Philips 2021 Stargazing Month by Month Guide to the Night Sky Book

Philip’s Stargazing month by month 2021 guide is the perfect practical guide for both budding and experienced astronomers. This very popular and best selling astronomy book covers Britain and Ireland. The new 2021 edition has been completely revised to ensure it is totally up-to-date for exploring the wonder of the night skies, month-by-month and day-by-day.

This new edition has been written by  Nigel Henbest and Heather Couper and is really well laid out and easy to use.

The monthly star charts with calendar, The Planets, Moon, and Special Events mean you will never miss anything again. The monthly “Observing Tips” help you locate objects and “Observing Technology” provide an insight to the selection and use of telescopes and binoculars.

The highlights of the year section will also give you lots of warning to plan for the events throughout 2021. There is a jargon buster, objects of the month in full colour and a really handy calendar telling you about the moon phases and any events happening during the month.

The book also finishes off with a list of the Top 20 sky sights for the year and a section written by Robin Scagell on choosing and using binoculars.

The Philips 2021 Stargazing Month by Month Guide is available as a paperback book or now in an Amazon Kindle version. Don’t think of it as just on a black and white Kindle Paperwhite device but you could read it via the Kindle app on any mobile phone or tablet device in full colour.

The Philips 2021 Stargazing Month by Month Guide to the Night Sky Book is available now from Amazon

Sky Camera Footage from 30th May 2020

This is some Sky Camera footage from Saturday 30th May 2020 the night of the first manned Space X launch. I didn’t catch the ISS or rocket as the sky was too bright for my night settings. The bright object in the video is the moon.

This is the start again of my sky camera project or as I like to call it ‘SkyPi’. It’s a Raspberry Pi with a Pi No-IR v2 camera and a 180 degree mobile phone type stick on lens.

These are 9.9 second exposures, white balance is ‘greyworld’ and the exposure is set to auto with ISO 800. The still images are then put together (not in Pi) but in Windows 10 using a free program called “Time Lapse Creator”.

It was originally uploaded to my Facebook page, you can follow AstronomyLog on Facebook.

Imaging the Messier Objects Remotely from Your Laptop Book Review

This is not a book teaching you how to remotely connect your observatory to your home laptop or PC so you can control your telescope from the warmth of your lounge. I don’t think that topic would fill a book anyway. Instead this book is about renting telescopes around the world for imaging and controlling them from your laptop. Doesn’t have to be your laptop though it could probably be a desktop PC, Apple Mac, tablet or even smart phone.

I am amazed that more people don’t just rent a telescope for a couple of hours which is in a country with cloudless skies. You can probably rent a better telescope and imaging rig than you could ever afford, and you don’t have to maintain it or provide an observatory or garden shed to contain it. Or I wonder if people consider selling all their astronomy equipment and renting time on a remote scope instead or we just love looking at our scopes and we love the hands-on feel.

Anyway, the book, this is a chunky 520 pages book from Springer. Most of the book is filled with individual details on how to image each of the 110 Messier objects using remotely controlled telescopes. The author has used several different scopes and tells you which he used to image a certain M object. With each Messier object you get a constellation chart pinpointing the object, sometimes you get a negative image, but there is always the resulting image that was taken. You also get information like RA and Dec, Field of View, exposure time used, date taken, universal time, moon phase, scale of image and detailed information on what telescope was used this includes the mount used, aperture of scope, the CCD make and model, colour or mono, pixel size and the overall location of the telescope.

Before you get into the main body of the book with the list of Messier objects, the first 50 pages are all about remote telescopes. This section discusses the advantages of renting time and the different telescope sites as well as the individual telescopes and camera equipment (e.g. FOV etc) that were used at each site to take the images shown in the book. There is also information on using RA and Dec and how to use this information for inputting what you want to image on the remote site’s web site.

To be honest this book is more useful than you think, it’s not just for remotely controlled telescopes. This is good for home setups as well. Now you can look at the Messier object you want to image at home and see what the author imaged and what equipment was used and his results. If you have similar equipment at home, you can see what results you should also expect. Alternatively, if the author used a larger telescope on an object and you have a relatively small telescope then you can find out that object is not really going to image well for you.

Chapter 6 holds a quick reference image library for a list of NGC objects which is also great for reference when imaging. Most of the astronomical images are black and white. Images of telescopes are in colour and so are the constellation charts. Don’t forget that the remote telescopes will probably only take the images, it will then still be up to you to process the images and make them look good.

Overall

Some others may just see this book as 50 pages of information about renting telescope time with a big chunk of the book just listing 110 of the Messier objects and details about each image in turn. Overall though I really like this book as I think I would find it useful for my own imaging at home by using the Messier section for reference. I also welcome the first 50 pages of information on remote telescope sites as it could be the way forward for astronomers who don’t want to spend vast amounts of money on equipment or they may not have the space to store it or maintain it. Especially if you don’t have an observatory and you must drag all your equipment out every night and set it up every time you want to use it, that can become tedious – I know first-hand. Another reason I think for using a remote telescope is that astrophotography has become very popular since 2010 and most objects in the sky have been imaged so many times (just Google some!). So, you need to think about imaging with bigger telescopes or in a different way with new colour palettes for example, remote telescopes let you do this with minimal cost.

Where can I buy Imaging the Messier Objects Remotely from Your Laptop?

You can buy Imaging the Messier Objects Remotely from Your Laptop from Amazon UK

EQ8 FTDI EQDIR USB Cable Upgrade

After changing from RS232-to-Serial cables that connect my Lakeside focusers to my PC, I decided it was time to upgrade the EQ8 Dir cable as well. That was an older one from HiTec Astro and ran using the Prolific drivers.

This time I decided to purchase the 5m EQ8 cable from First Light Optics. I went for the Lynx Astro FTDI EQDIR USB Adapter for Sky-Watcher Mounts. The 5m was ideal as it provided me with a nice lot of cable from the mount head down the pillar along the floor to the PC.

I plugged it in to my Windows 10 PC and there were no drivers to install, I checked which COM port it was on and chose that COM port in the EQMod tool program and it found the mount straightaway.

Well worth the £30 I spent on the cable. I recommend you change to the FTDI version if you are still running the Prolific version and are having problems with it.

Mercury Transit 2019 Report

The Mercury transit 2019 for the UK was on Monday 11th November with it hitting the middle of the Sun at about 3pm UK time. Start time was around 12.30. Not the best time to have a transit in the winter when the Sun is so low down all day and it sets really early at about 4pm.

The weather was not kind either a 20mph wind with heavy rain in the morning and lots of cloud. But at one point there was a clear section for about 10 minutes. I did not bother opening up the observatory and imaging properly with a high frame rate camera once I saw the pouring rain and cloud cover. Instead I decided to just get the Coronado PST out on a simple tripod and have a look.

It’s so funny when you first start looking for Mercury on the face of the Sun, you expect it to be bigger than it is. Here I am looking for a big black dot, when in reality it’s a tiny black dot, which seems only a few pixels across.

I tuned out the H-alpha part of the spectrum on the PST in order to get a better contrast and a plain orange Sun. I then tried my Moto G6 phone against the eyepiece (the PST has a really narrow FOV) the phone really over saturated the image, so I grabbed my Canon DSLR with the kit lens and put that up against a 20mm eyepiece in the PST and imaged by hand. Again auto mode on the camera over exposed the images, so I changed to a faster shutter speed.

I took them into my favourite image editor and tweaked them a little to try and bring out the little black dot (Mercury) some more, and here they are:

They are not that great, but I best I could do without a tracking mount and a proper camera attached. I was happy to have something.