Observing: TV85 at Whiskey Hill

Imagine fancying yourself a music lover who has been listening to Mozart, Coltrane and Deep Purple for years on a cheap monophonic cassette player. Then one day, you find yourself with a top-notch stereo and a whole new world unfolds. That's how I feel after spending an hour or so tonight under some unbelievably dark skies out at Linda's folks' place.

We pulled in just after dusk and it was already dark enough to see the Milky Way straight overhead. I waited an hour or so for it to get seriously dark then John and I set up the TV85 in John's stone house (which is without a roof, thankfully). After we turned off a few lights out by the livestock and covered a window with a sheet of plywood to block the light from the house we got down to some observing.

The dark lanes through Cygnus were not just visible, but actually dark. Incredible. My first target was the Double Cluster in Perseus. Simply beautiful - two clumps of diamonds amid a background of stars that I couldn't even imagine seeing back home. M13 was next, and even with the TV85 I was able to resolve some of the outer stars of the cluster. Ditto M15. The Andromeda galaxy (M31) was still just a smudge, but it was a bigger smudge than I've become accustomed to seeing with the small scope under brighter skies. Albireo split into it's bright blue and yellow pair with the LVW 13mm. Dead batteries in the Starbeam finder kept me from picking off more objects, as it took a bit of effort to put the easy stuff into the FOV.

Unfortunately it was short lived - the Milky Way quickly began to fade, the dark lanes disappeared, and the sky brightened as the Moon rose in the East. How cruel the gods are. We didn't stay out much longer, but I wasn't planning on an all-night session - I just wanted to get my feet wet, so to speak, to get an idea what it's like out at Whiskey Hill. I'll be watching the weather forecasts for next weekend which will be right around New Moon (+/- a couple of days).

Observing: Imaging the Moon & Jupiter with DSI

Checked the 40D + MaxView DSLR rig on the Antares 127mm again, this time with the TV32mm Plossl just to see if my focusing problem is caused by the Celestron eyepiece. It isn't - the same deal. I'm wondering if it isn't as simple as a field-flatness issue with the Antares that might be corrected with a add-on field flattener. Next time: TV85.

I packed in the 40D and broke out the DSI for the first time since I bought it. I just tested it with the new version of Nebulosity (2.0) in the living room yesterday to get comfortable with it, though I still need to read and absorb the Nebulosity manual.

First target: The Moon. With no idea what I was doing I captured a few shots of the area around Tycho and the southern highlands. These were single exposures, not stacks, and I used the Tele Vue 2.5x Powermate to bump up the magnification. I think I'm going to like this DSI thingy...:


On to Jupiter, now getting low in the west. Had a bit of a time focusing, so need to play with the DSI/Nebulosity combo a bit more to make sure I'm using it correctly. This was the best of the 6 attempts. I shot 100 frames, used Nebulosity to demosaic, normalize and convert to TIFF, then stacked the best frames in Lynkeos. Finally brought the image into Photoshop for some level adjustments and a tiny bit of sharpening. Still not what I want, but an improvment over previous attempts...

Observing: Moon & Jupiter

First time out with the Antares 127mm since I upgraded the focuser to the GSO Crayford. A 9-day old waxing gibbous Moon was the target, and the scope did a fine job with the Minus-V filter in place. So nice, in fact, that I decided to grab the camera and see whether the new focuser helped with the focusing problem I had last time I tried to do some imaging. Alas, it did not - once again every shot was out of focus at the edge of the frame while the center was in focus. This occurs using with the MaxView DLSR adapter and a 40mm Plossl eyepiece mounted to the diagonal, which I think is the same combination I used previously. Next time out I will try it without the diagonal, but I don't think it will make any difference. Oddly, I don't notice any focusing issues when observing visually. I should also try it with the TV85 just to see whether it can be narrowed down to the scope or the imaging chain. But not tonight, I'm tired and don't want to stay out late screwing around in the dark with expensive toys.

Cropping away all the out-of-focus stuff, and I got a pretty good shot of Copernicus, Eratosthenes, and just between them, the faint outline of Stadius - a "heavily flooded crater with incomplete low walls" (Rukl).

I was going to pack it in and started dismounting the camera when I saw Jupiter begging for attention. Slewed the scope over and snapped a few shots, none of which really can be confused with Christopher Go's work, but hey... I tried. Here's the best of the bunch, with a little post processing in Aperture and Fireworks:

OK, so if you squint it looks a little like Jupiter...

Lessons learned:

• The new Crayford makes it much easier to focus, but I really need to get a grip on the two tension adjustment screws.
• The 40D's live view makes focusing a snap, especially being able to see a 10x live preview.
• Something is terribly wrong with my imaging chain. Need to sort that out before it gets cold.
• Aligned the Sirius on Arcturus, Nunki and Alpheratz, all three pretty far from each other. Very good GoTo, at least near 0 deg declination. Had to hunt around a bit to find M13, though. Is this a leveling issue?
  
• I want a C8.

Oh, I almost forgot - the EZ Finder Deluxe is the nuts! It took longer to find the Allen key needed to align it than it did to do the actual alignment. I wonder if ScopeStuff or somebody makes an adapter that will let me mount it on the TV85, so I can 86 that infernal Starbeam finder once and for all.

Update 10/9: I squeezed some semi-usefulness out of another out-of-focus image:

Way to go, Orion!

Just after I purchased the Sirius mount, Orion upgraded the SynScan hand controller. Among other things, the new HC allows firmware updates via the net, and has improved tracking and fine-tuning of Go-To objects. Sounds like a worthwhile upgrade, so I emailed Orion customer service a few days ago to find out what the upgrade path is for an existing Sirius owner. Their response: There is no upgrade path, other than buying a new hand controller at full price of $395.00.

Frankly, this downright sucks. I'm not your typical the bitching-and-moaning type of consumer - for example, I spent $1,200 for a defective Sirius mount, then had it replaced by what was clearly a repacked unit complete with scratches and chips, and didn't complain about it. Nor do I expect something for nothing - I had to pay Celestron a nominal fee for a similar hand controller upgrade back when I had my N8GPS, and did so gladly. But full price?!?!? Wrong answer!

I've got a better idea: I never buy another Orion product again, and they can kiss my ass.

Thanks for listening. That is all.

Observing: Sirius & TV85

Time to see how the Sirius does now that I can actually see Polaris to do a proper polar alignment. Been a while since I used this mount but it went pretty easily without me having to dig out the manual - good thing, too, because I have no idea where that is.

At around 9pm it was just dark enough to see Polaris through the polar alignment scope. As we've learned, this must be done with the power off because the illuminating LED is worse than useless. Without leveling the tripod, I just dialed in the mount and fired it up. Picking alignment stars was a snap; Alpheratz, Fomalhaut and Vega worked for me. Then it put every object I tried into the FOV of the LVW 13mm. Life is good.

Not a serious observing session, just wanted to get used to the EQ mount again before I break out the 5-inch and the cameras and see if I have better luck with imaging than I've had so far with visual here in Waco. Had a look at Jupiter, M15, M22, M27, M57 - none very exciting in the small scope. Open clusters fared better; the Double Cluster (with LVW 42mm) and Pleiades (with LVW 22mm) were nice, while M29 was... small. The batter pack started running dry around 11:30 so I packed it in.

Things to do:

• Generate some new observing lists in Astroplanner.
• Upgrade to new version of Nebulosity and get the DSI going.
• Talk to neighbors, assure them that I'm not a weirdo who stands around in the backyard at night waiting for the mother ship to return and take me back to my home planet.
  

About The New Location

Robinson, TX is located south of the Waco border in Central Texas, about halfway between Dallas/Ft. Worth to the north and Austin to the south. My house is in a fairly new development of duplexes and town houses (so new that in Google Maps, it's shown as an empty field).

According to the Light Pollution Map, we're a solid 5 on the Bortle Scale:

"Milkyway washed out at zenith and invisible at horizon. Many light domes. Clouds are brighter than sky. M31 easily visible. Limiting magnitude about 5.6 to 5.9. "

That's fairly generous, 'cause we had a new moon this week and I was barely able to see M31.

Click to enlarge

But good news abounds. Linda's folks live northeast of the city (Whiskey Hill Rd. on map, a 4 on the Bortle scale) and I know from casual naked-eye observing there that it's significantly darker - to the point where I can easily see the Milky Way down past Perseus and the Cygnus rift with eyes barely dark adapted and house lights on. This is encouraging. Also, the Central Texas Astronomical Society has some dark sites, including the Paul and Jane Meyer Observatory maybe an hour west of Waco, right on the edge of Bortle-3 territory. Further west is darker still (Bortle-2, mag. 7.5!). I think I'm going to love living in Texas.

Observing: First Light in Texas

After a month in Texas I got around to unpacking some of the astro gear and decided to have a quick peek from the backyard. The new abode is just south of Waco and barely 1/2-mile off I-35 so the sky is fairly soupy. Still, at zenith it is just a bit worse than Lake Wallkill - I can see Milky Way through Cygnus and M31 is faint naked-eye. The big trade-off is the trees: there ain't none here! So the southern sky which was hidden from me for 6 years is now visible, albeit over my roof, and a clean shot to the north means my polar alignment scope on the Sirius mount is no longer a vestigal organ.

But for tonight, it was the QRP rig - TV85 on the Porta mount. Went out around 9pm CST while Jupiter, hovering above the teapot in Sagittarius, was still high above the rooftops. Looked good with the LVW 8mm (75x), better (as always) with the LVW 13mm + 2.5x Powermate (115x). Soon turned my attention to globulars in Sag, objects that I've never seen (at least not since I've been keeping track of what I observe). M22 was faint, with almost no resolution of stars in the cluster. M28 was even worse, just a round fuzzy spot. I didn't stay out long, was in before 10:30

So we're not much better off than Northern NJ as far as dark skies is concerned, but at least I can see something below 50 degrees elevation now. The good news is, Linda's parents are far enough out in the country that I can see the Cygnus rift in the Milky Way without even letting my eyes dark-adapt, and I plan to tote the TV85 along with me when we visit.

Nov. 2007 - Oct. 2008: The Lost Year

Wow, has it really been a year since my last post?

Lost time is a popular topic in science fiction and UFOlogy, but my lost year is much easier to explain: damn near all of my free time for the past year (longer, actually) was spent renovating a house in Closter, NJ that, in the end, I never moved into. After all our work, Linda and I ended up moving to the great Republic of Texas, where the skies are dark and the first two Constitutional Amendments are still in effect.

Lock and load!