Comet Panstarrs was going to be low and there was a chance we'd miss it, without perfect conditions.
We were unable to pick it up, as it was about 5 degrees above the horizon when the sky glow started to dim a bit and there were plenty of distant clouds and haze in the low horizon in the 5 degree range from what appears to be the true horizon.
I started out of course getting equipment ready, wondering if all the loading up would help curse the viewing. We have a joke among astronomers that buying a new telescope will guarantee cloudy weather. I didn't have a new telescope, but getting a lot of gear together may be reason enough to put the blame on me. :)
Before heading to Allen Park, I stopped by the Hector J Robinson Observatory (HJRO). Tim Dey and Tim Campbell were busy inside the observatory setting up a new computer system that will control the telescope mount. A Macintosh Mini will be running Windows 7 64 bit, under VM Ware and also will run a Macintosh OSX operating system for future video streaming opportunities from the observatory. Both Tim's were inside as I briefly stopped by to check up on the progress (or bug them). I was pretty hyped up and probably caused more chaos than help, but I did bring by a different USB to Serial dongle which they could test as they were having some problem with the cable connection. Tim Campbell donated some serious computing equipment for HJRO. Thanks to Tim, the Mac mini and a new large Sun monitor was sitting inside the observatory. The monitor looks really nice and I'll probably write more about it later. Of course we spend most of the time inside the observatory looking at faint objects through a telescope, not looking at computer monitors, so for much of the observing time inside, we'll probably be turning the monitor(s) off. We also at times have used red film to cover small monitors. (Larger monitors require more red film.)
The new monitor looked really professional of course. I had to get a snapshot of both Tim's working at the computer. Tim Dey had to put on a jacket as it was getting cold inside. He had our spare HJRO coat which is a coat we leave inside the observatory in case someone shows up without enough clothing and needs another layer to keep warm on a cold observing night.
Tim and Tim were both pretty busy. After spending a few minutes distracting them a bit, I decided to leave them alone and let them continue their work. (Tim Dey mentioned he spent a couple of hours cleaning up a bunch of stuff that was in the observatory - getting rid of some of the mess we had accumulated.) He asked me if I could take the "blue tube" which is the old 1977 8 inch tube out in my truck. This is a non-functional tube from an 8 inch telescope we built back in 1977. I said I don't have room in my truck right now for a nonworking telescope, as it's filled with working telescopes and I'm on the way out to Allen Park.
Tim mentioned the irony of my leaving a "non working telescope" inside the observatory and threatened to move it out into the "WM green observatory" (also known as the Waste Management dumpster).
Both Tim and Tim were going to meet up with the comet hunting group, later at the Allen Park site.
I left them to continue debugging and started out for Allen Park and actually took a quick trip inside Meijers before setting up.
At 4:20PM I arrived at the small parking lot. As soon as I arrived Brian Kutscher arrived as well. He started taking out his 8 inch Celestron SCT telescope and his solar telescope as well, a Lunt PST.
I pulled out my little four inch Newtonian reflectors first. A homemade one with a cardboard tube painted white was setup for photography and a Bushnell f4.2 reflector telescope, that has a Ball mount design. The home built F4 telescope has a little wider field of view than the Bushnell which is F4.2. The focal length on the Bushnell is actually 500mm but my home built one is in the 400mm range. My home built telescope was built in 1977 when I was in tenth grade. I ground and polished the mirror with the help of Mike Manyak Jr. a Detroit Astronomical Society member who helped our Lincoln Park Astronomy club (a Junior high club) grind and polish and figure 3 telescope mirrors. Club members always had problems with "turned down edge syndrome" when our mirrors were being figured or final polishing was performed. Mike Manyak corrected this, so the final figure was actually performed by Mike. But that's old telescope building stories. . . . let's move on.
This telescope of course is special to me as it's something I made my self. It has a lot of little flaws in it however, one being a shaky home made mount. I need to get a better mount for it, but I usually use it for quick viewing and often look through other telescopes which are more modern.
I also brought out a pair of Vixen binoculars actually a binocular telescope called the BT-80. It has a narrow field of view being an F5.5 binocular, with an internal barlow lens inside, making it actually an F11 focal length. This means the field of view is rather narrow on this. About 2 degrees at 36 power. I was using 26 power eyepieces with this during our viewing attempt. For the Vixen Binocular telescope 36 power would give a larger field of view, and as we were scanning for the comet we needed wider fields of view to look for it.
The comet was supposed to be about 13 degrees left of the sun and about 5 degrees above the horizon for Friday. It was about 6 degrees away from Mars which was supposed to be low as well. We looked at Mercury and Mars about a month ago from Allen Park and Mars was hard to pick out. It's even lower now, so Mars would be even harder to pick out. The comet will be getting a bit higher in the next few days and will be twice as high Sunday as it was Friday, but that will still be relatively low and I think clouds will ruin any viewing opportunities this coming Sunday.
Big Bertha a ten inch F5.35 Schmidt Newtonian reflector is a rare telescope. It was also a home built telescope made in 1962 by Nelson Lewis of the Detroit Astronomical Society. Big Bertha is on a large mount that was bought by the second owner back in 1982. I used a wide field eyepiece, which we call the "Harold Wonder" eyepiece. This was created by Harold who was the second owner of the telescope. He created this from "a tank eyepiece" (he thinks, but he is not sure.) This eyepiece gives a very wide field of view and is very easy to look into, with a big wide exit pupil which basically pops into view anywhere behind the two inch eyepiece glass.
The second owner of Big Bertha was Harold "the telescope man". Harold used Big Bertha as his main viewing telescope for several years in Dearborn in front of the Library or the police station there on Michigan Avenue. Thousands of people have looked through Big Bertha on Michigan Avenue. There are some members of the FAAC club who first looked up and saw an object through Big Bertha. I don't get that large telescope out as much as Harold did of course. It's a bit large and cumbersome to setup. I have to work on it a bit to make it better for setup and public viewing. I've even entertained the thought of remounting the optics in a truss dobsonian setup, but that hasn't happened yet.
I called Harold and left a message that I would be out in Allen Park with Big Bertha if he had time to stop by. Harold has been under the weather a little lately so he was probably not feeling well enough to make it out.
Harold owned the telescope from 1982 until 2009. Harold has a larger telescope now that is more portable as well. Larger, because it has a larger mirror, more portable because it's an SCT. Harold has a C14.
Harold uses a C8 now as his outreach telescope with the public, it's smaller and easier to setup and haul. Brian had his C8 setup and this is a very popular telescope. The reason a C8 is popular is it has a folded optical path inside the telescope due to it's optical configuration. This allows a SCT to have a shorter tube, which is easier to transport. These SCT type telescopes offer fairly easy setup and can offer high powers and good seeing. A Celestron C8 is a very popular telescope.
We also had some other smaller binoculars as well. I had a pair of 7 by 35 binoculars and a pair of 10 by 50 binoculars. I noticed at least one other person with binoculars. They looked like 10 by 50 binoculars. (If you're looking for a bright comet a pair of binoculars can help out a lot.)
I have seen a comet which was fairly far away and pretty faint with my BT-80 telescope. I've seen a couple of comets at HJRO. They were usually faint and they had a very small and faint tail being far away from the sun, not visible to the eye in the eyepiece, but perhaps brought out a bit in some photographs. One such comet was 103P Hartley, but that's another story and another comet. I've seen a couple of comets at HJRO since 2009.
As we had some solar filters that safely can block the sun and are meant to be used in front of telescopes, not just solar glasses for naked eye viewing but film that can block enough light to safely be used with telescopes, we looked at the sun with these filters.
YOU SHOULD NEVER LOOK AT THE SUN without a proper filter. A proper filter is a filter by a company that makes them for astronomy, like Thousand Oaks, or Baader Planetarium, or Daystar. These companies make filters that can be used in front of a telescope or binocular. You should not use filters that seem to block the light, but really don't safely block the light. Polorizing filters don't work to safely block out the sun, don't use polorizing filters. Xray film or darkened film isn't safe to look at the sun through, don't use those. Look for types of filters that are made for astronomy and advertized in astronomy magazines, like Sky and Telescope or Astronomy magazine.
I bought a large sheet of Baader Astrozap film about a year ago for the Venus Transit, and made up a bunch of home made filters which show sun spots and allow me to safely view the sun, when the filters are properly attached to the front of a telescope. I made some for binoculars as well. There are also HA filters which are more expensive. My Astrozap film was under $100 and allowed me to make several homemade filters. Some white light filters are $80 for one filter, so creating the filters yourself can save you quite a bit of money.
There are some solar eclipse glasses that safely block the sun, but these cannot be used with a telescope. Old solar filters, which fit in eyepieces are NOT SAFE and should not be used. There are very few of these left in the world. If you find an old telescope with a very small solar or sun filter that fits in the eyepiece, BREAK THE FILTER WITH A HAMMER and throw it away.
We had safe solar filters at Allen Park Friday. I was using "white light" solar filters which will block out all the damaging rays and only allow light that shows sunspots and the sun. There are also other filters which are safe one being a HA or Hydrogen Alpha filter. This kind of filter setup is found in the PST or Personal Solar Telescope. Brian brought his PST which could show us solar flares prominences of hydrogen gas flying off the sun. These hot gas jets are thrown off the sun. We see the edge of them flying off the side of the sun in an HA scope. We see them as sunspots when we look down on them with a white light filter telescope. They look darker because they are cooler. On the edge of the sun they often look like curved prominences.
I had solar filters on my 10 by 50 binocular and my Vixen Binocular telescope. I also have a solar filter for Big Bertha but I didn't put it on and use Big Bertha to look at the sun. Big Bertha can show nice views of sunspots, but being a ten inch it's image is very bright even with a solar filter and sometimes people think it's unfiltered when they look at the sun with the filter on it, that's a pretty bright image. . . and I didn't have time to setup for a long solar event, as we were waiting for the comet.
I also had a Solar filter from Thousand Oaks which is solar film that makes the sun look yellow. The Baader solar film called Astrozap solar film gives a white look to the sun. The Thousand Oaks film gives a yellow appearance to the sun. We don't look at the sun a lot and see it's true color or it's colors are filtered off with haze and clouds and light scatter. Because we don't look at the sun a lot, because we have a blink and look away tendency, we don't see the true color of the sun. This is a good thing. DONT look at the sun with your eyes. Don't stare at the sun. You will go blind or have permanent damage after looking at the sun for only 60 to 90 seconds with your naked eyes. So don't do it. The damage will not appear immediately but would appear about 48 hours after you looked at the sun. A day or two later you'd find yourself blind or with really bad eyesight and perhaps look at your loved ones over a breakfast table and not even see their faces. DO NOT look at the sun without proper eye protection. If you have a question about what is proper eye protection please ask one of us, ask an astronomer. Polorizers are not proper eye protection for looking at the sun. One day when we were looking at the eclipse a guy walked up to me and said he was looking at it from his car in Meijers parking lot. He said, I looked at the sun, using the "night visor" of his rear view mirror. Don't do that. . . a night visor will not protect you from the sun and is not meant to be a way to filter out harmful solar rays. I don't know how long that guy looked at the sun. If he looked at it for a long time through his "night visor" he probably damaged his eyes.
NAKED EYE PROTECTION FOR THE SUN
Solar Glasses sold as solar glasses through a reputable dealer, look in astronomy magazines.
Proper eye protection includes ONLY ONE type of welders glass, number 14 with a gold coating or green welders glass number 14. All other welders glasses which are 13 or lower are NOT SAFE and will let in much more damaging rays. Your better off not using Welders glass at all just to be safe. I have a piece of it to show people this as a demo, but I wouldn't recommend it because you might use the wrong rated kind and get damaged. So your probably better off avoiding welders glass for viewing the sun.
Okay, enough about viewing the sun. We looked at the sun safely using safe filters. We saw some flares of hydrogen gas being blasted off the sun in Brian's PST and also sunspots in a few other telescopes.
We had about 25 people stop by both FAAC members and visitors who happened to drop by.
The small parking lot filled up with cars. People started to park in other lots to walk to view with us.
Some of the FAAC members included: Tim Campbell, Tim Dey, Brian Kutscher, Rick Arzadon, James French, Leon Shaner, Art Parent and myself. We had several friends show up as well. Some that we have met and we let them know about the event and others who just showed up and stopped by.
I was kind of running around getting different pieces of equipment ready. I had my Canon EOS camera an EOS T1i. Brian had a camera, he mentioned the name of it, but I forgot it for this posting.
Tim Campbell and Leon Shaner brought a camera. Some visitors had cameras or cell phones as well. A friend of James brought a camera and eyepiece and small telescope. He had an eyepiece projection setup for AFOCAL photography.
I took a few photos with my Canon EOS of the group of people. I should have taken more photos, but I only took a few. I wanted to take photos of the sunset and see if I'd get any photos of the comet on these. That was my primary goal with the Canon EOS.
I also pulled out my Fujix W3 3D camera and took a quick 3d picture of some of the group as well. I only took one 3d photo and will post it in a separate post later.
I tried to take a few photos of the Sun through my telescopes that had filters on them. I tried to take a quick photo with my iphone through the BT-80 binocular telescope. That photo didn't work well because I had the 32mm eyepieces in and a 25mm eyepiece usually works better. For some reason the 36 power 25mm eyepiece works better with my iphone than the 32mm eyepiece for solar photos. I think it's because the 32mm eyepiece it to big and the back glass surface picks up to many reflections from daylight.
I had a T-mount which is a mount that lets a DSLR camera mount directly to a telescope. With an SCT and some telescopes you can easily mount a DSLR on a T-mount in the eyepiece and move the mirror enough to take a photo after observing with an eyepiece visually. With many newtonian style telescopes one has to move the mirror and remount it, creating an "astrograph" configuration to take a photo. The mirror distance is changed radically in a Newtonian reflector to get it setup for photos. A secondary diagonal mirror may have to be larger as well for a Newtonian to be setup for photography.
I had my little home made telescope setup for photography, not visual use this evening. This means I had the mirror mounted further forward, pushing the light cone out further, not useful for eyepieces, but useful for a camera like the Canon EOS T1i. I hoped to get a photo of the comet through my home built reflector. Before the sun set I took a picture of the sun with a solar filter on the little home built telescope. This was to check the focus for the camera, preset the focus on the sun. My goal wasn't to get a good shot of the sun with sunspots. I didn't have time to do that, and I would normally do that when the sun was higher in the sky.
My test solar photo was overexposed. It was in focus (and that was what was important.) Once my focus was set I didn't need to take more photos, so I took the T1i off the little home made telescope.
I also took a photo of the sun through the Vixen Binocular telescope using the Canon EOS as the sun was setting in the trees. I think Brian yelled out, the sun looks nice as it's in the trees, so that was my queue to try to snap this quick photo (below). The Canon EOS works better (than my iPhone) behind the 32mm eyepieces for solar photos. I was able to get a half decent photo, but this shows only the trees in the sun's relief, and no sunspots.
Tim Dey called me and was on the way, he mentioned he heard on the news a weather forecaster say the best time to view the comet was at 7:02PM. I was shocked to hear this as the comet would be fully set by 7:05PM so it's unlikely that it would even be seen at 7:05PM for our event.
As the sun was below the horizon, we took off the solar filters and many of us started to scan the sky for the comet. We were using binoculars, telescopes and cameras. Comet Panstarrs could not be seen or found. It was about 5 degrees above the horizon when the Sun was 3 degrees below the horizon. The sky glow and cloud interference was to great. There was not much time to find it. Clouds and haze extended up to 5 degrees above the horizon, so we were looking through the clouds and haze hoping to see the comet for a short moment. If the sky was perfect and we had no haze and a really clear sky we probably would have seen the comet. But we didn't observe it, apparently it was to low and in to much cloud cover. Above Jupiter shined as a +2 magnitude star. It's easier to see objects looking through less atmosphere. A challenge for this comet is finding it near the horizon.
Some of those who stayed around for a short time saw Jupiter. I also turned a telescope or two toward M42 the Orion Nebula and M45 "the Seven sisters" open star cluster. The glow from the nearby streetlight made viewing difficult in this parking lot. Ricks Newtonian near the back of the lot showed a lot better views of M42 than Big Bertha could show, because Bertha was under a street light and that light can easily light up the "corrector plate" piece of glass on the front of Big Bertha's tube. A Schmidt corrector plate can be an annoyance when a street light hits it. The field of view will light up with a "new sky glow" off the piece of glass in front of your telescope.
I told some visitors, we were hoping to open HJRO observatory and be there at about 9pm. But we had more visitors arrive at the small lot. We ended up staying on the hill until 8:40PM. By that time the four remaining FAAC members decided we wanted to go out and eat dinner "before we decide to head to HJRO". We all ate dinner except James who drank five cups of coffee. . . yikes I guess he was fueling up for a long observing night. . . .
Art Parent, Rick Arzadon, James French and I decided to visit to the local Coney Island down at the foot of the hill - Leo's Coney Island. Once inside, Art, Rick and James, were soon on a subject of ham radio. We talked mostly about ham radio, I listened and started to fall asleep while sitting there. It was about 10PM. I hoped we didn't have anyone driving by at 9PM expecting us to be open.
Once we left at 10PM, the sky looked clear. Art and Rick said they were going to each head home. James said he'd show up if I wanted to open up HJRO. I replied, I'd call him if I decided to open up after unpacking my car.
Back at home, I unloaded the car and felt pretty tired. I called Tim Campbell to see if he returned to HJRO with Tim Dey. They didn't return to HJRO. Tim Dey had other things to do. Tim Campbell mentioned the visual sky looked okay (according to reports from Leon), but seeing was poor for photography as far as they could tell.
I decided to stay warm and was tired enough after unloading the car to stay away from the observatory. I would have opened up, but the planning and event and other things today took to much energy out of me. I decided to stay home and had another snack before writing this post.
Tomorrow the weather looks like it will be worse. The comet will be a little bit higher in the sky, but it will get even higher by the 13th of March. This comet will still be in the sky later in the month as well, but it will grow fainter and fainter and will be something we'd see in a telescope instead of binoculars or naked eye observing. As the comet pulls away from the sun, it will head north and will be visible in the morning before the sun rises as well as in the evening.
One last photo - a marathon runner stopped by and he posed with James and a friend of James (far right) These three all have been involved in the Detroit Free Press marathon event. The runner is in the center and each of the other two in the photo are volunteers at the marathon event.
We had a lot of fun talking with the many visitors. Hopefully we will get to see and share some more views of the sky with many of you again.
Greg
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