Astronomy Log

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.

The Solar System Observer’s Guide (ISBN 0540088277) is one of many of the great astronomy books from Philips. The book is around 250 pages long, with some great colour astronomy photos throughout and the book is thoroughly readable.

Solar System Observer’s Guide begins with a basic introduction to our solar system and how the human eye works. You are also introduced to the various types of telescope and how they work as well as how binoculars work. There is also some information on astronomy drawing, using a web cam and astrophotography.

Each chapter in turn then covers the planets in our solar system including (in order in the book) Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.

Each chapter gives you full data about each planet including its orbit and about the globe, as well as how to find the planet in the sky and what you will see in your telescope. Each chapter gives you a great introduction about each planet with many of the colour photographs included being taken by named astronomers.

After the planet chapters there are chapters on comets, meteors, our moon, the sun and about aurorae.

If you are after a handy sized book which gives you a general introduction to the solar system then consider the Solar Systems Observer’s Guide.

This book would also make a great astronomy book purchase for a child’s school project, especially at the prices that Philips charge for their books.

Whilst in town this morning waiting for the bank to open, I wandered into WHSmith and looked at the astronomy magazines. There only seems to be two astronomy magazine choices either The Sky at Night or Astronomy Now.

The Sky at Night is slightly more expensive as it comes with a CD/DVD disk on the cover, but after flicking through the content Astronomy Now seemed to be the better purchase at £3.25

After looking through it, it’s typical that the new copy comes out tomorrow! Isn’t that always the way!

Annual subscriptions are £33 a year for Astronomy Now and £38 for Sky at Night, should I subscribe to either?

I’ve got to say I like the content in Astronomy Now and the images are brilliant and the articles look easy to digest.

Prime Focus is the name given when you take the lens off of the camera and insert it directly into the telescope. In order to do this you will require a number of extra astronomy adaptors.

T-Ring

The first one is the T-Ring which screws directly into the neck of the camera. Not an expensive part to purchase, mine for my Canon 400D was around £10. But they do all differ, so make sure you get the correct make and model to match your camera.

Check out Pixmania who stock T-Ring adaptors for Nikon and Canon SLR Cameras.

1.25″ Camera Adaptor

This optional adaptor is used for prime-focus and eyepiece-projection astrophotography with SCTs and refractors. It can also be used successfully with many Newtonian telescopes that either have removable sections on the eyepiece holder (to allow the camera to reach focus), or by employing a 2x Barlow lens to extend the focus point.

The rear section screws onto the nosepiece and is designed to hold a 1.25” eyepiece (ideally a mid-focal length Plossl, say a 12.5 to 20mm) for eyepiece-projection photography, with a thumb screw to lock the eyepiece in position, or you can just leave this part on without an eyepeice inserted.

The 1.25″ adaptor comes with the nosepiece and cost me around £15.

The image below shows how the pieces fit together, with the camera, then T-ring, the 1.25″ camera adaptor and then the nosepiece adaptor.

Nosepiece Adaptor

This adaptor can either be used together with the 1.2″ Camera Adaptor above (and it usually comes with the above adaptor anyway) or on it’s own with the T-Ring.

This nosepiece adaptor allows any digital or film interchangeable lens SLR (single lens reflex) camera to be attached to any 1.25” eyepiece holder. So you just slot this part into the telescope.

The front nosepiece section - which is usually threaded can also take standard filters. Using the nosepiece alone allows simple prime-focus photography and you can also use it with a Barlow lens to increase the image scale.

You can purchase a nosepiece separately (the chrome part) and it will cost about £6.

The image below shows the SLR camera then the T-Ring and the nosepiece, I also have a moon filter at the front of the nosepiece:

So all in all the cost of adapting your camera for telescope photography is not expensive at all and really easy to setup, it’s just the cost of a good SLR digital camera in the first place is the expensive bit.

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.

The Planetary System ( ISBN 080538734X ) gives you a complete overview of the solar system. It gives you a great introduction to watching the sky together with the theory behind orbits, eclipses and the history of major researchers of astronomy.

Each chapter in turn in The Planetary System then discusses each planet in turn and other major sky items, such as satellites, asteroids and meteorites.

Within each chapter in The Planetary System is what you would see when looking at the object. Seasonal cycles of the planets are discussed, together with the topography and geologic features of the surfaces of the planets. Craters and surface views are also included as are intricate details about the planets atmosphere.

The end of every chapter includes a summary with key terms learnt. It also includes review questions, quantitative exercises and additional reading.

The Planetary System is quite a large book which contains a lot of information and some great photos and illustrations in a mixture of black and white and colour.

The Planetary System includes a lot of theory and some intricate science and formulae.

This may be a little advanced for a lot of us astronomers, but the book does give you specific insights into a lot of information about our solar system and our solar systems planets. If you want to learn a lot more about our solar system and the planets then The Planetary System is a great book.

The Planetary System also comes with Voyager SkyGazer College Edition software on CDROM.

The Planetary System Book can be purchased from Amazon.

I am looking forward to the next “The Sky at Night” episode, which I am told by Windows Media Centre will be broadcast on the 4th August 2007 at 20:30 on BBC Four

1st Broadcast: Saturday 4th August 2007 at 20:30 on BBC4

2nd Broadcast: Monday 6th August 2007 at 01:10 on BBC1

3rd Broadcast: Saturday 11th August 2007 at 12:00 on BBC2

The sun never rises for astronomers using Robonet. Patrick Moore investigates Robonet, the robotic network of telescopes which spans the globe and links the cosmos directly to a laptop. In their world of permanent darkness these telescopes can react immediately to bangs in the night’ - the exotic cosmic phenomena such as gamma ray bursts which are over in the blink of an astronomical eye.

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.