Astronomy Log

I tried guiding again the other night for the first time in ages. I went back to imaging with the LX200 and guiding with my cheap refractor. I took this image of the Orion Nebula for 2.5mins with my Canon 450D and Astronomik CLS filter attached directly to the Meade LX200 10″ scope.

The initial image did not look that good, but once I had adjusted the separate colour levels and the brightness and contrast the image got a lot bigger and came alive.

It’s definitely one of my best so far, but I am sure I could do even better in the future.

Managed to get out last night at about 9.30pm until Midnight. With so many great sights in the sky at the moment in January it’s hard to know what to try and image first.

M1 Crab Nebula, M45 Pleiades, Mars, M42 Orion Nebula, Horsehead Nebula etc.

At the moment I love connecting my Canon 450D up to my £100 refractor guide scope. I just find it so easy to use and focus compare to the LX200. The worst thing on the LX200 is not seeing where you are when focusing. I like to see the drawtube on the refractor.

I ended up taking the pleiades and the orion nebula with the 70mm refractor.

Since getting my guiding telescope on top of my Meade LX200, I have run out of space to put other items around the telescope.

When you first get an LX200 telescope, you think there are lots of screws to use to add extras, but they soon get all used.

I currently have the Meade finder on the left hand side of the scope, the guiding scope in the middle on a rail and rings, on the right I have my Telrad.

The Telrad was originally stuck to the tube with some sticky padding although I wish I had never done this, so instead I drilled some holes into the Telrad base and screwed this into the tube. Because of all these items on the top of the scope, I then required weights on the underneath of the scope.

So, this means there is no space left for my DSLR camera, a bit of a pain if I want to do some normal widefield photography using my camera lenses. To get around this I decided to build a camera mount that would slot into the finder slot on the guiding telescope, which I was not using.

To do this I got myself a small piece of (1.5″ x 2″) wood which was about 2.5″ long.

I began by using a chisel to take out a line of wood where the finder mount would slide on, you could also do this with a screwdriver. The wood block will stay in place by using the screw on the finder mount on the telescope.

I then used the current metal camera mount I had and screwed this to the block of wood, between the metal camera mount and the piece of wood I did also add two rubber washers.

And that’s it, a simple way to add your camera onto your guiding scope.

Hi, Just returned from a day at the Cambridge Federation of Astronomical Societies Annual Convention. It was quite a nice and quiet day at the Cambridge campus.  I arrived just after the Dr Hayley Gomez talk, to be told on the door that Damian Peach was ill and would not be presenting.

It was really strange, as I was thinking what would I do if he did not show up, on my way to Cambridge in the car. Would I just ask for my £8 back and go home and do something else? Because I had only turned out to see Damian, but I stayed anyway and had a quick look around the stalls and luckily Jerry from Loughton AS stood in and gave a good old fashioned slide presentation instead.

After lunch, Chris Lintott spoke on Galaxy Zoo, the same talk he gave at Herstmonceux, but luckily I did not attend that talk. After that I then came home without waiting for Martin Ree’s talk.

I hope that the FAS still publish Damian Peach’s talk on the web as I would still like to read it, but I was gutted he did not show up along with several other people.

I don’t usually publicise this sort of thing, but I have found some discount voucher codes for Jessops cameras online:

Use code CAMERAS8 – 8% off all compact digital cameras – Ends midnight 9th Oct

Use code NIKD300 – £30 off the Nikon D300 body – Ends midnight 2nd Oct

Use code NIKD300S – £50 off the Nikon D300S body – Ends midnight 2nd Oct

You can use these discount codes at Jessops now!

This was my first visit to Herstmonceux on the south coast near Hastings. I had heard so much about it and remember seeing the adverts for it last year, but I was still unsure if I wanted to drive for two and a half hours to get to the site, but I’m glad I made the visit.

After coming off of the M25 you are then driving a long a lot of tree covered single carriageway roads which have a lot of twists and turns, but once I had arrived I made out the numerous observatory domes immediately with the campsite right in front of the science centre.

Luckily the weather was quite good, a little windy, but the telescopes on the Pulsar Optical tradestand did give visitors a view of the sun and the daytime moon.

The astronomy festival includes several tradestands from Ian King Imaging, Pulsar Optical, Telescope House and BBC Sky at Night Magazine as well as others. In a separate large tent was a collection of local astronomy societies as well as the SPA, which this year I actually joined for £12 for an annual membership which gets you a quarterly magazine, periodic newsletters and 5% discounts from astronomy retailers. They also provided me with a copy of the latest magazine, a pen and a red light pen once I joined.

The Herstmonceux site has 6 observatory domes, all were being used for various purposes during the day. One of the domes was being used for a very interesting exhibition of the history of the site underneath one of the telescopes. Another dome was the location for the talks during the day, again sitting underneath one of the telescopes. A third was open to viewing, the others were closed on the Saturday but open at other times during the weekend.

Other amenities at the site included a beer tent, with a very nice Harvey’s bitter. There was also a canteen and lots of activities around the science centre. Herstmonceux does seem a perfect place for a school trip with a shop at the entrance and lots of science related activities in the centre.

I arrived at about the time Chris Lintott was speaking on Galaxy Zoo, but I did buy 3 lecture tickets for the afternoon, priced at £2 each. All three talks were very good, including:

• Stuart Clark – “What’s Wrong with the Sun”
• Ian Ridpath – “Exploring the Moon”
• Nik Szymanek – “Imaging the Deep Sky”

One thing I must say though, is Nik please amend your talk, as I have now seen that same talk three times! Twice in Cambridge I think, and I did see your talk at the Bedford Astroblast, but at that you did do a slightly different talk.

I know it is difficult to gauge your audience at these events, but I would personally appreciate a slightly more technical talk on how to take the images like yours, instead of just going through the images you have taken and your Tenerife trips.

At the end of the day there was a raffle prize draw and then extra activities during the evening session, but I instead decided to leave at about 6.30pm,  but before I left I decided to walk down to the castle in order to get a few pictures of the very impressive castle and moat.

View all the photographs from Herstmonceux

Last week I bidded on an Astro Engineering Pro Pier on eBay, luckily at the last minute I won the auction. I do find that these kinds of pier don’t appear that regularly on the 2nd hand market, as most people are using them, so I’m glad I got it.

The only problem was that the pier was 200 miles away in Chester. So on Sunday I made the journey over to Chester in 3hrs, really easy when you have a Sat Nav!

Gosh those piers are heavy, it took two of us to put it on the backseat of the car and my wife had to help me get it out of the car when I got back.

There was a slight bit of rust on the bottom, so I am considering getting some smooth Hammerite and painting it.

I also purchased a 2nd hand Meade Ultra Wedge a while ago so now I have the set up. The next thing is to look for a shed and start that observatory project, as I’m fed up with the weight of the LX200 10″ and the time it takes me to set up.

So I shall be posting regularly and keeping you up to date on my observatory project.

Exactly. It seems to me that Philips have stopped producing our beloved SPC900 Webcams. Amazon, Play and Pixmania used to stock them online, but no longer do. So what now? I suppose you could always look on eBay.

Does this mean that the price of second hand SPC900 Webcams will increase as they become harder to get hold of.

I did discover the new range of Philips SPC webcams and wrote a blog post about them. But is the SPC1300 or SPC1330 the new astronomy webcam? Do the old 1.25″ adaptors fit these webcams? Or do we need to get the glue out and try to fit the old adaptors to the new webcams?

The SPC1300 is a 2 Megapixel CMOS camera, the SPC900 was a 1.3 Megapixel camera.

If anybody wants to try the SPC1330 they are stocked at Amazon or Play.com – both offer Free Delivery.

Or will this see the end of us using Philips Webcams for Planetary Imaging, do we now need to go back to Logitech webcams?

Did you see the “Starmen” programme on the BBC? What a great astronomy programme, so good I had to watch it twice.

It was about us amateur astronomers and how important we are to keeping an eye on what is going on in the sky. I think my favourite part was actually seeing everyone’s astronomy kit, as well as the observatories that everyone had in their back-garden.

Terry Pratchett even appeared on the programme with his own bespoke observatory, the dome was actually made from wood.

It was amazing to know just how many people have astronomy as a hobby, and that so many people go to work all day and then stay up all night sitting beside a telescope.

Usually the only amateur astronomy on TV is on The Sky at Night, I would like to see more amateur astronomy on the BBC, perhaps we need a new Astronomy TV series which reviews astronomy equipment, teaches us the night sky, and instructs on how to use the kit in order to undertake astrophotography etc.

During heavy rainfall and Sun at the same time on Friday 22nd August 2008, at around 6pm, I looked around the sky for a rainbow, and there it was at the back of my house, with more bands of colour than I can remember ever seeing.

“A supernumerary rainbow is an infrequent phenomenon, consisting of several faint rainbows on the inner side of the primary rainbow, and very rarely also outside the secondary rainbow. Supernumerary rainbows are slightly detached and have pastel colour bands that do not fit the usual pattern”. Is this photo below a supernumerary rainbow? It does seem to have a lot of colour bands.

The main image even shows a second rainbow trying appear above the main one, this is called simply a double rainbow. Two rainbows in the same sky is also something I have never witnessed before.

Apparently secondary rainbows are caused by a double reflection of sunlight inside the raindrops, and appear at an angle of 50°–53°. As a result of the second reflection, the colours of a secondary rainbow are inverted compared to the primary bow, with blue on the outside and red on the inside.

It is remarkable how quickly a rainbow can appear and how quickly it can fade away and lose it’s intensity and the number of bands of colour.

Rainbows are optical illusions and meteorological phenomena that cause a spectrum of light to appear in the sky when the Sun shines onto droplets of moisture in the Earth’s atmosphere. They take the form of a multicoloured arc, with red on the outer part of the arch and violet on the inner section of the arch. More rarely, a secondary rainbow is seen, which is a second, fainter arc, outside the primary arc, with colours in the opposite order, that is, with violet on the outside and red on the inside.