Kind of cool

I am typing this blog posting from 35,000 ft up in a flight from NYC to SFO using in-flight wifi. The cool thing is that I am watching and interacting live with an astronomer through the Night Skies Network. Currently looking at M84. The wonders of modern technology!

Viewing galaxies

I took my two oldest kids to a star party at Crestview Park in San Carlos tonight. The transparency and seeing were both outstanding. After looking at the usual showpiece targets (including Saturn - which was spectacular at 266x, M13, M57 etc) I decided to put the great conditions to the test and turn to galaxies. First up was M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy in Canes Venatici. Although it initially just appeared as two smudges in the eyepiece, I was able to make out the spiral arms with averted vision - which I haven't seen before as this galaxy is usually positioned within the bright light dome of the Bay Area. We then moved on to Virgo - and took in M84, M86 and also M104 (the Sombrero Galaxy). The most striking of these was M104, the disk and central bulge were very clear, and the dark dust lane was also quite visible - looking the best at 133x magnification.

Observing at Crestview Park

Got a couple of hours observing in last night at Crestview Park in San Carlos. This spot is at 600 ft elevation, and gets reasonably dark especially to the West which is a straight shot out to Half Moon Bay with little intervening light pollution. I took my two older kids, and met up with a friend, his kids and telescope.

We observed Venus, Saturn, Mars, M81/M82, M37, M100 (I think ...) and M13 which is now back in the sky again. We were able to make out a number of the "faint fuzzies" in Virgo. Under dark skies, these would be a lot of fun - but we need to get somewhere much darker than San Carlos. At some point we'll get over to Montebello Open Space Preserve, which is at 2,200 ft and quite a bit further away from light pollution. The Dark Sky Finder (http://www.jshine.net/astronomy/dark_sky/) shows Montebello being in the orange zone - compared with Red for San Carlos.

Night Skies Network

This is the coolest thing I have seen for a while: http://www.nightskiesnetwork.com/ - astronomers broadcasting live using a Mallincam (basically a high end integrated video camera attached to a telescope). You get a live feed of whatever the astronomer is observing and you can interact through a chat window. The strangest (and oddly compelling) thing is that the astronomer can broadcast audio - so you can make comments, ask questions etc through the chat window and hear a verbal audio response. Weird but cool at the same time.

I was just watching a stream of M92 (a globular cluster in Hercules) and then M57 (the Ring Nebula) through some guy's C8. Really amazing to see the color and detail in M57. I am going to be adding a Mallincam to my wish list ...

M3 - globular cluster

This is my first DSO (deep sky object) - M3, a globular cluster comprising 500,000 stars. M3 is approximately 30,000 light years from earth and is thought to be 8 billion years old. The picture consists of 10 separate shots, all 15 second exposures at ISO 1600 - stacked using Deep Sky Stacker.

First astrophoto

I recently bought my first dslr camera - the Canon EOS T2i. It is easy to connect the camera to the telescope in prime focus using a T-ring adapter. The camera is controlled using Canon's EOS utility - which makes focusing much easier than trying to focus through the camera's screen (although still not foolproof).

This photo was 1/500 sec at ISO 200, f/6.3 (using a reducer/corrector attached to the telescope, which is usually f/10).

I tried to stack multiple shots using both Registax and Avistack - but encountered memory errors. It could be the PC or it could be the fact that the T2i produces huges files. I am clearly at the beginning of a very steep learning curve here!

Amazingly clear tonight

Despite the Clear Sky Clock predictions, tonight had incredible seeing (i.e. very still air). Mars yielded great detail all the way up to 266x: the polar ice cap was bright and clear, and two of the major surface albedo features (which I think were Mare Acidalium and Syrtis Major) were also very distinct.

I then turned my attention to the moon, which gave tremendous views of various craters and rilles - 266x was again the best magnification, although the view through the widefield Ethos 13mm (215x) was also fantastic because of the "spacewalk" effect of 100 degrees AFOV. One crater that caught my attention in particular had a very large central peak (mountain) that looked like it is comprised of three components. I am pretty sure this is Theophilus. This crater is 64 miles across, and has a rim that is 14,000 feet deep. It is thought to have been created somewhere between 1 billion and 3 billion years ago.

The night was so clear that I could easily make out the terraces in the crater rim - apparently these are due to landslips that have taken place over many millenia. The central mountain, which rises to a height of about 2km consists of three peaks - each of which were easily visible through the telescope.

Observing at Crestview Park

This weekend was the first clear one in many weeks, so I took the telescope up to Crestview Park - which is the observing location used by our local astronomy club. While not a dark sky location in the real sense of the term, it is about as good as it gets in our suburban location. My 9 year-old son had a lot of fun helping to set up, and observing. We stayed late enough in the evening to catch Saturn once it rose out of the horizon haze.

The cardboard box is my makeshift shield for the PC - keeping dew off the laptop, and keeping light from the screen out of our fellow observers' eyes.