Didn't open the observatory due to weather and humidity

SO THE OBSERVATORY WAS CLOSED - Instead I observed from the Possum Platform at home.

There were reports of storms possibly occurring on the radio. It was very humid and hazy last night, especially around 11PM. While running a late night errand I looked up and saw it might be worth taking a look to test the atmosphere (bowl like clearing conditions). The clear sky chart report stated it would be cloudy and transparency would not be good.

I was too tired to open up the observatory. I didn't want to throw out a late night post and then have someone arrive late to be disappointed by poor seeing and humid conditions. The humidity we had last night might rival a Panama rain forest.

I pulled out a couple of small telescopes and observed at home (for a "quick" look). It's funny how a quick look can turn into a long look and then you're falling asleep outside instead of being inside.

Transparency was better than I expected from the clear sky chart, with little "flickering" noticable, but the consistant view was somewhat bubbling from the humidity. I don't know if there's a good way to say transparency seemed okay, but humidity hampered the view. I was able to see the great red spot or at last something that looked like it, through the binocular telescope with 15mm eyepieces.
(about 46 power.)

There was some dew as well. The heat and humidity seemed pretty oppressive. My glasses would fog up or dew up when I would set them down. It was like being in an unpleasant sauna, with a few bugs buzzing around. I sprayed myself with enough insect repellant to perhaps keep stray pit bulls away.

Memerized or perhaps just to tired to pick up and go back inside, I felt myself drifting into Rem sleep, well perhaps more like REM observing.

Nothing of major interest to report, just gazed at the moon and Jupiter for a long time. I was trying to see how many details I could spot on Jupiter. I get this perception or feeling that some of the moons are closer and coming around this side of Jupiter and others are further back when viewing Jupiter through the binocular telescope. I think this is more of an imagined than something that can be proved, maybe it's actually some kind of optical illusion.

THE WANING MOON
The moon was wonderful, a better view than the night before. The sky was clear and not showing a glow or colored effect from pollution in the sky. I could stare at the terminator line most of the night. Some of the craters and mountains shinied brightly out of the shadows due to their height. One large crater(sorry I didn't look up the name) had a rim that was bright and lit up but darkness surrounded the rim. Darkness was inside the crater walls. That crater looked like half a mirror test on a test stand, where the edge of the mirror is brightly lit up and the rest of the mirror is dark. While watching a star suddenly appeared next to the dark side of the moon. It was covered (occulted) by the moon. The moon had past over the star and it suddenly appeared and flickered in the night sky. it appeared near the top dark side of the moon. (Remember I was using a binocular telescope, so this would look like it was near the botton of the moon in most telescopes or photos.)

The moon had an orange tint the night before, but last night it was more cold and white looking. The image bubbled a bit near the outer fringe. Not a bad view for 36 power.

I searched for the ring nebula and could not find it. This is a small target. Perhaps to small for the small telescope I was using.(magnitude 9.5) If I had the 10 inch Newtonian out I'd have likely found it, but I only used two small telescopes and didn't want to drive to the observatory to use the C-14 or a goto mount.

I also tried to take a handheld photo of the area where the ring Nebula would be. It was to hot to play with the telescope and pull it off the camera tripod so I just flopped down on the wood deck to shoot handheld. I pressed the camera against my face trying to hold perfectly still while the 10 second exposure went off. I'm not even sure I had a good focus, it wasn't bad, but it was far from perfect.

While I was laying perfectly still on the deck;, taking a few photos, I imagined being attacked by a local possum who took up residence under our deck.

I tried to remain calm while imagining that the possum would attack -- perhaps defending her "nest" of little possum offspring. (Possums have 13 little ones in their litter or swarm or whatever we are supposed to call them.) The possum family of course bothers the neighbors. The possums have been eating our neighbors corn before our neighbors could harvest any of it. And one little possum has been poisoned and crawled and died in another neighbors garage ("stinking it up to high heaven".) I told my neighbor (who removed the dead body) the possums want to live on our property, eat at the other neighbors garden, and die on his property.

Possums have 50 sharp teeth but probably won't fight, or be aggressive unless cornered and they'd rather play possum/dead than fight most of the time. They are like a cute, big ugly rat. They are actually marsupials and can climb like a fat squirrel. They have hands and feet that grasp like our hands and carry their kids in a pouch. Also they rarely get rabies, but they are pests and love to eat out of gardens and local garbage cans.

They have an odor kind of like a skunk that they give off and reportedly leave dropping that are kind of like dog droppings, but smell worse. I don't know for sure what possum droppings smell like, hopefully I'm not rolling around on them on my deck late at night enough to start smelling like a possum.

DISCLAIMER: (I hope that I don't smell like a possum, but sometimes may play possum at work.)

Well the possum never showed up, maybe poisoned by eaten some rat poisoning. My handhel photos don't rate a posting here.. I could get a faily clear shot at 10 or 13 seconds exposure. A 20 seconds exposure was to blurred with obvious camera movement.

Reviewing the photos I thought, maybe I should be looking for the Hercules Cluster instead as it was obviously nearby. I focused on using the binocular telescope most of the time, and the mount would not supply a steady view while looking up near the zenith (straight up).

This morning thinking about how tired I've been lately a part of a line came into my mind and I tried to write a short poem around it. So here it is. . . kind of old fashioned sounding.

-----

My eyes are moon burned from looking last night,

with cold dark circles beneath.

The hot humid air, bubbling atmosphere,

drove my observing to grief.

-----

Hmm. . . funny what looking at an OPT website can do.

Photo above is a long exposure of me looking at the moon through the Vixen Binocular Telescope.

I was looking up the Lunt Solar scope that we have in the observatory on the OPT site. Ocean Pacific Telescope is one dealer that sells these and other telescopes. There are more expensive telescopes out there of course, but the 35mm Lunt Solar scope is a pretty nice telescope for solar viewing. Bigger Hydrogen Alpha setups are great and provide more detail. But a 60mm solar scope of this type could be in the $3500 range. And a 100mm in the $7000 to $8000 range. You can buy hydrogen alpha filters and spend nearly $8,000 to put a filter on a larger telescope. Often these filters may include a blocking filter and a special adapter that matches it from the same manufacturer, for instance Daystar makes some of these packages. You could easily spend $10,000 for a filter set for a larger telescope. We even have a member who has a filter set that would likely cost in the $8,000 range in our club. He states this gives much more detailed solar views than you'll see in a typical small solar hydrogen alpha telescope.


Many astronomers have small solar telescopes, one very popular one being the PST or Personal Solar Telescope. These cost about $500. You can get "dual filters" for the front of these PST instruments and that could push the cost over $1000.

But what about the 35mm dual filter Lunt setup? It's really nice, and after looking through it, that to me would be the minimum personal solar telescope I'd want, or something more expensive. Some of the photos on the Nasa site from the earth are through solar telescopes that are 60mm or larger. It's difficult to imagine taking a photo that was published through a smaller solar telescope. Is a telescope for viewing the sun worth the price? Well it depends on the astronomer I suppose. But considering it's easier to look at the sun during normal hours than stay up late to look at some faint object that might be affected by haze, it's clear that a lot of people find solar viewing a great pursuit.

In looking at the Lunt, meaning the exact same one we have in the observatory, one thing becomes very interesting and clear. The telescope is small and portable. But it's also not very wide. It's narrow enough to "mount in a binocular configuration". This makes a personal solar telescope purchase of the exact same model very interesting from my own perspective. Because it means there might be a chance to make a mount that would hold one I purchased with one from the observatory, for viewing at the Lincoln Park Site. It would be very interesting from my perspective, to pull up with a matching Lunt Solar scope with a mount and pull the Lunt from the observatory for a temporary use outside on a separate binocular mount. I have seen the effect that binocular viewing can have in enhancing the moon watching experience. I'd like to experience binocular or stereo viewing of the SUN through a really nice setup.

This is perhaps the "next buying temptation". But of course I'd have to be careful and probably go over the alternate configuration setup for use at the observatory with the club and the school system. I think it's a possibility, but I'm not sure how long it will be before I order a Solar scope to test it out. (Then again I could get a second Lunt without a mounting bracket or eyepiece even cheaper. I have dual eyepieces already for the binocular telescope setup.) Maybe I could fabricate the binocular setup and get into stereo solar viewing for about $1100 without figuring the cost of the mount. It's tempting to think about.

One thing to consider when solar viewing is the sun beating down on you as you watch and that heating you up and making the view uncomfortable as well. So some kind of make shift shielding is also a nice thing to plan for. In the observatory we can use the shutter to block out the sunlight from the viewer most of the time and just allow the sun to peek past the shutter into the Lunt mounted on the mount. With a Binocular setup, things would be a little more complicated for the shielding.

Okay, enough late night thinking about solar scope purchases, time to get some sleep. . . it's cloudy out.

A little better photo, but still not much compared to the view

As promised here's a photo through the eyepiece from the Canon t1i.

This photo still is not nearly as good as it should be. I'd estimate the view looking through the eyepiece showed 20 times more detail and many more craters than in this handheld photo.

To do the photograph correctly, I should have mounted a webcam like device to the telescope and taken a video clip or movie with this mounted on the telescope properly. With the Vixen, it's likely that I'd have to use "eyepiece" projection, which is not the case with many telescopes, for example the telescopes in the observatory. So I'd need an adapter that held the webcam over the eyepiece using "eyepiece" projection into the webcam. The video recording would provide many frames and good software would select the best frames and give me a photograph that would look as good or better than what we'd see in the eyepiece.

Because I continue to do handheld photos most of the time through eyepieces my photo suffer in quality.

Still you can get a rough idea what the view was like seeing this photo. Most cheap telescopes would give a view this well and even better than presented below.

When I get a proper webcam and adapter things may change. Or when we get the replacement camera for the observatory that should have movie capability. This will likely happen in about a month or so. With Astronomy you may want to take you're time and be patient, as many things in the sky will be there in the future for us to look at. Sometimes as consumers we forget that and tend to rush out to get the latest gadgets to look at the stars.

A simply horrible photo

Just to be sure I put something out I'm including this as an example of a bad photoof the moon through an eyepiece.

This is blurry and doesn't show any decent detail. The telescope shows so much more detail and fine quality than this junky photo I have to make excuses.

Why is it difficult to take a good photo at the eyepiece? Well there's a sweet spot, you need to hold the camera injust the right position and the iPhone 3 gs needs to set focus and exposure via a target which you can pick with a touch of your finger on the face of the phone. Then touching the phone to trigger the photo moves it aa well. You also don't have a zoom capacity to get a decent framing or vary the exposure. So you en up with shots like this.

This should have a lot more detail and there's probably 100 times more detail at the eyepiece.



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What to do when it's cloudy

Eat out.

When I returned home from Carters in Dearborn, the sky cleared up a little. This was later at night around midnight.

I had other errands to run. Once finished, I looked up and saw the moon rising with mist and clouds. Wanting to check out the moon a bit with the binocular telescope, I set it up for a quick look. The ridges near the terminator line were amazing to view. The night and conditions were getting worse, but I took a few shots of the setup and tried to take a handheld shot through the eyepiece with the iPhone camera. Those photos looked to be poor in quality, so I pulled put the canon eos and tried taking a few with that.

I didn't have time to upload those photos to the blog and didn't bring my camera to do any uploading during lunch, so the photo from Carters will remain in this post.

I'll try to post one of the other photos in the next blog entry.






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Moon map pro view of banting crater area

It's interesting to see the detailed maps after reviewing what I saw and looking at moon atlas.

The Moonmap Pro software has more details and the imagery shows more streaks and more detail. Clearly showing me what I saw and what I could not.

Here's a sample screen shot from the program.

Combining the two programs provides some serious ability to view and identify lunar features in detail. Another reason to own an iPad.




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A fun time surveying the moon throughout the binocular telescope

I took some audio notes to review.

Sitting in a chair with moon atlas running on the iPad. I selected a mare and started searching to match craters and other features.

I ended my viewing with a pair of 15mm eyepieces in the Vixen binocular telescope.

I could see the a b c d craters that correspond to the messier craters. The smallest of these being 1.6 miles across. It looked like a bright dot. You could tell it was a crater.

I could see more detail with my left eye. The right eye for example would not see the 1.6 mile crater but it would blink in and out. The right eye would confirm what the left was viewing and the small crater would pop in and out of 3d perception.

Here's a screen shot of the messier craters, from the moon atlas program. The streaks to the left really looked like a comet, with the messier craters appearing as the head of the comet. A fitting name for the craters.

For those of you wondering, just how good and how much detail a pair of binoculars that have 3 inches of glass for each eye can be, the detail I saw was better from a crater perspective than what is shown zoomed in fully with this program. There were a lot of craters and this with an almost full moon. However the ridges were less visible than with the Moon Atlas program. There were a lot more bright spots and you could see more bright ejection paths from crater impacts than this program will show on the map. The shading was more subtle than shown in the moon atlas. And this was under viewing conditions that were far from ideal. A larger telescope would show more information. One member of the FAAC club mentioned that the moon map programs seem to lack the contextual view (maybe they need a split screen mode) for the iphone or ipod touch. This may be a problem. I actually don't have a moon atlas loaded on my iPhone so I can't confirm that. I can say the iPad had a large enough screen to easily see the context of what you were looking at and zoom in to look at details and figure out what you were seeing. I could have spent 10 hours of moon watching with the Moon atlas sitting on my lap, but you have to stop and get some sleep. With bigger scopes you can see even more detail. The moon atlas at $6 seems to show a lot of detail, but naked eye astronomy through the telescope shows so much more detail, I found myself wondering if there was a way to have a more detailed linked map, something like the other moon mapping program that has a poor interface. That other moon mapping program called moonmap pro has a very unstandard and segmented interface.

MoonMap Pro is not as user friedly, but the satillite maps of the moon in great detail. It would be great if some kind of mapping software could combine the two. In reviewing this post and adding to it, I pulled up the MoonMap Pro software and looked at seciton 42 which contains high resolution sattillite imagery of some of the earlier areas I was looking at. I looks like you could use the Moon Atlas program on the iPad to get your bearings and figure out what section and detailed features you are looking at, then fire up the MoonMap Pro and start drilling down into sections to get a really close detailed view that is greater than you'd see in your small telescope. See my next post for a sample screen shot of the MoonMap Pro close up view.





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