Astronomy Log

Practical Astronomy is a straight forward guide to the hobby of astronomy. If you are a beginner to astronomy then this is a perfect book to pick up and read.

The book begins by introducing you to astronomy and teaching you the night’s sky and how to guide yourself about.  There is also a chapter on choosing the right astronomy equipment for you, including information on various telescope types. Practical astronomy ends the first section entitled “Introducing Astronomy” by advising you on how to record your observations via cameras and web cams. This section of the book also contains a section containing star charts.

The second part of Practical Astronomy works through “Exploring the Sky” and the book gives a chapter to viewing the moon, sun, observing planets, outer planets, the stars and deep sky objects.

Each chapter takes you through each type of object with full colour images, tables and diagrams.  This type of book is perfect for the beginner as it gives the reader an insight into the hobby of astronomy as most areas of amateur astronomy are covered. There are also star charts and moon maps included as well as a small glossary and resources list.

Practical Astronomy by Storm Dunlop is available at Amazon

I have been waiting for a Netgear Gigabit modem/router for ages, and at last one has been released. It’s called the DGN3500. At the time of writing it seems to be retailing for around £110 delivered, but I did not want to pay this much, so I decided to buy it from Pixmania for £81 + P&P. I had only ever purchased one thing from Pixmania before and that was my astronomy webcam my Philips SPC900.

I ordered the Netgear DGN3500 on a Thursday morning at 8am and received the item via Fedex on Monday morning, not too bad considering it came from South of France. It’s also fun tracking your parcel on the Fedex website as I saw it come up to Paris and then arrive in Stansted and then come to Cambridge.

I previously had a Netgear DG834G for around 5 years, and it was the first wireless router I ever bought. It has been rock solid for all those years and is still going strong, and it never needed rebooting or anything. All I did was keep feeding it the latest firmware. So I opted for another Netgear.

The first thing that strikes you is the increased size of the DGN3500 compared to my DG834. Something you’ll see below in the image:

I had hoped that I would export all my settings from my old router and then just import them into the new router, but unfortunately this did not work, so I had to manually enter my settings. This is not really a problem as the admin panel looks the same as I was used to.

As most of my PC’s now have gigabit ethernet I was looking forward to increased speed over the network. I currently had a mixture of Cat5 and Cat5E network cables. I was happy to see that the Cat5E cables all provided gigabit connectivity as on the router it shows gigabit in green and 10/100 as orange.

Even though the Cat5E cables are fine for gigabit I still ordered a couple of 3m Cat6 cables to see if I could get more speed, but I can’t really tell that I have gotten any extra speed.

One new thing with the DGN3500 is that it has a USB socket on the back allowing you to connect a USB hard drive or stick pen for network attached storage. I have plugged in a 16GB USB pen for temporary storage purposes. You can set this up via the netgear control panel and provide password access, or add folders to it, you can even specify if only certain USB drives are allowed to be connected to the DGN3500 modem router.

Something new for me is that the DGN3500 has an on/off switch on the back as well as a reset switch.

As Pixmania is a French company some people are worried about plugs being 2 pin plugs etc. But don’t worry Pixmania provide a 3 pin plug adaptor which just clips onto the 2pin adaptor – brilliant!

The only other difference from buying from Pixmania is that they the European version does not include the standard UK white phone filters, but instead you get some strange French phone adaptors pictured below. But if you already have phone filters you probably won’t need any more of them, and if you do I am sure they are cheap to buy.

Overall the Netgear DGN3500 seems a very good wireless modem router. It’s early days yet, but I have had no problems yet. Speed is good, although I would have thought that signal strength could be better, but that could be down to my wanting great signal strength when I am in my observatory in the garden, it could also be that my wireless router usb adaptor needs some new drivers.

I could not fault the price at Pixmania as I think I paid about £88 including delivery for the DGN3500-PES version from Pixmania, where as everyone else wants about £110 delivered for the DGN3500-UKS version.

Get your Netgear DGN3500 from Pixmania here.

I managed to get out before the snow set in and the clouds appeared today (Sunday 21st Feb). I went out at about 4pm when it was still light, but the moon appeared directly above me.

I took this image with my cheap refractor but this time I also used my Televue 2x Barlow as well as my Canon 450D camera on ISO800 for about 1/50th exposure. I forgot to add that I also used my 1.25″ Baader Fringe Killer filter.

Click on it to enlarge it.

Today it’s snowing, but yesterday I managed to view the Sun and do some imaging – crazy weather!

Usually when viewing the Sun at the moment it’s a very uninteresting sinle coloured disc, but today (20th February 2010) I was amazed to see two small sunspots on the face of the Sun.

With this being such an unusual occurence lately I had to get some images.

Before I purchased my guidescope I only had solar filters for the LX200, by way of a hartmann mask and a glass ETX solar filter. Now I also have a mylar sheet type filter for my small refractor. Both provide different colours of the Sun.

The ETX glass solar filter gives an orange colour to the Sun, whilst the mylar sheet provides a kind of white colour.

The sunspots are so small you may have trouble seeing them on these images, but they are on the lower right hand corner. Click on the image to enlarge it.

First the mylar image on the refractor:

The image from my LX200 using an ETX glass solar:

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.

Images taken from Hubble have shown Pluto changing colour.

Nasa says the dwarf planet on the edge of our solar system is becoming increasingly red.

Its illuminated northern hemisphere is also getting brighter.

Nasa’s scientists believe these are seasonal changes – as the planet heads into a new phase of its 248-year-long seasonal cycle.

“These changes are most likely consequences of surface ice melting on the sunlit pole and then re-freezing on the other pole,” Nasa’s Space Telescope Science Institute said in a statement.

The overall colour is probably a result of ultraviolet radiation from the distant Sun breaking up methane on Pluto’s surface. This, scientists say, would leave behind a red carbon-rich residue.

Nasa said: “The Hubble pictures underscore that Pluto is not simply a ball of ice and rock but a dynamic world that undergoes dramatic atmospheric changes.”

Stargazing with Binoculars with Robin Scagell and David Frydman

Stargazing with Binoculars is the latest book from Philip’s (as of Spring 2008). Using binoculars is a great way to begin your astronomy hobby before you go out and spend money on a telescope, especially now that you can buy some powerful binoculars for little money. I use a pair of binoculars myself as they are quick and easy to pick up and use, I think everybody should have a pair.

So it is about time we saw a book on astronomy with binoculars. The book does contain in-depth information on the various types of binoculars and what to look for when purchasing a pair. This includes the various models, using tripods and how to attach the binoculars with an L bracket, this information is not at the beginning of the book but actually at the back of the book.

The book also covers how to look after your binoculars and how to observe the sun with them. Stargazing with binoculars actually begins by introducing you to the night’s sky and how to find your way round it.

There is an interesting chapter entitled “The binocular observer’s year” which tells you what the best sights are to look out for month by month during the year.

The book also contains a chapter on the solar system which gives readers a general overview of the night’s sky and the hobby of astronomy.

Stargazing with binoculars is a great book as it contains some really nice colour images of the night’s sky, which are all up to date. If you are interested in astronomy and want to buy a pair of binoculars or if you already own a pair but want to get outside to look at the night’s sky, then buy this book.

Stargazing with Binoculars is available from Amazon

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.

I sent my lunar eclipse images around the internet and managed to get the photo on the Sky News website within about 12 hours. The local CAA have also responded, and so have the SPA. The SPA have requested a high resolution version, hopefully for the quarterly magazine, but we’ll see.

Managed to get out tonight for a while around 7.30pm, I did not think the clouds would clear. Usually whenever there is something worth looking at it’s always cloudy! But eventually the clouds went and the moon was in full view, even though it was -1 degrees in the shed.

I took these images by attaching my Canon 450d to my cheap £100 guiding refractor telescope, I still think the photographs it produces are great for a £100 telescope. Images were taken mostly using an exposure time of 1/800th and an ISO400

I stayed out as long as possible to try and get the full story of the eclipse, all the way through from start to finish, but I did move my camera between the refractor and the lx200 so some later shots did get rotated as I did not put the camera back in the exactly same position.

The partial eclipse was not a great site to behold, but still something worth looking at.