Thursday night 3-4-10 part 1, images to follow later . . .

Last night I had a very busy night with the club and afterwards.

There was an executive meeting. They discussed the Hector J Robinson observatory, the proposed rules we'll be observing and how the FAAC core team from the SIG group and core members may work in the observatory. Also there was discussion about keys and access for FAAC members, basically covering many of the basics and some discussion about how this would hopefully typically work. Some discussion about liability or questions about the club and understanding of that with the school system, questions about what would happen under different scenarios came up. Some of the questions reminded me about how much people have to worry today about getting sued or people who might sue you over anything.

In the good ol' days, we didn't worry as much about that stuff, but then again, we were kids at least I was when I was at the observatory. So maybe all those questions were handled by the grown ups and sponsors at that time. I can remember one of our sponsors being proclaimed a curator of the observatory by the Lincoln Park School board. They gave him special status as he had helped out so much at that time.

Back then things were a little different. But I'm better off not comparing those days with today and move forward.

This post will be pretty brief. I'm going to be posting more photos, but I'm not sure how many today. I went out to the observatory yesterday. I felt relieved at some of the proposed rules. The rules for FAAC operation of the observatory seem pretty sound to me, but that's really a longer subject and nothing that I need to post here.

I called Harold from the club. He's one of the senior members of the club if you want to talk about how long people have been in Astronomy. He's been into Astronomy and fired up about it for 64 years. I called him to let him know that I was heading by the observatory because it was clear out. I sent out a message at about 2 or 3 PM to other core FAAC members dealing with setup that I was thinking about going out there, but everyone was busy and couldn't go out.

I sat in the observatory for two hours. The sky was clear with some clouds in the distance, really hardly anything you could notice. I was trying to learn how the mount's goto function was working and also to make things interesting fired up a computer with "The Sky 6" on it.

This computer in theory can easily drive the telescope. I had Harold on the speaker phone and we kept the conversation going about general things mostly. About the observatory and the club, we chatted back in forth about a number of subjects which is how these phone calls can get going between friends and club members.

I didn't even open the dome most of the time I was there. I kept playing with The Sky 6, but couldn't figure out how to have it direct the telescope. It seemed like some secret command was just hiding somewhere under some menu window tab or something. I could get it to connect with the telescope, but couldn't get or find a command that sent the telescope anywhere. Harold mentioned something about needing a copy of an old manual for some older product. Actually I'm so tired this morning I forgot what that was and didn't write it down at the time, but I'll call him and look it up on the internet later.

I pulled out my laptop and tried to get a wifi connection because I forgot to print the quick start guide Greg O had written after spending an evening of testing the system with the FAAC group. His two page quick start guide was somewhere on my laptop, but I couldn't find it. I didn't have it in an easy to find place. I couldn't remember the name. I couldn't connect to the WIFI at the school because of security. There was some open wifi, perhaps from a neighbor, but I wasn't going to try to connect. While I had The Sky 6 up, I didn't find a way to minimize and close the window to get to the net and probably would be getting off the task at hand surfing for some manual. If I was on the net I might be able to download the quick start guide from Greg O. But I didn't think to do this from the computer while The Sky 6 was up. I briefly thought about it, but how hard can it be to find a small paper. I used my search features on the Macintosh laptop I had with me to attempt to find the quick start guide. I couldn't find it. It was there somewhere. I decided to look for the guide using my iphone and old emails but I couldn't locate this email and attachment on the iphone either. Perhaps I was trying to multi-task to much and with to many new things.

So I finally abandoned The Sky 6 and focused more on the Losmandy controller and tried to recall how to get the goto to work. I was able bring up the Goto function and selected M50 as the target. The scope moved and went to M50. (I'm recalling it as being M50.) Anyway, it was one of the M objects, the details of which one are not to important . . . because the scope found it. . . or perhaps it didn't.

The telescope was aiming at the location where this object was supposed to be. I had to move the dome and open up the shutter. I rotated to dome to match the telescope location. I was flying blind toward this M object it would seem. Flying like a pilot would perhaps on instruments alone. Would the GOTO be working and be in sync. Had the mount remembered where it was supposed to be and where the objects in the sky actually were?

The shutter started to open. There in the shutter clearly sat the Michigan Nebula. The Michigan Nebula is what some members in the FAAC group refers to as clouds. The entire sky at least most of it was covered with clouds. That is most of it and there were little holes here and there, but nowhere openings in the clouds anywhere near where the shutter and telescope were looking. I could try to find something else where a small break in the clouds might appear. There was a 10 degree break in the clouds to the north stretching up from the horizon. Maybe the clouds would move onward and there would be clear skies over the observatory. I had been there for 2 hours. Not much to show for those two hours, but I had a nice phone conversation and at least that was something.

I decided to pack it in. I had an errand to do and locked everything up and headed home. In about 20 minutes I was home. I looked up all the clouds had moved off. It made sense that when I finally left the sky would quickly clear. It was Murphy's law at work.

I looked up and the sky looked really nice. Viewing I thought would only be average when I looked at the Clear Sky Chart earlier today. I thought there was to be humid air of 80% tonight and that probably wouldn't make high powered views look very well. Mars and other targets seemed to call out and dare me to come back out and take a look.

I did some things at home and then announced that I'm going back out. I sent a note to the FAAC core group members who are involved letting them know of my plans. Just in case anyone was up this late, happened on the internet and were bored and wanted to burn the midnight oil. I figured half of astronomy is being nuts enough to go out and spend long hours and get in trouble for it later. Maybe there were other lunatics about this evening in the group that would want to join me.

They were probably all asleep, nestled in their warm homes, and getting some rest on a late Thursday night.

I went back out and the sky looked good. I was starting out at 11:50 PM. I had printed 8 copies of the quick start sheets and took seven of them along with me to leave at the observatory.

It was almost midnight, should I call Greg O and let him know by phone I was out there and might be out there for a couple of hours yet. Would it wake him up? Would he appreciate the late night call? Hmm. . . he's an astronomer. . . it's clear out, he should be awake.

Funny how a short post can turn into a long one.

(To be continued.)

Helios Heater How efficient is this item

The photo below this message shows a Helios Heater. I took this photo before putting the heater in my pocket the other night. I took it along and wanted to activate it to warm my hands a little by the end of a viewing session. This is a portable hot pack that can be activated and reused. I was wondering how efficient this was. By efficiency I mean how much heat and energy is required to charge it vs. how much you'll get back and be able to use to warm you're hands or body with.

I looked it up on Google, just to see if anyone had anything to say about the efficiency of this but found a PDF file that was an advertisement for a different Helios heater which was an IR electric heater that heated objects using IR heat. The IR heater actually used a parabolic reflector to aim the IR energy at objects and was supposed to be very efficient, up to 92% efficient. Converting electricity to usable heat. We would not want to aim an IR heater at the telescope when we are using it, but might be able to aim it at people in the observatory, but that's the subject of a different post.

So back to my question, "How efficient is this little automatic heat pack?" It uses a fluid which is a salt compound and is in a liquid state when it's charged. To charge it you have to boil it. The crystals liquify and a trigger event which I believe may be the release of oxygen from an aluminum tab will cause the crystals to reform and give off heat in an exothermic reaction. The energy from the phase change from liquid to solid gives off heat. 130F to be precise.

To charge them you need to boil them in water. You need to use boiling water as a way to transfer heat into them without melting the cover and they suggest you may want to have a small towel or something in the pan of water as well to keep the packet from sticking to the bottom of the pan or overheating and melting. You need to boil the smaller ones for 5 minutes or so in boiling water which is 212 F. I can't talk about energy efficiency and creating a calculation about efficiency unless I make some assumptions. If we make the assumption that you are using 6 times the weight in water as your small water bath then you need to generate at least 6 times the difference in the water temperature for units of energy to get the water to 212. If we ignore the energy needed to keep the water boiling we have about 840 units of energy to get the water bath to 212F. I'm making a lot of assumptions use about units of energy to heat up an 8 once small heater to 212 and cause the crystals to liquify. This of course is a really brief and quick guess and it will actually take more energy. But I'm giving a conservative guess at how many units of energy. I'm assuming one unit of energy per degree per ounce and this really isn't a BTU or a fixed unit, just some energy unit. But if we use 212 F and the F difference as the unit for energy we are getting back and stick with degrees in the same unit, the ratios of all our calculations will give us a basic ratio of efficiency and it doesn't have to be BTU's it can just be basically units of energy like a BTU.

I'm also not calculating the amount of energy that is required or figuring out how much additional energy is needed for the phase change, to actually melt the crystals. I'm treating this as if it's just being heated up like water, but it's more probable that there is a huge input of energy to cause the phase change to happen, which is not included in my charge calculations. This makes the calculations more conservative, so it's really less efficient if we are using 6 times the water. There are a lot of things that could be happening over time. Water could evaporate as it boils, the water might not boil at 212 F and a host of other variables. A real experiment would provide different figures and perhaps give a better account.

So we have all these disclaimers above and likely more for my calculation. How hot is hot? I'm using 70F as the temperature of the pack when we start and figure we need 140 degrees added to get the pack to change, if you're wondering.

For using the pack. I have one that has been spent sitting right in front of my computer. If I put it on my forehead it feels cool to the touch. It's room temperature. Our body won't feel heat unless it's warmer than we are. Which is normally 98.6. So usable heat from the pad is about 30 degrees from 130 Degrees down to about 100. This means we have a basic formula for my little 8 ounce hot pack (and I've guessed the weight of this.)

212 - 70 = 142 units to heat up the water from 70 to 212.

6 times the water mass to give us a bath. 6 * 142 = 852 units of energy. Without worrying about phase change added requirements. Basically the water boils and we figure that is enough, but there is more than this happening so this is very conservative.

Our pack is 1/6th the mass of the water. It doesn't matter what it's size is. We'll just say it's giving off 30 degrees or units per pack. Or returning 30 units of energy but requiring 852 units to heat it.

So my conservative energy estimate for this hot pack is 852/30 for efficiency or about 3% return on the energy put into the boiling water. Clearly from an energy perspective this is a rich man's heater. It's wasting more than 90% of the original energy. You could use it as a hot pack the minute you've heated it, but it would still provide very little return on the original energy. Clearly a hot water bottle or electric heater would be far more efficient.

But the big advantage to this is heat on demand and you don't need electricity or a battery with you. It's a crystal heat battery using phase change characteristics and a chemical reaction to release stored energy.

2010 March 1 End of observing sky report and Mars

Before I closed up I took a shot of Mars and the dome. It was handheld with the Canon t1i. I droped to one knee and tried to hold the camera steady with a 3200 ISO shot in AV mode. The camera fired off a 1.6 second exposure. Of course there will be a little blur. I was freezing by then, didn’t use a tripod so it’s not a perfect photo, but it gives an idea of how bad the sky was by the end of the evening.

A productive all night observing session in my dreams

(photo with this is iphone image handheld through the Williams 40mm.) Not that great due to secondary shadows, but better than what I could do with the homemade eyepiece I took along.

Viewing and testing the observatory all night I walked out to the mini parking lot where some cars park where the tennis courts used to be. I had left something to do and realized I had to get back into the observatory and drove quickly back into the spot. It' was 7AM and some cars were pulling in and people were parking near the observatory.

The doors was clear and you could see inside, fortunately I had locked it and went inside. A few people were outside and looking in. I couldn't let any of the kids inside because there were no teachers present. I had a productive all night session at the observatory. But I cannot recall what I looked at or what I saw.

Then I woke up. Funny how a dream can alter the way things are compared to the actual layout. There's something for the dream analysts out there.

Differences between the dream and reality. There is no small parking lot where the tennis courts used to be, actually it's just grass and a berm. There is no clear door on the observatory. People parents don't park behind a fenced in area next to the observatory.

There are no vertical internal partitions in the observatory, as if it's a larger observatory with more walking around space inside it like inside my dream.

BRIEF ACCOUNT OF LAST NIGHTS SESSION THEN DETAILS

Actually last night a 10 to 20 minute session that I had hoped to try in making a quick run and taking some photos of the moon through a homemade eyepiece and the 40mm eyepiece we have there, turned into a 2 hour session, that wasn't very productive. I'm not really sure where all the time went. I did play around more with the Losmandy controller, but it was pretty non-productive. I should have been reading or reviewing the manual. I found the wobble function, more by mistake than design. This causes the controller to sweep an area of the sky. I think some dobs like the obsession has a feature with the Sky Commander that is a circular search function to find objects with a programmable feature.

REAL LIFE FACTS FROM LAST NIGHT'S actual impromptu session.

I was really tired last night and needed to go home and get some sleep. But the sky looked fairly clear. Once again clouds seemed to threaten, especially earlier in the day. The clear sky chart showed partial visibility predicted with cloud cover. There was some kind of clear bowl or break in the clouds. The moon looked like it was covered with a little bit of haze not completely clear, but clear enough to get some test photos. I figured I could make a quick test run and find out how quickly I could get from my doorstep to the observatory.

I set a timer and took a photo on my iphone just about when I started. I started the stopwatch on the iphone as a timer. I went upstairs and downstairs a couple of times and threw on my boots. Didn't have much to grab before going. Took a bag of eyepieces and the camera adapter, just in case I gave in and decided to take some kind of real mounted shot. I planned on driving to the observatory, open it up and look at the timer so I'd know how long it took to get from my door to opening the observatory. Unfortunately the door was sticking and I was having problems with the lock before I looked at the timer. I fumbled around with keys and of course opened up the gate and walked through the snow, which didn't delay me to much. It basically took perhaps 5 minutes or less to drive over there. And maybe 5 minutes to open and shut the gate. I didn't leave it open. I didn't want uninvited visitors and since I'm not a FAAC group and it's still cold out, it was unlikely that anyone would wander by.

I think (I'm going to have to check my records) I sent an email to Greg Ozimek and Timothy Dey, giving them an update. It might have been a text message, yes I'm waking up now enough to recall it was an email via a "text to speech" program I have on the iphone called Dragon speech. Dragon speech works pretty well, but it needs you to state things like period to end a sentence and almost always throws a couple of words in that are wrong. I actually texted a couple of corrections while at a stop sign on the way over there. So it wasn't a perfect high speed run or something. But it would take about 10 minutes or less to get over there and open up the observatory, under the most perfect conditions. And that's just opening up the door, not the dome or whatever other stuff you'd do to prepare the observatory or plan or inspect the inside of it.

As it stood, it was 17 minutes before I was inside. I spent what seemed to be an extremely long 7 minutes just trying to open up the door.

Once inside I sat down a couple of bags I took along. One had a camera and camcorder inside. The other my limited set of personal eyepieces. Nothing to big to brag about in my eyepiece bag, I need to get better eyepieces, but haven't figured out how much I'll spend or exactly which eyepieces I'll be buying.

Thinking it would be cloudy and hazy I didn't plan ahead of time to go to the observatory and it was really to late to call up anyone from the FAAC club (at 11PM) on a Monday night, And what would I say, "hi I'm going to spend a few minutes here and the clouds should be here soon."

I figured I'd be there for maybe 20 minutes clouds would appear and I'd have time to perhaps take a few photos through the "Harold" homebuilt 2 inch eyepiece and through one of the bigger 40mm eyepieces at the observatory to compare them. I'd do "pedestrian styled handheld photographs" through the eyepieces.

I took three cameras with me. The iphone 3GS, a Canon t1i and a Sony HD Camcorder.

I could attempt taking stills with all three of these with handheld techniques and see how each eyepiece would stack up.

I wanted to use low powered big glass eyepieces as well. I had good results with the Harold homebuilt 2 inch eyepiece with the moon at home. This worked better however if I zoomed in and best it seemed with the HD cam up to this point. I thought it was the 10x zoom capability of the Sony HD cam.

I wasn't sure if I could get an entire shot of the moon with the C14 and these eyepieces. The C14 has a long focal length and would be high powered and have a narrow field of view.

Maybe I'd get an entire wide field photo of the moon, but we are talking about an F11 scope.

I hoped to take a few quick shots with the iphone and the t1i through both eyepieces and then quickly return home.

This might be a really quick run. 20 minutes inside a few shots taken and then I'll be back home. Little did I know the attraction of staying at the observatory, even when conditions are marginal.

20 minutes had already passed by the time the shutter was finally open. As the shutter opened it labored and squeaked a bit. I could smell an odor from the motor. This wasn't fun and it smelled like a bit like an electrical fire or perhaps a large amount of ozone from the sparks in the motor. Was this fresh ozone, or is the motor failing to move that cold and difficult shutter and burning a bit. I reversed the motor and closed the shutter a bit, hoping the reverse in direction would improve the shutters ease of opening. I wondered about a worse case scenario which would be a motor burning up and small fire starting in the dome. I wouldn't want to be there alone and have some electrical fire break out. That certainly wouldn't be nice. Maybe it's ozone, maybe it's a bad sign.

The motor "sparks" you can see physical sparks fly when you engage it. I can remember seeing it spark even in the old days now. More of a faint recollection than something that I can recall before seeing the most recent sparking show. I now recall seeing that same spark effect over 30 years ago when I was attending the school.

The dome opened up, no fire yet. I moved the dome opening allowing the moon to shine on the C-14. Lights were on. Outside a guy was pushing a shopping cart down the sidewalk near the observatory. He was heading down the sidewalk in the night toward Fort Street.

I shut the door and had all the lights on inside the observatory.

It took some time to uncover and then aim the telescope at the moon. I didn't use or attempt to use the goto functions. The controller moved the scope toward the moon. I'm still learning to move the scope with the controller which will take a little practice.

The arrow keys on the controller are logically set up. For some reason my mind always thinks the telescope is on an dob like mount, not oriented like the GEM equitorial, it's as if my mind thinks at first the up and down arrow keys will move the scope up and down, but the arrow keys cause the mount to turn in relation to the equatorial mount orientation. With the GEM mount you often have meridian flip and the telescope is moving on the DEC and RA axis. Depending on where you are looking the scope is skewed and moving in an axis that is different than the way a person would naturally hold the controller.

It takes a few minutes to get this mapped inside your mind and beginners likely would have problems thinking that an up arrow should move the telescope up, no matter where you're aiming.

The mount moved the scope to the moon.

I put the 40mm Williams optics eyepiece into the telescope. This is a 2 inch eyepiece. It's big and low in power compared to shorter focal length eyepieces. On a typical F5 Newtonian a 40mm eyepiece would easily show the entire moon.

The moon seemed to be outside of the field of view and didn't seem to fit inside the entire field of view. The C14 has a long (f11) focal length and it's not a fast scope without a field reducer. (or a hyperstar configuration.) I was using the scope without any alterations like a field reducer that would give it an F7 focal length.

Maybe it's my eyes and the iris and my position. It looked the the moon would almost totally fit. But I didn't look at it very long, because the moon was way to bright without filters and I didn't have a filter installed. The almost full moon was very bright and would quickly blind and ruin any hopes of good night vision just by looking at it. The moon of course is not the first thing a person should look at in a typical night, but this wasn't meant to be a typical viewing night.

After getting the eyepiece in focus. I started the iphone's camera application and tried to get a shot of the moon using the iphone. I've had better luck with a more powerful smaller eyepiece with the iphone than with big eyepieces.

In this case the brightness of the moon through the C14 played havoc with the exposure setting with the iphone 3GS. The auto exposure and focus were not settling down. It was more the case of firing off a few shots and hoping to catch something. I was thinking a low powered big piece of glass might be the best for phone camera photographs, for the public, but now I don't know if that's the case. With higher powered smaller pieces of glass and a little zoom you can get a pretty decent snapshot. The iphone and most camera phones don't have a zoom. It seems like you need to get part of the light cone and try to put the phone in position to try to avoid the obstruction that shows up. Maybe with more testing I can figure out if there's a good technique. I spent a little more time than a visitor would spend trying to get an eyepiece photo through the 40mm eyepiece and was disappointed with the results. i thought I'd get a much better photo. Then it was time for the Harold homebuilt eyepiece.

This is a wide field eyepiece. I estimated it at being at least 60mm in focal length and it provides really nice wide field views through the big Newtonian (big bertha). I thought it might offer a really nice wide field view and push the C-14's lower powered limits. I likely does this. It's field of view however is not that great, not as large as I thought it would be, with the C14. It has roughly the same field of view as the 40mm Williams optics eypiece. At 60mm estimated focal length it should have a wider field and not the same as the 40mm Willams, but perhaps the lens design gives it a more narrow actual field than one might expect. Maybe that Williams optics is using some super wide field design. I've since verified this Williams swan eyepiece is a wide field design and supposed to give pretty wide views. It does this, so the 60mm is not really performing badly at all, it's just the Williams performs with a very wide view.

I thought I might be experiencing the same power at first due to field of view. Maybe thethe home made Harold eyepiece was a shorter focal length?

This Harold built eyepiece throws a really long light cone however. I seemed to have more problems with the central obstruction and finding a good location for the iphone using the Harold eyepiece on the C14. When I review my blog post and look at the photos, the Williams performed better on the C14 than the Harold Homebuilt for iphone photography. I can't say the same thing for the Newtonian at home which may not show any advantage to the Williams eyepiece.

In either case, it was taking much longer than it should have ideally to get a picture using eyepiece and hand held techniques with both eyepieces and the C14. It would be something that would be disappointing for most visitors and not worth their effort. We would be better off using a mounted camera and perhaps emailing them a still later.

The t1i didn't fair much better. It didn't seem to be able to easily zoom and I basically had to hold it so close it could perhaps scratch the lens of the t1i to get a chance at a decent photograph. Maybe it was the cold, maybe I was being rushed. I can sometimes zoom in with a camera or the Sony Camcorder which has a more powerful zoom and get a decent still.

I had one pretty spectacular still handheld using my camcorder and the "Harold" lens on Big Bertha, which is a 10 inch f5.35 Newtonian. It seems the Harold lens is optimized to perform better on Big Bertha for photography. Maybe it was just a case of me spending more time with the Newtonian when it was warmer out.

The smaller field of view from a longer focal length telescope seems to hinder handheld photographs. Maybe a rich field excels more for pedestrian handheld shots.

I even tried to take a shot without the lens on the x1i. This held up near the telescope eyepiece. A person visiting would not do this. It didn't provide a good result or really provide any benefit as far as I can tell. Using the zoom didn't really provide much benefit either.

I picked up more secondary obstruction shadows with the Harold lens on the C14 than with the 40mm. This might mean the homemade eyepiece is just to low powered to be useful for the C14. I'd have to experiment more, but on the C14 it seemed to work better with the Williams Optics was more forgiving for iphone photography.

The camcorder was in my bag and I decided to pull it out and try it. I had some pretty spectacular results with Big Bertha and this camcorder and the moon. It gave me some pretty good stills. I had a lot more problems with the C14. The zoom with the camera didn't really overcome light cone and shadow issues. I didn't find a good setting or sweet spot. There were dark shadows on the photos. When I focused in deep into the image using the zoom image quality suffered.

Maybe it was the cold night and I was tired. I'm not sure why I had as difficult a time. Maybe it's the longer focal length and higher power. Maybe I was less patient. Maybe the focal length and resulting exit characteristics of the light cone just make it more difficult. I'm still not sure why I didn't get better results.

Taking handheld stills through an eyepiece takes a lot of experimentation if you're holding the camera and you have to shoot a lot of junk shots and be really patient. It seemed the zoom on the camcorder allowed it to give me really spectacular shots from the Harold eyepiece and my faster Newtonian. Perhaps that is the ultimate setup for handheld pedestrian styled eyepiece photos.

The Harold eyepiece gives me a bigger field of view in the Newtonian than a 1.25 40mm Meade eyepiece. So it seems like it's a lower powered eyepiece in the Newtonian and I'd estimate it as a 60mm 2 inch eyepiece.

All in all I was pretty happy with the results from the William 40mm 2 inch eyepiece on the C14.

I've spent to much time on this review and story and have to finish this later. I'll update it or add more comments and finish the story later. But really there wasn't much else that happened as far as getting a good photo or great views of other objects. I seemed to waste a lot of time with the mount. And I took a quick look at Mars finally, but clouds started to cover it and cut short any decent attempts at getting any good visual detail or decent photographs. Perhaps the best photo was a quick handheld shot of the C-14 and Mars outside the shutter in the same photo, through the shutter and thin clouds. This was shot without a tripod and handheld. A tripod would have done a better job as the exposure was 1.6 seconds.

State of the floor

There's not as much clutter, things are getting a little better.

Dents from rocks or pellets or bbs in the dome?

Some of the dents in the dome. More details and rambling in other post

Looking for leaks, a long and sleepy post, half dreaming

It’s been a long day, not difficult, just one that seemed long because I didn't get a lot of sleep last night. So I was walking around like a zombie much of the day.

Fortunately work was slow today and it was nice and sunny this afternoon. It reminded me of a pop up that arrived on my iphone yesterday about a big “solar event” that was happening. I have a free iphone app from NASA called 3d Sun that anyone can get for the iphone. It has a push notification setting, that will signal you that a big solar event is happening.

This application has a real time update and view of the sun a map of almost the entire sun from two satillites that NASA has out there aimed at the sun. These orbit one in front and one behind the path of the earth and aim at the sun to beam back a “stereo” view of the sun. They show 89% of the surface of it. A nice animated globe representation is on my iphone when this application is first running that shows me what is going on with the sun.

It shows sunspots, and there are even youtube updates and links that can show you filmed recordings of events like a comet that recently flew so close to the sun it disintegrated.

There was a huge flare yesterday and I was talking with someone on the phone when this beep and message popped up on my phone. I opened up the 3D app as soon as I was off the phone and the details were right there in the message area from 3d Sun.

There’s a huge event happening which is huge ejections of material from the sun. Nasa says something collided with the far side of the sun yesterday and that’s has triggered a big event. There are also three big sunspots that are on the sun right now. I can see the representation/photo render or whatever we should call it on my iphone, but of course I’d rather run out to the observatory on a sunny day and take a peek.

But work stuff was going to tie me down at work. I was in a holding pattern at work today. Also I didn’t want to go out there during the day, without calling Leo McMaster (school teacher at the middle school.) Leo was probably in class teaching. And who knows maybe Leo was lucky enough to take them out there and show them some solar flares or something. So I just waited around and did my daily tasks. I thought about leaving early and heading out there and made half an effort. I had a few errands to run as well so there was no way I’d likely get there in time.

The day would be over. But the sunspots would remain for another day.

Maybe I could do the next best thing since the temperatures were warm and 45 degrees F this afternoon and still nearly 40 as the sun was setting.

I thought I could go during the daylight and look for a hole in the dome. Maybe a small hole which I suspected was letting water in, would be visible with a bright sky outside and I could shut myself in the dome and see the light and find the leak.

I called Greg Ozimek to let him know I was about to go in there. I think I called Leo as well and left a message. It might not have even been about my short visit, because i didn’t plan on using the solar scope. I figured I’d take a peek and see how much the sun was going into the dome. It seemed too low. I decided to open up the shutter and record a short movie on my iphone and record the noise of the shutter opening. I wanted a little more light in with the shutter open, because I didn’t want to use a flash to take a photo of it's current state. A quick photo of the floor would show how much things were cleaned up. I could send it to Greg Ozimek of post it here to show him the current state of clutter inside.

I arrived when the sun was about an hour from setting. The snow was still around the observatory and my tracks from a last week were still there. The snow of course was slushy. Rather than bring a shovel or walk the long path I just took the direct path and walked out through the mushy mess. That's what boots are for.

Once there I opened up the observatory and heard the alarm system start to make noises. It’s now functioning for those who want to know. I entered in quickly and disarmed the alarm. Happy to note it's functioning.

Well the good news is there are no holes that are visible in the dome. This means the water is coming in some way, but it’s not easy to detect. I thought there was a hole the other week, when looking at the condensation inside the dome, over the area where ice existed, but I guess that doesn’t prove a small hole exists.

The other thing perhaps I ignored before or never noticed was the inside of the dome has a bunch of little dents and dings in it. These number in the hundreds and it looks like somebody over the years has been shooting pellet or bb guns as the dome or perhaps throwing small rocks at it. I suppose we could do some kind of forensic dig for bbs or pellets or something. Probably the crew that repainted the dome and fixed it up were aware of this, I just never noticed it before.

I’d like to claim they were meteorite impacts, but to have that many we’d have to be on the moon.

I also took a photo of the old tube we still have stored in the observatory. Greg Ozimek mentioned in one of our weekend conversations that he thought there was little room in the Lincoln Park museum and wonders how much of a challenge it will be to actually put such a large telescope on display there. He said the museum is filled up with a lot of stuff already. This of course causes my half asleep mind to wander. Every member of the club or person involved with the observatory probably has their own set of dreams or ideas that are totally different if they think about how the observatory would be used or how the students would proceed. I’ve been through several variations of dreams and ideas myself, but all these of course are just my own and more for a diary entry than serious projects to pursue.

I’ll try to start listing a few of these perhaps over the next few blog posts. For now I'll start with a few of my own wacky thoughts and ideas. This is just meant to be a list and example of some wild dreams people can come up with in thinking how far a project could go. And I know that none of these are really a great fix for a known problem or issue and there’s really no demand for these.

THE MEETING CONTROL ROOM

1. Build a small building next to the observatory as a type of planetarium training room. This would have a roll off room observatory on the second floor or a platform for outdoor telescopes. That outside platform would also function as a video camera platform for an end zone video location for football games. So it would be a small multipurpose building. How would you build it? It would be a project and could even in my dream scenario be a natural building. That is one build to be off grid as far as heating and cooling and would have a storage room inside it that would act as an area where other telescopes by the club or school could be stored. This of course would have a small room for a planetarium or some kind of AV presentation room and you could perhaps feed it with live video images from the observatory if you linked the two. you could perhaps image and send live feeds to this warmer building that would have seats and allow people to sit in a warm presentation room while the telescope in the observatory was controlled or run by one operator, or via remote control. This would allow a kind of one room schoolhouse concept as a teaching room and also it could be built by the students if you created it with natural building materials it would even be a green low embedded energy building.

This of course is just one idea I had early on as a blue sky idea as soon as I heard about the observatory. The nice thing about new projects is many get onboard and excited about them, but once they are complete it’s hard to keep sustained enthusiasm. I think as humans we tend to look for the new and ignore those who just maintain the old. You can get a lot more excited about an architecture presentation than talking about janitorial services.

Knowing how things turn out, even if something as wild as what I've just described happened, chances are it would end up being a permanent hot dog stand or something instead and the original thought or purpose of the building would change.

Of course there are a million and much smaller footprint variations to this. For example before I even knew about this project Tim Dey and others were talking and dreaming about a wifi link and broadcasting over the net to the school. With that technology you don’t need to worry about some buried cable and link to a media or presentation room next store, you can just use a wifi beam to send the images right into the classroom. We have the WIFI link already. So that is a possible feature and it takes a lot less building, sweat and money to do.

When I talk and chat to others I find everyone of course has their own ideal scenario on how to advance or move astronomy forward and teach kids. Usually old timers who have been out of astronomy and were in the old astronomy club, think about the old days and want to repeat it.

I was talking to one of the Jr High members and he was saying you could just buy a bunch of telescopes and have them hauled out of the observatory and lets kids find objects the old fashioned way. You don’t need goto and computers, was his comment during a part of our phone call. He thought all the expensive technology was overkill. There’s probably a bit of truth, in keeping things simple to teach the basics. But it's a lot nicer to have the high tech options. You can always haul out some old technology and star charts and teach the older ways.

I’m looking at this old acid etched 12.5 inch mirror sitting on the floor a reflection of the past looking at the present. And wondering. A dream of the day.

A FOLDED DOB?

I could send it out to get it resurfaced, and not even work on the mirror, get it aluminized and perhaps create a design that uses a folded newtonian design. We could use perhaps a 4 inch secondary flat and fold the optics and have a folded dobsonian telescope as a telescope project. It could be mostly done without much optical work at all. We’d let the shop class build the dobsonian portion of the project and assemble it. Then again we could even have club members work on the mirror, but it’s a 12.5 inch and who in the club wants to rip their back working on polishing a mirror like that.

So I’m looking at that mirror and thinking hmm. . . maybe we don’t need to put it in the museum yet, maybe we can just give the museum the tube the tube and build a folded dob. But then where do we store it. Hmm. . . back to the straw bale natural building. Then again, there's a 20 inch super fast mirror I saw out there on Astromart. That would make a killer dob. But of course it's a bigger expense and perhaps an example of overkill and telescope fever.

CONCLUSION

This is why really in the end, it’s a question of who will use the facilities and what kids in the school will ultimately do and choose to do. There may be some guidance from sponsors or teachers of the school, but it all comes down to vision and if they really want to do something and what their vision would be. For example we had a club in the old days, and that was a vision and we were into building things back then by hand to save money. Maybe times back then were focused more on manufacturing and that part of Michigan history. My friend had a machine shop in Wyandotte. We built more stuff in the USA, it was more natural for kids to think it's cool to build stuff with your hands, and maybe you'll work in a small factory or inventive shop like Edison worked in back then. Today it's more about electronics, the internet and perhaps texting. We just buy what we want and charge it. Maybe our environment today is to must past the build it yourself mentality and more into integration. Maybe I'm just tired and trying to sound like an old timer and say things are different. Today it’s a lot easier to just go fund raise and buy a telescope build by a company. So the old timers who want to grind and build dobs are at a disadvantage.

In the old days, but I’m not trying to say we need to bring them back, the club kind of decided what it wanted to do. Probably due to direction of the Jr. High club officers. We were of course encouraged and perhaps guided by the sponsors, with what resources were available. It was more of a kid directed thing. Currently the observatory really doesn’t have kid enthusiasm as far as I can tell with any input in what will happen, or what should happen next. Maybe Leo could tell me more about this and maybe there is some enthusiam, but perhaps it's more from FAAC than from the kids at school.

It’s something for the school system to eventually work through. As far as I can tell FAAC helps to run it and we are still setting it up and getting the bugs out. It will be interesting to see what happens. Of course these are just my own thoughts at this time and I'm writing a long post, so don't take this as any kind of official FAAC statement, it's just my musings of the day.

As I post this I can’t help but feel I’m writing to much obvious stuff and perhaps 40 % more wording than I should in this blog. My next blog entry will be a little more brief and stay on one subject.