Sunday, January 10, 2021
Issue 572: Happy New Year’s 2021 from the AstroBlog
While things don’t exactly look good now (to say the least), I hope we can expect something better than another whole year of “I’VE GOT A BAD FEELING ABOUT THIS!” Anyhow, this is the traditional AstroBlog New Year's update, muchachos.
Before we get to that, however, I know y’all wanna know WHAT
SANTA BRUNG Unk. Well, not any new telescopes; that’s fer sure. If you
follow this here blog even intermittently, you know Unk has been engaged in
thinning the scope herd over the last several years. Oh, I’ve still got telescopes
and eyepieces aplenty. But I’m down to one SCT, a few nice refractors, and a
10-inch Dobbie.
That doesn’t mean I didn’t get anything that was
kinda-sorta astro-related, however. Something I like to do every week when I
can is check into the Amateur Astronomy Digital (radio) Voice Net. A weekly
meeting of amateur radio operators who are also amateur astronomers. This very
fine net, hosted by NCS Jason Hissong, NX8E, a great ham and a great observer,
can accommodate both DMR and D-Star users. The net meets every Wednesday night
at 9 pm EST. It’s a good net, but I
wasn’t checking in very often. Why? Because the only D-Star radio I owned was a
HT (handie-talkie, that is). Unk has never been a big fan of HTs, you see.
Anyhoo…the little VHF rig in the shack here, a Yaesu
FT-1900, was about a dozen years old, so I figured it was time to upgrade. What
did I ask Santa for? I thought about the Icom ID 5100—I love its big display—but
it really seems more suited to mobile use, so I went with the ID 4100. And,
after wrestling with the RT Systems programming software on Christmas afternoon,
I got it set up for both analog and digital operations, and hope to become a
regular on NX8E’s net henceforth. You can too if you hold at least a Technician
license. If you’d like to join the net, see the Amateur Astronomy Digital Voice
Net page on Facebook for details.
Anyhow, now for the annual wrap up…
January brought
an article on poor, old Meade, which was in the midst of yet another
bankruptcy. The long and short of it was the company that bought Meade after
their last crash some years ago, Ningbo Sunny, lost an anti-trust suit,
declared bankruptcy, and was looking for a buyer. Where are they now? I haven’t
heard much news about ‘em lately. They are apparently still getting some
product to dealers, however. The website comes and goes and products, even
bread and butter ones like the LX90, are frequently shown as “out of stock.”
The irony? As that bad news came out, I’d just completed a review of their
LX85 and was quite impressed. “Meade is back,” I thought.
In a good sign for the revival of the Blog, January 2020
featured not one but two entries. The second being an account of my
yearly ritual of photographing M13. This edition concerned me doing that with
the above mentioned LX85 the previous fall. As above, I was quite impressed by
the optics of the 8-inch Coma-Free SCT that came with the LX85 GEM package, and
also by the quality of the AVX-like mount. Actually, I thought the Meade LX85,
which features ball bearings on the declination axis as well as the RA axis,
unlike the Advanced VX, tracked better and was easier to guide.
April? How about February and March? There wasn’t any
February and March. Unk wasn’t quite ready to get the Blog back on the rails till
April, but when I did, I swore I would get at least one and sometimes two new
articles out the door every stinkin’ month. The first of these was a real blast
from the past, since it found me in the backyard with my Mallincam deep sky
video camera I hadn’t used in years.
I was curious to see how it would work—or if it would work
at all—since I had not applied power to it in at least five annums. But the
Mallincam Xtreme fired right up and worked just as well as it ever had. So did everything
else. Yes, your silly Unk did fumble around a bit with the Mallincam software,
but he finally got back in the groove.
As with the Mallincam, I was hoping all would be well after
going on two years of disuse. And it was save for one thing: the mount’s internal battery, a button cell.
After getting over the shock of what one little battery can cost on fricking Amazon,
Unk installed it in the Gemini II, got the mount into the backyard, and got it
going again. “Going” meaning this wonderful mount performed just as well as
ever.
Confronted with a downright strange stretch of clear spring
weather, your uncle was able to get another Blog entry into virtual print in
May. I realized that if I were to get outside with a telescope more regularly
again, I needed a project. That project, I decided, would be The New Herschel
Project.
Which would be decidedly more modest than the original
Herschel (2500) Project documented in this blog. That project, a.k.a. “The Big
Enchilada,” involved me observing all 2500 Herschel deep sky objects in less
than three years. This time? Fewer objects, but more challenging in its own
way: I would observe the original Herschel
400 objects from my average suburban backyard. I would use the Mallincam when
necessary, but the largest aperture telescope would be the largest left in my
inventory. My sweet 10-inch Dobbie, Zelda.
The month’s first entry was about the first evening of the
New Herschel Project. And, more prominently, the telescope I used to essay
that: Charity Hope Valentine, my Meade
ETX 125. Like everything else the little scope had lain dormant for years.
Before I could think of getting her into the backyard, I
knew I’d want to replace the battery in Charity’s LNT finder (she is a PE style
ETX). That battery, like the Gemini II’s cell, keeps the scope’s clock running.
I ordered one for Charity, and ordered one for the Celestron AVX as well, since
I reckoned it would be good and dead too. Replacing Charity’s battery was a
pain as always, but I got ‘er done and got the little scope into the backyard.
Alas, clouds scuttled our mission after we’d seen but one
object. I was glad I’d got the little scope outside, though. For one thing, I
found that the hand control cable was going bad. The insulation was gone in
places. I’ll replace that “soon.” Another reason? She is a good little telescope
and I still and always will love her.
There was a third entry in June, believe it or not. But it
recounted a rather bitter affair. I’d found my Celestron Edge 800 had a
severe problem. After seven years, the paint on the interior of her tube was
failing. That necessitated carefully removing as much of the old paint (which
had quite obviously been applied to an improperly prepared surface) as possible and repainting
the interior.
July’s second article took Unk from the high-tech to the very
lowest tech. Wherein your correspondent went hunting for the amazing Comet Neowise
with binoculars. I began with my 100mm giants, but when it became obvious I’d
have to hunt up the parts and pieces of their mount, I backed off to my Burgess
15x70s. The comet looked amazing nevertheless.
August recounted Unk’s adventures with hand-held astronomy
software from the Palm Pilot days onward. This was spurred on in part by a Sky
& Telescope assignment I was working on, a Test Report on the new
version of SkySafari. Needless to say, I was impressed by the new ‘Safari.
I’d skipped a version, and was amazed how far the software had come in a short
while. I don’t hesitate to say it is now fully the equal of most PC and Mac astronomy
programs.
Well, Muchachos…September was not exactly an astronomy-friendly
month down here in Possum Swamp. We were hit by a pretty serious hurricane,
Sally. This installment was about the passage of the big storm. While it caused
a lot of damage to our east, the sum total of her depredations here was a
downed 6-meter antenna and a few limbs in the yard. We were on the standby generator
for less than an hour.
The year began with my M13 tradition and it was ending with
the same. I knew I had to get out right away, as soon as the Gulf calmed down,
or there would be no yearly M13. To be honest with y’all, it had been
about three years since I’d done any astrophotography, and I was a mite nervous
about whether I’d remember what to do and how to do it.
To make things easy on myself, I employed my beloved William
Optics Megrez II Fluorite, an 80mm f/7, Veronica Lodge. She makes
astrophotography as easy as that difficult art ever can be with her excellent
wide-field optics. My results were nothing special, but got me back into the
groove of polar alignment, guiding, and image processing.
November brought another Herschel evening, and a pretty good
haul of objects. The ostensible goal was getting CPWI working in wireless
fashion with the AVX mount, but it didn’t take me long to figure out that was a
no-go. My first generation Celestron wireless dongle just wouldn’t stay
connected for long. I went back to “wired” and had mucho fun doing Herschels
visually.
The final post of the year was about—what else could
it have been about?—The Christmas Star, the grand conjunction of Jupiter
and Saturn. The article also comprised my annual Christmas card to you, my dear
readers, but the focus was on the opposition. For once the weather cooperated,
and I was able to see the spectacle and show it off to Miss Dorothy and a few
neighbors with my 80mm f/11 achromat, Midge.
2021? Who knows what this year will hold? It is starting off in genuinely crazy fashion. Unk? I have two hopes: that me and Miss D. get the vaccine soon and that I get up the gumption to get a scope outside and really start knocking off some Herschels. Which I promise to do just as soon as it gets a little warmer, muchachos.
Thursday, December 24, 2020
Issue #571: Merry Christmas 2020 from Uncle Rod and the AstroBlog…
Well, I did manage to sneak in another issue before this cursed year was history, muchachos. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to do that or not, though. It’s been cloudy more often than it’s been clear this December, and the clear nights we have had have been unseasonably cold for us down here on the borders of the Great Possum Swamp.
That’s a problem for your correspondent of late, since, for
some reason, I seem to feel the cold more acutely after my accident last
year. Much as I might want to do some observing, the idea of shivering in the
dark sometimes keeps me inside. Be that as it may, I did get out one recent chilly
evening. How could I not? It was the GRAND CONJUNCTION.
Like everybody else, your old uncle was very much looking
forward to the once in a lifetime experience of seeing Jupiter and Saturn in
one eyepiece field. Howsomeever, as the 21st of December approached I sensed not all was sweetness and light with my fellow astronomers. What was raising some of you folks’ hackles, oddly enough, seemed to be the
public’s excitement about the event.
Yeah, that did seem a mite strange. Most of us want
mom and pop to look up and see the stars. Alas, some of us also insist that has to be
done our way, with respect and no appropriation of our turf. What
I’m referring to is irritation over the conjunction being touted in the media
and by the man-on-the-street as “the Christmas star.”
Why did that bother anybody? Well, some of us said it
was merely because they wanted the facts clear in the minds of the
public. This wasn’t any star. It was merely an effect of perspective.
The two planets only appeared to be close to each other in the sky from our
vantage point. There was no magic or miracles to it. “Why can’t we just stick to the cold, hard, immutable laws of physics?”
“Now, now. Calm down, y’all” was my advice. I suspected most of the general public actually knew the conjunction wasn’t a star, but the
planets Jupiter and Saturn. The reports I saw on CNN and MSNBC certainly emphasized
that.
Anyhoo, I believe the problem for some of us wasn’t
so much our fear the public would confuse planets for a star as it was the
religion angle. But you know what? For many people, including people in the sciences, even
in these latter days, faith is important. Very important indeed. And if
this conjunction reaffirmed that faith and brought a little hope at the end of a dark year, so what? Is that such a bad thing? What’s
also worth noting? A conjunction very much like this one did take
place in 3 BC.
Another irritant for not a few sky watchers? That darned public was poaching in our private preserve. Trying to filch OUR conjunction. We’ve seen this before with Blue Moons and Super Moons. I admit the latter used to drive me bananas, too. Until the night I was strolling Selma Street back in the heyday of Chaos Manor South on the evening of one such Super Moon...
I was all primed to tell any of my neighbors who inquired, “Sorry, the difference in the size of the Moon is undiscernible by the human eye. There is nothing ‘super’ about it.” That’s what I was gonna say until I noticed all the little families gathered on their front porches gazing at Luna in wonder. Instead, I bit my tongue and let them marvel at a glorious sight.
Which is what I advised folks in our community to do when
the subject of the Christmas Star came up. I took some heat for that. But I
didn’t care. I took quite a lot of heat for a Focal Point (editorial) I wrote
for Sky & Telescope many years ago wherein I opined the (now bygone, I guess) practice of buying and selling stars was maybe not the bad
thing some of us made it out to be. I didn’t care then, either. If “buying” a
star or gazing at a Christmas one causes someone to wonder, I am happy.
Anyhow. Enough editorializing. I wanted to see that Christmas
Star with my own eyes. The question was how. It didn’t take long for me to
decide I’d do it simply. No fancy cameras or tracking mounts. Just my 80mm f/11
SkyWatcher refractor, Midge, on her AZ-4 alt-azimuth mount.
There were several reasons for that. Given our weather of
late, it wouldn’t be unlikely we’d be clouded out at the last minute
and I’d be setting up a big scope just to tear it down and carry it back inside
a few minutes later. Also, the planets would be awfully low by the time
darkness came on December 21st. I suspected I’d have to move the
scope around to avoid trees. Finally, I just wanted to enjoy the event and
maybe show it to a neighbor or two, not worry over cameras and computers.
Pretty Moon. |
Almost ready, I had a quick look at the fattening Moon so I
could precisely align the red-dot bb gun finder on the scope—Selene was beautiful, natch.
But I didn't linger, quickly moving over to the pair of planets—who were now, indeed, a single point to my eyes. In went
a 13mm Plössl, and to that went my eye.
To say the sight was a beautiful one would be an
understatement. It wasn’t just that the planets looked good in the (relatively)
long refractor. It was the idea of the thing. Those two enormous gas giants in
one rather small eyepiece field. Furthermore, it was the realization that
Jupiter was a much closer foreground object than the ringed wonder, who was about twice as distant as Jove. Pondering on that and looking and looking almost made
it feel as if I were seeing the depth of a 3D image…and I almost thunk myself
into a mild case of vertigo!
While it was the juxtaposition of the two that was so striking,
there was no denying my inexpensive refractor was delivering the goods. At 68x, there was plenty of banding detail and color on Jupiter. Saturn was a deep
yellow, showing off Cassini’s Division and a little disk detail. Upped the
magnification to 150x and they still looked great despite the fact the
Christmas Star was getting lower and lower and the seeing was naturally
becoming lousier and lousier.
The SkyWatcher, Midge, came to me quite a few years ago and
for only one reason: I fancied her
mount. I had originally intended to buy the alt-az rig from Orion, where it was
badged “Orion Versago.” Luckily, I announced that intention on a Cloudy
Nights forum, and a kind person clued me in to the fact I could get the same
mount for less money from B&H Photo, where it was being sold as the
SkyWatcher AZ-4. And not only that, the SkyWatcher package included an 80mm
f/11 achromatic refractor.
Naturally, I went for the SkyWatcher and immediately
recognized Midge was a fine little telescope. Beautifully finished tube, good
focuser (though only a 1.25-incher), and surprisingly good optics. I will admit the scope was little used for the longest time. But a decade later she is out in the backyard a lot. She is trivial for your now somewhat feeble
old uncle to set up—if I am just going to be giving something a quick look, I
leave the eyepiece tray off the tripod, and am able to quickly collapse the legs to maneuver through doorways.
![]() |
My souvenir of the evening... |
Eventually, of course, the Star really got down into the mess at the horizon. Before winding things up, I held my iPhone up to the eyepiece and shot a few pictures. Not because I expected much of an image, but just so I'd have a "souvenir" of the evening. I went back to the pretty Moon and shot a few of her as well. Soon thereafter, your uncle retreated to his den for a warming potation and a second viewing of the season 2 finale of The Mandalorian.
I am always a little stressed out over big
astro-events that capture the public's attention. There have been a lot of Kahouteks over the years, afterall. But this was one astronomy Special Event that
really worked out; not just for me and my fellow astronomers, but for everybody,
and for that I am glad.
Christmas Eve…
These latter-day Christmas Eves are nothing like those huge Christmas Eves of yore at old Chaos Manor South with a giant tree and little kids, eyes full of wonder, running everywhere. And no trips to old El Giro's for margaritas like we used to do each Yule eve, either. This Christmas in the Year of the Plague was an even more quiet one than those of late. Just me and Miss Dorothy. On the morrow, I’ll fix a nice Christmas repast for two (I’m doing a ham this year) and see what the Jolly Old Elf brought me.
Whether I get out with a telescope or not between now and New Year’s, I’ll be back before long with an article to, if nothing else, tell you WHAT I GOT! Have a beautiful holiday, muchachos.
"Wait just one cotton pickin' minute, Unk! Ain't you forgettin' something?!" Almost did: My traditional Christmas Eve viewing of that greatest and most numinous of ornaments, M42, The Great Orion Nebula. It hadn't looked good when I had arisen at my accustomed 07:30 on Christmas Eve morning. Windy, thunderstorms, generally yucky. Looking at Accuweather on my phone (I got tired of the Weather Channel's pop-over ads), and the Clear Sky Clock (I will never call it "Chart"), however, showed maybe there was some hope.
Following my normal Thursday night routine, checking into the Lockdown Fun Net on 28.420Mhz, I peeped out the radio shack door. And there was Rigel shining on like some crazy diamond. I hurried into the house, fetched Midge, and inserted the 17mm Koenig eyepiece I'd purchased at the 1993 Deep South Regional Star Gaze into her diagonal. Best view of M42 I've ever had? No. This was a 3-inch telescope under suburban skies with a waxing Moon nearby. But beautiful? Yes. I looked upon it as a good omen.
Sunday, November 29, 2020
Issue 570: The New Herschel Project Night 3: 29 down and 371 to Go
When I resurrected the good, old AstroBlog some months ago, muchachos, I said it was my hope to bring you a new article at least every other week. ‘Twas not to be in November. In this time when everybody with a lick of sense is sticking close to home, it wasn’t like I could travel to a star party or a dark site somewhere. I’d have to report on my backyard adventures. That is just OK, but it takes clear skies to do that and late-season hurricane Zeta saw to it I didn’t have any of those.
So, the first half of the month went down the tubes thanks
to the lousy WX. What about the second half? As November neared its
end and hurricane season finally petered out, it was time to play telescopes. It
was time to do a little backyard astronomy before the month was done in hopes of
keeping my head above water Herschel-wise.
That was what was on the agenda: Night Three of the New
Herschel Project, my quest to observe and/or image all 400 deep sky
objects from the first, the best, the brightest list of ‘em, the Herschel 400. And to do it from my humble suburban backyard. I had another mission, though. I had
satisfied myself Celestron’s neo-NexRemote, CPWI,
worked fine with my Advanced VX mount. It worked fine with a serial cable
from the PC to the AVX. How about with a wireless set-up?
Since I expected to do some wrestling with the laptop trying
to get CPWI squared away, I thought I’d keep Night Three relatively simple. I’d
leave the Mallincam alone and go visual. On a good night, my backyard has a
zenith limiting magnitude of about 5, so doing the more prominent aitches with
an eyepiece shouldn’t be a problem.
There would be one other change from Night One. I decided to
put SkyTools 3 on the bench. While I love the program, there were a
couple of issues regarding its use in the New Project. First off, something is
squirrely with the H-400 list I downloaded from Skyhound.com. When I’d load the list and connect SkyTools to CPWI so I could initiate gotos from SkyTools,
the program would crash. Investigation revealed it was fine with any other
list. Apparently, something in the list of 400 objects was driving my Lenovo
laptop computer bats. I tried redownloading the H-400, but no dice. SkyTools 3 would just suddenly go away.
Problemo numero dos? My eyes have been going south
for over three decades. I’d always had outstanding vision and expected that not
to change. Until one evening in the late 80s when I was out cruising the
Messiers with a small scope and Jay Pasachoff’s Field Guide to the Stars and
Planets. The Tirion charts in the book are on the small side, and
they are of the white stars on black sky variety, which is harder to make out
in the dark than the opposite. But I’d never had trouble using them with a dim
red light. Until this particular evening, when I realized they were now totally
unreadable for me. How does that relate to now? The text in SkyTools 3
is on the small side, and can be a pain even though I’m wearing glasses.
Deep Sky Planner 7 |
Once the Edge 800, Mrs. Emma Peel, was on her mount in the
backyard in late afternoon, I took a couple of minutes to check her over. As
you know if you read thisun, I had to do some
rather serious maintenance on the telescope not long ago. The problem, if you
haven’t read that entry yet, was the paint on the inside surface of her
tube was failing. I had to remove as much of the old paint as I could,
which wasn’t hard—it was coming off with mild scrubbing—and repaint the
interior. I’m still awfully mad at fricking-fracking (this is a family friendly
blog, y’all) Celestron, but the new paint is adhering well. My brush-on
job will never look as good as spray-paint, but it looks OK.
Emma’s physical done, all that remained was to set up the
laptop. That wasn’t hard since I’d be going visual. All I’d require was the Lenovo
itself, its power supply, mouse, and the Xbox gamepad (a wired model) I use to
slew the scope when it’s under the control of CPWI.
I did round up my Celestron-style serial cable just in case
the wheels fell off the wireless business. But I had some hopes since I’ve recently
had very good success controlling the scope with the SkyQ Wi-Fi dongle and
SkySafari. I also fetched the StarSense hand control just in case. Finally, I plugged
the StarSense alignment camera into the port where the HC would normally go—no
hardware HC is needed when you go wireless.
When darkness arrived—blessedly early these days—I powered
up the Advanced VX, turned on Emma’s DewBuster heaters, and got set to tackle
wireless scope control. Next step, of course, was to fire-up the CPWI program.
It has been updated fairly recently, so you might want to check your version
and head to Celestron’s website (such as it is) and do a download. There are
some bug fixes and also some additional features for the gamepad. Those gamepad
options are still not nearly—not NEARLY—as robust as they were for NexRemote,
so it’s reassuring Celestron seems to be slowly chipping away at that.
Celestron's latest CPWI. |
Alas, your silly old Uncle’s elation was not to last.
Remember what I said up above about wheels falling off? Well they came off my
wireless wagon in just a few minutes. There was no apparent cause; CPWI just
disconnected from the telescope and there was nothing I could do to get it to
reconnect short of rebooting the laptop. It wasn’t just a fluke, either. I
tried a couple of times and the same thing happened: I could connect and align without a hassle,
but that connection only lasted a few minutes.
Why? It wasn’t
the strength of the Wi-Fi signal from the SkyQ dongle. I was less that three
meters from the scope and the laptop’s Wi-Fi signal strength indicator was maxed out.
Also, I was using the SkyQ’s simplest mode, Direct Connect, which does not
involve your home network. I suspect the problem lies deep within the SkyQ.
My SkyQ Link dongle (it's now called "Sky Portal Link") is, as I’ve mentioned before, the seven year-old
first version of the device. Today, it works pretty reliably with SkySafari,
but apparently that is kind of its limit. Even there, if I let my iPhone go to
sleep it takes the App about 15 seconds to reconnect to the scope. I don’t
believe that can be normal, and suspect that’s because of the shaky first
version nature of the dongle. Heck, at least I can do something with it.
When I first got it, it wouldn’t do a derned thing.
Oh, well, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles and not overly surprising. I shut off the mount, shut down CPWI, connected the serial cable between the Lenovo and the StarSense hand control and started over. There were no surprises thereafter.
The night was getting slightly old by the
time I finished messing around with my wireless debacle. I did a StarSense
alignment, brought up Deep Sky Planner 7, connected it to the CPWI program and
essayed a few objects before it was time to shut down so your Uncle could go
inside and watch the latest episode of The Mandalorian, a show he fancies.
Before I address the evening’s rather paltry haul of
objects, I do want to talk a little about Deep Sky Planner. I’ve gone
into detail about this wonderful program both in the AstroBlog and in a Test Report I did for Sky & Telescope some
years ago. But I want to give it a little space here since it is one of the
best planning programs in the business, has been under constant development
by Ms. Phyllis for many years, and is remarkably stable.
This subject is particularly appropriate at the moment since Unk has heard Deep Sky Planner 8 has just been released (I used 7 on this night). If
you haven’t given the program a try—there is a limited trial version available,
I believe—you owe it to yourself to do so, and I’m
hoping a few words on it here might impel those benighted souls who don’t know
the program to at least visit its Knightware website.
What is great about Deep Sky Planner? It’s
not just that it is very legible out on the observing field, even for my tired, old
eyes. It is its simple, elegant design. As you can see in the screenshots here,
DSP sports a fairly standard Windows menu system—you, know File, Window, Help,
etc. Certainly, it has specialized menus because of its specialized nature as
astro-ware: Observing Log, Telescope Control, etc. But here’s the thing,
campers…the menus, even the specialized ones, are in the usual place at the top
of the display.
The Herschel 400 plan loaded and ready! |
What else? These days, the number of objects contained in a
program is not as much of an issue as it used to be. Heck, even smart phone
astro-apps contain millions of deep sky objects. However, those of you who,
like me, started using computers in astronomy back when the Yale Bright Star
Catalog and the Messier list made a planetarium program a heavy hitter,
probably want to know the totals for DSP. They are impressive. Deep Sky Planner
8 holds 1.6 million objects (you can get the breakdown on the Knightware website).
I believe that will satisfy most of us even in these latter days. Let me add that you may not have to spend any time searching that big library to build observing plans. The program's website has many ready-made plans posted (accessed with the "Community Page" selection in the Help menu).
Any downsides to the program? I’m not sure it’s a downside,
but DSP does not offer charts of any kind. That may surprise some, since
sky maps have been a feature of most planning programs since this type of software
appeared way back in the early 90s with DS3D (Deep Sky 3D, an MSDOS program). But
that’s the way Deep Sky Planner has always been
Truthfully, though, it doesn’t bother me regarding DSP. You
can download images of target objects from the Digitized Sky Survey, so you
can easily see details of an object's field. More importantly, the program can
be linked to a number of planetarium programs including TheSky and Cartes
du Ciel. Only wish I had? That Phyllis would figure out how to connect DSP
to my fave planetarium, Stellarium. Guess what? That has happened in Deep
Sky Planner 8.
OK, so I hope I’ve encouraged you to visit the Knightware site
and have a look around at least. Anyhoo, once I had the scope aligned via CPWI,
and Deep Sky Planner runnin’, I had a look at a few of the Herschel 400’s
bright showpieces. Wait. What? You didn’t know the Herschel 400 had
bright showpieces? Hoo-boy, are you in for a treat when you begin the list! These are just a sampling
of ‘em. Oh, if you find the Herschel Numbers puzzling, have a look at this somewhat dusty old AstroBlog entry.
First up was one of my all-time favorite open star clusters,
H45-4 (NGC 457), the ET Cluster (DSP lists the common name for this one as the “Dragonfly,” but it will always be the little Extraterrestrial to me).
It was quite a sight in Mrs. Peel with my 25mm 2-inch Bresser wide-field
eyepiece (that Unk, amazingly, won at one of the last Deep South Regional Star
Gazes he attended). The field of the Bresser was littered with myriad little
gems, and ET’s googly eye, bright Phi Cassiopeiae, just blazed away.
Since I was in the north, I decided to view the Dragon’s H37-4
(NGC 6543), the Cat’s Eye Nebula. It’s bright, at magnitude 8, but if you
expect the Cat to look anything like its amazing Hubble portrait from your
backyard with an 8-inch telescope, you are in for a big disappointment. At high
power with the 4.7mm Explore Scientific 82-degree (another win, from my last Chiefland
Star Party), I could get fleeting hints of some sort of internal detail. But
that’s all it was, “fleeting.” Mostly it was just a somewhat off-round
blue-gray ball of smoke with a prominent central star.
In early evening this time of year, that great old horse, Pegasus,
sprawls across Northern Hemisphere skies. He was my next stop for an easy and
pretty catch, H18-4 (NGC 7662), the Blue Snowball nebula. At the 298x
delivered by the Explore, the magnitude 8.4 Snowball was quite obviously blue,
and, yeah, looked like a ghostly snowball. Pretty, but no hint of any detail.
Another piece of low hanging Herschel fruit is in Andromeda,
H224-2 (NGC 404), Mirach’s Ghost. This is a relatively small (3’) S0
galaxy with a magnitude of 11.7. You’d think this might be hard from the suburbs,
but it is not. The only impediment is that magnitude 2 Mirach is a mere 7’
away. Nevertheless, even in the suburbs the galaxy is easy-peasy looking very
much like the “ghost” of Mirach—or maybe an eyepiece reflection.
![]() |
Old Betsy in her original form 26 years ago at Chaos Manor South. |
The night was getting older, and, almost unbelievably, the
great swan, Cygnus, was preparing to dive beneath the western horizon. I had
just enough time to visit one of the constellation’s many wonders, H73-4
(NGC6826), the Blinking Planetary. The popular name comes from this object's peculiar feature: look
straight at it in the eyepiece and the round nebula surrounding a bright central
star disappears. Look away, use averted vision, and the nebulosity pops back into
view. Alternate looking at and away from the nebula and it indeed blinks on and
off.
Normally, my skies are good enough and Mrs. Peel is large
enough that the blinking effect is reduced (more aperture allows you to see the
nebulosity with direct vision and the blinking pretty much goes away). Tonight,
however, the effect was pronounced—likely because the object was in the
thick and dirty air at the horizon.
With later evening upon me, the stars of winter were
beginning to glitter in the East. One of my all-time fave planetaries is
located in Gemini, H45-4 (NGC 2392), the Eskimo Nebula (I know it’s now
politically correct to call it the “Clown Nebula,” but after this many
years I can’t get used to that name). How was this bright ball of fluff?
As midnight approached, it was able to put on a pretty good show with the
Explore. The central star is trivial to observe; the goal is detail, like “ruff”
of the Eskimo’s parka (the central star is the Eskimo’s nose). I’ve at least had hints of this with a 4-inch
from the city. With the SCT from the suburbs it really wasn’t a huge challenge—of
course I’ve had many years of experience with this object. Pretty!
Time enough for just one more. Unk’s warm den was really
beckoning by now. H27-5 (NGC 2264), Monoceros’ Christmas Tree Cluster is another
DSO I’ve often visited over my decades of amateur astronomy. Verdict? It looked
good from Chaos Manor South with an ETX, and it looks good from the deep
suburbs with an Edge 800. It sure doesn’t take much looking to see how this
open cluster got its name. Bright (magnitude 7.8) 15 Monocerotis forms the base
of the tree and scads of dimmer—but still brilliant—sparkers form the near
perfect outline of a Yule tree. What about the famous Cone Nebula, LDN 1613, at the top of the tree?
It is a challenge for very large Dobsonians from the darkest sites. On the other
hand, my Xtreme will make pretty quick work of it with the SCT from reasonably good skies.
After sitting there at the foot of that beautiful Christmas
Tree for quite some time, gazing up at its numinous ornaments, your aged Uncle
began to feel chilled. It was time for that den, a little TV, and perhaps some
warming libations.
This night was fun, but thanks to the weather I am badly
behind the New Herschel Project power curve. I need to do objects and lots
of them to keep on my “one year” informal timeline. So, next time, whenever that
is, it will be “Mallincam Xtreme” all the way, muchachos.
Finally, given the pandemic, it was a quiet Thanksgiving at home for Unk and Miss Dorothy. Our many Thanksgivings at the beautiful Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans' French Quarter seem a long, long time ago now. Nevertheless, it was a nice holiday and Unk's turkey--the first one I've ever brined--turned out very well indeed. I hope all of you, my dear readers, had a happy and safe holiday, too.
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
My Yearly M13, like my Christmas Eve peek at M42, is a tradition I’ve maintained through the years—when I can, anyhow.
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.