Astronomy

If anyone uses iTunes for any reason you may want to have a look at something called iTunes U. A number of academic institutions have put up podcasts on various topics. So far I have only checked the listings for the OU and there are video podcasts on there for Astronomy and Planetary Science. They seem to range from 2 to 10 minutes in length and transcripts are available on the site also. About 15 files currently uploaded at present but hopefully this resource will grow over time.

100 Hours of Astronomy is one of the cornerstone projects of the International Year of Astronomy and runs from 2nd-5th April.

http://www.100hoursofastronomy.org/

Details of the various events can be found at the above site, including Around the World in 80 Telescopes, 24 Hour Global Star Party and Sun Day. A little disappointed to find from the site that there is nothing going on that’s very local to me as it seems to me that the 24 Hour Global Star Party was designed to be the biggest of the outreach efforts yet I have seen very little in the general media promoting this event. There are two events reasonably near, at Letchworth and Levington, but on the 100 Hours site the posting does not indicate that anyone outside of the members of the organising group are invited. Still, that’s just my neck of the woods and if anyone has any inkling towards astronomy I would urge them to have a look at the site and see if there is anything in their neighbourhood as I’m sure many of the events will welcome all comers.

I aim to be out as much as possible over the four days and hope to have my solar filter by that time and can attempt take more photos which should look a little more interesting, though having looked into solar photography a little more, it seems it’s not quite as simple as just the solar filter. I saw somewhere that in addition to the Solar Continuum Filter, a UV-IR cut filter was recommended. I think that is towards the bottom of the wish list currently. I When I was looking for the filter I found a different camera mount which I might buy; a Baader Microstage II, which was what I was originally looking for when I got my current mount. The mount operates on a click stop mechanism and can be swung out of the way, without dismounting, for visual aiming. An additional benefit is that it will accommodate my new 2” eyepiece as well as the 1.25” eyepieces. This same outlet also has a cable release for the camera, at £15.99, but I have seen a couple of reviews which claim these devices do not offer a great deal of improvement in stability and are difficult to retain in place around the camera but the only alternative I can see is a new camera with a threaded shutter release and that’s even further down the wish list than the UV-IR Cut filter.

During my three hour marathon yesterday evening, I must have spent at least an hour trying to get some shots of Saturn and these are just about all I got. I took 18 shots all told, half of them show nothing at all and of the remaining nine, eight of them look very similar to this one;

From Astronomy Blog Media

And I have just the one here where the setup was reasonably stable.

From Astronomy Blog Media

Both were taken on a 10 sec delay, 1 sec exposure at ISO800. I thought I had set the ISO to ‘HI’ though I don’t know what effect that has, I don’t see how it is different to setting it to the fastest setting of ISO1600? Maybe it had reset itself, as it has a habit of doing, to ‘AUTO’. The aperture and focal length differ, the top one being aperture 5.0 and focal length 18.4mm and the bottom aperture 2.6 and focal length 5.8mm but I don’t recall making any changes and the shooting conditions did not change. The bottom image was one in the middle of the sequence so I have no idea why it is so much better than all the others which show so much oscillation.

It’s doesn’t appear quite so obvious here as when I look at the images in Photoshop, but there are some chromatic effects from top to bottom of the image of Saturn and I’m not sure why this is, whether eyepiece or camera.

Well here it is, the clump of pinkish pixels which caused me so much excitement last weekend. It’s still a bit of mystery to me, though it’s certainly not something on the Sun. It doesn’t appear in the best image I have of the Sun, uploaded here.

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/lh/photo/q__2mTh8anx9Kpty7PSTXA?feat=directlink

And it’s not there in the Venus images from the previous week and it’s not there in subsequent shots taken this weekend.

There are still no sunspots at the moment but I would still like to get the Solar Continuum filter to pick out the granularity but at £60 I might just wait until there are more active areas before lashing out.

From Astronomy Blog Media

From Astronomy Blog Media

Not very impressive in these images, but in Photoshop they stand out from the rest of the image pixels very noticeably.

Out observing for almost three hours tonight. I never realised that 7° could feel so cold, it was quite still so no wind chill but really cold by the time I came in. I would have stayed out longer but the alignment appeared to have wandered.

Tried to setup the ‘scope using ‘Auto two star’ but having entered all the site information and lined up on Sirius, instead of the usual ‘SkyAlign’ point it at something press ‘Align’, point it at something else and press ‘Align’ again and Robert’s your mothers brother, you’re ready to go, this time the handset offered a menu of objects to be used for the alignment process and Sirius was not one of them? So I went through the usual ‘SkyAlign’ process using Rigel, Betelgeuse and Sirius and I was up and running.

My local equipment supplier has a sale on at the moment and I picked up a couple of new eyepieces which I was eager to try out. They did me a Meade 4000 Series 15mm and an Adler Optik Skarp 2” 32mm SWA for £80 which looked like a very good deal to me. I was also thinking of getting a Baader Solar Continuum filter but they did not have any stock, so that will have to wait.

I went first to the Orion Nebula, M42, as I am reasonably familiar with it but, having looked at it last time with the 9mm + Barlow, the image with the Meade 15mm was a far greater FOV, so not much use as a comparison of the merits of the two eyepieces. Next I put in the Adler and went over to the Beehive Cluster, M44. A wonderful view of a tracery of stars of very similar magnitude which filled the FOV, I now realise that I should have moved the ‘scope around a little to see if I had the whole cluster in view. The reviews of the Adler that I have seen suggest that there is some softening of the image outside of the central 50% of the field, I realise that I’m not that discriminating given my level of experience, but I did not notice this and the cluster extended over the whole of the FOV. I would really have liked to have had a go at photographing the cluster but the mount will only fit the 1.25” eyepieces. Ho hum, can’t have everything. Had a look at another couple of objects, King Cobra, M67; didn’t see anything well defined, and NGC2264, The Christmas Tree Cluster which didn’t appear to be a particularly good target for the Adler either. I really ought to slow down and try other eyepiece options but I tend to just go off to look at something else. In this case it was Saturn, which gave a very good view in the 9mm + Barlow, rings are presently very closed up but still clearly visible. Tried for a long time to get a shot of it with the 9mm eyepiece but there is little length for the camera mount to grip and I struggled to get a useable image in the viewfinder. I tried setting the mount up off and on the ‘scope but didn’t get anything at all so went to the 25mm + Barlow, the image through the eyepiece looked good but the viewfinder image, less so but I took about 20 shots on various settings which I’ll have a look at tomorrow.

I had a look at another couple of things, or at least tried to, first was The Leo Triplet but nothing recognisable to me resolved so I had the ‘scope go to Denebola and it put a star in the edge of the field but I don’t have sufficient knowledge to know if this was Denebola so I had it go to Castor and, after it failed to line that up, Pollux. Neither came into the field of the 25mm and I put the red dot finder on again to try to get it in view and still couldn’t get it in view. At this point I decided I was getting too cold and probably wasn’t going to achieve much more and called it a night.

Having received a brief note from the OU last week, confirming I had passed S197 I assumed that the routine would be the same as it was for S194 last year and that would be that. However I have received another communication today giving a little feedback on the End of Course Assessment and advice that there is a little more info on the OU website. Fair enough, that was all I was looking for.

It seems that I passed this course, not sure how you fail if you submit the end of course assessment. Didn’t even get a mark for the multiple choice questions completed online; how difficult can it be to provide feedback on just this part? Didn’t expect anything different, this was all I got from the last course I did but I don’t feel any better about it either. These courses aren’t cheap, £130 I think they are up to now, but if another £20 obtained even some perfunctory feedback I would happily cough up.

Beginning to wonder if my first assessment might have been the right one? I’ve had a closer look at some of the images and my little blob of pixels has moved slightly in some of the shots. Whilst the Sun rotates and first to last shot was as much as 90 minutes apart I don’t think this accounts for the movement and I’m back to wondering if it might be an error on the CCD. I can’t find it on previous images but I will try to think of something to be used as a test shot and have a close look at it. The other possibility that occurs to me is some minute damage to the solar film used to bring the Sun down to manageable proportions for viewing. The film reduces the throughput by 99.99% and whilst there is no problem discernable to Mk1 eyeball maybe the CCD has recorded something.

The photos that were linked from spaceweather.com were all tight shots of the area of activity and did not show the exact location, so I will have another look tomorrow to see if I can find something which gives a better indication of the location.

I’ve now had chance to have a look at my photos from earlier in the day and there did not appear to be a lot to shout about. I opened them all up in Photoshop and about half a dozen of them were not close to being framed correctly and another twenty had thin cloud obscuring some of the detail, such as it was. Some of these were a series of continuous shooting and might make a nice little animated GIF showing the cloud moving across the frame. Other than that there did not seem much of interest, I looked over many of them for some sort of identifiable feature, examining the limb for any interesting irregularity and found nothing that, to my eye, looked at all interesting. But I did notice a cluster of fuzzy, pinkish pixels which I had seen on a previous image and had put down to a possible error in the CCD. Although I had shot in colour all the rest of the image, and all the other images, appeared as shades of grey apart from this small spot, which when I zoomed in, appeared in all the other images. It appeared in the same spot on the Sun even though the Sun was not in the same part of the frame from image to image. I can’t tell you how exciting it was to have something to show for my afternoons shooting, in all probability, disproportionately so!

I went off to spaceweather.com to check on solar activity and found that there is only one area of activity on the Sun at the moment, in the south east, which was a disappointment as my little smudge was in the north west but it did eventually dawn on me that the images I was looking at were as seen through the telescope and that what appeared on screen top left was, when viewed with the naked eye, bottom right! Doh! So it does seem that I have a really low grade, handful of fuzzy pixels which represent something which might turn into a sunspot in the near future.

I haven’t done the crop of the area yet but will post it later along with an image showing what someone with the right knowhow and equipment can do.

I was outside getting set up early to try to get some shots of M42 and thought I would see if I could get something useable from the Sun. Which turned out to be just as well as I have just broken down the kit and brought it in as cloud has closed in and now at ten tenths.

It was a pig to get lined up, squinting through the red dot finder scope and my polarising filter to try to get an image in the eyepiece. My pupil must have been like a pin prick as I really struggled to get my eye in the right position to see if I had anything in the field and it didn’t get much better all the time I was observing. I did eventually get the Sun centred and set the sync function to keep it there, which it did quite well and the reason that it did drift a little was due to the mount not being level. I did level it at the outset but it went off at some point.

I’ve downloaded the 60 photos now and there are some artefacts and some cloud on a lot of them. I think the artefacts are due to dust somewhere in the equipment, will have to check and do some dusting. I tried various settings, ISO set to ‘HI’ and ‘Auto’, some done on 10 sec self timer and a bunch on continuous shooting. I’ve uploaded them to Picasa and need to have a look in Photoshop to see if there is more detail in the photos than appears at first glance. Added location info to some of the photos but it’s a bit of a pain as this needs to be done individually for each photo, maybe there is a way of adding this data to a batch but I haven’t found it yet. I did find something in the Canon software that would have been very useful, a function called remote shooting, which I assume would allow control of the A560 via the laptop, but it appears not to be supported by this model. Damn.

Just living down to my slacker inclinations. I was planning on getting out this evening when the skies cleared late this afternoon and make an attempt to photograph M42 in Orion even though I haven’t managed to track down a cable release yet. But then I got all wrapped up in pizza and Orion has dropped down into the increasing haze towards the west.

I’ve looked at the websites for the two local astronomy suppliers for a cable release but haven’t been able to find any listed, maybe I imagined it but I’m sure I saw one somewhere for use with an unthreaded shutter release. I’ve emailed the outlet near my work and if I don’t hear from them I’ll pop down there sometime next week.

I use Starry Night on my desktop PC but don’t have anything on the laptop so I had a look at their website and Starry Night Pro 6.2 looks very attractive and the claims made there suggest their software offers better control of my ‘scope than that offered by Celestron’s own NexRemote package?! I was quite interested, though the price is quite a hike over the Digital Download v5 that I paid just $12 for, at $125. The only glitch being that it requires an OpenGL 1.4 compliant graphics card and I can’t find out if my ATI Radeon 3100 meets that criterion as there is little info I can find on ATI’s website. Starry Night Pro 6.2 has a lot of bells and whistles I don’t need but offers some very interesting capabilities as well. I’ve put that on hold for the time being and downloaded the latest version of Stellarium, v0.10.2, which is free. I used a much earlier version about two years ago and wasn’t that impressed but this version looks much more up to the mark with a really nice representation of the night sky, using OpenGL though it doesn’t specify which version, and comprehensive catalogues. It’s not quite as cute as Starry Night in that it doesn’t have links to online astronomical data and automatic download of data for satellites, comets and eclipses. One thing it does do is suck up a lot of processor resources, between 40-50%. This may be due to the graphics set up on the laptop, with the system RAM being shared with the graphics maybe some of the GPU work is also shipped off to the CPU as well? I guess that the expectation is that it will run on top of everything else for the vast majority of the time so not much else will be making demands on the system, though, with the availability of wireless networking I usually have Firefox open whilst I’m observing and sometimes update my observing log in Excel whilst I’m out with the ‘scope. As I didn’t get out there this evening I haven’t had chance to see what impact this has on system performance though I do know that BOINC, which runs all my distributed computing projects, was crawling when Stellarium was running.

SeasideMan offered a comment on the shots I took of Venus, suggesting that they were grainy and over exposed, which made me look more closely at the settings used. I hadn’t made any changes to the camera settings used, I just grabbed it and used the settings as they had been previously, which was, basically, automatic everything. The camera settings are recorded in the image data and ISO was 80 at 1/60th of a second and focal length 18.4mm. I’ve checked the camera and ISO80 is as low as it will go and 1/60th doesn’t seem excessive given the subject material so I wonder if the graininess and apparent overexposure is an artefact of the CCD, which is simply not designed for low light photography down to the levels I used it at?

There are a plethora of settings to be looked at and I don’t fancy making a huge series of incremental adjustments in the pitch dark the next time I hope to do some photography so I will need to try to find a base setting before my next attempt. There is a black and white shooting mode I will give a try as well as shutting off the AF Assist and flash which would seem to serve no useful purpose in these circumstances. The A560 offers ISO1600 which might be interesting to try as ISO80, at the other end of the speed range, was grainy or some artefact gave the appearance of graininess on this setting. I’ll probably leave the exposure on auto initially.

There are a couple of more basic requirements that I would like to address; a cable release and about 10kg of something to place on the mount to reduce vibration whilst shooting.

I did remember to look over my shoulder, from taking the photos of the Moon, and when Venus appeared I moved around to have a look. I wanted to try this ‘sync’ facility again, this time with Venus, but whilst I could disengage the ‘sync’ with the Moon, it didn’t offer me the option to ‘sync’ with anything else and I didn’t have time to reset and see if the option appeared in the menu afterwards, but Venus was heading for the leylandii again so I slotted in the x2 Barlow and the 25mm eyepiece. The crescent was clearly visible again, though not terribly distinct, and quite bright so I decided to load up the photo rig again and see what I could get. The answer was, not lot. The Barlow is about 4 inches long and so the camera and mount are hanging out some distance from the centre line of the ‘scope and almost diagonally opposite from the mounting point of the tube assembly. This meant that any vibration took a long while to settle down. I set the camera to a 2 second delay to see if it would settle but it didn’t. Moved it up to 10 seconds, which was the only other option available and whilst this helped, Venus was moving so quickly through the field that I would centre it, press the shutter release and then watch Venus, via the camera viewfinder, meander out of the shot! I did get one reasonable shot by setting up with Venus located top right and was still in shot after the 10 sec delay. Nothing special but the crescent is clearly visible. The darker image has been through Photoshop but only to remove the background glow, otherwise the contrast hasn’t been touched.

From 6th March Venus Moon

From 6th March Venus Moon

From 6th March Venus Moon

From 6th March Venus Moon

Nothing here is going to win any prizes but you have to start somewhere and I was pleasantly surprised by how the little Canon performed but on the downside, all these were taken in fairly bright twilight and I wonder how I will get on in full darkness?

Whilst waiting for Venus to appear out of the deepening twilight yesterday evening, I thought it would be a good opportunity to have a little play with the mount I got many months back for my compact digital camera. It was all a bit hasty; the camera is a Canon Power Shot A560, 7.1 Mega Pixels and, like some many cameras of this compact format, uses just 2 AA batteries, and uses them very quickly, so the first thing to do was get some batteries on charge in case those already in the camera died, which usually takes no more than about 20 shots if taken in a short space of time. The camera wasn’t too difficult to set in the mount ready to be put on the ‘scope once I had something worth shooting.

I went through the alignment process on the ‘scope, using the Solar System object method which just requires the usual time, date and location data and then centre a specified object, in this case the moon, and the job’s done. As I said earlier, things were done a little in haste and when I came to look for Venus in the available objects that the ‘scope believed should be visible, it wasn’t listed?! I did the alignment again and had entered the date in UK format, dd mm yyyy instead of US, mm dd yyyy, so the ‘scope thought it was looking at the sky in June, by which time Venus will be gone at that time of day.

So I’m set up and still no Venus appearing through the twilight so it seems like a chance to set things up with the camera and fire off a few test shots of the Moon before tackling Venus, which is still not certain to appear as there is some cloud about. I also find something in the menu, and I’m still not too sure how I got there, called ‘Sync’ and offers the option to ‘sync’ with the Moon, which I did and it seemed to track very nicely, so how is this different to Lunar rate mode? Another look in the manual required I think. I’ve got the 25mm eyepiece in and have a little length on the barrel that I can use for the camera mount and I’m all set up. Switch on the camera and the lens extends and smacks up against the eyepiece, so I have to back it off a little and that’s pretty much it, I’m ready to shoot. I take a few shots and realise that it’s difficult to tell if the shot is in focus as the viewfinder screen on the camera doesn’t look that crisp, though when the shot is taken and being saved to the memory card it is displayed on viewfinder screen and they look better than the image whilst setting it up, it also crossed my mind that I focussed the ‘scope without my glasses on, specs are such a pain doing this stuff, so it may not be that good a focus for the camera anyway? So I bracket a few shots making small adjustments on the focuser each time hoping to get something useable and these are some of the ones I got.

From 6th March Venus Moon

From 6th March Venus Moon

The black circular outline is the eyepiece, so it’s clear that I could have changed the position of the camera on the mount but there was enough useable image there anyway. These are the best ones out of about eight bracketed shots and a couple of others where I played with the zoom on the camera; waste of time. After working on it in Photoshop, crop, contrast, sharpen and blue adjustment the finished product is below, which I will put on the masthead in due course.

From 6th March Venus Moon

For those who really need a change of scenery, the nice people at NASA are busy looking for some undeveloped real estate with the launch of the Kepler mission, in about ninety minutes. Kepler will be looking for Earth like planets in the ‘Goldilocks Zone’ (not too hot, not too cold but just right) i.e. where there would appear to be suitable conditions for the existence of liquid water.

Kepler will be looking at a relatively small portion of the sky, near Cygnus, for the next three and a half years to determine if there are many planets that fulfil this criterion.

Sitting inside watching the cricket at about 20.52 and see something out the window. Go outside and see something travelling from west to east, distinctly orange in colour with a flickering tail. Grabbed the binoculars to get a better look but didn’t show me a lot more detail, no sound, certainly didn’t appear to be particularly high and traversed about 20° of sky in about three minutes. Disappeared behind cloud about 35° above the horizon, I watched for another couple of minutes, as I could see that the cloud cleared at about 20-25° above the horizon but whatever it was never reappeared. Didn’t look like something that was coming down and if it was I would have thought that it would have been a big enough piece of space junk that there would have been data on it’s re-entry. Been spending the last few minutes looking for any other reports but not found anything, nothing on Twitter, no scheduled launches other than Kepler, which is not due for another six hours, and would be in big trouble if it could be seen from here! May be it was something more local than it appeared, but I have no idea what it was.

Cloud seems to have built up a little since I left work about an hour or so ago, still breaks for sunshine at the moment but the forecast is much the same as yesterday with considerable cloud by 18.00. I’ll give it an hour and decide whether to get the kit out.

Actually got the kit out and looked at some sky! But only for a little while. It was still quite bright twilight but Venus was visible and I quickly assembled my gear, 9mm eyepiece, x2 Barlow and polarising filter with just a little cut to try to darken the back ground. And just as quickly took it all out of the focuser. I just couldn’t align the scope well enough to go straight to the max magnification setup and went to the 25mm eyepiece to bring Venus to the centre of the field but ended up spending some time looking at it with this eyepiece as it gave a very crisp image. Also, even though The Jodcast had indicated this should be the case, I was stunned to see something showing a crescent that wasn’t the Moon; never seen that before. I put the big stuff back in and had another look and found a lot of stuff going on, difficult to get a tight focus, a lot of vibration from everyone milling about waiting for a look, partly due to a little breeze, and Venus moving very quickly through the field. By the time each had had a look, she was out of the field and had to be found again. By the time everyone had their turn it was quite a bit darker and I was thinking I would take the filter out and go back to the 25mm plus the Barlow but by that time she had dropped behind the bloody leylandii the neighbours have let grow to 30 foot+. Damn. Still, it was good to get the gear out again and hopefully not my last look. I aim to get set up a little earlier and have a look in the scope setup to see if I can have it track automatically, I don’t think it does this, I think it just does Lunar, Solar and sidereal tracking but it’s so long since I used it, 3rd October according to my log, that I can’t remember.