Astronomy Log

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.

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