In at the observatory but will likely be gone by 12

Just stopped by to look through my ninotelescope at the moon and use the observing chair.

And realized when I opened up I don't have the chair here tonight.




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Just a quick attempt using the t1i on the binoscope

Quickly from walmart




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There is a lot of haze tonight

The observatory will not be open.


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Went on an errand to walmart

Decided to buy a pair of polirizing sun glasses to check them out for lunar veiwing of the full moon.

They cut down on the light but are nowhere near the effectiveness of variable polirizing filters and they make it more difficult to view. Because of course your eyes are further from the eyepieces with them.

Test photo in parking lot below.

One thing about viewing the full moon, you can get away with being in a very light polluted parking lot.


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Here's a blog post test from walmart

Test


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There's a chance the observatory will be open tonight, but it may be closed until 11pm

There may be a problem with the goto star model and we may only allow FAAC members inside while we are setting up the model. The public is welcome to stop by, but we may be busy and not have a lot to show you, and you might only get a glimpse through some other small telescope or have to wait.

If your not a FAAC core member or FAAC member, feel free to stop by and check it out, but don't go out of your way to block off a large amount of time for tonight, because as you can tell there's a chance we will be pretty busy.

It can take an hour or two to get the mount setup. I'm not sure what happened to the star model but I have some ideas what might have messed it up. We need another star model in there anyway.

Sorry about the long and kind of conflicting post. My operating norm seems to be to show others the scope and the skies if things are worker fairly well. We haven't had a perfect model in the mount for some time and have had some issues with the star model in the goto controller in the past.

There is also a way to disengage the model and create a Tpoint model in the computer to have some separate star model.

One potential problem is in diagnosing another problem I moved the mount slightly manually, which is a mistake that can throw off the model.

What is a star model? It's basically a map of stars in relation to the telescope mount setup. It maps the stars and tells the computer chips inside the goto controller where the mount is pointing in relation to the stars in the sky. The goto controller has things like a clock and gps position set inside it. Using some clever math and programming, the mounts goto controller should know where it is pointing and be able to point the telescope to a star and object map to one of many thousands of objects in the sky.

Some computerized mounts with small telescopes you can buy like a Celestron Nexstar series of telescope or some Meade models of telescopes have a goto mount. A goto mount can tell the mount where to move automatically and often will control motors in the mount to cause the mount to move and point at an object the user selects. There are dozens of configurations of goto type mounts and also other various types of computerized setups. Some mounts have a something called digital setting circles, which read the position of the mounts shafts as they rotate. Giving a feedback as to where the scope is pointing. Most goto mounts just memorize where you pointed the scope because you told it what the telescope is pointing to. And these will control the motors and know how far a motor should turn to move from one position to another. So the goto controller will tell the motor where to point. But it will not receive feedback from the mount unless it has digital setting circles. This means most goto mounts are using guesswork as to where the mount starts pointing. And as long as the mount isn't moved manually, it stays pointing where the computer last thought it would be pointing. But if you move the telescope, the mount doesn't report where the telescope moved to, because it didn't use the motors to move it, but instead you used your hands to move the scope. So the scope moves, but the computer goto controller doesn't know it's moved. It has no sensor to realize the mount has moved. So the start model is OFF.

There can be other problems as well. There may be some kind of error or power glitch that may throw off the model. In theory a power glitch should not throw off a model but this may be one of the things that has been happening at the observatory as well.


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Here's a shot from a few weeks ago : the ring nebula

Here's a wide field shot. This was shot at the observatory using my canon t1i on the Meade 80mm refractor. This is mounted with a t ring adapter on the Meade and of course the mount allows tracking for this long exposure.

I'll have to look up the length of the exposure and other data from the metadata on the image. It maybe something like 30 seconds at iso 800 or something near to that if I can recall correctly. I'll check and repost.

The ring looks almost like this size wise with a low powered eyepiece like the 40mm through a wide field scope like Seans 10 inch rich field Orion telescope or something like the 10 inch Newtonian I use which is a f5.35. Both being rich field scopes.

This of course is a much smaller telescope but the long exposure makes up for the smaller size objective.

You may have to click on the following to load the larger sized image.



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