Astronomy Log

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.

I have now upgraded from my first telescope my Bresser Messier 130N to an LX200 10″ GPS with UHTC. After starting my astronomy hobby four months ago with my first scope, it is now time to upgrade.

I am glad that I purchased the 130N first, before spending a lot of money on a hobby that I may have found was not for me, as my initial budget was £250, and I nearly went for an ETX80.

The 130N is/was a very good beginners scope especially from the point of view of value for money. The 130N Mount was really good, solid and well made.

I have decided to upgrade in order to concentrate of astrophotography and to see more of the universe. Using the 130N was great but difficult to acquire really good deep sky photos. Although the 130N has provided me with some very good moon images (in my mind, anyway).

I shall in due course take some photos of my scope for history sake and add a proper review of the 130N to the site shortly, a kind of lasting shrine.

Now comes a massive learning curve on getting used to the new scope and what it can do. Watch this space.

Since purchasing my Canon 400D with its 18mm-55mm lens I have thoroughly enjoyed using it, especially for taking night shots of the sky using the bulb setting. But as the whole point of owning an SLR camera is to be able to change the lens, I thought it was about time to purchase a new one.

I decided that I did not want to spend hundreds of pounds on a new lens, so I decided upon a 75mm-300mm Canon lens, which does not have IS (Image Stabilisation). After looking around the internet I found that the cheapest price from a retailer like Amazon was around £175, so I decided to look on eBay, where I found a company selling them for around £120 including delivery.

Well today I received it, I think it was cheaper because it was a US version and I have tried it out in the daytime, and it makes me feel like a private detective or part of the papparazi when using it.

But I do like it, I now want to know what kind of astronomy images it will produce with the extra zoom.

The 75mm-300mm USM Lens is available at Argos, Jessops, Amazon and eBay.

Every night when I am out in the garden, I hear rustling in the bushes of the hedgehogs doing the rounds looking for food. When I first heard the rustling in the dark I wondered what it was, but now I know when the hedgehogs are coming and going as they make a ’scraping’ sound with their spines under the back gate.

Boy do they move fast with those little feet, and they also scratch themselves a lot with their back feet, must be the fleas!

So here is an image of one of my friends the hedgehog, who visit me most nights, and whom I am now used to seeing and hearing!

My apologies to the hedgehog if the flash momentarily blinded you!

I know this is not completely related to Astronomy, but it is sort of when I am trying to watch The Cosmos which I missed on TV the other day.

After waiting for 6 hours for an email saying I could try the BBC iPlayer, I then logged in and tried to download The Cosmos, but I have been having problems.

When I first logged in, every screen after that was asking for my username and password, I think I was asked 3 times for my details before I got to the section where I could download a TV program.

I then found I had to download a client iPlayer to watch the TV programs, for that I needed a second username and password. How many usernames do I need? Hopefully when the BBC release the iPlayer fully they will remove one of the username and password pairs.

I was doing all this on Windows Vista, but found I required Windows XP, so I moved to my laptop to download the program. The download was quite fast, the 124mb program took less than 5 minutes. I then turned off the laptop last night, as I was going to watch the program with the laptop attached to my TV the next day.

I then rigged everything up to watch The Cosmos and the BBC iPlayer told me I did not have the rights to play the video - great, DRM problems! I then tried to re-download the program, but it kept failing, so I deleted my original program and then it downloaded successfully - this time with DRM rights intact.

There appears to be bugs in the beta, but at the same time the Channel 4OD player is flawless and works really well, I can choose to download or stream programs from Channel 4OD, and as long as I have a ‘good’ signal from my wireless router I can watch streamed programs from 4OD on my laptop with no problems and only login once!

But instead the BBC have gone with downloads only, which are fast, but if you download the content the BBC don’t want you to keep the file for longer than 30 days plus if you have watched your downloaded program once then the BBC iPlayer program will be useless after 7 days, so DRM is used, which I don’t like, can’t you just keep the download as long as you want? You can if you record the program off of the TV.

BBC The Cosmos - Tue 21 Aug, 7:30 pm - 8:00 pm 30mins

The third episode in the series asks how far out into space and back into time could we see?

Adam Hart-Davis travels across Chile’s ultra dry Atacama desert to the world’s largest telescope, the appropriately named Very Large Telescope, to discover how this massive machine is revealing incredible new sights from across the universe.

Meanwhile, astronomer and engineer Dr Maggie Aderin visits the strange telescope in Tuscany that will soon reveal the cosmos using gravity waves - predicted by Einstein, but until now too weak to detect. She also joins the team at the Hubble Space Telescope who produce the most famous images of space by mixing art and science.

It will be good to see the team at the Hubble Space Telescope and see how they get their photos.

At the beginning of the evening of the 12th August, I thought we we’re going to have cloudy skies as at around 9pm the heavens opened and it was raining heavily, but at around 11pm when I looked out the sky was crystal clear.

I managed to stay up until 00:30am and then I ventured outside, I stayed out until about 2am, but I must say I was slightly dissapointed as I thought there would be lots of meteors every couple of minutes, well enough to allow me to put my SLR onto bulb and run it for 30 seconds a time and hopefully catch a meteor on film, but alas this did not happen.

I eventually think in about 90mins I spotted about 12 meteors. It was nice to stay up late and watch Mars and the Pleiades rise over the horizon and I managed to take a picture of this below:

Pleiades at the top of the image, with Mars at the bottom, shown in between my plum tree in my garden.

After getting up today at 8.30am I noticed the postman had delivered my BBC “The Cosmos” posters from the Open University together with a OU magazine. The posters are ok, nothing amazing, there is a nice photo of the moon landing on one of them.

There are 2 free posters accompanying the BBC series called “The Cosmos”.

They can be obtained by telephoning: 0870 900 0312

Calls do cost, so get the bill payers permission, but it took me only about 1.5mins to record my details.

Or you can go to the Open University website: www.open2.net

Saw Adam Hart-Davis discussing his new series entitled The Cosmos on BBC Breakfast TV this morning, from the clips it looks really good and a definite must watch for us astronomers.

The series spans five weeks.

First Episode of The Cosmos - Tue 7 Aug, 7:30 pm - 8:00 pm

Life in the Cosmos

Are we alone? In this edition of the cosmos-exploring series, Adam Hart-Davis joins alien hunters at the huge new telescope in California dedicated to receiving the first message from intelligent beings. He meets Frank Drake, pioneer of the search for extraterrestrials, who has calculated just how many aliens might be out there. And he reveals why microbes from Devon are being sent into space to find out if life could once have survived an interplanetary trip.

Also, Janet Sumner investigates a new way to detect life on Mars, using a probe made with living material from Earth. Dr Doug Vakoch of the Interstellar Messaging Composition Group who is working out how we should reply to a message from space. And Adam asks: what if the aliens are listening to us? He finds out how far into the cosmos our ancient broadcasts have travelled.

What a bright night sky, due to the full moon, which was incredibly bright tonight. The brightness of the moon literally blinded me when looking through either the viewfinder or an eyepiece. The brightness also knocked out a lot of the night sky and a number of stars became invisible.

This brought it’s own new challenges when trying to complete some photography, the webcam needed to be set to a low brightness and the digital camera required lots of experimentation to get some pictures of the moon.

Most of the pictures were taken at ISO100 at 1/25 second exposures. I then brightened them with the auto levels in Fireworks.

I also finally managed to located the Andromeda Galaxy, which through my telescope looked like a small hazy disc, but I was pleased to located it at last.

I also manually found the Ring Nebula again, it did look quite small, too small infact for me to get any photographic evidence, as I just could not get focus on either the ring nebula or the andromeda galaxy. I may try again at a later date or when I have a bigger telescope.

I stayed out until 1.30am, and at that time the temperature was about 8 degrees, and it felt cold for summer! Anyway at that time I checked Starry Night Pro and discovered that Mars was now starting to appear on the horizon. Amazing my first view of Mars, it was definitely orange coloured if not a little small in my telescope. Hopefully we will be seeing a lot more of Mars in the coming months, at an earlier time of the day, enabling me to get some photographs.