Wednesday, October 21, 2020
#569 Mars Redux
 |
| The ASI120MC, Shorty Barlow, and Meade flip mirror. |
Did I take a peek or two at Mars in 2018? Sure I did, but it wasn’t
a very good year for the planet what with the dust storms and all. I’d been
hearing, howsomeever, that this year’s apparition was turning out to be a Real Good
one.
And….as I thankfully have frequently of late, one afternoon
last week I felt the call of the backyard. “Time to get the C8 set up, I
reckon.” What would I set up Mrs. Peel, my Celestron Edge 800, for, though?
That was obvious. While we are now pulling away from the Red One, when Mars was
at opposition on the 6th of October, we were a mere 62 million
kilometers from that mysterious world, we won’t be as close again for 15
more years, and the planet is still awfully big and bright.
15 years? That will make your old Unk…well, “15 years
older,” and I question whether I’ll be up to getting even an 8-inch SCT into
the backyard by then. Frankly, thanks to the injuries I suffered last year, it
ain’t exactly a piece of cake for me to get the freaking Advanced VX set up now.
That being the case, I figgered I’d better take advantage of this Mars opposition.
And I will, y’all, I will. The image you see here will just be the beginning, I
hope. As I was during the BIG opposition of 2003, I plan to be in the backyard
taking my humble planetary snapshots almost every clear evening.
First step, then, was deciding on the camera to use. Well,
that wasn’t much of a decision to make since I really only have one planetary
camera these days. Planetary camera? Without going into a lot of detail which
will be amply explained by the links above, what you want for taking pictures
of the Solar System is a camera with a small sensor which is possessed of many
pixels. And you want it to output .avi video. You’ll take as many frames as possible
and reasonable and stack those into a finished still image.
 |
| Sky & Telescope's Mars Profiler helps you find your way across Mars. |
That’s when I began hearing about a new mainland Chinese
company, ZWO optical. Looking at their offerings, I found they had a camera
that appeared might do the job for me, the ZWO ASI120MC, a one-shot color job
with a maximum resolution of 1280x 960 (all my other cameras hovered around 640x480).
As above, when you’re imaging planets the idea is to take a lot of frames and
stack them in the interest of reducing noise and catching moments of good
seeing. The 120, ZWO said, was capable of up to 100 frames per second (fps) at
lower resolutions and 20fps at max. That sounded right good to me, so I took a
chance.
This was before ZWO, which is now one of the top CCD/CMOS astronomy
camera vendors, hit the bigtime. When I ordered, they had no U.S. dealer; my
little widget had to come all the way from the People’s Republic of China. Which
it did in a surprisingly short time.
What was in the box when it appeared on the front porch of
the legendary Chaos Manor South and your not-quite-so old Uncle got it into his
hot little hands? Well, there was the substantial and, frankly, impressive
camera itself. Metal, nicely finished in red. There was also a 1.25-inch nosepiece,
a short USB cable, a CD with some software, and an IR block filter to make it easy
to get shots with easy to balance color. Heck there was even a fisheye lens for
the cam, which some folks have used to turn the 120 into an inexpensive all-sky
camera.
Anyhoo, the little camera has been my sole Solar System
imager over the last decade. Hey, I don’t aspire to become the next Damian
Peach or Chris Go—even if I had the talent and dedication to achieve the
results of those masters. As always, Unk is a dabbler. One night, I’m
looking at a bright comet with a 3-inch refractor, the next I’m doing deep sky
video, the next, spectroscopy. You get the picture. The ZWO proved to be simple
to use and has produced results that have pleased me.
Oh, Unk did fib a bit. I do have another camera that would
work well on the planets, my QHY5L guide cam. However, it’s black and white. I
want color, and if you think your fumbling Uncle is gonna start shooting
through RGB filters, you’ve got another think coming. It’s one-shot color all
the way ‘round here.
By the way, the 120mc is still readily available from ZWO
and their dealers. It’s a little more expensive than mine was, but you do get a
little lagniappe for the extra dineros:
the camera now sports an ST4 auto-guide output. Is the 120mc color
version sensitive enough for guiding? Based on my experience using the camera
for short-exposure deep sky imaging, I would say
it definitely is. And for planetary use, it is still the bomb. You can
get ZWOs with bigger chips these days, but, again, for the planets you don’t need
bigger chips. The megapixel range 6mm sensor in this little camera is just
right.
Would it still work, though? I hadn’t used the camera
in quite a while, and many Windows 10 updates had intervened. Only one way to
find out…downloaded the latest driver from ZWO’s website, rounded up a USB “printer”
cable, connected it to the laptop and cam, lit off Sharpcap, and she
started right up, no problem.
Sharpcap? Yes. While I previously used Firecapture
(and before that, the now-forgotten K3CCD Tools), I’ve chosen to move on
to Sharpcap for control of my planetary camera. Firecapture is
still great, but, for one thing, I am more used to using Sharpcap now,
since I fire it up on a regular basis to do polar alignments (its polar alignment tool is flat-out amazing). Also, I might as well get my money’s worth out
of the software since I am paying for a subscription to the Pro version Sharpcap.
Finally, it is an impressive, professionally executed, frequently updated piece
of software.
And so, it was time to put the scope together on one cool if
hardly chilly Possum Swamp afternoon. The telescope was, as I’ve done mentioned,
Mrs. Peel. To get planetary images that show much detail, you need mucho focal
length. Even my girl’s 2000mm would not be enough. I would increase that,
however, with a 2x Barlow.
 |
| I began with the ringed wonder. |
There is. The secret is a “flip mirror.” A flip mirror is
like a star diagonal, but with a couple of differences. Normally it works just like
a diagonal: light enters from the telescope
and is diverted 90-degees by a mirror and to the eyepiece. However, a flip
mirror includes a knob or lever that allows you to flip the mirror down,
out of the light path. Images then go out the back of the diagonal through a
camera port. Put an eyepiece in the flip mirror’s eyepiece holder, attach your
camera to the camera port, center up the target in the eyepiece, flip the
mirror down, and it will be in the field of your camera (flip mirrors are
adjustable so you can align the camera and eyepiece views).
A flip mirror makes finding and centering objects at large
image scales and with small imaging sensors trivial. Only fly in the ointment?
While you can still buy flip mirrors, they are not as plentiful as they once were.
They were originally popular with deep sky imagers as well as planetary imagers
back in the dark ages. Once DSO astrophotographers went to large chips, they
had little further use for flip mirrors, and there was then a reduced demand for
them. But you can still find them both new and used. I’m am still chugging
along with the 1.25-inch Meade I’ve had for the better part of 20 years.
 |
| Not my fave side of Mars, but there's Olympus Mons! |
Alrighty, then. I did a quick StarSense auto-align (yes, I
am too lazy to center a few stars with the hand control these days, folks).
Mars was still low and in the trees, so I thought I’d give Saturn a look see.
Maybe Jupe, too. I started with the king, old Jupiter. Got him framed nicely,
and focused and started exposing. And, in Uncle Rod fashion, I screwed up right
out of the gate.
To begin, I forgot one of the first things I learned about
planetary imaging way back in the webcam days:
aim for the shortest exposure possible; one that yields an onscreen image
that looks slightly underexposed. I didn’t. I overexposed Jupiter.
However, since I plan to get out at least every couple of nights (giving Mars
time to rotate new features into view) I’ll be back to Jupiter soon.
My other foul up? You want plenty of frames, but not too
many. Jupiter rotates so rapidly that if you go much over a minute features
will actually begin to blur. More importantly, stacking programs like Registax
and AutoStakkert will refuse to process videos that are too large. For moi,
about 30 – 45 seconds at 20 fps or so is more than good enough. Yes, more
frames can yield a less noisy image, but you do reach the point of diminishing
returns after about 1000.
 |
| The B.A.A.'s excellent Mars Mapper. |
All you need to do to capture Mars or whatever is set
exposure and gain till you get that slightly underexposed look onscreen, open
the capture menu, click “start capture,” tell Sharpcap how long or how many
frames, and hit the go button. When your sequence completes, the program conveniently
places your file in a folder called “Sharpcap Captures” on your desktop.
Whether you go for Sharpcap Pro or the basic version, the software is highly
recommended by your old Uncle, and if he can get pretty good results with it,
you surely can.
When Mars finally got high enough to fool with at about
21:00 local, I went there, touched up focus and ran off a few sequences. Now,
what was on display was not my favorite side of Mars. I find the Mare Serenium “streak”
slightly blah. However, it’s not entirely without its points of interest. On
this steady night, even before I processed the images, I could see Olympus Mons
was visible. Of course, Mars’ rapidly shrinking polar ice cap was on stark
display.
“Mare Serenium?! Unk, I don’t know pea-turkey about
that-there!” If you’ve done everything correctly, including when stacking your video
frame with Registax or AutoStakkert, and have judiciously applied
Registax’s famous wavelet filters, you will be surprised at how much
detail you’ve recorded. You obviously need a map to sort out that detail. Ideally,
one tailored for the date and time you took your pictures.
A chart just like that “MarsProfiler,” this can be found on Sky & Telescope’s website. It’s
actually a little app. You enter the
date and time of your image’s acquisition and it will show just what in
tarnation you are looking at. While it’s not quite as detailed, I also really,
really like the British Astronomical Association’s “MarsMapper.” In some ways I prefer its Mars disk format to S&T’s flat
chart, but I find both of these apps absolutely indispensable.
 |
| The beloved Rat-Bat-Spider from Angry Red Planet. |
Then, get out with the scope and get some shots of the Angry
Red Planet. Even if you don’t know a thing about processing planetary images
right now, you’ll have some video sequences in the can that you can work on
next month—or next year—and your results will just get better as you go along.
Unk? I’ve got to teach my university classes tonight, so I may not get back to the 4th stone from the Sun this evening, but I darned sure will tomorrow night. No, it ain’t as good as 2003, but it sure feels a lot like that, muchachos, it sure feels a lot like that.
Postscript...
One thing you can say for your old Uncle Rod? He ain't no piker. Well, he tries not to be one anyways. Two nights after I snapped the image above, I thought I'd give Mars another try. Two days is enough time to give the planet, which has a day only a bit longer than ours, a chance to rotate into a slightly different position so it will reveal a few new features.
 |
| Edge 800 8-inch SCT, ZWO ASI120MC, 6,000mm |
My results? I had to throw out a few sequences due to dust on the sensor chip. Once I noticed that, I moved the planet to a clear spot (I'll clean the ZWO's chip before doing any more work). The remaining sequences I got were easy enough to process, and the resulting final stills, while they darned sure won't win any prizes, are good enough for me; they make me feel like I've come home to Mars once again.
Which I'll admit is sometimes MY Mars. Not the Mars of NASA's rovers, but an old Mars of beautiful princesses, bizarre creatures, and mile-high skyscrapers adorning strange Martian cities. That's what I dreamed of when I shut down the laptop, stowed the bottle of Yell, and dozed away on the couch, anyhow.
Sunday, October 11, 2020
#568 My Yearly M13: 2020
Now, I certainly try to and usually do get out and do
astrophotography more than once a freaking year. But long stretches do often separate
my sessions. The main reason for that being the weather. As I have oft-opined here, it seems to me imaging-worthy skies have been less common over the last 8
years or so than they used to be. I’d be the last to claim you can make any conclusions about weather trends from a mere 8 years of observations, but
that is the way it seems to me.
One thing I do know for sure? In the first decade of this new century
I had many mid-summer nights of imaging and observing fun down south in Florida at the Chiefland
Astronomy Village. That good summer observing began to dry up around 2012, and Chiefland
weather the rest of the year began to decline not long after. That is one of
the reasons I have not been back to the fabled CAV in nearly five years. Even
the still somewhat hardcore (well, a little) Uncle Rod can only stand so many
nights holed up in a cotton-picking Quality Inn under cloudy skies.
Unfortunately, it ain’t just Florida skies that now seem worse year-round; the same
is true up here on the northern Gulf Coast in Possum Swamp.
Be that as it may be. Resolving to shoot M13 once a year,
yeah, ensures I get out with a camera and a telescope at least once between late
spring and early autumn. The last time I
did some honest-to-God prime focus, long exposure, guided imaging? Wellllll...that was…I can’t
exactly remember, y’all, but maybe not since last year's M13.
So it was that once bad old Hurricane Sally had become just
an unpleasant memory, and the clouds that had followed in her wake had all
flown off, I prepared to shoot my annual portrait of the big glob. Two weeks after the storm,
we were enjoying a nice stretch of weather. Plenty of Sun and blue skies with highs
in the upper 70s and lows at night in the 50s. While “50s” is a little cool for
your aged Unk’s bones, I prefer being a chilled to having the sweat
dripping off me and onto the laptop as I try to take deep sky pictures in my bumbling
fashion.
So, as October came in, I would be getting out into the
backyard with telescope and camera. But which telescope and which
camera? As I said last time, I’m lazy in these latter days. What is a pretty much guaranteed way to
get recognizable deep sky shots without much effort? Shoot them with a short –
medium focal length 80mm APO (color free) refractor. My beloved 80mm William
Optic Fluorite f/7.5, “Veronica Lodge,” would fill that bill.
Veronica is elegantly and sturdily built, but still light
enough not to challenge my Celestron Advanced VX GEM mount, so that was what I
would put her on. The only question in that regard? “Guided or unguided”? The
sky Friday before last was clear, but man was it hazy. Haze scatters
light, making the light pollution of my suburban backyard worse than it is on a
clear and dry evening. That meant I’d probably limit my exposures to two minutes.
Since I’d be doing a precise polar alignment, I probably could have gotten away
with no guiding at all for 120-second shots. But since I’d have the guide
camera with me to do a Sharpcap polar alignment, why not guide?
Scope, check. Mount, check. Camera? I thought that would be my
old Canon Rebel. It’s dependable, I have an AC power supply for it, and as
things are reckoned today, the 12-year-old camera has relatively large pixels.
That ain’t a bad thing in the deep sky imaging game, campers, since “larger
pixels” naturally means “more sensitive.”
All that remained was to decide on the software I’d be
using. As always, I’d be controlling the Canon and
acquiring images with Nebulosity. The program, by Craig Stark, author of
the original PHD Guiding, will do anything I need it to do and more
including acquiring, stacking, and processing DSLR images. While it was initially
intended for use with Canon DSLRs, it also works with many astronomical CCD
cameras.
I dunno about you, but when I’m imaging I do not like
hanging out at the freaking telescope. I want to sit at the computer and run
the show from there. I could have used Celestron’s CPWI program, the successor
to NexRemote, which we talked about a couple of weeks back. That would have
allowed me to control everything from the laptop including the goto alignment.
I don’t have much experience with the program yet, though, and thought it best
to keep things a mite simpler.
 |
| The new Cartes du Ciel beta. |
Likely I’d be fussing with the other software, trying to remember what little I ever knew about it. So, instead of CPWI I thought I’d use a nice, friendly, simple planetarium program with an ASCOM driver. ASCOM would give me a little onscreen hand control useful for centering objects in the camera’s frame.
What I’ve used most over the last few years when it comes to
PC planetariums is the excellent Stellarium. However, a sentimental favorite,
Cartes du Ciel, was, I heard, in a new (beta) version, 4.3. That being
the case, I thought I’d give the latest CdC a whirl. I’ve noted quite a bit of
traffic on the program’s mailing list of late, so Cartes is obviously more than
just still alive.
Guiding? I ain’t used anything but PHD2 since it came out.
And I hadn’t used anything before that but the original PHD Guiding
since the dark ages when I was photographing the skies with my old self-guiding
SBIG black and white astro-CCD. It would be PHD2 Guiding all the way. I
had to get it going on a new laptop about a year ago, and was quite not sure I
had all the settings correct—I hadn’t used it since then—but I figgered it
wouldn’t much matter with short focal length Veronica.
Anything else? Well, I was darned sure glad I checked out Sharpcap
the day before my M13 expedition to make sure all was well with it. It turned out my
subscription had expired. You see, I use the Pro version (the one with
the polar alignment tool). It ain’t freeware, being offered on a yearly
subscription basis. Seemed like I had just renewed the program for the very
reasonable fee of 15 dollars a year, but, yes, another year had flown by.
Anyhoo, it took but a few minutes to get a new subscription and a license in
place. Glad I wasn’t blindsided by that in the dark backyard, though.
So, into that backyard I went, setting up in my usual
fashion with the scope beside the deck and me and the laptop on the deck. It’s
like an observatory for somebody who doesn’t want an observatory: I can leave
the telescope set up in my secure backyard for as long as the weather stays
nice. Sitting at the patio table under a big umbrella, I’m out of the dew and
so is the PC. And I’m just steps from my den where I spend my time while the
exposures are clicking off. Oh, I check things once in a while, but watching The
Mandalorian on TV while drinking a…uh… “sarsaparilla” is a lot more fun than
watching the PHD2 guide graph, friends.
While I hadn’t used Veronica in a long while, she went
together smoothly: plunked her into the
mount’s Vixen saddle, attached her tube extension to the focuser, put my (excellent)
Hotech field flattener into that, and mounted the camera via a, natch, Canon format
T-ring.
 |
| Nebulosity doing its thing. |
Whoooeee. I was close to sweating even in the cooling air as
the stars winked on. Next order of bidness was polar alignment. I temporarily placed the laptop
on a little tray-table next to the scope, plugged the guide scope into
the computer’s USB port, and fired up Sharpcap.
How long does a Sharpcap polar alignment take? Maybe
10 minutes first time out. Five minutes or less after that. The process is
simple. Set the mount in home position pointing north in declination with the
counterweight down. Click in the Tools menu to start the polar alignment.
Sharpcap will expose a few frames and will shortly
tell you to rotate 90 degrees in RA. That done, you’ll use the mount’s altitude
and azimuth controls to point at the North Celestial pole with the aid of
onscreen graphics and text directions (“Move up 12’…”). How accurate is it? Now that
it takes refraction into account, I have faith that when it tells me I’m just seconds
from the pole that’s just where I am. And my results indicate it is telling
the truth. If you have a guide camera, Sharpcap is the obvious cure for
the polar alignment blues.
Polar alignment done (the somewhat course altitude/azimuth
controls on the AVX make the process more difficult on that mount than on my
Losmandy—but it’s not bad), it was time to essay a goto alignment via the StarSense
auto-align camera. I’ve never had a problem with the StarSense; it’s always
produced an alignment as good as what I can do with the normal hand control.
But there are a couple of gotchas to watch out for—one of which your hapless raconteur
encountered on this very evening.
 |
| Full sized image. |
‘Twas not to be muchachos. The StarSense did the goto
alignment successfully as always, going to four star-fields and plate solving.
When it was done, I sent the mount to Vega, which I thought would be a good
target for rough focusing. Fired up Nebulosity, started clicking off focus frames
and…no Vega did I see. Tried slewing around a little. Nope. No Vega. Sighted
along the tube and did some more slewing. Nope, sorry, Charlie.
There was nothing for it. I’d just have to calibrate the
StarSense. That is easy if you, unlike your silly Uncle, remember how to do that.
Send the mount to a bright star (Vega in my case). Get the star in the field of
an eyepiece or camera (I did that by replacing the StarSense with a red dot
finder temporarily). Press Align, and use the hand control’s direction buttons
to precisely center the star.
That sounds easy. And it is easy if you, unlike Rod, remember
to press Align, not Enter. Pressing Enter sent the mount
back to where it was in the beginning; where it thought the star oughta be. So,
Unk got to start all over from the beginning after biting the bullet and digging
out the StarSense manual.
Got ‘er done, and all should have been well. But wouldn’t
you know it? Uncle Rod did some assuming, and you know what they say
about that word. Once the calibration is done, the HC tells you you need
to do another alignment. That’s easy, just press enter and it will be executed
automatically. Silly old Rod, however, thought he should set the mount back to
home position first—which you do not need to do. You will not be
surprised to learn the AVX pointed the scope to the Earth for the first plate
solve. Power down, start over from scratch one more time.
 |
| Zoomed in with a crop. |
OK! We was rollin’ now. That’s what Unk thought, anyhow,
but the gremlins weren’t quite done with his sorry self. Time to engage Cartes
du Ciel. Started the program, connected the ASCOM driver to the mount,
clicked M13, and then the slew button, and off we went for the globular. The
mount was about halfway there when the computer went fitified with a
blue screen of death. I don’t know I’ve ever had that happen with Windows
10, but it sure did happen on this evening.
Luckily, the mount continued to M13 unaffected, I restarted
the computer, reconnected all the software, and the laptop was OK from then on.
What was the problem? Despite the fact that I was using a beta version of
Cartes, I’m guessing the culprit was actually the older ASCOM version I was
running, 6.1. By the light of day, I investigated and found some people had had
problems with that one. So, I updated to the current v6.5, even though I had had
no further problems with Cartes for the remainder of the evening.
Cartes du Ciel? Other than that hiccup, it was
wonderful. No, it does not have the pretty sky of Stellarium, but it
makes up for that with the legibility of its display in the field, and has many
more features for observers than Stellarium, despite me loving that
program very much. Go out and get the new CdC; it is another winning version in
a long string of winning versions.
The rest of the evening was frankly pedestrian in the extreme.
I got PHD2 Guiding doing its thing without a hitch. While the seeing, never
good, was degrading as time went by, my errors were just a little worse than 1”
with PPEC not turned on. Well, till M13 began to get lower on the horizon after
about an hour, and I began to approach 2”. Unfortunately, in October there ain’t
much time before the glob begins to get low; especially if, like your fumbling Uncle,
you waste at least half an hour before taking your first sub-frame. But the higher guide
error toward the end of my sequence was not a problem. Again, an 80mm scope is very
forgiving. You almost have to work not to get round stars.
 |
| And...the clouds are back. |
The denouement? Early Saturday evening, I shot a series of
T-shirt flats using the sky at dusk as illumination. As I was doing so, I witnessed
the darned old clouds begin to flow back in after giving me almost a week’s respite. Not just that...another big storm was shortly threatening the Gulf. So, I was glad I’d got out, full Moon or no (did I mention shortly after my imaging
sequence began, a fat Moon began to rise in the east?). That done, I went through the usual
processing steps with Neb: debayer both
lights and flats. Stack lights and flats into single images and combine master
flat and master light into one photo, process using Nebulosity, and do final
touchup with Photoshop.
“But what about darks, Unk? You gotta shoot darks, doncha?”
I did, Skeezix, but I did that as I was shooting the lights, automatically. I
set the Canon Rebel to subtract a dark after every image. It takes twice as
long to get through your sequence, but I find doing it that way yields better
results. With an uncooled camera like a
DSLR, it’s always best to shoot a dark immediately after the light so the
sensor is at a similar temperature.
My results? Not so bad. While something like this would never
appear in the magazine’s Gallery section (!), I’ve done worse on a hazy night in
the suburbs with big Moon rising. Frankly, this year’s shot is at least
as good as what I got in 2019 with an LX85 mount
and a Meade 8-inch ACF under similar conditions (in late 2019; the blog article didn't appear till January 2020). But you know what? This
exercise ain't about results, anyway; it’s about Unk getting his silly old self out under
the night sky with a camera and getting back to work, muchachos.
Monday, September 28, 2020
#567 Hello Sally!
You didn’t get two in September for a very good reason: it was resolutely cloudy in the weeks leading
up to Hurricane Sally—September is the big month of hurricane season, after all—and it has been
resolutely cloudy since. It is threatening to clear up this week, no
doubt due to the presence of a waxing Moon. Moon or no, I need to get a
telescope into the backyard for a photo-shoot to accompany my next Sky &
Telescope Test Report, so I may actually grab a camera and give M13 a try. As those of you who've hung out here for a while know, I try to image the grand Great Globular once a year no matter what.
Anyhow, what happened during the storm? Well, a couple of days before Sally hit, I had a premonition: this
was gonna be another Elena. A what? Hurricane Elena struck Gautier,
Mississippi back in 1985. Unk, a young, freshly-minted engineer with his first
real job happened to be living in that little coastal town at the time. But
that wasn’t the kicker.
The kicker was that my wife at the time and I had gone to
bed Saturday night after hearing a weather report that assured us Elena would
hit Apalachicola, Florida. Being late risers on Sunday who liked to read the
New York Times over much coffee sans TV or radio, we didn’t give the storm any thought in the
morning. Till the phone rang. It was one of my colleagues asking what the wife
and I were gonna do. I replied, "I think she’s still reading the magazine
section; I’m making more coffee.”
“No, I mean about the storm.”
“What storm? Elena? Why should we have to do anything?”
“You haven’t heard? Turn on the freaking TV. She’s going to come
ashore at Gautier and go right over our heads!”
And so she did. And quite an experience it was; it’s the
only time I’ve experienced the passage of the eye of a hurricane. Frightening? Yes. Strangely exhilarating? Also, "yes."
I had that ineffable feeling that Sally was gonna be a repeat, so to speak,
and it became clear that was precisely what would happen. Sally’s track
got pushed to the east past Louisiana, past Mississippi, and right to Alabama.
Ever since Elena, I’ve taken these things seriously even
when I’m told I’ve got nothing to worry about. Most of our preparations
were already complete by the time Sally drew a bead on the Alabama Gulf Coast. I’d made a run on Publix for bottled water and other stuff (pop-tarts, peanut butter, bacon; the usual survival supplies), and
the 25kw whole house generator we’d had installed last year had coincidentally just been serviced and was ready to go. Only thing left to do was to
tip-over my amateur radio HF vertical antenna. It has a tilt base for just such
eventualities, so that was easy.
The evening before landfall was eerily calm, though looking up
and seeing clouds literally dashing across the sky foretold there was something
bad in the Gulf headed our way. I went to bed about midnight just as the bands
of rain began to come thick and fast and winds began to gust up to 30 – 40
mph. I slept well but for a couple of
times when I was awakened by the power going out, the generator coming on, and
power being automatically transferred. But I was able to fall back asleep each time. Until about 5 am or somewhat before when it really began to blow
and the power went off and stayed off.
Gotta tell y’all: your old Uncle really squealed about the price
of the generator and its switchgear and their installation, but I sure was happy
to have it on this morning. The winds howled—did they ever! —gusting up to, I’d
guess, 85 at least, but we had TV, air-conditioning, the Keurig, the microwave,
pretty much everything. The cable TV did go out after a while, but the fiber Internet
never faltered and we found a good weather channel on the darned Roku.
 |
| The W4NNF shack and the 6-meter antenna. |
Venturing out on the deck showed the backyard was about the same. The patio table was on its side but OK (I'd stashed the chairs in the radio shack the afternoon before). Oh, the driveway was covered in small limbs and leaves, and there were a few
down at the back of the backyard, but nothing really major. Amazingly, my 6-meter antenna which was mounted on a cheap TV mast still stood. So did the 2-meter aerial on its TV mast. Alas, with one departing gust Sally knocked the 6-meter one down. Oh,
well, I’d been meaning to replace the pitiful thing for a long time.
A trot around the neighborhood after the rain finally paused
showed a few of my neighbors had lost trees. Those were invariably pines or
palms, neither of which grace Unk's yard, thank goodness. Lot of limbs down, some older wooden
fences had given up the ghost; that was about it.
The denouement? Power came back on at 7:30 am and
stayed on. Part of the reason for that is our power lines are underground in
this neighborhood, and the substation we are connected to also serves the local
hospital, so getting it back working is a big priority with the power company.
Now, just across Mobile Bay where the eye had come ashore,
the flooding and power loss and wind damage were terrible. Power was still off
in some areas a week after the storm. Heck, some people in the city—like the
downtown neighborhood where good old Chaos Manor South still stands in all her
glory—were without power for almost that long. So, all things considered, I’d
say me and Miss Dorothy were pretty lucky.
So that’s it, campers. Sure, I feel sorry for the folks with severe damage and who were without power for a long time. But this is the first storm
I’ve ever been able to ride out in comfort. It wasn’t that long ago that Dorothy
and I and daughter Lizbeth were evacuating to Atlanta in the middle of the night or—after Katrina—living
in her university office for days. So, I know how it is. But we down here are
tough when it comes to these storms; they are just a part of life on the Gulf.
Astronomy? As above, I plan to get my yearly M13 taken
before time begins to run out. Hercules is already beginning to get a little
low. I ain’t gonna wimp out like I have a time or two in the past and use
video, either. No, it will be a DSLR, flats, darks, all that good stuff.
Well, I might wimp out a little bit. C8? No. 5-inch
APO? No. It will be my beloved f/7.5 80mm fluorite refractor, Veronica. Yes, I
know a little more focal length would be nice here in the relatively bright
suburbs, but I’m lazy and it is just so easy to get pretty pictures with
Ronnie.
So, stay tuned. If I actually get the skies and haven’t totally forgot how to do deep sky imaging, I should be back here this coming Sunday or (more likely the one after). Until then, muchachos, until then…
Sunday, August 30, 2020
#566 Stars in the Palm of My Hand Redux
Now, your old Uncle, Luddite that he is, is not that big a fan
of the danged pocket computers. I could, as I often say to the annoyance of everybody around me, go back to a black dial-phone hardwired into the wall.
Happily. But I must admit they can be handy for some things--like astronomy. I’ve been
involved in using smart phones and their ancestors, the PDAs, in stargazing for
quite a while.
I got started not long after the turn of the
century with something some of you may remember, Palm Pilots. If you’re young,
or like your old Uncle occasionally a little short on brain cells, what the
Palm was was a “PDA,” a Personal Digital Assistant. It did some of the things
we do with smart phones these days: keep
a calendar, manage contacts and appointments, make notes, stuff like that. But
with no connectivity. Not only could you not make a phone call with one, in the early days of PDAs you
couldn’t even connect to the Internet. Well, you could—sorta. Plug the Palm
into a PC (via an RS232 cable) and it would update little news and weather
apps; stuff like that. Sounds primitive 20 years later, but these things were
actually amazingly useful.
And not just because of the built-in apps like the calendar
and stuff. Soon there were third parties producing all manner of software to
run on the Palm, just like with today’s iPhones and Androids. In a short time, there was a
whole Palm industry producing serious software like word processors. And even hardware like keyboards. While it might seem a little strange to do word processing on a PDA,
it worked thanks to the devices’ increasingly good screens. That was a life
saver for me in the days when I was still riding destroyer sea-trials. I needed to do some writing on deadline, and couldn't bring a non-secure, non-government laptop with me. A PDA was no problem, however, and I was able to get my work done with my Palm and my (folding) keyboard.
And all that was just ducky, but what I was really
interested in, as y’all might expect, was the growing inventory of astronomy
software for the Palm. Yep, there were quite a few astro apps, some quite
powerful; especially the one I settled on for regular use: Planetarium for
Palm. One of my fonder memories is of using my Palm IIIxe and my wee ETX60 (by means of an RS-232 cable from Palm to Autostar) to tour dozens of
deep sky objects from the dark Smoky Mountains.
 |
| Astromist |
Not that I needed to be convinced. I was so impressed by my Palm that I started a Yahoogroup just for the use of PDAs in astronomy, "PalmAstro." For a couple of years, it looked like the sky was the limit for the gadgets. Till it all came crashing down and Palm wound up belonging to freaking HP. What happened? Poor management on the part of the Palm execs was part of it, but mostly it was the coming of the smartphone, which made PDAs almost instantly obsolete.
Palm did sell some phones, but with very limited success. The cells they rolled out that still used the Palm O/S unfortunately used a version of it that made the phones incompatible with all the tons of good software that had been written over the years. That was pretty dumb and that was pretty much that for the company. To this day, HP occasionally releases a phone under the Palm name, but these Palms have nothing in common with the good, old PDAs.
While I kept the PalmAstro Yahoogroup on the air until Yahoo shut
all its groups down earlier this year, there’d been little interest in it in a
long time, including by moi. It was time to move on to something more
capable than a PDA as cool as they were. Something with a still better display
and Internet connectivity. What was that? Not the smart phone, not for Unk
right away. iPhones just seemed stupid-expensive to me. How about a nice iPod
instead?
While the early iPods did very little other than play music,
the later ones were more like iPhones, just without the phone stuff. That was
the iPod touch. It could do anything my Palm could do—calendars, contacts, etc.—but
with a color touch screen, more memory, a faster processor, and built-in Internet
connectivity. And, naturally, there was already plenty of astronomy software to
take advantage of that pretty screen (most apps designed for the iPhone ran fine on the Touch), beginning with SkyVoyager, the
ancestor of today’s SkySafari.
But, soon enough it was time to move from Pod to Phone.
Not only to play telescopes, but because I found having one increasingly necessary
given changes at work. I was now commuting to both Pascagoula and New Orleans
to work on the NAVSSI system (a navigation suite of radars, computers, and other sensors) on the Navy’s LPD landing
ships. I found an iPhone made my work much easier with its instant access
to my colleagues with phone and email--not to mention all the other smart phone features we take for granted now. And, naturally, when SkySafari cranked
up, I got started with that amazing software.
If you’d like to know more about SkySafari or my take
on it, at least, watch for an upcoming Test Report on the app by me in Sky &Telescope.
Suffice to say, however, that the program takes all the power of a desktop
planetarium program, and stuffs it into your smart phone or tablet (including Android
devices). For now, however, let’s switch gears slightly and talk about the other
half of the smartphone astronomy game:
how you make your goto goto its gotos with your freaking telephone.
It took me a while to get friendly with the SkySafari's telescope control features. I got my first iPhone, an iPhone 4, loaded it up with
SkySafari, looked at the app a time or two, and that was it--oh, used it once in a while to see how high up Jupiter or something was, but not much more than that. Why? Unk
practiced a different sort of astronomy a decade ago. I was still
ensconced at good, old Chaos Manor South, our huge old Victorian home in the
city’s Garden District. There, there was very little chance to observe.
I could look at the Moon or a planet from the front yard,
but that was about all and all it had been for the better part of a
decade before that. Not so much because of light pollution, which I knew how to deal with, but because of the countless oak
trees old and young. My backyard was so overgrown by the end of the 90s that I
was limited to a few “windows” here and there—and God forbid you cut down a
Garden District oak! So, Moon and planets it was, and I didn’t need all the
deep sky objects and stars now packed into SkySafari to tour the Solar System. There also didn't seem to be much point in connecting the phone to one of my telescopes.
 |
| SkyQ Link plugged into CGEM port. |
Now, that got my attention. Back in the go-go days of
The Herschel Project, I invariably controlled the Advanced VX or the NexStar
11 GPS or the CGEM with NexRemote, which took the place of the hand
controller. You didn’t even have to have the HC plugged in. And the SkyQ link
would, I thought, make the NexRemote experience a whole lot better.
Eliminating a cable between PC and mount wasn’t just a
matter of aesthetics. More than once, one of the zombie-like folks you’ll encounter
at most star parties (you know, the people who set up a scope but never use it—instead
they wander the field all night long) had tripped on and disconnected my NexRemote
cable in their quest to determine, “WATCHA LOOKIN’ AT?” causing me to lose
my goto alignment.
When the Link arrived, I was impressed. It looked
professionally done, and the instructions for getting it set up were simple
enough. Plug it into the mount, connect your PC’s or phone’s wireless to it,
start the SkyQ app or NexRemote (along with a helper program for NexRemote), and you were good to go. First problem? It didn’t
work with NexRemote. Period. End of story. Game over. Zip up your fly.
OK, how about SkyQ? It refused to work with the Advanced VX, though it
would work with the NexStar 11 GPS in alt-azimuth mode—in very limited fashion.
Now, normally when something like this happens, I just stuff
the junk in question back in the box and return it. But I really, really wanted
this thing to work. So I got in touch with Celestron. They readily admitted
they knew their app would never, ever work with the Advanced VX or any other
German equatorial mount (despite what their ads said). They did insist NexRemote ought to
work. They offered me troubleshooting tips and promises about upgrades to the
software used to allow NexRemote to access the Link. And they kept doing that,
stringing me along, until it was too late to return the SkyQ Link. Oh, well. I
stuffed it in a drawer and forgot about it.
And that was the end of wireless scope control for me for
some time. Until, in fact, early 2017 when I was assigned to do the Sky
& Telescope Test Report on Celestron’s new Evolution 9.25 SCT. There was
a lot new about this telescope including a built-in rechargeable battery and a new-design fork mount among other things. Some of these things were good
and some not so good, but what was really good was the scope’s main selling feature,
built-in Wi-Fi.
 |
| Evolution 9.25 |
If the Evolution worked as advertised. Some owners had
complained about weak Wi-Fi signals with early Evos. Me? I found I could
control the telescope just fine from 100 meters away on an open observing
field. Naturally, in a backyard with lots of obstructions the range was shorter,
but it worked more than well enough nevertheless. I still wasn’t sure I
preferred a phone to a hardware HC—I missed the tactile feedback from actual
buttons—but I was at least becoming a believer.
Part of the reason for that was my astronomy way of life had
changed. Following my retirement, Miss Dorothy and I had moved from Chaos Manor South to the suburbs. I
now had a nice, open backyard and skies that would show mag 5 stars at zenith
on a good night. Since I could now look at the deep sky any time I
wanted (when we had those increasingly rare clear skies), I found I was far less interested in doing pedal-to-the-metal observing from dark sites. Me
getting older and less inclined to stay up late and to brave the heat or cold
and the bugs also had something to do with it. At any rate, a phone with
SkySafari running on it suddenly seemed to fit my lifestyle a lot better than a big laptop packed to the gills with astro-ware.
BUT… (there’s always that annoying “but”). I was perfectly
happy with the telescopes and mounts I had. I really wasn’t interesting in
dropping a couple of thousand bucks on a Celestron Evo 9.25 SCT; that was for sure.
So, I did some research. The SkySafari folks and others offered Wi-Fi solutions
of their own that would work with just about any telescope/mount. But these generic
solutions didn’t give you the Celestron no-hand-control-required alignment
capability. Which was when I began thinking about the SkyQ Link again and doing
a little research.
What I turned up was the new dongle Celestron began selling
at about the same time they rolled out the Evolution was little different from my old
SkyQ Link. In fact, the electronics were exactly the same; the only changes were its slightly redesigned appearance and a new name, “SkyPortal Link.” With the Evolution on its way back to California and me rested up from all the observing I’d done with the 9.25, I decided to
hunt up the widget and give it a try with SkyPortal and SkySafari.
 |
| Doing an AllStar alignment with the Evolution. |
With the AVX set up and polar aligned I plugged the dongle
into the hand control port, powered on the mount, and grabbed my trusty iPhone.
I had some hopes, since the lights flashing on the dongle as it booted up looked correct—unlike
with the SkyQ app. I had no trouble connecting with SkyPortal, either. But then came
the acid test—goto alignment.
After all the drama I’d experienced with the Link previously,
the denouement was almost boring. I centered four stars, two on each side
of the Meridian, SkyPortal said I was aligned, and the Advanced VX went to
anything I requested for the remainder of the evening, just like it always did.
Any downers? Only that after not having used a touchscreen to center a star in
a long time, I was back on square one with that.
And now? The events of the years since I tried out the
Evolution have just led me more and more in the direction of smart phone astronomy.
In 2019, I was laid up for months thanks to an accident I have still not fully recovered from. After I healed enough to want to do some observing, I found I was less likely than ever to traipse around to star parties and dark sites carrying
a PC. Often it’s no goto at all…just me, my
good old 10-inch Dobsonian, Zelda, and SkySafari in the friendly backyard.
2019 was bad for me, yeah, but 2020 has been just as much of a loser of a year in its own way. And for everybody thanks to the the Bad CORONA (as opposed to the good kind that comes in frosty bottles) among other disasters, tragedies, and constant confusion and mayhem. Now, there are no star
parties to traipse to even if I were up to it physically and mentally. I'm moving everything except astrophotography to my phone and tablet, and am thinking
about doing the same with that (which is made possible by some innovative
products from ZWO and others).
I don’t know that I’m ready to get involved with a gadget
that allows me to control my imaging sessions with a phone yet, but what say we
kick it up a small notch anyhow? When it comes time for me to do my observing
for my SkySafari Pro test report lets’ throw in a curveball. I am told the
program now supports the Celestron StarSense alignment cam. How will that work
out? We shall see just as soon as I get a clear night here.
Otherwise? Anything else I’ve got planned…the continuation of the New Herschel Project, My Yearly M13, getting a few pics of Mars…will have to wait until the stormy Gulf calms down. I will have something for y’all in September, but unless and until the weather improves, I cannot swear it will be much.
Saturday, July 25, 2020
#565 Night of the Comet
What’s the ground truth about this comet? It’s the best we’ve
had in years—maybe since Hale Bopp departed the inner Solar System. But
don’t fool yourself: Hale-Bopp wasn’t just a naked eye object; it was a
naked eye object for a long, long time. And it wasn’t just bright; it was
BRIGHT. At its height, it was visible in near daylight. This visitor, on the
other hand, now requires binoculars to be seen if, like most of us, you are a
denizen of suburbia. In fact, its position meant that even when it was at its
brightest most observers needed optical aid to see much of it. If anything.
Wish I could have seen NEOWISE in its morning passage. I
love morning comets—maybe because they remind me of my first one, long ago Ikeya-Seki. The stars just didn’t align for your old Uncle this time, though.
As you might not be surprised to hear, it being July and me being down here in
Possum Swamp, the weather, including the dawn weather, has been lousy. But there was more to it than that;
your old uncle was too worried to be much in the mood to wake up at oh-dark-thirty
for comet chasing.
“Worried about what?” I
was potentially exposed to the COVID 19 virus. The details don’t matter. Well,
except for the fact that everybody involved was masked and wearing gloves and
the place where the exposure occurred was disinfected. Those things meant I wouldn’t
get sick. But I wouldn’t know that for at least ten days.
 |
| Where are you little Panstarrs? |
All this happened fairly quickly considering the fact that our poor state is
facing a huge spike in cases. About an hour after we arrived, one of the heroic
nurses was at my car window taking my temperature and my blood oxygen level. The
bad? I was running a modest fever. The good? My blood oxygen level was fine, which
I was told is more important than your temperature. Soon, a nurse had a swab up
my nose. Despite what you may have heard, that is uncomfortable but not
painful. I liken it to the feeling you’d get as a kid when you accidentally inhaled
some heavily chlorinated pool water.
Next? Back home at the New Manse, there was nothing to do
but wait and see. The fever had been worrying, but I was pretty sure I had a
mild sinus infection. At any rate, Miss D. had ordered one of those gun-like infrared
thermometers and a pulse-oxy meter from Amazon. Both insisted I was fine. Blood
oxygen in the high 90s and no more fever. Of course, your old Unk being the way
he is, that didn’t help. Every morning I’d awaken with a slightly scratchy
throat (from a night in the air conditioning) and would be sure I had
IT.
We continued to be symptom free, and five days after we were tested the results came in: NEGATIVE. In a few more days, the two weeks of
our self-quarantine were up and I was a free man. Well, free enough to at least
journey to Publix at 7 a.m. once a week for groceries and to the comic book store on Wednesdays to clear my box. The whole thing had
spooked me, and other than that I am sticking close to home. Let this be a cautionary
tale: the only reason, I’m convinced, I
wasn’t sickened and maybe worse (at my age I am definitely an “elevated risk”
kinda guy) was the mask, the gloves, social distancing, and the disinfecting we
did. I hope you also do these things, muchachos. If you are like most amateur
astronomers and like me, you are not in the spring chicken demographic and do not
want to play around with this stuff.
Be that as it may; the end of my quarantine also brought a
temporary lifting of the early evening clouds—Neo had now moved into the evening
sky. I was ready to tackle another comet in a long string of “my” comets. But how, exactly, would I do that?
 |
| The finished mount did look funky. |
Next question? Which binoculars? Over many years
of (occasionally) serious observing, I’ve accumulated numerous pairs of
glasses. I’ve never considered myself a real binocular fan, but, like cats, they’ve
just come to me: everything from a sophisticated
pair of 40mm roof prism binocs, to the everyday bread-and-butter 10x50s, to my big
honkin’ Zhumell Tachyon 25x100s.
Yeah, 100mm binoculars, the “six-inch refractor” of the
binocular game. We all want ‘em—or think we do. To make a long story short, about
nine years ago I found you could buy a pair of Chinese 25x100s for about
250 bucks. Not only that; they were garnering a reputation for excellent
optics. Only 250 for 4-inch binoculars? Yep. Naturally I ordered a pair and
found them to be excellent optically and at least good mechanically (you can
still buy the Tachyons, but the price is about double what it was a decade
ago).
The thing about 100mm binoculars…well the things?
They are great on the sky. Not only do they obviously gather a lot of light;
they have enough power to make them more usable in compromised skies than, say,
7x binoculars. I’ve even resolved the rings of Saturn with ‘em with fair ease.
That’s the good thing. The bad thing is that when you pass 70mms, binoculars’
weight increases exponentially. You might conceivably be able to hand-hold 80mm
glasses for short periods. 100mms? Fuhgeddabout it. And a tripod, even a big, heavy
video tripod, ain’t good enough. You need a genuine binocular mount.
And there are some very good binocular mounts out there. Like
those sold by Oberwerk (nee Bigbinoculars.com). But they don’t come cheap, and
you simply cannot compromise when it comes to 100mm binoculars. “Good enough” won’t
do. The problem was that, as you well know, Unk is a stingy soul and was even
before he retired. The solution came fairly quickly, though, in the form of the
EZ Binocular Mount kit.
 |
| Out on the CAV field. |
The assembly of the kit is a story in itself, which you can
read about here—as you may know, Unk’s
mechanical skills are somewhat lacking. I got it together successfully with the
assistance of Miss Dorothy, but was still a little skeptical. Let’s face it; it
looks funky. You’d never mistake it for anything but a kit. Ah, but when
you mount those big glasses on it out in the dark, it’s a different story. The
Peterson EZ binocular kit works better than any binocular mount I have ever
used, big or small. If my backyard experiences weren’t enough to convince me,
using the EZ on Comet Panstarrs back in 2013 sure did.
So, the Zhumells have gotten a lot of use over the nine
years I’ve owned them? Not really. The problem is that even 25x binoculars need
a dark sky to really strut their stuff. Oh, they can do alright in the typical
compromised backyard…but given the fact that you have to set up the mount to
use them at all, it’s really no more labor intensive to assemble a telescope.
And much as I love binoculars, there’s simply no doubt a scope is a more versatile
and better choice most of the time.
But not all the time. The exception is when a comet
is in the sky. Again, there is nothing, muchachos, and I do mean nothing,
that will give you a better look at a comet than big binos. Not only do you
have a wide field and plenty of light gathering power, you get that 3D effect inherent
in binoculars. There’s also the fact that it’s just more comfortable to use
both eyes than one. So, I grabbed the Zhumells' case and started hunting
for the EZ mount.
However, it was hot, muggy, buggy, and your Unk was feeling
lazy. Of course, I still have the Peterson mount, but I haven’t used it since we
moved out here to the suburbs, and knew it was in parts and pieces in several
boxes that are located somewhere. I decided to cheat. I’ve got a big
enough Manfrotto camera tripod, and since the comet would be close to the
horizon, surely that would be good enough, wouldn’t it?
 |
| ALCON 2003 |
Well, alrighty then. No 100mm binoculars for NEOWISE. We
have one of Explore Scientific’s 100mm short focal length achromatic refractors
here. On the SkyWatcher AZ-4 alt-azimuth tripod it’s not much of a pain to
set up, and it ought to perform well on the comet. But I found myself fixated
on binoculars. As above, they really are the perfect instrument for comet
viewing (and comet hunting…like many others, the late, great Comet Hyakutake was
discovered with giant binoculars). And then the solution came to me: the good, old Burgess binoculars.
As y’all have probably divined, I am not the world’s biggest
supporter of the Astronomical League. We can talk about that some Sunday perhaps,
but for now I’ll just say that whatever my feelings about the AL, I had a great
time speaking at the organization’s 2003 convention in Nashville. What went on at
the Embassy Suites hotel all those years ago (seems like just yesterday to your
aging correspondent)? Well, in addition to talks, dinners, even a little video
observing in the parking lot, and the usual things found at conventions of all
kinds, there were vendors—folks selling astrostuff.
Now, in those days, Unk was still very definitely an
astronomy gear junkie. There was simply no way I’d go home without something
new. But what? Well, there was Bill
Burgess (who is still in the astronomy business and doing well, I hear) with
his wares. Which included a pair of 15x70 binos he was offering for—get this—50
bucks. Trying them out in the dealer room, it was obvious they were well
built and seemed good optically (the stars are, of course, the only true test
for astronomy binoculars). At any rate, how could I go wrong for fifty bucks?
I couldn’t, as tests in the front yard of good, old Chaos
Manor South (remember those hallowed halls, muchachos?) showed when Dorothy and
I got home. The humble Burgesses soon became my go-to glasses. In addition to
being high in quality and rugged, their strength was and is that they offer
more light gathering power than the usual 10x50s, but in a package that is
reasonably hand-holdable. Unlike 80s, I can use these 70s for extended periods effectively
and without strain.
 |
| The legendary Burgess 15x70s. |
There things remained for several days. Which was not all
bad. While I waited for semi-clear conditions, the comet continued to rise
higher above the horizon though it was dimming a bit. Finally, early last week,
I got what I reckoned might be my last crack at NEOWISE what with a storm
churning up in the Gulf of Mexico.
Out to the deck me and the Burgesses went again. Same
routine: scan down from the bowl of the
dipper while moving to the west. And there is it was. My lasting impression of this one?
It was a perfect little comet in the Burgesses with a tiny head, some coma visible,
and a cute little tail that extended farther than I thought it would in the
nasty skies. A friend, a talented observer, managed to see the comet much better than I did from
darker skies, and was able to glimpse the ion tail. Me? No way, but I was satisfied
with what I’d seen. Which was admittedly better than what I saw of Comet
Ikeya-Seki all those decades ago. Frankly, I’ve never seen a bad comet, y’all, and
this was most assuredly a good one. Hope you saw her or get to see her before she is gone.
What next? Obviously, I need to proceed to night three of the New Herschel Project. But as you can probably tell from the above, the weather down here in the Swamp is unlikely to allow that anytime soon. So, it’s, as Rod’s Mama used to tell him frequently when he wanted something, a great, big “We’ll see.”
Sunday, July 05, 2020
#564: The New Herschel Project Night 2, 21 Down 379 to Go
 |
| Unk's "observatory." |
 |
| CPWI alignment choices. |
 |
| M105 and company. |
 |
| Pretty M61 and supernova. |
 |
| Good, old Sombrero. |
 |
| Little but cute ghost. |
