Astronomy Log

This is for anyone who read my previous post about my friendly hedgehog who used to come and see me in the garden whilst I was using my telescope.

Well over the winter the hedgehog ended up making a nest near a fence post, made up of leaves, moss and twigs.

Today whilst out cutting the lawn I noticed there is a big hole in the winter hibernation nest and he must be now on the loose again. I hope to see him soon.

It must have been the last two days of sun that woke him up.

Apologies to anyone who visited in the last hour (between 2.30pm - 3.30pm) and got a blank white page. 

I moved the astronomy blog from a shared hosting account to a new web server.  Hopefully everything should be fully working as usual, if not, then there may be the odd bug to iron out.

I had been looking out for a Meade DSI for a while, although I did not want to pay the full retail price, that meant looking for a second hand model, either on eBay or AstroBuySell.

I ended up buying my DSI Pro from eBay, and there was a bit of confusion between what model it was that I was actually buying. The seller said it was bought from Green Witch about 3 months ago, which led me to think it would be a DSI II. Although it wasn’t! It was a DSI Pro version 1, although I suppose at around £150 it was probably a good buy.

It turned up quickly and was missing the parfocal ring, but after a few emails, the seller found the parfocal ring and posted it on.

To begin with the DSI looks really complicated to use and it’s another computer software program that I need to learn how to use.

I first thing I did after installing the Autostar Suite, is that I printed out the manuals, as they only come on the main CD as PDF documents.

So far I have read the manuals and watched the online Meade videos, but I think it would have been good if Meade had included some kind of “How To” PDF or video as opposed to telling you how each menu works or what each button does.

I did not get the CCD filters in the sale, so now I am on the lookout for some Meade CCD RGB filters.

A short while ago I discovered the UK Astronomy Buy & Sell website. It was nice to find a website where you could list any astronomy item for sale for free, instead of having to pay the high listing and final auction fees of eBay.

A couple of weeks ago I listed an LX200 data cable, and some astronomy books for sale, a couple of the books sold and the communication between the buyer and myself was easy via email and the transaction was easy, payment was made through PayPal, so eBay (who own PayPal) still got some commission!

This week I have now also become a buyer from the site, as I purchased a Baader UV/IR Rejection Filter for £16.50 including delivery and it turned up in the post today, again a nice straight forward transaction.

Admittedly I do frequently look at eBay for astronomy listings, but I also regularly visit the UK Astronomy Buy & Sell Website, if you don’t know it have a look yourself, you may find a bargain!

View my astronomy listings here

I have not been out for a couple of weeks, it seems the colder weather has put me off and I have been very busy in the evenings as well. But I managed to get outside for a couple of hours the other night after wrapping up warm. I went looking for Comet Tuttle but could not really see it or Autostar was pointing me in the wrong direction.

Anyway, I managed to have a re-visit to Comet Holmes, to see what has happened since I last looked at it about 14 days ago here. It appears that the outer dense ring has decreased or should I say thinned out.

This image was taken by my telescope mounted Canon 300mm lens.

I was amazed to find a program called Planetarium which can be installed on a Palm top with Palm OS 3.5 and above. Planetarium is a full astronomy program which can also control your telescope.

So the first thing I did was go and get my old Palm M505 out of the loft and charge it up. The Palm is something I have not used for ages as I kept finding the battery was always out of charge whenever I went to use it. Another thing is that nowadays the mobile phone can do most of things that the Palm can, but now it has a new lease of life as long as I can get it to talk to the LX200.

I then downloaded the Planetarium software and installed the extra LX200 drivers. Installation was easy, after I tried to install the latest Palm Desktop software onto my Vista PC, which was not too happy, so I ended up installing it instead onto my XP laptop which worked.

After starting Planetarium I entered the latitude and longitude co-ordinates and the date and time. Overall the software looks good, you can even set the read out to display in night mode where the screen turns red.

The next thing I need to do to is now find a Palm to RS232 Serial cable so that I can try and connect the Palm to the LX200 somehow. If anybody has any ideas on how to get the Palm to talk to the LX200 then please leave your comments.

I was glad to go out last night on Halloween and see clear skies as I was after having a look at the Holmes Comet after it had managed to get so much news coverage and at the same time come away with some images of the comet which is currently in the Perseus Constellation.

The Holmes comet can be clearly seen with the naked eye in the north and it makes a good sight in a good pair of binoculars, even low powered telescopes will get a good view. Apparently the explosion of Holmes was so big that the comet brightened by a factor of a million.

Holmes is currently moving away from the Sun, and is almost midway between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. When I looked through my LX200 10″ you could clearly make out a circular cloud of gas and dust emanating from the nucleus of the comet, together with a brighter cloud of material.

These images were not taken using a telescope but with my trusty Canon 400D SLR with a 300mm lens with the camera on top of my telescope, most images were at f/5.6 on ISO400 with exposures of around 30 seconds.

This second image of Comet Holmes below is a magnified image.

It is not clear what caused the comet to shed its skin, since it is moving away from the Sun’s energetic influence. One possibility is that the comet was hit by a meteoroid, or perhaps there has been a build-up of gas under part of the surface that catastrophically ruptured the surface.

Comet Holmes is a regular visitor to the inner Solar System. It takes 6.9 years to orbit the Sun once. It made its closest approach to our star last May, passing by at some 300 million km (190 million miles).

With a number of clear nights in a row last week I managed to stay out for a number of hours and actually get used to using the LX200. I also managed to let the LX200 take me on some of the tours I uploaded from the Meade website.

Whilst out I managed to get some photographs using prime focus as well as using my camera bracket on top of my LX200 to get some shots with my Canon 75-300mm lens.

Camera Mounted Shots

Orion Nebula - 300mm

M34 - 300mm

Andromeda Galaxy - 300mm

Prime Focus Photography on LX200

Ring Neblua - 70 sec exp. ISO800

This shot of the ring nebula is a bit blurry, as it needed a lot of exposure time as without it I just could not gather enough light.

I managed to get the scope out last night and it was a brilliantly clear night. Below are some images from last night of the moon which I took by just adding the DSLR camera to the back end of the scope. These images were taken using a moon filter attached to the camera, so hence the slight darkness of the images.

The clarity of the moon from the LX200 through the eyepiece is quite astounding and very clear.

I took a trip to my local Maplin store today in order to purchase some new aluminium boxes so that I can put my new LX200 parts in them for storage, such as the power supply and hand controller.

At the moment Maplin have an offer on two different tool boxes, one is at £14.99 for one good quality box which comes with full foam padding that you can cut out and use.

View it here.

The other boxes that I purchased are three aluminium boxes, all different sizes, they don’t have any foam inside, but they are only £19.99 at the moment for all three boxes.

View them here

Now I just need to go and source some foam inserts, I am going to venture to a Dunelm store probably tomorrow to see what they have got, foam wise.