet would rely on my iPad sky safari software controlling the telescope, as the comet was not defined inside the telescope controller.

I used skyfi a wireless control box that sets up it's own wifi network to control the nexstar mount with my iPad. Testing it there times before I arrived earlier worked without problems. When out at the river I could nit get my iPad to connect to the wifi network.

I sat much of the time in my car warming up as cold winds off the lake really chilled me. I felt at times I was standing in the cold in swimming trunks instead of with long johns and winter clothing. Clearly I should have worn winter snow pants.

I have a theory that my Prius hybrid motor running caused rf interference or magnetic interference to mess with my iPad and the skyfi remote. Perhaps it was the cold weather on the skyfi box as well. Whatever the case I could not get the remote to work and control and point the telescope. It worked briefly but died just before I was to slew to the comet.

I had my vixen BT 80 binocular telescope out and used that to manually find the comet. I could not locate the comet with the Celestron mount using the hand controller, even with a four degree field of view.

I ended up taking some photos of the comet using a fixed tripod Amd the camera lens on the canon EOS t1i. I took some ling exposures to find the comet, and see if I could see it with images on the laptop. But also some four second exposures at 3200 iso and as wide an aperture as possible to get some kind of wide field shot of the comet.

Ison looked like a huge green fuzzy star through thin clouds and haze and the tail was visible clearly through the bt80 binoculars and my 10 by 50 binoculars. Clouds moved over and obscured the view as I was viewing the comet. I setup backyard EOS to take up to 30 photos in a sequence and took many photos hoping to get a decent one to show others.

Below is one of the photos.

Processed in deep sky stacker to remove a single dark frame from the single four second exposure, photoshop and Neat Image Pro noise reduction.

You can see there are a couple of aircraft leaving jet trails in the photo as well.



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Comet Ison - some photos from Thursday morning.

Some photos from Thursday Morning.   This photos have been quickly processed and some advanced techniques are missing from these photos. 

It's early in the morning Friday.  If it's clear out I could decide to go out to HJRO and try to get another shot of Ison.  I'm to tired to even think about that right now.  I'm going to post some photos, I threw together from early this morning/last night's session.

I'll keep the comments brief.  I used Photoshop, Neat Image Pro to filter noise, and Preview on the Macintosh.  To stack images I used Deep Sky Stacker on the PC.  I acquired most of the shots from the Canon EOS under control of Backyard EOS on the PC.

I took a few test shots from live looping auto guiding mode from the Orion Star Shoot camera.  I processed and worked on a few of those black and white test images.  This was while it was guiding, a 2, 5 or 10 second exposure.   I was able to even get some half decent (for the cost of that camera) black and white iamges from the auto guider as well.

Enough comments.  Here's some of the photos.

I took some images of Comet Lovejoy.  Most of my Canon EOS images still need to be processed.  I worked on processing this image I actually took with the auto guider as a test image.  This actually shows Lovejoy pretty well, for a short exposure black and white astrophotography camera.

Comet Lovejoy above: (trying to pull to much out of the image results in much of the checkerboard noise we see in the photo above.)

All  black and white images from the Orion Star Shoot auto-guiding camera (comet LoveJoy above and M42 further down) were processed in Nebulosity, Neat Image pro and Preview.    There is a lot of noise in those images, so I used Neat Image pro to reduce some of it.

Above: Aan image of Comet ISON taken at F7 through the C14.  This image was stacked from about 3 images.   I was taking a lot of images at F11 through the C14, but then found F7 worked much better.  The coma is basically the comet's actual color, green.  This image shows more black and white than green, due to poor processing on my part and a desire to show as much of the comet's tail as I could.  The comet appears white because it's overexposed and my processing for this photo didn't keep it's slight green color.  With a more sensitive camera and better processing, we'd likely see more dust details in the comet's tail than shown above.  It's also difficult to tell if much of the dust is lost in haze or cloud's in this photo.

Earlier in the evening, I took a few photos of the Orion nebula.  I was testing the focus of my Canon EOS.  I decided to take a few stills with the Orion Star Shoot Guider to see what it could do while in guiding mode.  A 4 second and 10 second exposure were combined and processed to create the photo above.  There is still some noise, in the photo above depending on how bright you view it.  I probably tried to push this image to much and made it to bright.   I used Nebulosity, Photoshop(?), Preview, Neat image Pro and Photomatix HDR programs to get the results above from the Orion Star shoot.  I believe I actually took two passes with Neat Image Pro in between a couple of the other adjustment steps.  

I also took some photos earlier in the day of The Eskimo Nebula (no photos posted here yet), and  a test photo of the Crab nebula (M1).  I didn't get enough exposure of the Crab Nebula to process it.  I didn't have time to spend on M1.

The above Black and White photo came from a color photo I took of Comet ISON.  This was cropped and zoomed in from the wider shot taken from the Meade Refractor.  I started out adjusting the color to reduce red and blue sky glow and enhance the natural color of the comet (green).  But I decided to also create a black and white version of the image to copy the style of a photo that George Korody sent me.  His photo was taken with a black and white camera and took 30 seconds.  My photo was taken with the Canon EOS T1i and I combined three exposures totaling 105 seconds if I recall correctly.  The three 35 second exposures on the Canon EOS rivaled George's quick Black and White photo.  

I actually generated an intermediate photo that overemphasized green for this shot, but decided to combine that photo with the black and white version of it, to tone down the green tone and colors in the one shown below.  The photo of ISON below has a little bit of color in it, but it's almost completely Black and White.

Per George's comments: To the left of the comet there is a faint galaxy in this photograph.

"I see that you caught elliptical galaxy NGC4697 (Magnitude 9.2) towards the left side of your image.  The bright star below the comet is magnitude 12.85"

Lastly I'll leave you with another image of comet ISON, this was taken with the Orion Star Shoot Auto guider at the end of the session.  This camera took a 10 second exposure through the Meade telescope.  Not bad for a quick image from an auto guiding camera.  The image below was enhanced/adjusted using Nebulosity, Preview, and Neat Image Pro for noise reduction. 

Right now the moon is hanging about 8 degrees above the western horizon

It's nearly 4am and comet Ison is only five degrees below the eastern horizon. The moon sets as the comet rises.

I'm going to be trying to get better ranges of comet Ison this morning. Will be doing mostly photography through the telescope.

I'm taking images of comet Lovejoy as well, right now at HJRO.

It's going to be a long night. So many comets, so little time.




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A quick update about Wednesday morning's comet viewing, revised a bit.

(A bit of re-editing happened to this post, I'll add photos in another post later tonight if possible.)

Last night I didn't get to sleep until around 2am.  I thought I set my alarm and perhaps I did for 4am.  If it rang I didn't recall hearing it and turning it off.  There's a chance I didn't even set it as I woke up around 5:15am and couldn't get out of the house until 5:25am

Got up late to view the comet. I woke up around 5:14am and didn't get out of the house until 5:25am.

Took my Canon EOS, a laptop and my eyepieces.  When I arrived at HJRO I left the eyepieces in the car.

It was bitter cold out, around 23 degrees.

The sky looked good, but I didn't have time to take wide field images.  I simply rushed to open up the observatory door, in hopes of setting up and taking as many photos as I could.  I had probably less than 25 minutes to open up, setup and take photos before the clock would strike 6am, the effective witching hour for taking photos before the sky grew to bright.   I decided to only attempt to take photos with the C14, not the Meade.  I didn't have time to setup the Canon EOS on both telescopes, focus and take photos.  I also knew that I had a slim chance of getting the Auto-Guider focused and working in such a short time.

The first minute or two, I visually viewed the comet through the c14 with the same 40mm eyepiece I used 24 hours earlier. Comet ISON looked brighter than it did the day before.  It's starring to look better now.

(Unfortunately the comet is moving so fast, good close up photos from HJRO with the C14 might only be possible for a couple more mornings (weather permitting).  The Meade might reach it better.  If we lived in a perfect world I'd have a large easy to setup telescope for photography and the weather would be much warmer, giving me time to setup in the morning near a nice low horizon.  With the weather being so cold out lately it's unlikely that I'd setup to to photography with a telescope and tracking in this cold.  It might take an hour or two to get a really nice setup.  One could ideally use a low focal length rich field setup for the comet as well as it gets closer to the horizon and the tail becomes longer.  Having something like a "hyperstar setup" at a nice dark sky site, perhaps something like an over the water view would be nice, something like the dark sky site at the tip of the thumb of Michigan would be awesome for the comet if it provided a nice low horizon dark sky location. ) 

Took a few stills, with the canon EOS on the c14 before I had the Toshiba PC laptop hooked up to control the camera via Backyard EOS.  I like and highly recommend using a laptop or some computer for your photography of a comet, the larger immediate display of the images you take helps you locate the comet in the field, and insure you have a better focus. 

Before I setup the Laptop, I tried to focus on the comet using a focusing mask.   My mistake due to the rush and lack of time was trying to use the focusing mask with only the small Canon EOS t1i display, reviewing and using the small display didn't work well for me.  Perhaps due to the small display, perhaps because I forgot to put on reading glasses.  Visually the image at low power of a nearby bright star jumped around with the seeing with the mask on.  Rendering a quick use of the mask, useless.  I was better off aiming and focusing as best I could due to the time limitations.  Using the laptop would be a better way to do this.

Also I want to point out that using my laptop to capture images while focusing is better with one person in HJRO than using the computer in the observatory.  We have a large monitor and the computer display of images and controls are setup for a separate operator.  You often have to move to the telescope from the position you're in in the observatory to focus the telescope when getting the telescope in focus.  A live view perhaps to the other monitor facing the telescope would work, but we often run the configuration with the Windows and Macintosh sides of the Mac Mini going to separate monitors.  We haven't optimized the setup in a quick way yet to do solo astrophotography and it's a challenge.   I'm better off using my Toshiba laptop for solo imaging runs at HJRO.   The USB wire I use for the laptop also works better most of the time, because I can use the large observing chair as a stand and have the laptop up close near the eyepiece and camera.  It allows me to stand and setup the telescope focus while observing the results instantly using the laptop. 

- I should have dressed warmer.
This morning although I dressed up, the added colder air and rush likely made me much colder.  I left the observatory shivering by the end of the session.  I didn't use the IR heater at all during the entire imaging and setup, this made the comfort level almost unbearable.  I should have worn winter snowmobile boots and a snowmobile pant setup as well to have more comfort.  perhaps another layer of clothing and ear muffs as well.

- 5:40am
I took a few photos while trying to get the other stuff setup, the auto guider. Had to setup the auto guider in between exposures taken of the comet.

Had to refocus the Meade for the auto guider and was rushing. Had to go back to a nearby bright star to focus the auto guider.

The auto guider is not recognized by the computer in HJRO, at least it didn't work this morning. Phd guiding software did not see the Orion camera on the Macintosh or PC side.

I quickly tested and discovered PHD guiding software ran on my laptop. But the guiding didn't work very well, for stars inside the field of view near the comet, it could be due to the poor focus I did as I was rushing with phd.  I ran 2 minute intervals on some of the star tests to do autoguiding and that ate up at least ten minutes of my imaging time, which made it impossible to get good auto-guiding adjustments and the long exposures I was hoping to get.  You really should be at the observatory an hour before imaging is going to happen to setup.  Ideally I'd be there at 3:30 and start imaging tests around 4:30 or so for example with the comet if it was first visible around 4:30am.  The comet is not visible in the C14 until 5am however so a 4am arrival would have been better.  I retrospect I probably should have bundled up more and just went to HJRO and tried to image all night.  Perhaps warming up in my car during imaging sessions and test, the results would have been far better.

DIGRESSION EQUIPMENT THOUGHTS: Not that this log is meant to be a gripe fest. but for low targets, we have better viewing using the Meade Piggybacked on the back of HJRO.   A more ideal setup for comets would have two cameras piggybacked on the C14, some other telescope that was wide field on the telescope as well, perhaps removing the Lunt Solar telescope for a wide field telescope for auto-guiding.  Having a large telescope for auto-guiding would also be idea.  Really you'd want a better setup all around, HJRO is far from ideal for imaging comets.  To image comets you need a nice dark site, which we don't have.  You want a really low horizon, which we don't have due to city obstructions, and you'd want a portable rig ideally that has two telescopes a larger rich field perhaps for the auto-guiding.  For high up hard to see deep sky images of comets the observatory would likely do better with our auto-guiding setup.  To get faint stars to work with the auto-guider you need to let PHD do the mount calibration for backlash, which can take ten minutes out of your imaging run.  So overall we are better setup for fainter comets far above the horizon.  What is the big advantage to HJRO vs. a portable rig.  There is practically no setup time, as the telescope and mount are there and setup already.  There is no hour or longer setup of the mount and telescope.  There is less wind because the walls protect the observer.  We have a wooden floor with carpet on it, which is much warmer than a observing position outside.   For outside observing, unless you were using a large rich field telescope, a wide exposure is probably a much better setup.  In this cold weather I don't know if many FAAC astronomers will brave the early morning hours to setup and view the comet visually from any location.  (A part of me wishes I had a Faststar hyperstar setup and a trip to a dark sky site to get photos of this comet.  But most of those kinds of "cheap rigs" cost nearly $5000.  (outside my immediate telescope budget.)  The next best way to get a nice comet photo from a remote location is with a DSLR with a lens on a fixed mount.  It's relatively cheap.  One could use a small tracking mount with the DSLR on it as well, or use piggyback photography with a DSLR on a small telescope which tracked the comet.

THE AUTO GUIDING ATTEMPT
I took one long exposure while phd guided the mount, but phd started throwing errors so I cut it short to 156 seconds, aborting the exposure.

THE SYNC ON THE COMET MISTAKE
Before going to refocus I decided to do a sync on the comet as I liked my framing of it. But the comet is moving and you should not sync to a moving object. By the time I got back from the focus of the Orion guider the comet had moved and my 156 second exposure missed.the comet and showed only half of the comet on the edge of the frame and the tail.

Re-centering the object for a better photographic attempt, I took six 60 second 3200 iso exposures.  With phd guiding not working well, I could not get a long exposure.   I took six dark frames for stacking and image processing at the end of the session.  These were registered as 11 degree C sensor dark frames, and the exposed frames during the run were at 14 degrees C, not perfect, but close enough to perhaps help in the post processing and tweaking of the images.

By the end of the session the chill was starting to really set in.  I left HJRO around 7am to go home.  Outside HJRO the lights of the middle school had been turned on by morning staff.  I don't know if those lights affected the comet photos, it's more likely that the rising sun (sky glow)  affected the images.

SUMMARY
It will be challenging to get good images from the massive amount of sky glow that exists in those photos.  I may only have one or two images that are usable from this mornings session.

It was a real whirlwind of activity today for me at HJRO.   I would not say the trip to HJRO was worth it, to see the comet, Monday morning, but Tuesday morning the trip was worth it because the comet is much brighter. 

If your able to get the right setup a small telescope and binoculars and wake up early in the morning, viewing the comet visually now would be as rewarding as the nice views we had of Panstarrs.  As the comet gets closer there's a chance for unusual outbursts, so that makes viewing this "sun grazing" comet an exciting opportunity.  With the Michigan weather I almost felt I could feel cold CO2 particles and ice flying off the comet on my face, but that was just the Michigan weather.

Near the end of the session, I looked at the comet visually through the C14, 6:12am.  The sky glow  overwhelmed most of the tail by that time, making the comet appear like a fuzzy star, with most of its tail missing.  Observing after 6am would be disappointing, you need to be out there at 5am to observe this during the next few days.

I didn't get to sleep until 8am.   I'll look, process, and hopefully post some of this morning's comet images in the next post, or edit and add images to this long rambling post. 

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Quick review of Comet ISON with photos - attempt 5am to 6:30am Tuesday morning

Arrived at HJRO shortly before 5am.

Before I continue, I want to say there is a chance I'll try to image this comet again before the sun rises.  If I can get equipment issues ironed out and the weather cooperates I may get a better photo this morning.   One of the problems of course is the comet is getting brighter as it gets closer to the sun but the sky will glow from natural sky glow from the sunrise and images after 6am when the comet is higher are practically worthless as they start picking up a lot of blue sky and the contrast with the tail, renders the images pretty useless.  We have to take all our images before 6am between 5 and 6am and the comet is fairly low on the horizon making it difficult to image from the observatory due to the wall obstruction.  We need an object about 18 degrees above the horizon for the C14 to be able to image it.  The Meade can image a little lower because it's mounted higher on top of the C14 and it can peek out of the shutter at a lower angle in the east and west.

A more detailed log about viewing the comet Tuesday follows:

Opened up but experienced a few issues and problems.  ISON was not defined as a comet in the sky catalog and I had to download an updated comet list off the internet.  I had some tracking/balancing issues and the auto-guiding camera would not connect.  Some of these were possibly user error, others were perhaps related to my not being awake enough and having enough time to configure the observatory.

At first I looked at the comet visually through the C14 with a 40mm eyepiece.   Temperatures were very cold out, about 27 degrees and there was a slight wind of about 10mph at the observatory.

The comet looked about as good as Panstarrs looked earlier in the year with a much smaller telescope.  The C14 didn't seem to bring out much of the tail and I decided after looking for a short time to try to take some long exposure photos.   I didn't get ideal images, because of tracking issues and the lack of time.   I was running late, but no visitors showed up, so I was able to get a few photos.

This images are not anywhere as good as images taken by other astronomers of the comet.  With better luck and more setup and planning time, I might be able to do better.  As the comet gets closer to the sun it will be brighter.  There's a chance Wednesday morning will be clear out and I may try to image the comet early this Wednesday and see if I can do better.

While looking at the comet through the C14 I tried to take a half a dozen exposures of the comet through the wide field Meade telescope.  I took these with a Canon EOS T1i DSLR camera.  I took relatively short exposures with the Meade as I was in a hurry to move the camera to the C14.

Here are five photos I took with the Meade 80mm refractor and the Canon DSLR.  These were stacked with Deep Sky stacker and I worked on trying to tease out detail from 5 13 second exposures. We are talking about a total exposure time of only about a minute, so these images don't show the tail and faint parts of the comet as well as I'd like to see them. 

I ended up playing with the image in Preview on the Macintosh and used way to much adjustments actually trashing the image pretty good, to get detail from the tail, but this introduced many noisy and oversaturated artifacts that make the comet look more like a comic book comet than a nice astrophotograph.  I guess I can call it "art" and leave it there.

Below you can see the output from Deep Sky Stacker with some natural adjustments.  

Deep Sky Stacker is a free program on the P.C. and it does a nice job of removing the motion in the five images and correcting the comet image.  But we don't have a lot of detail to play with in the photo above. 


The over saturated "artsy" kind of look.  from a cropped image from the Meade adjusted to give more detail in the coma and tail.  This makes it look a little bit more comic book like, which is not the normal goal of astronomers when taking images of deep sky objects.

- Moving to the C14
I was unable to get long exposures like a 180 second exposure or some exposure that might take five minutes.  Something long which would bring out the tail of the comet would be nice.   I saw some tracking or balancing errors with a 180 second exposure, so I made the decision to try to take a half a dozen 60 second exposures of the comet on the C14 and see if I could stack them to get a good image.  Most of the 60 second exposures were not very good.

I ended up working on a single image from the C14 which was a 60 second exposure.  A little bit of manipulation showed the following from Photoshop.

This image was manipulated further to try to enhance the detail in the tail but these are over-processed and introduces the same kind of artificial noise we see in the "art" like photo results from the Meade above. 

That's about it for now.

I'm hoping to get better photos soon.  Ison will be approaching the sun by the 28th of November and this is the week we'd want to get an image of it before glow from the moon would affect morning imaging.

Will attempt to open up HJRO by 5:45am Tuesday morning to observe and photograph comet Ison.

Comet Ison will be in the morning skies this cold Tuesday morning and in theory will be visible from a good eastern horizon view.

Perhaps with binoculars and a small telescope most anyone will be able to find the comet. It will be about half way between Mars and the horizon at 5:30am.

It will be cold out this morning. I will try to view the comet at HJRO.

It won't be very visible from HJRO until it's risen about 18 degrees or further which would mean the comet wpnt be visible until nearly 6am for The observatory's large c14. We may be able to see it with the Meade refractor as well a little bit before 6am.

The sun rises around 7am so sky glow will start when the comet becomes more visible to the telescopes inside. (The sun starts to brighten the sky for an hour before it rises.)

Here is a chart showing Ison and it's position at 6am on Tuesday morning.











Clear sky chart shows that it should be clear this morning.

Unfortunately it snowed around here and the weather will be cold out.

- In planning for Tuesday morning.
There are a couple of ways I could try to view the comet. I could try to view it from HJRO later in the morning around 6am or find a location near with a better eastern horizon. . . Perhaps somewhere near the river.

I'm leaning toward going to HJRO because I won't have to setup a telescope in a cold environment and can turn on the heater inside HJRO, if it gets to cold after observing. I also have a better chance of getting a photo from the telescope by opening up at HJRO. Around here I'm not sure a good low eastern horizon can be found to allow me to view from both locations.

I like to see it through a big telescope, but if I headed down to Ecorse to setup my large ten inch newtonian("Big Bertha"); I would not have time to take down the telescope and travel to HJRO and view the comet. I think I should shoot for HJRO tomorrow morning and any other viewing from other locations will be optional.



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Playing with my new 94 inch telescope

There is a story on the Internet about a guy who owns the biggest amateur telescope. He bought a 70 inch surplus mirror that was meant to go into a spy satellite, but became military surplus. He spent some time creating a huge truss telescope structure and apparently coated the mirror with some nonconventional method. I have no idea how good his mirror is and how good that telescope works, but reading about it threw me into a mood to go searching for another telescope.

I spend to much time dreaming about more telescopes, and more telescope mounts. Something I can take out to a dark sky site. My dreams often end up searching for things like mounts and large telescopes. Maybe a Losmandy g11 mount for Big Bertha, my ten inch Newtonian. Maybe some new planetary killer for sale on an astromart or cloudy night website. One moment it's a planetary killer, and another moment it's a rare large sct, perhaps a nine inch takahashi sct which is super rare and expensive, or a c11 with a hyper star lens. Or maybe a rich field telescope that is a little smaller than big Bertha that I could use on a tracking mount to take wide field photos when out at a dark sky site.

Then I get back to reality and think about the telescope I have access to at HJRO. It's difficult to compete with a Celestron c14 with a small personal telescope. Being at the observatory and able to look through the 14 inch telescope spools me. I often conclude, there is no point in spending money on another telescope which will not compete well against the C14, and cost so much time and money to deploy, I'd rarely see it used. I end up realizing I'm very fortunate to be in the FAAC club and able to look through the Lincoln Park Observatory Telescopes which are so close to home and quick to access.

If I had a lot of money, I could buy a huge telescope. I can dream of some monster telescope like a $75,000 50 inch telescope that one can buy from Great Red Spot astronomy. I'd have to wait for a mirror to be built, buy a trailer and then drive hundreds of miles perhaps to get a good view camping and observing. If I was to take photos they still would be limited because the tracking for a large dob of that size would not allow long exposure photographs.

If I had a huge telescope like these I'd have to schedule the time to take a decent photo, then download the photo and play with the photo using photoshop. And I might not select the right photos or it might be cloudy where my telescope was setup. I could rent a telescope from I telescope.com or some other rental site and spend money for imaging time.

But I already have a 95 inch telescope that I own (in part) as a taxpayer, it's sitting in orbit. It takes photographs of many interesting objects in space. It's the Hubble space telescope and NASA puts all the raw image data into files called FIT image files on the web. Anyone can browse and download any of the thousands of images that are posted and learn to process those photos. NASA even has programs on the web to help me convert a fit file into a readable tiff file inside photoshop and there are tutorials on the web that show us the basics of merging the separate filtered images into a color file. (I won't go into details but can post a link later.)

I've thought about this for years and never tried to process a Hubble photo until tonight. I decided to go out to the web and select an image and learn a little bit about how to process that image. My photoshop skills are still fairly basic.

I went out and selected the ring nebula. One of many photos that NASA has out there, a color three channel image fit file was selected and downloaded to my Macintosh laptop. I used fits liberator to convert it to a set of three tiffs representing three color channels.

The program created a three channel image which has three different color channels. I didn't spend time to read up and determine what the three colors were and probably made that mistake, not using or selecting the proper colors. I just guessed that layer 1 was red, layer 2 was green and layer 3 was blue : an rgb image. But that probably isn't the case with the image I selected from Nasa's site.

I processed the first attempt with r,g,b as the channels and merged them. I used curves on each channel to adjust them a bit and merged the three into an rgb image. Below is my first attempt.

Ring Nebula (green tint)
My first quick image process of raw fit file from at the Hubble space telescope.



As you can see there is a red and green tint to this image which is not true colors that we'd see. My curve mixing was pretty good on this image, for a first attempt. There is an error in the image I didn't mask out, but the nebulosity is pretty good in this image. The sharpness is stunning of course, thanks to the great source image NASA provided.

Not entirely happy with the colors I choose, I decided to reprocess it from the same fit file. I did this with red for channel 1, blue for channel 2 and green for channel 3 of the exposure I downloaded. This gave me a more true to natural color of the Ring Nebula, but I didn't process the curves as well brining out the subtle shades in the nebula that I was able to get with my first attempt. Clearly there is a lot more to learn.

As you can see the Hubble images provide a pretty stunning result. Quite a bit better than our c14, and it only took me a little bit of time in photoshop to get this image.


Ring nebula (closer to true colors) second attempt from Hubble image below.





The best thing about my new 94 inch telescope is, it didn't cost me a dime and the images are just sitting their on the NASA website ready to be processed.

(Compare the Hubble image with a single still we took of the Ring Nebula some years back at the Lincoln Park observatory.)


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Sometimes astronomers just can't make it out to observe

There will be a student solar event at HJRO during this Tuesday. I'm not sure how many Faac members will be able to help. Some won't be able to make it due to health reasons or work obligations.

It's really clear out right now. Kind of cold. Good for imaging.

I've been working on video editing today and we have a medical appointment tomorrow here in this house, so I can't plan on being out and observing tonight. The skies are great. It's cold out however.

I may go out and observe and do a bit of imaging anyway. Now that most of my brief video editing is complete for this band video I shot earlier this summer. I've been putting off editing for a while with other distractions.

I feel like going out and imaging a bit at HJRO to get some deep space long exposure test images and also to get a glimpse of Ison in an image or visually. This would be at 5am however and I've spent a lot of the evening watching cooking shows on Create tv and doing a bit of video editing.

I'd like to get a nice image of comet Ison, but it's further away from Mars and the Leo triplet so I can't get those images in the same wide field exposure. I might be able to get some test images of jupiter to play with as well.

I've been spending about half my free time reading up on computer mounts or thinking about building a tracking mount for my binoculars. Kind of like a dobsonian tracking platform, but this would be for a tripod. How would you create a tracking platform for a tripod. Well I have some ideas, but one thing is likely, it would need to have q positive tracking gear, kind of like a typical gear on a telescope mount, but the gear would have teeth or a gear that is curved that allow the tripod to rest in a fixed state and not move much when the alt/az was activated. A kind of locking design a bit like the tripod spreader my bino tripod already has. The tripod would likely only need to track for 1/2 hour so 7.5 degrees of movement would be enough. Many dob tracking tables move 15 degrees and track for an hour. I think the tripod would have to be low and the northern table would actually be split and have two gears one for each northern tripod leg. The southern part of the tracking spreader, would be for one leg. The tripod would not likely be fully extended but quite low for a low CG, something more geared toward a seated position, than standing. This would give the CG a lower position. It might make viewing near the zenith a challenge because the binoculars would be quite low.

I'd like tracking binoculars for solar and public events. I know I won't have anything constructed by this Tuesday.

The other half of my time or free time has been spent thinking about new video and computer equipment for video editing. Not astronomy related. It's mostly dreaming. I have a pretty cool video edit system already, but it's limited for massive camera video from many bands at q music festival.

It's almost 3am. I'm not sure if I'll try to open up tonight for the image test or not. I hate missing good observing opportunities, but the other stuff going on around here, keeps me away from HJRO maybe half of the good nights.

Below is a really bad example sketch of the tripod spreader tracking concept, taken from tracking table design ideas, shown on the right.

It's not scaled or drawn well, more for internal thoughts.

The tripod legs would have to be captured somehow so they could not easily be lifted from the base and the base would be a kind of table connected, but not with a solid base, more like a spreader. It would still rotate the base like a normal table would to allow full EQ adjustments to the rig.




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Comet Ison would be a tempting morning target, but weather will be horrible

Ison will be positioned close to Mars, and the Leo triplet Saturday morning.

Unfortunately we will have 60 percent cloud cover and winds gusting up to 45 mph in Lincoln Park, so the observatory won't be open at 4 or 5 am to try to image the comet.








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One of the better photos I was able to take of Jupiter this month when it was high in the sky.

Jupiter at 625x.

A shadow transit that happened earlier in the week. This image shows Ganymede and Io two of Jupiter's moons. In this photo Ganymede is casting it's shadow on the planet.

This photo was taken just before sunrise when Jupiter was very hi in the sky and sky conditions were quite good.




I actually processed the above photo a few different ways and the image above is just one of the outputs I created from the same AVI movie.

Below you can see index information with the names of the moons, in the double photo.




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Jupiter with one shadow as it rose more in the sky.

Te image of Jupiter looked better in this photo, with only one shadow on the surface. This was a photo taken after the triple shadow transit when Jupiter had risen much house in the sky.

The image of Jupiter looks better here, and we can see the great red spot.




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I've been trying to capture some great photos of Jupiter from HJRO

This involves waking up or staying up into the early hours of the morning.

Jupiter rises late in the evening.

Processing a captured AVI movie from a camera like a canon EOS attached to the C14 is rather easy. We just load up Registax 6 which is free software with the AVI movie and toy with the adjustments a bit. It's a little more work than I'll mention here, but the computer does most of the work.

The real challenge is not learning how to use Registax, it's getting a good photo or movie to begin with. The c14 is a great telescope and the observatory can provide great images. When objects are low and near the horizon the light must pass through perhaps as much as 100 miles of atmosphere. There is a lot of particles and humidity often in the sky and that causes distortion in the images you gather.

The top photo below was captured late last month, 9-26. It was captured using backyard EOS and a 2 x Barlow. A 5x digital crop of the sensor data zoomed in the image further giving us 1250x for the image. That is a tremendous amount of magnification and most times this image will break down from something like the c14 at that kind of power. That kind of power is usually not usable because the seeing and transparency isn't good enough. But the morning I took this Jupiter was high in the sky and conditions were good. So the too image was taken around 6am in the morning. Jupiter doesn't show as much detail as I'd like it to show, but for a one shot camera and our setup, it's pretty good.

The second image is Jupiter with 5x the normal focal length of 625x when we have the canon EOS t1i attached to the f11 c14. Native power is 125x with a t mounted 3/4 inch sensor. 3911 divided by 50 times 1.6 gives us the effective power. When I multiply this by five, The 5x digital magnification setting in backyard EOS software that I used, we get 625 power.

So the second photo is half the power of the first. And the image maybe slightly zoomed a bit with processing. The states powers are close to the actual power we see with a normal 100 image display.

Why does the second image look much worse, than the first?

Te second image looks worse because Jupiter was photographed at about 2am in the second photo. Jupiter was much lower in the east and still rising. It was only 18 or so degrees above the horizon. There was more dew and humidity in the air. I was also looking through half the shutter and half of the telescope was aimed at the wall. Jupiter hadn't risen far enough to be fully visible in the shutter, but I tried to get the photo anyway. I was hoping to get an image of the triple shadow transit last week with the second photo, but the shadows of three moons of Jupiter were moving across the face of the planet when it was only 3 degrees above the horizon as the event started.

I could not see the shadows on the planet with a different telescope outside aiming low at the planet. The air was unsteady and Jupiter was fuzzy in the telescope. By the time Jupiter was hi enough to get a capture with the C14 one of the shadows of one of it's moons was already off the face of the planet.

A triple shadow transit only happens a couple of times a decade, so they are rare. I was hoping to get a photo of this or see it visually. If I was in Europe under clear skies I probably could have seen the event. But it was over and Jupiter was to low for our area.

This shows the most important thing in getting a good astrophotograph. You have to have an object high above the horizon and get those images when the object is 30 degrees or higher in the sky. Lower targets can be seen and photographed, but they won't look as good.

Later in the year near December Jupiter will be high in the sky near opposition at midnight. We will get the best views and photos of it at that time, around midnight, when it's highest in the sky, and closer to earth.







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Jupiter this morning

Was out early this morning taking some video clips of Jupiter through the c14 at HJRO trying to see what I could get as an image from them.

Here is one result from this morning.

Europa, and Io two moons are on the left.

Jupiter in this image was captured at 625x using Backyard EOS and my canon t1i. Capture was at 5x digital zoom off the default 3911mm focal length.





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M27 photographed with Canon 60da, 12 exposures stacked

Tim Campbell let us use his 60da Canon EOS to photograph the dumbbell nebula.

Tim Campbell, Tim Dey and I were at the observatory while these images were taken through the c14, using Backyard EOS.

We took 12 four minute exposures, and 8 dark frames to reduce camera noise while processing the photos.

I quickly stacked and processed these using deep sky stacker, a free PC utility and photoshop.

I used only two curves when color processing the images in photoshop where most good image processors would spend more time and use more curves. I also didn't strip out and process the stars separately.

The image was also adjusted a bit on the iPad using Filterstorm, changing the exposure a bit and sharpening up the image a bit.




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Jupiter at 625x via backyard EOS and camera on c14

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Kayak at sunset, photo dark compared to video, due to 4k unbinned pixels of image - GO PRO example

Here is a crop of a still image I took with the little Hero camera near Dexter 
Michigan.   What was interesting about this picture was it was dark.   This is 
not the original photo but a painted and touched up version of it.

The actual HDTV video was much brighter at that time of day and when I switched 
the camera over to still and took a photo I got a nice large shot but it was 
dark.   Why?

Well in astronomy many cameras are setup to offer grouping of pixels and sensor 
pixels are used as a group to get lower resolution still images which are using 
a set of pixels effectively causing a feature known as"binning".   It turns out 
the Go Pro uses a binning kind of process which groups pixels from a large 4k 
sensor and causes a smaller image to be much brighter.   When it was using all 
the pixels and getting higher resolution the image was much darker.   The 
exposure is so dark that a blurring of colors and undersaturated blacks occur in 
the original image.   I had to darken and change contrast a bit and used a 
surrealistic + filter inside Photoshop before using a painting filter.  This 
allowed me to get a half decent but still dark painting which of course was 
cropped for this version as well, reframing the image a bit.

The Go Pro hero is a pretty nice camera, but it doesn't match the capabilities 
of a nice dslr camera. 

A request from my friends wife which saw the original was for me to turn the photo

into something black and white, with almost no color.  Due to the limitations

of the photo being very dark and over-saturated with greens, I found pushing the colors

and working it more like a painting gave a better result. 

Kayak at sunset.

I didn't take a picture of the Nova last time we were out.

Tim Campbell took a photo of the Nova using his Canon 60DA EOS camera.

I don't have that photo right now for this post, but may use it for an article in this month's Star Stuff (FAAC club Newsletter).  I'm late at getting that article together, so I don't know if I'll even get that update published this month.

Yesterday I tried to combine kayaking with Astronomy.  Or I should say go kayaking and have my telescope ready for Astronomy if the weather proved to be reasonable for viewing.  It turned out I didn't have enough energy and will to break away from chatting and talking after kayaking, so I didn't do any Astronomy out in Dexter, although I had my telescope in the car.

I took a Hero 3 Black Edition camera with me while kayaking.  I ended up taking a few videos with it in the waterproof case.  I also took a few stills, but this was of the little river near Dexter and I could see the moon rising over the water as I kayaked back toward my friends house.

Here's a picture I took from the kayak.  I've done a little photo manipulation to correct the fisheye distortion in the original using Adobe Photoshop CS6.  I used a 15mm lens correction and -22 custom correction to get the photo into a nicer perspective, losing most of the fisheye distortion.   The reflection of the moon in the water looked really nice near sunset.  The dark water had an almost polarizing effect on the reflected view.


It's a nice night out tonight and I may still stop by the observatory to try to get a spectroscopy photo of the nova for spectral analysis.  We have a filter to take a photo of something like this, but I don't know if I'll be awake enough to head over there and give it a try.  There's is a chance I'll go over.  We'll see.   I put out a post of the results if I'm able to make it there. 

Image from last Thursday's sunset

HDR painted effects, from two iPhone photos. Merged into a panorama with photoshop after HDR processed with Photomatix Pro.



I saw some nice cloud formation that reminded me of the "pillars of Creation" portion of a nice astronomy photo which is quite popular. Before I was able to get a good photo of the Pillars in the sunlight they had changed. I took this photo from the hill in Allen Park where Meijers is.


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Summer solstice at Fair Lane Estate, Tim Takes photos

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Today some Faac volunteers setup the new rings for the c14

The c14 is now remounted with rings that will give a more secure bond to the mount. This will stop a familiar creaking noise we used to hear once in a while with the stock Celestron mounting dovetail. The stock mount had other telescopes supported on the tube of the c14 itself. Now we don't have those mounted to the tube, but they are mounted to stronger and more rigid telescope rings.

This happened today as the sun set. George Korody, Mike Rousseu, Tim Dey, James French and I were at the observatory to help out and perform the new setup. George and Mike led the effort and George donated the rings to the observatory.

I took a photo of the setup. But I, not posting that here.

I'm posting a photo of Venus and Mercury which I took last week at HJRO, during a brief visit.




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Summer solstice photo Henry Ford Fair Lane Estate

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HJRO will be open tonight from 11:25pm until about 1am

We will observe the Saturn, the moon and likely several other targets.

Sorry about the last minute announcement.

I'm not sure how late we will be open. The above is an estimate.

If the evenings demands and observing go well we may be out later than the title suggests.


Greg


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Not a lot to report at HJRO lately, I did a little sidewalk astronomy last week in Riverview

Last week we had a couple members of the Faac club go out and do some work making the observatory better. They tested a new focusing mask that Tim Campbell donated to HJRO. Tim Dey and Tim Campbell were the testers.

The next evening Tim Campbell worked on the alignment of the mount. Apparently the mount wasn't pointing very well. We need to get a better alignment setup in the mount. This is a software thing, but we have been putting this off because we are going to be getting new telescope rings that hold the c14 more firmly and securely to the mount than our current setup. George Korody is donating these rings from an earlier setup he used to use as he used to own a c14. The ring setup is worth at least $1000. Plus he bought other parts and donated this to help it happen.

This last year seems to be a year of donations with many members of the club and even Leo McMaster making donations to HJRO. These items include:

A new better setup using a Macintosh mini computer. That will allow us to stream video of observing sessions to the school or other places over the Internet. Various computer hardware donated or loaned.

A camera that allows us to auto track on stars. This is necessary to allow long exposure photography of more than a minute. We can take four or five minute exposures now. At least with the testing we've done. This opens up more in the realm of long exposure astrophotography at HJRO.

The focus mask.

Telescope rings.

The telescope rings will mean we have to do an alignment to the telescope mount again. So we haven't done much in worrying about getting a killer alignment because the new rings will require another alignment.

A lot of work has been done by George Korody, Tim Dey, Tim Campbell and others at the observatory. They are just a few of the unsung heroes of the observatory.

I was able to stop by briefly and look at Saturn at HJRO, but we were out for such a short time that I couldn't make the announcement over the blog to the public because I could not guarantee the length of time the observatory will be open.

Unfortunately things are moving slow in the setup and adapting of the home for the latest health crisis at home. It's really an ongoing crisis that my family has been coping with for ten years, but things have evolved where it just requires a lot of attention at home. Part of this may be solved by streamlining our home healthcare setup, but that takes a lot of time and there is no easy way to predict when I'll be able to open ip HJRO and hang around long enough for normal visiting sessions.

Tim Campbell did announce that he would be opening up the observatory last week during one evening to the club members and I was the only member to show up.

There is supposed to be many clear sky nights next week starting on Tuesday. We may have the observatory open one or more of those nights.

Some of the members of the club that can run the observatory have been busy helping others in the club who have had health problems as well. So overall there is a lot of people who have been put on hold now that the weather is breaking. It's difficult to say if many of the core HJRO members will be available to help at HJRO with visitors.




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A rare quick opening of the observatory, Monday afternoon for the middle school.

Because I have been tied up with family health issues, I have not been able to open up HJRO much in the past month.

There are other key keepers in the Faac club, but they have been very busy with work and other normal things in day to day life.

Yesterday I tried to open up the observatory quickly in the afternoon for the middle school students. The biggest problem however was I had a lot of morning tasks to do at home and had to run some errands as well. So I was off to a late start in the morning. I also wanted to get another Faac member to arrive so two of us could run the observatory. That took a little bit of time. I found Harold was available and willing to interrupt his shrub cutting and yard cleanup tasks. So Harold and I met and I called one of the middle school science teachers to let him know we would be open at 1pm.

Unfortunately I called him to late and he and the other teacher were about to start their last class. Harold and I ended up looking at the sun and we showed one school employee the sun as well. I texted a few members of the astronomy club as well to let them know that observatory was open, in case any could stop by. Dan Barriball a faac member stopped by briefly as well to check out the sun.

Harold and I basically talked for a couple of hours enjoying the weather.

Today is Tuesday and the sky was pretty clear out. I had to many things to do and didn't have time to contact any Faac members and try to open up the observatory again. It's difficult to plan for weather restricted viewing ahead of time and tough to get people to volunteer at the last minute.

My other viewing at HJRO was Saturn about a week ago. I stopped by late at night on the way to Meijers and looked at Saturn for about 15 minutes. A nice break, but then I had errands to run. I took a snapshot of the planet with my iPhone but didn't have time to find all the adapters and get my canon EOS to take a better photo of the planet.




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Sorry about the lack of posts about observing.

I've been very busy with two parents who are I'll for the past month. Caring for two people is can be a little stressful and keeps a person pretty busy.

Because of this much of the activity at HJRO has been by others and I have not been involved much with the astronomy club lately.

We have another person who can open up the observatory, but the current key keepers have much less time to open up the observatory due to their other commitments/jobs which keep them busy.

I was at about 90 percent of the openings of HJRO in the past couple of years. It may be a while before I can be more active with the observatory and many astronomy sessions due to the family health needs I'm dealing with.

I've quickly met a couple of other members or briefly observed at home in the past month. Haven't had much time to observe.

I hope that the session to observe the conjunction of planets in Alen park goes well around memorial day weekend, if that happens. I'm not sure I'll be able to be there as a brief visitor, much less take part in setting up many of my telescope options.

In any event the telescopes I have that would show the three planets together are small grab and go telescopes, so I might be able to show up and briefly setup and do some observing or let other Faac members use my telescopes to observe that event. We will have to see what happens.

As far as HJRO and the school system, I'm a bit disappointed that I can't offer my time to help the kids see some solar observing. My time is really limited right now and HJRO observatory is being reconfigured with more equipment. That reconfiguration could interfere with the ability to show the sky and do solar for the kids, but hopefully that will quickly happen.

HJRO will be getting a new telescope ring setup, which will allow the telescope to be mounted to the telescope mount with a much better and rigid setup. The rings are being donated by George Korody, who is one of the main faac members responsible for the setting up and rebirth of the hjr observatory at Lincoln Park.

In any event I may write more, but find it really difficult to announce and plan any observing events. I'm literally working or up about 18 hours per day with maybe four or five hours sleep at night lately. Needless to say this affects and wears me out as well and makes any spare time in the day a candidate for a cat nap rather than a time to plan to observe. And since demands are random and unplanned, it's almost impossible to block off any time and commit to observe or have the observatory open.

Right now the moon is out and I may head out and do a quick observe of it from my yard before heading to bed or perhaps helping others here get to bed.

There are far more important things happening right now than astronomy for me so I'm just going to have to sit on the sidelines forma while.

Greg
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I went out to HJRO late tonight to take a quick look at Saturn and took a movie of it and processed it, at about 2AM

I've been very busy at home lately and unable to plan and set aside a long block of time for visitors.  I watched the Red Wings today for a couple of periods.  Also decided to make a quick late night trip to the observatory and try to get a better photo of Saturn.  Saturn looked really sharp but not as good as it did the other night.  There was actually quite a bit of moderately average seeing conditions.  Not horrible, but not good.  This movie taken can be processed to not show the seeing issues.  This gives a pretty good representation of what I could see in the eyepiece.  But my view was less powerful and the Cassini division was pretty dark and didn't stand out with a kind of shadow effect that we see here.  I could see some gradient banding detail visually, but my contrast wasn't as good as we see here in the processed image.   Also I could see the ring and some color differences in different parts of the ring for a while.  This using a 15mm eyepiece on the C14 in it's native 3911mm configuration.  I sent out a message to a few FAAC members who might be up and wondering if anything was happening.

Image of Saturn:  Photo was created using Registax 6 from a 1000 frame movie.  Best 100 frames selected.

I probably over processed this a bit with a little bit to much wavelet settings.  I used Linked wavelets on the first four out of six layers.  Turning off the last layer in Registax 6.   Saturn did look wonderful.  This movie was taken at 3911mm with the T1i and 5x digital zoom using BACKYARD EOS.   The shot was taken at 1600 iso, I don't have the exposure setting handy, but I can look it up if someone is interested.

I took a photo of some nice sunspots but blogpress on the iPad is acting up

There are some nice sunspots on the sun.

I'll edit this and post the quick photo I took later on the computer.


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Some Faac astronomers will be at HJRO at 8pm or so tonight

The plan is to open up around 8pm.

Will post more later.

Greg


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Was at HFCC near the science building in their courtyard for solar observing Saturday

Chatted with Tim Campbell on the phone and mentioned it would be nice to do some solar observing. He mentioned he was busy at the HFCC planetarium giving a presentation, but that he thought about taking out his solar setup and doing solar outreach.

The problem was, he'd need someone to watch the setup while he was giving the presentation. I wanted to compare the new Hershel wedge on the solar setup Tim uses against my Vixen binocular telescope with dual filters.

I've seen at times really great detail with two eyes on the 80mm binoculars when using safe solar filters, I wondered now the twin 80mm would compare to a single 101mm view of the Tele Vue NP101 is.

With the Herschel wedge supposedly giving great views, it would be interesting to see if I could match the detail of the Herschel wedge.

We started looking around 2:15pm. James French joined us and brought his four inch telescope with a Baader planetarium filter on it.

We looked at the sunspots and also at solar flares though Tim's wonderful 80mm lunt solar telescope.

The views from the Hershel wedge were stunning. Many details could be seen. Tim had a zoom eyepiece from Lunt on the rig and it was already zoomed in to the highest power when I first looked at the sun.

I started to count sunspots in one group on Tim's setup. I counted at least 30 sunspots in the large group. But I knew there were some I missed because they were so small or I wasn't keeping track of the place I left off counting. There were likely forty sunspots in a small area.

When I looked through the vixen telescope the view was nice and pleasant, but it was no where near the view or detail of the Lunt Herschel wedge. I could perhaps make out half as many sunspots but. I was using a lower power than Tim's rig was using. I tried higher powered eyepieces and still found that it was difficult to get the sunspots in sharp focus for some reason.

The Hershel wedge won the shootout big time. It was far more pleasing of an image and I hoped to get a nice Tmounted shot of the sun to show what that telescope could do. Unfortunately with the filter and tmount I had I could not get the setup to go into focus.

I shot a few photos through the eyepiece which is called AFOCAL. Photography. This worked but the detail just wasn't the detail I was seeing in the telescope.

Below are some photos of the HFCC event.

Two young FAAC student members showed up as well.




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A lot of people have been under the weather.

Let's see, both my sisters have been under the weather with some kind of bug. I've been under the weather and a fellow Faac observer James has been not feeling well.

Symptoms may vary from person to person. Some are complaining about sore throats, some fatigue. I have been having a little bit of a sore throat and cramps and aches and pains in my legs from time to time as well as a general feeling of great fatigue from time to time. The chords in my hands feel like they are aching as well once in a while. I had a doctor take a brief look at my throat and she said, it looked okay. I was wondering if some of this might be related to allergies, there is a lot of tree mold in the air according to some recent local news reports.

With all the people I know being under the weather, one has to wonder if some kind of virus is going around.

Today James called me and I thought he wanted to know if HJRO was going to be open so I returned his call. I said I probably would not open up HJRO myself but might visit if others were going to open up. I called a Tim to find out if he was planning on opening up. He said he was thinking about it and may be opening up later but we should call the observatory phone to be sure they are open.

I packed up my car thinking I might meet James at the observatory and do a little observing outside, while two Tim's were inside testing cameras. I drove by the observatory at about 9:30 but nobody was there. I had a few errands to run, one being the picking up of some medication for our family and also ran through a couple of places to get a jot chocolate and a coffee. I returned home with the medication and coffee and then got back into my car and started to drive while calling to find out what was happening at HJRO.

It turned out that the two Tim's were busy with some other things and one of them said the sky didn't look very good out.

I decided to drive to Wyandotte by the waterfront to look at Saturn and the moon, fairly quickly and then perhaps open up HJRO if I felt good enough or return home. I felt the more likely scenario would be I would return home rather than open up HJRO with sick parents at home and myself being sick.

I told James I would call him if I was going to open up, but decided that it wasn't worth the risk and hassle to open up. I did talk to Art Parent as well on the phone and talked to him for the thirty or so minutes I observed. I ended up heading home. When I arrived the heat from the vents in the car, brought a feeling of fire passing over my fingers. Like the hairs on my hand were lit up. It was an interesting sensation, almost like a form of tickling sensation. Tickling and pain sensations can be almost the same and interchangeable at times. It's related to nerve sensors. But rather than speculate if my muscle and tendon aches were a kind of flu, I'm better off giving a quick observing report.

At 36 and 48 power Saturn looked stunning through the BT 80 vixen binocular telescope. It looked like seeing and transparency were very good. This at relatively low powers however which can be misleading. I put filters on the 32mm plossls and looked at the moon with 26x. The moon of course is one day past being full. The moon looked okay, but heat currents seemed to affect the seeing. The moon revealed a problem in seeing conditions that was not visible with the planet Saturn.

The temperature in Wyandotte was about 46 degrees according to my cars thermometer. The air was calm and somewhat moist but not nearly as bad as it was Friday early in the morning.

That's about it for a report. The sky is supposed to be really good for viewing the next couple of nights. I just don't know if we will have any healthy operators to open up HJRO.

Sorry about the late warnings or last minute reports. I've been to busy and feeling inconsistent in my health lately so I can't easily plan or give a good announcement before many impromptu observing sessions.

Greg


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A photo of the sun from yesterday, Thursday mornings outing.

I woke up Thursday morning (yesterday) and went out for a ride and since it was clear in the morning I took my binocular telescope and solar filters with me.

I also took my canon EOS camera as well.

Grabbing something to keep me warm, I must be addicted to those Tim Horton hot chocolates, and I don't even get paid to mention those so many times on my blog. . . :)

Anyways, grabbing the hot chocolate, I decided to setup right on Fort Street in Trenton Michigan.

The sight was rather poor due to rising thermos coming off the streets and from all the traffic. I snapped a photo using my iPhone which did not turn out very well.

I USED A SAFE SOLAR FILTER - designed to safely view the SUN.
I used safe solar filters.  See more comments below, but didn't use a guard outside to block the sun that might be hitting the outside eyepiece.  I wasn't looking through the safe solar filter from a shaded location.

Glare from the sun can affect the view and the photos.  And we can see a reflection lens flare which is caused by glare in the photo below.

I decided to try to take a few photos with the Canon EOS and those were not very good as well.

I downloaded one of the photos to my iPad and saw that there was a big reflection glare by the bottom of the image.

The photo below was taken at 1/160th of a second, handheld.

I decided to tweak the shot a bit in Filterstorm and this was a simple Mellow Yellow filter setting I saved in Filterstorm, making the white disk image look yellow which is more pleasing to some viewers. I also sharpened the image a big bringing out the details of the sunspots a bit, but a zoom into the photo shows I may have over sharpened the image a bit.




It's interesting that many people think the sun is normally yellow when it's up in the sky. It's so bright we don't look at it directly. The sun will show different colors when briefly glancing at it due to the atmosphere of the earth absorbing different wavelengths, in effect becoming a filter.

WARNING: ONLY USE A SAFE FILTER DESIGNED TO LOOK AT THE SUN AND READ DIRECTIONS CAREFULLY.  When in doubt, don't look and save your eyesight.

Don't look at the sun directly or with a telescope or binoculars because you could go blind. Have an astronomer verify the correct filters for a telescope, or call one of the many telescope and astronomy dealers that are out there who are knowledgable and can sell you a special filter or solar observing system that can safely view the sun.

Companies like Daystar, Thousand Oak Optical, Lunt, Coronodo(Meade), and Baader planetarium, sell solar telescopes of safe filters.

There are many ways that are UNSAFE and dangerous which people think are safe. This includes homemade filters from mylar ballons, and almost every type of welding glass sold. These are NOT designed to look at the sun and are not safe. I had an old astronomer who had a lot of knowledge tell me he was using number ten or twelve welding glass to view the sun, and that is NOT the safe rated glass to view the sun with.

There is only one kind of welders glass that is safe to view the sun through and that is only for naked eye observing, not using powered observing through a telescope. Because that glass is rare, your better off no using any welders glass and avoid using any of them.

The only safe welders glass is the old number 14 green glass welders glass, or number 14 with a gold coating on it. Some versions of number 14 are not safe as well, so you are better off avoiding welders glass for solar viewing.

A long time ago people used to think you could used dark exposed negatives as a kind of solar viewer. Those are not safe and that should NOT be used.

There are some safe solar glasses that are sold by planetariums and on the Internet that can be used. They are marked as solar glasses. They are used as glasses for your eyes, not for any kind of powered viewing.

There are filters and filter kits, sold by companies like Opt over the Internet that can be added to a telescope to make it safe.

I have a Daystar white light filter that is a safe filter marked for solar use. I also have Baader planetarium filters that are safe for solar viewing.

Some filters kits are designed for photography only and may not be safe for eyepiece viewing. To keep things simple at HJRO and with my own solar kits I only have solar filters and telescopes that are suitable for visual viewing with humans looking into the eyepiece. If I avoid the photographic only filters I can avoid accidentally using one for visual human use. So to be safe I only use visual solar filters rated for safe viewing.

Filters themselves can be damaged as well and have to be inspected each time before they are used. The best way to inspect one is by using a regular light bulb and look at that incandescent light bulb through the filter. If there are no cracks or holes that can be seen it can be safely used.

For filters that attach to telescopes you need to make sure they are firmly attached and will not easily be removed and can't just fall off or be blown off by the wind. Such accidents could be fatal and cause instant blindness.

Finders and other optical aids have to be covered when looking at the sun. One member told us he had his hair catch on fire from light from the finder when looking at the sun through his telescope. He didn't realize that the finder could cook or blind him if it was uncovered. At HJRO we keep the finder and the c14 covered during solar viewing.

Also the solar observer cannot tolerate any playing around near the telescope, or goofing around. A goal for safe solar public events is to keep others away from the front of the telescope when people are viewing. Make sure nobody is touching or playing with the front end of the telescope and that the filters are very much secured in place.

Constructed filters need to be constructed and taken care of. I have safe solar filters that I made and some I bought. The ones we make have to be inspected and constructed to resist any kind of malfunction and stored properly to avoid moisture damage and scratches.

That's about it for the security info on safely viewing the sun.

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