The McWetlog

Controlling a computerized telescope from a computer is not new; it usually requires compatible desktop planetarium software and a serial cable to connect the computer to the telescope mount. The only wireless option I was previously aware of was to use Starry Night Pro with a Bluetooth adapter — though it appears that that adapter is no longer available.

Enter Carina Software’s SkyFi Wireless Telescope Controller, which adds WiFi to a computerized telescope. It connects to most telescope mounts with serial (RS-232) interfaces, including the two I own (the Celestron NexStar 5 SE and the Sky-Watcher HEQ5 Pro). Ironically, it isn’t compatible with newer mounts with USB ports, though they’re working on that. As you might have guessed from their name, Carina Software also makes software, including SkyVoyager, a planetarium app for the iPhone and iPod touch. I’ve been using it for a while; it’s a nice app. SkyVoyager, by the by, includes telescope control. Until this gizmo, that meant connecting via WiFi to a computer running Voyager, Carina’s desktop application, that was plugged into the telescope mount in the usual manner. Now you can control a computerized telescope wirelessly from an iPhone or iPod touch — directly. Contemplate that for a moment: controlling a computerized telescope from a phone or an iPod.

This made a big splash at Macworld this month: see coverage at MacRumors and MacNN.

SkyFi costs $150; SkyVoyager costs $15; Voyager runs between $100 and $180.

Here’s a raw, unprocessed, monochrome image of Prometheus, a small moon of Saturn, taken by Cassini last Wednesday; I’ve edited out some of the cosmic ray hits on the sensor. It’s today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day; the Planetary Society’s Emily Lakdawalla has been playing with some Prometheus imagery. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.

A composite image of the four largest moons of Jupiter. From left to right: Ganymede, Callisto, Io and Europa. Credit: NASA/JPL/DLR.

Ganymede and Callisto are the two largest moons of Jupiter. They’re similar in size and chemical composition (half rock, half ice), and both may have subsurface oceans, but their differences — Ganymede has a differentiated core and is the only moon in the solar system with a magnetosphere — have been confounding planetologists. Researchers at the Southwest Research Institute have proposed an explanation that has to do with the Late Heavy Bombardment, approximately four billion years ago, when comets and asteroids pelted the Earth’s Moon and other terrestrial planets. When these impactors hit Ganymede and Callisto, the ice at the impact site melted. Ganymede is a lot closer to Jupiter than Callisto; according to the researchers’ model, thanks to Jupiter’s gravity, about twice as many impactors hit Ganymede than hit Callisto — and they hit a lot harder, too. The net effect is that a lot more of Ganymede’s ice turned to liquid water, and the remaining rocky materials sank and settled in the core. Neat. News coverage: Astronomy, CBC News, Universe Today.

Callisto escaped a lot of the Late Heavy Bombardment because it’s so far away from Jupiter — at about 1.9 million kilometres, it’s the most distant of Jupiter’s four major (Galilean) moons. That distance means it’s not in an orbital resonance with the other three moons (Io, Europa and Ganymede are in a 1:2:4 resonance, which means that Io completes four orbits for every two of Europa’s and one of Ganymede’s). It’s still tidally locked, though. Callisto is also far enough away that it does not receive nearly as much radiation as the other major moons. Its 0.01 rem per day is a lot more manageable than Ganymede’s 8 rem per day (nearly six times the yearly limit for radiation workers), Europa’s 540 rem per day (60 percent fatality after 30 days), or Io’s 3,600 rem per day (100 percent fatality after seven days). If human beings are going to set up a base in the Jupiter system, it’s going to be on Callisto.

The Daily Telegraph has a story about British astrophotographer Peter Shah, who’s taken some awfully good photos with amateur equipment. I don’t think the Telegraph knows much about amateur astrophotography: while Mr. Shah’s work is pretty good, comparing it to Hubble imagery is a bit much; there are plenty of astrophotographers out there doing equally good work — or better. (Mr. Shah is, on the other hand, better at promotion: he’s self-published a book of his photos. Nice!)

And calling Mr. Shah’s equipment “modest” is a bit misleading: £20,000 (about $34,000 Canadian) is well within the range of the astrophotographers’ kit I discussed in September. It’s “modest” in the way that spicy food is “medium” — i.e., it’s not synonymous with “mild”: it packs a punch, but it’s not nearly as lethal as some other stuff out there. Mr. Shah shoots with a very good astronomical CCD through an eight-inch astrograph on a Losmandy G11 mount, attached to a concrete pier in a dedicated observatory (the telescope is the cheapest part of this package). This, or something equivalent, is the most that most astrophotographers will realistically be able to aspire to. Fortunately, Mr. Shah’s example shows us that you can do very, very good work with what is good-quality, not-inexpensive but attainable equipment.

My own astrophotography rig is about one-tenth the cost of Mr. Shah’s, but with practice I should be able to do some serious work with it. I’ve been poking through a couple of astrophotography groups on Flickr, and I’ve been amazed at the results some astrophotographers have gotten with inexpensive 80mm apo doublet refractors — which bodes well for me. Short of an imaging light-pollution filter and an autoguider, I already have everything I need in terms of equipment.

On the other hand, I’ve seen some pretty mediocre work — even from people using high-end gear. Owning a 16-megapixel cooled astronomical CCD and a 24-inch Ritchey-Chrétien does not automatically make for good astrophotography, just as owning a Hasselblad or a Leica does not automatically make you a good landscape photographer. Astrophotography is not a point-and-shoot affair: there are a lot of tasks — collimation, polar alignment, accurate focusing, image processing — that take time and practice to get good at. I’m just getting started, and I figure it’ll take me years to exhaust the capabilities of my current gear.

It’s easy to focus on the equipment, but you can accomplish an awful lot with modest gear if you know what you’re doing, and the best gear won’t help you much if you don’t.

I’m quite susceptible to positive feedback; when I get it, I’m encouraged to keep at whatever it is I’ve gotten it for. I’ve been getting a lot of positive feedback for my astrophotography. On Flickr, the most popular photos I took in 2009 were, by far, this shot of the Moon and this attempt at star trails photography. Even if I’ve been posting my photos to all the relevant astrophotography groups, the resulting feedback has been gratifying — and maybe a little surprising: I didn’t think they were all that good. I’ve seen better, and want to do better (which, you will agree, is the right attitude to take if you want to get good at something).

This year’s Christmas gifts were in the same vein. First, that Moon photo was surreptitiously, printed, framed and presented to me as a gift. It now hangs above my piano. And second, Jennifer presented me with a Sky-Watcher eight-inch Newtonian reflector, with the intent of my using it for astrophotography. It’s not a true astrograph, and may need a new focuser and a Paracorr to really excel at that task, but from all accounts it’s a very good scope with a great bang for the buck, and it should be light enough for the HEQ5 Pro mount (I’ll find out soon enough, probably in the spring).

I’m getting the distinct impression that I should keep at the astrophotography.

Orion has lost its mind: the telescope and binocular company has announced three “monster” Dobsonian telescopes, with apertures of 36, 40 and 50 inches. Yes, 50. The 50-incher, which won’t be available for a year and a half, will have a 500-pound mirror and, fully assembled, will weigh 900 pounds and be more than 14 feet long. It will also cost $123,000 (U.S.).

These are easily the largest commercially available telescopes out there; even Obsession maxes out at 25 inches (Obsession discontinued its 30-incher a while back, and made a grand total of four 36-inch telescopes before the difficulties of manufacturing nearly killed them). There are observatories with smaller scopes than this; in the 50-incher’s product description, Orion says that they’re aware of only three 48-inch scopes in amateur hands.

Now we won’t be able to pick these up at a local telescope dealer: they’re built to order, with a 75 percent down payment. If Orion sells more than, say, five of these in a single year, I’ll be shocked. These are clearly halo products intended to build Orion’s brand equity — the telescopic equivalent of a fancy sports car at the top of the marque to help push sales of compact cars. For a company that mainly imports inexpensive Chinese-manufactured scopes, this is an interesting move. And by “interesting” I mean, of course, “batshit crazy.”

One more example of holyshittery: all telescopes come with a warning not to point it at the sun, because it could damage the scope or, worse, blind you. These telescopes’ warning is a bit more insistent: not only could this thing blind you, it could start fires: “Don’t point a Monster Dob at the sun! Just pointing this at the sun can instantly damage eyepieces and cause irreversible eye damage and burns. Use extreme caution leaving it uncovered during daylight. Concentrated sunlight from this much aperture can damage the telescope or set its surroundings on fire!”

The huge stellar cluster R136, comprising massive O-type stars that will explode as supernovas within a few million years, resides within the Tarantula Nebula in 30 Doradus, about 170,000-190,000 light years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud. It’s the largest star-forming region in the Local Group of galaxies. The Hubble Space Telescope took this false-colour image between October 20 and 27, 2009, with its new Wide Field Camera 3; the view spans about 100 light years. Via Gizmodo and Universe Today. Image credit: NASA, ESA, and F. Paresce (INAF-IASF, Bologna, Italy), R. O’Connell (University of Virginia, Charlottesville), and the Wide Field Camera 3 Science Oversight Committee.

The ejecta plume from the LCROSS upper stage 20 seconds after impact (NASA).

The big news in space last week was the announcement that the LCROSS probe, which along with its Centaur upper stage rocket smacked into Cabeus crater on October 9, has discovered water on the Moon.

Now, this isn’t exactly a surprise: the possibility of water is precisely why NASA sent LCROSS there. The idea was that water ice might persist in craters near the lunar poles that never saw sunlight. Water molecules don’t tend to survive on the lunar surface: sunlight tends to break water molecules apart. So the plan with LCROSS was to smack something big — i.e., the Centaur stage — into a crater they thought might contain water and then analyse the ejecta plume spectroscopically (before LCROSS itself crashed). The data revealed at least 100 kilograms of water vapour — which principal investigator Tony Colaprete called “a significant amount.”

Coverage: Astronomy; Bad Astronomer; Sky and Telescope; Universe Today.

The presence of water is everything from the perspective of setting up a permanent base: if there’s water on the Moon, you might not have to take it with you. It has implications not only for potable water, but also for generating fuel for fuel cells and rocket propellants: water ice from craters in permanent shadow could be electrolicized using power generated by solar cells set up on nearby mountains in permanent sunlight. It’s why talk of a permanent lunar base has generally assumed that it would be at the poles — because such talk assumed the existence of water at the poles. That may no longer be merely an assumption.

Pete Conrad at the Surveyor 3 spacecraft; the Apollo 12 lunar module is in the background. November 20, 1969. Credit: Apollo 12 crew/NASA.

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 12, the second manned lunar landing. Each Apollo mission had its own memorable highlights, and 12 had plenty: not least of which the fact that the Saturn V rocket was struck twice by lightning during the launch. It was also the first precision landing, with the lunar module coming down within 200 metres of Surveyor 3.

Apollo 12’s lunar module pilot, Alan Bean, turned himself into a full-time painter after his retirement from NASA. He’s been painting scenes from the Apollo mission for years, incorporating bits of his uniform and moon dust into his paintings, and texturing them with his boot prints. An exhibition of his work opened at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in July and runs until January 13, 2010; I bought the accompanying book, Alan Bean: Painting Apollo (Amazon.ca, Amazon.com), which reproduces his work since 1982. It’s interesting stuff, not at all photorealistic — an honest attempt to portray in paint what he saw and experienced, and definitely a change from the books that collect Apollo-era photos that have been published this year.

Miles O’Brien (the former CNN space reporter) has this video of Alan Bean giving a tour of the exhibition:

Here’s a New York Times article about Bean and his art from last June.

The spiral arms of the galaxy Messier 83, 15 million light years away, as seen by the Hubble’s new Wide Field Camera 3, installed last May. What you’re looking at — blue open clusters, red emission nebulae — is the formation of new stars on a massive scale. More at Astronomy Now, Bad Astronomy and Universe Today. Image credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA).

NASA’s Ares I-X rocket on Launch Pad 39b at the Kennedy Space Center on Monday, Oct. 26, 2009. It launched Wednesday morning. Photo credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls.

The engineering test flight Ares I-X took place Wednesday morning. A lot of us were excited to see it, though real Ares launches are still years off. More on that in a moment. Meanwhile, here are collections of photos:

• NASA’s set on Flickr
• Spaceflight Now’s gallery of launch photos
• Universe Today’s gallery of launch photos
• The Big Picture’s Ares gallery

The fact that Ares and the Constellation program are still years away from operational status, despite the fact that the Shuttle fleet they’re designed to replace is supposed to be retired next year, is a basic problem of resources: NASA doesn’t have the funds to develop new space hardware and use existing space hardware at the same time, and developing new space hardware doesn’t exactly happen overnight. (Consider that there was only one U.S. spaceflight between Skylab 4 in 1973-74 and STS-1 in 1981 — a period of seven years. That was the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, which used surplus Apollo hardware.) We’re in for a long drought in U.S. manned spaceflight.

A question via Flickr:

If someone put a gun to your head and said, “choose a scope to use forever, the Equinox 80 or the NexStar 5,” which would it be? (I know they both have their own purposes, i.e., gazing or astrophotography, but I’m stuck with which one to buy!) So which would you use forever if you had no choice?

If I had to choose a telescope to use forever, it would probably be neither of these two telescopes, which are relatively inexpensive. If I won the lottery, one of the first things I would do is go out and buy a Tele Vue NP127is. Or an Obsession 18. Or, you know, both, because I just won the lottery. (This exercise is rendered substantially academic by the fact that I don’t buy lottery tickets.)

But if I was forced to choose between the two telescopes I have right now, I’d have to say that in all ways except aperture and price, the Equinox 80 is a better telescope than the NexStar 5 SE. But aperture and price aren’t nothing.

Continue reading this entry »

Last Friday’s observing session was the first at our new location in the field behind Jennifer’s high school. It was notable for two things. One was the sheer amount of dew that accumulated in a short period of time: everything was soaked, and even the eyepieces were getting fogged. Temperatures dropped quickly that night, and even I was cold at the end of it.

The other was that it was the first time I used the HEQ5 Pro’s polar axis scope to attempt a more precise polar alignment. With a polar axis scope, you make your equatorial mount’s polar alignment more precise by lining up Polaris inside its circle in the reticle. First you have to get Polaris in the field of view, then approximate the positions of Ursa Major and Cassiopeia in the sky (they’re in the reticle, but you look outside the scope to see where they are) and use the mount’s altitude and azimuth adjustments to get the star where it should be. It was, in the end, easier than I thought.

Computer alignment misfired on the first attempt (it kept wanting to point the telescope toward the ground), but succeeded when I reversed the telescope in the mount (screws on the right this time) and started with it pointing north. After that, the mount was scary accurate, putting everything I wanted to look at dead-centre in the eyepiece (admittedly, I was using a 30mm eyepiece, which provided a wide field of view and would therefore forgive slight tracking errors, but still) and, more importantly, keeping it there for long periods of time. I honestly could have done some astrophotography with that alignment, but Friday was more for testing out the new location and working on my polar alignment — both of which were a great success.

Of course, I also saw a few things in the telescope, which was nice too.

Jason Kottke notes the winners of the Royal Observatory’s Astronomy Photography of the Year 2009 contest, which was conducted on Flickr (here’s the group). “I had no idea that images this sharp and detailed could be taken with non-pro ground telescopes,” Jason writes. It’s worth mentioning, though, that “non-pro” doesn’t necessarily mean inexpensive.

True, photos in the Earth and Space and Our Solar System categories were taken with off-the-shelf equipment like digital SLRs and commercially available, mass-produced telescopes, but deep space astrophotography (i.e., galaxies and nebulæ) has become the realm of mind-bogglingly expensive equipment — much to the dismay and discouragement of tyros with merely above-average amounts of disposable income.

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I should not have been surprised that more than one mount exists to attach a Garmin nüvi to a bicycle’s handlebars. There’s an adapter for everything.

It definitely applies in amateur astronomy, where I’ve been wondering about this sort of thing lately. I asked about attaching a camera to an equatorial mount and was told to drill a hole in a standard dovetail saddle for the ¼"-20 screw. Nope: Orion sells a dovetail with a screw already installed; it costs seventeen bucks. I was told I could make a side-by-side telescope mount with a little work. Nope: Losmandy sells one — granted, it’s a Losmandy dovetail, whereas a Sky-Watcher mount uses the narrower Vixen-compatible system, but yes, there’s an adapter for that too. Sky and Telescope’s February 2009 review of the previous version of Orion’s six-megapixel StarShoot Pro camera bemoaned the lack of an adapter to connect SLR lenses to it. Guess what? Adapters are now available.

I’m not physically handy; I’m unlikely to ever have a workshop in my garage, and I’m not about to start machining things. It will always be easier for me to buy something with the money I’ve made doing something I’m actually good at. So it’s heartening to discover that for most things I can see a need for, I’m not alone, and someone who actually is handy is filling that need.

Amazon.ca is having a sale on DVDs right now, and I notice that one of my favourite TV miniseries, From the Earth to the Moon, is now on sale for a paltry $30. (In the U.S., it’s even cheaper: it’s only $13 on Amazon.com.) If you have any interest in NASA, the Apollo program, or manned spaceflight in general, and you haven’t seen this thing, you owe it to yourself to remedy that forthwith. (Preferably via one of these links, because then I get an affiliate-program kickback. Maybe even a whole dollar! But lay hands on it one way or another.)

From the Earth to the Moon isn’t without its flaws: the near-ubiquity of Frank Borman (played by David Andrews), who appears in five episodes but flew only one Apollo mission (not for nothing do I jokingly call this series The Frank Borman Show); the near-invisibility of John Young (played by John Posey), reduced to bit parts on the sidelines despite flying two Apollo missions; a couple of overly sentimental episodes; and a tendency to omit some of the touchier points of the Apollo astronauts’ biographies (e.g., the Apollo 7 crew’s backtalk, the Apollo 15 stamp incident).

But the production values and writing are excellent. Each episode focuses not only on a specific Apollo mission, but also on one aspect of the Apollo program: the development of the lunar module for Apollo 9, the return of Alan Shepard to flight status for Apollo 14. Apollo 8’s episode places it in the context of the very bad year of 1968; Apollo 15’s episode (our favourite) dramatizes the training of astronauts as field geologists. It doesn’t hurt that the spacecraft dialogue is often taken verbatim from the actual missions. There’s plenty to gush about.

From the Earth to the Moon basically takes us from The Right Stuff to Apollo 13 and beyond, and fills in the blanks for the rest of the Apollo program. With all the recent hubbub about the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11, it’s worth pointing out that the Apollo 11 mission does not serve as the series’s climax; in fact, it’s only dramatized in the sixth episode — halfway through. From the Earth to the Moon dramatizes the whole picture — not just the triumph of 11 and the near-tragedy of 13 — and makes it all interesting.

Previously: Lee Silver; The passing of the moon walkers.

So I now own a Sky-Watcher HEQ5 Pro equatorial mount; I ordered it earlier this month through Focus Scientific and picked it up on the 17th. I’ve had it out twice so far to run it through its paces, and I have to say I’m impressed.

Compared to our Celestron NexStar 5 SE, this thing is built like a tank; the NexStar suddenly feels very flimsy. Definitely a step up in quality and robustness. It’s heavier, of course, and as such a bit harder to carry. Mounting my three-kilogram Equinox 80 refractor on it is almost an insult to its 14-kilogram capacity: I had to use only one of the two 5.1-kilogram counterweights, and to balance it I had to move it almost to the top of the counterweight shaft. Suffice to say the scope didn’t vibrate much.

I was concerned that there would be a problem when my full lunar imaging train was added — i.e., the scope, extension tube, Powermate and camera. Not so much with the mount, but with the scope’s bracket. I thought I would have to remove the bracket and make use of a standard Vixen-compatible dovetail and rings. Not so: the whole setup was still stable, and I was able to get a pretty good photo of the Moon on the second night of testing. Not that I need an equatorial mount for such short exposures, but its rocklike stability made it much easier to focus.

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I love night launches.

(Image credit: NASA/Ben Cooper.)

Jonathon Narvey uses South Korea as a template for progress in the Middle East; among other things, he tries to make a point about space programs:

In 1950, this tiny country [South Korea] was broken, worse off even than the Arab Middle East of the time.

Sixty years later, South Korea is the 15th largest economy in the world, with an entrenched democratic political system and, despite the temporary setback of this week, an active space program. …

But back in the Middle East, all of the Arab states, comprising a far larger population and geographic area than South Korea, have a combined GDP less than the country of Spain (at one time a Muslim outpost in Europe). Space program? The closest thing to an Arab astronaut we might see in the next while could only be a Hamas suicide bomber strapped to an augmented Ashoura rocket.

Now that last sentence is a bit unkind — particularly since a cursory check online reveals at least two Arabs to have flown in space (a good place to look is Space Facts’s biographies of international astronauts).

1. In June 1985, Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia flew as a payload specialist on STS 51-G, the fifth flight of Discovery; his backup, Abdulmohsen Al-Bassam, never flew in space.
2. The Soviet Union’s Intercosmos program allowed a Syrian cosmonaut, Muhammad Faris, to travel to the Mir space station in July 1987 aboard Soyuz TM-3, returning on Soyuz TM-2. His backup, Munir Habib, never flew in space either.

Admittedly, they went to space through the benevolence of their Cold War patrons, but Arabs have been to space. Meanwhile, the first South Korean in space, Yi So-yeon, flew to the International Space Station only last year, in April 2008.

(Interestingly, the Intercosmos program also generated a cosmonaut from Afghanistan: Abdul Ahad Mohmand, who spent nine days on Mir in August and September 1988. The first Iranian in space, Anousheh Ansari, flew as a space tourist in September 2006; her family emigrated to the U.S. while she was still a teeenager. Neither Afghanistan nor Iran are Arab or part of the Middle East, but it’s not like those two countries aren’t conflated with it all the time.)

I recently had someone ask me how to connect a camera to a telescope. I answered him by e-mail, but then I thought that it would be a good subject for a blog entry. Fortunately, taking photos through a telescope is not at all difficult, but it does involve a couple of pieces of equipment that photographers may not be familiar with.

First, some definitions. There are several ways to attach a camera to a telescope. Prime focus attaches the camera directly to the telescope, turning the telescope into a great big camera lens. Afocal photography positions the camera, with its lens attached, at the eyepiece; this is done either freehand (holding the camera up to the eyepiece), through an adapter that connects the eyepiece to the camera, or through a mount that holds the camera in place in front of the eyepiece. Finally, eyepiece projection keeps the telescope eyepiece but removes the camera lens: the eyepiece projects the image directly onto the camera’s sensor; an adapter like this one connects the two.

(A good discussion of these different methods can be found in Michael A. Covington’s Digital SLR Astrophotography: Amazon.ca, Amazon.com.)

Continue reading this entry »

Tonight I made my first attempt at photographing star trails, and I think it turned out reasonably well. I was kind of hoping that since I was shooting during the purported peak of the Perseid meteor shower and pointing my camera at the shower’s radiant, I might catch a few meteors streaking a straight line across the camera’s field of view. Alas, none was bright enough to leave a mark on my camera’s sensor. Not that I’m disappointed with the result by any means, though it did take a bit of work to get it (26 manually timed exposures layered in Photoshop, all of which taking place past my bedtime on a work night).

The skies were finally clear enough for astronomy last night, but with the Moon almost full, it was too bright to do any observing or tripod-based astrophotography of anything but the Moon (or Jupiter, which was up later, but by then the skies were hazy). So I photographed the Moon again. But this time I tried a few new things with my lunar photos.

For one thing, I increased the image’s sharpness. This is apparently considered essential in lunar photography: it really draws out the Moon’s topography. In Photoshop the tool to use would be Unsharp Mask, and when I was farting around in Photoshop CS4 yesterday (the way I learn things), I tried this out on some of my old lunar photos. But in the end I made use of the Definition slider in Aperture, which achieves similar results. The final image (top right), with Definition set to maximum, is indeed a good deal sharper than the original, without too much contrast or too many artifacts.

Once work on that photo was complete, I produced two variants, each of which with only one setting changed. In the second image (middle right), I pumped up the saturation — or rather, I maxed out the Vibrancy slider in Aperture. Vibrancy has been described as Aperture’s “smart saturation.” The end result is similar to my photo of March 9 (which also made use of Vibrancy), enhancing the Moon’s subtle colours.

The drawback is that colour fringing is also enhanced (see the north-to-northeast edge of the Moon), an effect of shooting through a refractor rather than a reflector. My apochromatic refractor is a great telescope, but it’s still an inexpensive doublet (it cost me $680 last fall, but the price has since gone up and it now runs around $830 Canadian; Orion’s EON 80mm ED is the same scope). When dealing with a bright object like the Moon, there’s going to be a touch of chromatic aberration. If I want none at all, I’m going to have to shell out serious coin for a much more expensive refractor, or shoot through a reflector or catadioptric telescope.

But I digress. The third image (bottom right) gets around the chromatic aberration by going monochrome — using only the red channel. Refractors’ chromatic aberration occurs because different colours have different focal points; since blue is the colour that has trouble reaching focus, going to just the red channel should get the sharpest image possible, I think. Besides, I like using single colour channels for black and white photography: it yields interesting results.

(You’ll have to click through to get a better look at these images; you won’t be able to tell very much from these thumbnails.)

Earthrise from the Moon, Apollo 8, December 1968 (NASA).

Apollo 11 was not the alpha and omega of the entire Apollo program; last December, there was another 40th anniversary commemorated: that of Apollo 8, the first manned space mission to leave the vicinity of Earth and orbit the Moon. Subsequent events — i.e., six successful moon landings — have obscured just how significant that was seen at the time. Apart from the achievement in and of itself, the flight of Apollo 8 was seen as one bright spot in a year that saw a lot of pain — war in Vietnam, the Prague Spring, riots in France, the assassinations of MLK and RFK. The crew of Apollo 8 — Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders — were selected as Time’s men of the year for 1968 (cover).

Nowadays, Lovell is better known as the commander of Apollo 13, thanks to the movie; Borman and Anders have comparatively low profiles among the moon voyagers, since neither of them landed on the Moon. (I was disappointed, for example, that neither of them appear in In the Shadow of the Moon.) All three astronauts did, however, reunite for talk about Apollo 8 at 40th anniversary celebrations at the Newseum in Washington last November. NASA has video from the event on YouTube: part one, part two, part three.

PBS’s American Experience had an episode on Apollo 8 (Amazon.ca, Amazon.com), but I haven’t seen it.

A public appearance by Neil Armstrong is rarer than a sighting of a megamouth shark, but he joined his Apollo 11 crewmates last night for the annual John Glenn lecture at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, commemorating the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. The Times has coverage of the event; NASA has video of the entire evening on YouTube and a photoset on Flickr.

(Image credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls.)

Apollo 14 astronauts in the Mobile Quarantine Facility aboard the USS New Orleans after their return from the Moon in February 1971. Left to right: Stu Roosa (command module pilot); Alan Shepard (commander); Ed Mitchell (lunar module pilot). Mitchell is the only surviving member of the crew: Roosa died in 1994 and Shepard died in 1998. (NASA)

I grew up in a world where people used to walk on the Moon. I was born two months before Apollo 16; the last moon landing, Apollo 17, took place before my first birthday. The moon landings took place in what was virtually a historical instant: only four brief years separated the first flight to the Moon, Apollo 8 in December 1968, from the last, Apollo 17 in 1972. We pivoted, as a species, from dreaming of going there to leaving it behind in hardly any time at all.

The astronauts who went there, from the first five NASA astronaut groups, were roughly the same age — peers who, for the most part, fought the same wars and flew the same aircraft before their selection as astronauts. And, as I’ve said before, they’re getting all getting old together, too. The surviving moon voyagers range in age from 73 (Charlie Duke) to 81 (Frank Borman); of the 24 who have travelled to the Moon, 18 are still alive, and of the 12 who have walked its surface, nine are still with us.

Continue reading this entry »

I definitely love the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Even though it hasn’t achieved its final mapping orbit (which will result in images with two to three times greater resolution than at present), it’s managed to photograph five out of the six Apollo landing sites. I can’t wait to see what it’ll catch when it’s operating at full resolution; I’m already impressed. Via Bad Astronomy.

(Image credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Arizona State University.)

I wrote about the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter on The Map Room last month; now NASA has released the first flyover images from the LRO Camera, and they make me go squee:

The angle of view is about 3.5 km; the full-sized video’s resolution is 73 cm per pixel.

I think I’m going to like the LRO.

On the astrophotography front, now that I’m reasonably flush again, it’s likely that I will be buying that equatorial mount some time this year (though, given the kind of weather we’ve been having, there hardly seems any point). So it behooves me to do a little research into how to perform a polar alignment on an equatorial mount. A rough alignment seems straightforward, though I’ve never done it; astrophotography requires something more precise. Astro Baby has a tutorial on using the polar scope to align the HEQ5 Pro (which is the mount I’ll almost certainly be getting). Andy’s Shot Glass has what looks like an excellent video tutorial on drift alignment, which is for when you need really exacting alignment — i.e., for astrophotography. But then, you don’t need an equatorial mount unless you’re doing astrophotography.

Previously: Gearing up for astrophotography.

If you’re at all curious about the equipment I’ve been using to shoot my recent Moon photos, click on the above photo to see the annotations on its Flickr page.

From left to right: a DR-6 right-angle finder for Nikon digital SLRs, which is mounted on my Nikon D90 digital SLR, to which is attached a T-ring for a Nikon F-mount, which allows the camera to connect to my Televue 2× Powermate with its T-ring adapter, which, in turn, is inserted into a two-inch extension tube, which is inserted into the focuser of my Sky-Watcher Equinox 80 apochromatic refractor.

All of which is completely unwieldy on my now surprisingly flimsy Manfrotto tripod. Time for a better mount. For lunar photography, a computerized equatorial mount is overkill; I can do this with a sturdy alt-azimuth mount that would normally be used for observing. Candidates include Astro-Tech’s Voyager, Orion’s VersaGo and Vixen’s Porta II; heavier-duty possibilities include Orion’s SkyView AZ, Sky-Watcher’s HDAZ, and similar mounts. Time to poke around.

I first tried photographing the Moon with my new 2× Powermate on May 8, but my 80-mm Sky-Watcher Equinox refractor couldn’t reach focus with the Powermate. It needed more focus travel, apparently. (The Powermate’s special T-ring adapter¹ hadn’t shown up yet, so I connected my camera to the Powermate using my existing T-ring adapter and the Powermate’s two-inch eyepiece adapter.) I had to make do with this shot instead, taken without the Powermate.

I had the Powermate’s T-ring adapter on order at Focus Scientific (great people; shop there); I picked it up on Monday, along with a two-inch extension tube, which I hoped would allow me to achieve focus with all this gear. I got to test this combination out on Thursday night. As you can see, it worked:

Continue reading this entry »

Via Bad Astronomer, a trio of op-eds in the New York Post on where NASA goes from here, particularly in the context of manned spaceflight:

• We need a modern Apollo program by Phil “Bad Astronomer” Plait;
• Orion and Ares — the future of NASA by former astronaut Tom Jones;
• Lost in space by Buzz Aldrin (whom you may have heard of).

The status of the Constellation program (especially the Ares booster) is causing no shortage of angst, it seems, but the big picture is of concern either way: insufficient funding, insufficient vision.

Star Trek cast members attend the rollout of the Space Shuttle Enterprise at its Palmdale manufacturing facility on September 17, 1976 (NASA).

Paul Wells:

I wonder whether the people who put the original Star Trek series together had any inkling that, nearly 43 years after the first episode aired, humanity would have travelled such a great distance in depicting wide-scale human space travel — and such a paltry distance in achieving it.

In that vein, a comparative timeline:

Continue reading this entry »

Forty-eight years ago today, Alan Shepard became the first American to travel into space with the launch of Mercury-Redstone 3 (Freedom 7). The flight lasted 15 minutes, 28 seconds; here it is in full:

This video combines footage from the pilot observation camera (left) and the instrument panel camera (right) with audio from both Shepard and Mission Control. Via NASA’s Twitter feed.

I forgot to mention that, during the high school observing session, I made one hell of a misidentification. The kids pointed to a bright star in the east, which I immediately dismissed as a plane. Except it didn’t move. It turned out to be Arcturus, the second-brightest star in the northern sky. I should have gotten that, but in my defence, my usual observing sites have obstructed views of the east. I don’t normally see anything east of Spica at this time of year.

Setting up for that session was much easier than I thought it would be: driving to the site and bringing stuff from the car in several trips is a hell of a lot less effort than trying to carry everything in your arms or on your back over several hundred metres in one trip. Who knew? Anyway, considering that we’ve had several offers of open, rural sites to observe from, car-based observing looks like a viable option. Which means that telescopes that would ordinarily be far too heavy to lug to the nearby field are back on the menu. Which means that Dobsonian telescopes — big, lots of aperture, not very expensive — are back on the menu.

Continue reading this entry »

Earlier today, Steve Eves’s 1:10-scale model of a Saturn V launched from a farmer’s field in Maryland. Eves’s rocket is one for the record books: at 725 kg and nearly 11 metres in height, it’s apparently the largest model rocket ever built by an amateur. It seems fitting that it’s a model of the largest rocket ever built, the Saturn V. Apart from this YouTube video (above), which covers everything from countdown to the parachute landing of the rocket’s three pieces, Gizmodo has photos and video from the launch. A long article from the February 2009 issue of Rockets tells the story of how this monster came into being. Via NASA’s Twitter account.

Update: Jeff Foust’s Flickr photoset of the launch.

Had a bunch of kids look through the telescopes last night, as part of the programming for the 30-hour famine at Jennifer’s high school. It almost didn’t happen: as so often happens, the clouds came rolling in as the sun set. But I’d already packed the telescopes and associated gear into the car, and the clouds were patchy, so what the hell.

We had some sporadic clear patches of sky to look at, but observing time was brief — in no small part because eager/goofball students kept twisting the focus on the Schmidt-Cassegrain way out. While I tried to fixed things, a lot of kids lost interest, but there was a hard core of one or two of them who stuck around until the clouds covered the entire sky. Fortunately Saturn was up, and visible most of the time: you can’t go wrong with Saturn as a first thing to look at through the telescope. And they didn’t break anything, which is always good.

The Onion, last Friday: NASA embarks on epic delay. “Top officials at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration unveiled plans this week for a comprehensive, multibillion-dollar delay — the agency’s most ambitious postponement of cosmic exploration ever.”

The New Scientist, also last Friday: NASA may need extra $30b to stay on schedule to moon. “Without an influx of cash, cost overruns could delay NASA’s return to the moon or prompt cuts to the agency’s science missions to try to keep its moon plans on track, according to a government report issued on Thursday.”

Sigh.

All the positive feedback I’ve received for my recent attempts at lunar photography have made me more enthusiastic than ever about getting into astrophotography. I’ve already got a few books on the subject; truth be told, there’s a bit of a learning curve. It’s going to take me a while to get good at this. And that’s not a bad thing, because astrophotography can be awfully expensive: it’s going to take me a while to assemble all the equipment required for a basic astrophotography rig that can do more than just photograph the Moon.

I’ve already got two main pieces of equipment. I have a telescope geared towards astrophotographers: an 80mm Sky-Watcher Equinox apochromatic refractor, with really good colour correction (as far as I can tell) and a short (500mm, f/6.25) focal length. I also have a digital SLR sufficient to the task: a Nikon D90. (Most astrophotographers use Canon, whose noise reduction algorithms are better for stars, but a Nikon is hardly unacceptable.) In addition, I have a number of accessories for the D90 that will help: an external battery pack (to aid with multiple long exposures in the cold), a corded remote (to reduce camera shake when pressing the shutter), and a right-angle finder (to aid in focusing and allow me to see through the camera when it’s attached to a refractor or catadioptric telescope). I also have T-ring adapters to connect my camera to a telescope: one for a two-inch focuser (like my refractor), and one for Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes.

So, what else do I need?

Continue reading this entry »

Further to my last post, there’s actually quite a bit on the use of animals in spaceflight. See NASA’s brief history of animals in space and the inevitable Wikipedia entry. A book, Animals in Space: From Research Rockets to the Space Shuttle by Colin Burgess and Chris Dubbs, was published in 2007 (Amazon.ca, Amazon.com).

On September 18, 1968, the Soviet Union’s Zond 5 spacecraft orbited the Moon and returned safely to the Earth; it was one reason behind NASA’s decision to change Apollo 8’s flight into the first manned spaceflight to orbit the Moon.

Zond 5 was an unmanned spacecraft, but it was not uninhabited: “A biological payload of turtles, wine flies, meal worms, plants, seeds, bacteria, and other living matter was included in the flight. … It was announced that the turtles (steppe tortoises) had lost about 10% of their body weight but remained active and showed no loss of appetite.” That’s right: the first vertebrates to visit the Moon were Russian Tortoises (Testudo horsfieldii). They apparently survived their trip (unlike Laika); I wonder if they’re still around — they’re tortoises, after all.

More on the Soviet Zond program.

Earthrise as seen by Lunar Orbiter 1 in August 1966, more than two years before Apollo 8 (NASA/LOIRP).

The Los Angeles Times has the fascinating story of the effort to recover data from the Lunar Orbiter program of the 1960s, during which 2,000 photographs were taken by five unmanned probes. The data sat, all but forgotten on obsolete tapes, for decades, while a NASA archivist struggled to find the funding and hardware to get them transcribed. Neither was found until recently, after her retirement; now, they’re trying to digitized the old analog data stored on those tapes. So far, two images have been released: this awesome Earthrise, taken more than two years before the more famous Earthrise photograph by the crew of Apollo 8; and this grand shot of Copernicus crater. More at the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project page; MoonViews is the associated blog. Via MetaFilter.

Last night’s observing session was a two-telescope affair. The NexStar 5 SE, our computerized 125mm Schmidt-Cassegrain, was set up for the first time since November alongside our 80mm apochromatic refractor, the Sky-Watcher Equinox 80, which continues to work tolerably on my camera tripod. Jennifer really enjoyed the fact that each of us could look through a telescope at the same time, and was amused when we switched to the other scope, or swapped our eyepieces. (Note to self: we need more eyepieces.)

So, what did we see? We caught Venus before it disappeared below the horizon, its crescent so thin your in-laws will never come back, even at the relatively low powers we observed it with. Saturn’s rings were nearly edge-on, but still visible, and we caught a couple of its moons (probably Dione and Rhea).

Jennifer enjoyed the wide, 2½° view afforded by the refractor combined with the 16mm Nagler, which made observing open clusters like M41, M44 and the Pleiades a joy. It was also abundantly clear that the Equinox is an extremely sharp scope: the Trapezium in M42 was tiny, but all four stars were resolved. Stars were generally more pleasing in the Equinox than they were in the NexStar despite the latter’s greater aperture, but the NexStar’s greater aperture made M42’s nebulosity much more impressive. Suffice to say I’m beginning to understand why the refractor guys go on and on about their tiny and expensive scopes.

Both scopes were fitted with dielectric star diagonals — I picked up a used two-inch William Optics dielectric for the refractor earlier this week — which definitely made an impact. Using the 1¼-inch Orion dielectric on the NexStar was a noticeable improvement over the scope’s stock diagonal.

It’s been a very cold winter, too cold to do much observing. I’ve missed it.

After watching From the Earth to the Moon (see previous entry), I decided to do some digging into Lee Silver, the Caltech geologist who spent several years teaching geology to the Apollo crews. Played by David Clennon in the series, he appears in two episodes: Galileo Was Right and Le voyage dans la lune.

Now in his mid-eighties, Leon T. Silver retired from Caltech in 1996, where he remains W. M. Keck Foundation Professor for Resource Geology, Emeritus. This older page summarizes his research. He remains quite well known for his work on the Apollo program; when the HBO series came out, Silver talked about the differences between the series and real life (see also here). This contemporary article (1.5 MB PDF), which I presume is from a Caltech publication, profiles his work with the Apollo 15 crew, though in fact his work with the astronauts began with the Apollo 13 crew. Finally, Silver sat for a series of interviews about his life and career between 1994 and 2000; go to session 3 for his work on Apollo (he’s quite candid).

Lunar module pilot Charles M. Duke Jr. collecting samples during the Apollo 16 mission on April 21, 1972. Duke, the youngest person to walk on the Moon, is now 73 years old. (Photo information)

Jennifer and I finished watching the 1998 HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon last night. If you’ve seen it, you know how good it is; if you haven’t, and you have any interest in human spaceflight, what the hell is wrong with you? Get it right now: Amazon.com, Amazon.ca.

Anyway, it’s triggered (or rather, reawakened) a fairly passionate interest in the history of NASA, so expect a few posts in this vein in the near future. (Consider yourself warned.) Including this one:

Of the 24 astronauts who have travelled to the moon,¹ six have since died:

1. Jack Swigert (Apollo 13) died in 1982 from bone cancer shortly after being elected to Congress; he was 51.
2. Ronald Evans (Apollo 17) died of a heart attack in 1990 at the age of 56.
3. James Irwin (Apollo 15) died in 1991 at the age of 61. He had developed arrhythmia during the mission, and died after a series of heart attacks. He was the eighth person to walk on the Moon.
4. Stuart Roosa (Apollo 14) died in 1994 due to complications from pancreatitis; he was 61.
5. Alan Shepard (Apollo 14) — the first American in space — died in 1998 from leukemia at the age of 74. He was the fifth person to walk on the Moon.
6. Pete Conrad (Apollo 12) died in 1999 at the age of 69, after a road accident. He was the third person to walk on the Moon.

Continue reading this entry »

My first major astronomical experience took place 30 years ago: the total solar eclipse of February 26, 1979. Some people spend thousands of dollars to see a solar eclipse; I was lucky: the eclipse came to me. But to see it, I had to stay home from school that morning. My father’s recollection is that for some nonsensical reason or other, the schools were going to keep the kids inside during totality. Screw that, said my parents, who had three science degrees between them. So I saw the last few seconds of totality from my front porch.

Meanwhile, a lot of people came to Winnipeg in February to see it, which as an expatriate Winnipegger I will admit is not the best time of year to visit: see recollections at Behind Blue Skies and Regenaxe. Here’s the April 1979 issue of the newsletter of the Kingston chapter of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, which contained several eclipse reports, including one by David Levy.

(Photo of the 1979 eclipse by Matthew Cole.)

Took another try at photographing the Moon last night, when it was almost full. This one is better than the last one, I think.

This time I shot without the focal reducer, which presented a larger image to the camera, and tried focusing with the D90’s Live View. This didn’t work so well, because a nearly full Moon is very, very bright: it was washed out in the LCD. Because it was so bright, this shot was 1/1600 second at f/6.25 (although I ended up increasing the exposure in Aperture on this one, even shots taken at 1/4000 weren’t bad).

Deimos, the smaller of Mars’s two moons, is a tiny speck of a thing, with a mean radius of only 6.2 km. (Small for a moon.) But the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took two pictures of Deimos, 5½ hours apart, last month.

(The same camera nabbed Phobos, the larger moon, in March 2008, and also caught an avalanche in progress on the Martian surface, to say nothing of the Phoenix lander’s arrival. HiRISE is made of awesome.)

Via Bad Astronomy.

(Image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona.)

Last night, I spent some time taking pictures of the Moon. I think I managed to get a pretty good shot, don’t you? (Click through for some boring technical details.)

This was my first attempt at astrophotography with a bunch of new equipment, including the camera (my Nikon D90) and the telescope (my Sky-Watcher Equinox 80), but also my first attempt at connecting the camera to the telescope via a prime focus adapter (thanks for the machining, Nathan), and my first attempt at focusing through the camera’s right-angle finder. All things considered, it turned out well; the only drawback was that when the focal reducer is added to the mix (a necessity with the adapter), the Moon is pretty small in a short-focal-length refractor, which made for a lot of cropping on the computer.

Spotted Comet Lulin tonight after much searching with the 80mm apo refractor; I started from M44 and began my search from there, working backward along what I guestimated was the comet’s path from the Sky and Telescope finder charts (star-hopping isn’t my forte). It was awfully faint, barely visible against the background sky — my back porch isn’t exactly a dark-sky preserve — which explains why my first attempt Saturday night, using 10×50 binoculars, didn’t go well. I needed more aperture (the 80mm apo) and more magnification (my 16mm type 5 Nagler gives 31½× on the apo).

This was my third comet. My second was Holmes, which was much easier to spot (and photograph). My first was Hale-Bopp, an experience I don’t expect will ever be surpassed in my lifetime.

I mounted the refractor on my camera tripod; I tried it a different way this time and it worked much better. I may yet be able to avoid buying an alt-az mount for this telescope, which is handy since, as I said earlier today, I have to watch my pennies nowadays.

Also looked around the neighbourhood of Orion tonight. The Moon looked wonderful; should have spent some more time looking at it at higher magnifications.

Last month saw a couple of roundups of the year’s best astronomy images. Phil Plait’s top ten focus more on scientific bad-assery — i.e., the pictures may not be beautiful in themselves, but what they represent is mindblowing (I blogged a couple of them myself at the time). Meanwhile, the Big Picture ran a Hubble advent calendar in December, revealing one new photo a day; many of the photos came courtesy of the Hubble Heritage Project and are extremely beautiful in and of themselves. Above, M81, a personal favourite of mine (credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team STScI/AURA).

On April 9, 2007, the Hubble Space telescope captured Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede, passing behind Jupiter itself. In addition to the hella-cool image, there is also a brief time-lapse movie in high definition (18 seconds, 540 frames over two hours). I love the Hubble. Via Bad Astronomy and Gizmodo.

To find out what Celestron and Meade are up to, it looks like you need to go to consumer electronics expos, not amateur astronomy expos like NEAF. Their sights are set on bigger things than the amateur astronomy community — and their focus is on technology.

Celestron’s CGEM mount, announced at Photokina, is a computerized equatorial mount with a twist: the computer allows you to fine-tune the mount’s polar alignment by slewing to a star based on where it thinks it should be, if the mount was properly aligned; the user then uses the mount’s latitude and azimuth adjustment controls to centre the star, at which point polar alignment is presumably perfect. It’s an interesting way to do it and, from what I can tell, it’s all in software. They’re putting this one under their usual line of 8- to 11-inch Schmidt-Cassegrains.

From what we know so far, Meade’s upcoming ETX-LS, which I assume will be a small Maksutov-Cassegrain like the existing ETX line, goes a lot further. To be announced at CES in January, the telescope includes GPS and a built-in CCD sensor, which based on this report sounds like it will be used both for alignment — in which case this thing may be able to centre stars by itself during alignment — and for astrophotography (via Gizmodo). User participation optional.

My concern is that optics and electronics fail at different rates: if one part of my Nexstar 5 SE fails, I can at least put my scope on a different mount, or my mount under a different scope. To say nothing of obsolescence: in 10 years, today’s go-to mounts will look quite rustic, while the optics of the scopes they support might still be good. There’s such a thing as too much integration.

Images are now available from the MESSENGER probe’s second fly-by of Mercury. This image “is one of the first to be returned and shows a WAC image of the departing planet taken about 90 minutes after the spacecraft’s closest approach to Mercury. The bright crater just south of the center of the image is Kuiper, identified on images from the Mariner 10 mission in the 1970s. For most of the terrain east of Kuiper, toward the limb (edge) of the planet, the departing images are the first spacecraft views of that portion of Mercury’s surface.”

(Photo credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington.)

Previously: MESSENGER images!

Third-party accessories may not fit on a Celestron NexStar 5 even if they’re designed to do so. Apparently, some NexStar 5 telescopes are a little thicker around the corrector plate than others are, so even accessories specifically designed for them may not fit if the tolerances are too tight. I found this out in my recent shipment from Kendrick Astro Instruments, which arrived today. Their solar filters and Kwik Focus are designed to cover a telescope’s objective lens or corrector plate, and be tightened with screws. They’re sized to fit based on the telescope tube’s outside diameter (OD). My NexStar 5 SE has an OD of exactly 150 mm, which is on the cusp between two sizes. The smaller one was advertised to fit my telescope, so I ordered it. It doesn’t fit, and according to the Kendricks — who are, incidentally, wonderful to deal with — it should have fit easily. So back it goes, to be replaced by the larger model.

Would I ever like to lay my hands on one of Orion’s newly announced 190-mm f/5.3 Maksutov-Newtonian astrographs (an astrograph is a telescope specialized for photography). Of course, I’d need a fairly robust equatorial mount first, and a place to put it on a semi-permanent basis. Oh, and $1,300.

As usual, I gravitate towards the obscure and unique corners of my interests. Maksutov-Newtonians are weird telescopes: most Maksutovs on the market are Maksutov-Cassegrains; Mak-Newts combine the Maksutov corrector plate with a Newtonian reflector configuration. The upshot is that they have a reputation for superior image quality — certainly better than other catadioptric telescopes (e.g., Schmidt-Cassegrains), and approaching that of premium Dobs and apochromatic refractors, as this comparison demonstrates. In short, damn good for astrophotography, which seems to be Orion’s target lately — they’ve announced a six-megapixel CCD and a cheap autoguider, for example, while Celestron and Meade futz around with handheld planetariums.

Most Mak-Newts come from Russia, although Ottawa-based Ceravolo used to make them. Orion imported several from Intes a while back; I wonder where this new one comes from. Orion’s marketing copy highlights its component quality; earlier Russian imports apparently had first-rate optics but were a little unrefined otherwise. I look forward to reading the reviews. With any luck, it’ll still be on the market when I’m ready for one.

Nothing is wrong with this picture. Yes, we were looking through the telescope before sunset last Friday, and no, we don’t have a solar filter yet. We were looking at the Moon, which looked pretty good.

Our plan was to look at and photograph the Moon before sunset, and then turn to Jupiter once it got high enough. (We stayed in the backyard because the path to our observing site was too muddy to carry a telescope along it, so solar system objects only that night.) But we never got that far: the onslaught of mosquitos chased us back inside before Jupiter was favourably positioned. I got bitten more in two hours than I had in five days of camping the previous week.

Note also the presence in the above photograph of one of my new toys: an Asus Eee PC, a Linux-based subnotebook with a solid-state drive. Basic, but cheap. Of particular note is that it comes preinstalled with KStars, the open-source planetarium application. One goal of last Friday’s observing session was to see if I could connect to the telescope, which was at least partially successful: the program recognized the telescope, but I didn’t do anything beyond that. Next time.

It would figure that, after nearly two months of clouds and rain and generally unsuitable-for-amateur-astronomy skies, I am presented with clear skies when otherwise occupied. Four glorious cloud-free nights while camping over the weekend, and I didn’t even bring so much as a pair of binoculars. And last night was pretty good too, once the moon approached the horizon, but at midnight I was too tired to set up the telescope.

Even from our back lane, though, with a very bright back porch light nearby, the skies were really impressive last night: magnitude 5.0 visibility (I can just barely make out Eta Ursae Minoris) and a clearly visible Sagittarius Arm. Probably even better from our observing location. Now if only the skies and my schedule could coincide.

Rod Mollise worries about the decline of astronomy magazines — namely, Astronomy and Sky and Telescope. Fewer pages on cheaper paper, staff turnover, schizophrenic content — all as a result of rising production costs and robust competition from the Web. It’s the same story I’ve heard elsewhere: magazines are hurting generally, genre and niche magazines especially so; see, for example, previous entries The decline of the science fiction magazine and The incredible shrinking Trains.

How print magazines can stay relevant in an online world is undoubtedly the industry question. I know that they can, otherwise a plugged-in putz like me wouldn’t keep subscribing to them. And print magazines can’t be inevitably doomed, or else The New Yorker wouldn’t have been able to buck the trend and become profitable after decades of losing money. And note that when it comes to books, the opposite is happening: e-books are struggling. Magazines can’t compete with the Internet on timeliness or cost — not when magazine subscription costs are rising and Web sites are free — and people don’t mind reading shorter pieces online. There is a solution or two out there, and Mollise tries to come up with some specific to the astronomy mags: stop trying to compete with the Internet on news, offer more reviews and distinctive content. In other words, be more interesting, more distinctive — more essential. These are not bad ideas.

It’s been raining today, but last night it was clear — also, I didn’t have to go to work today — so we spent it at the telescope. It was our first chance to observe from the field this spring; it’s a much better observing site than our parking lot. A few changes to our routine: we brought camp chairs and a table, and set up the telescope with its tripod legs collapsed. This made for a much more comfortable, relaxed and leisurely observing session, though we had our hands full on our walk to the field.

We set up before sunset and waited for the heavenly bodies to appear. The Moon was first, appearing in the blue sky as a young crescent so thin your in-laws will never come back; it was day and a half after New Moon. In the telescope it was ethereal: we were using our new f/6.3 focal reducer; using the 16mm Nagler Type 5 eyepiece, which produced 49× and a 1.6-degree field of view with the focal reducer, we could see the entire disc of the Moon. We also finally saw Mercury for the first time ever: it was nearby, and resolved as a disc in the scope. It would have made a hell of a picture, with trees in the foreground, but I left my camera behind deliberately — I wanted to observe, not fiddle with gear.

We spent a lot of time on Saturn, which was crisper than it had ever been for us — probably because we’d been out long enough for the scope’s optics to stabilize. Lots of little moons. We swapped between our two Tele Vue eyepieces, adding the Barlow lens as required, getting 49×, 79×, 98× or 158× depending on the combination. The Barlow worked well (at last), though adding it required serious refocusing.

The sky didn’t get truly dark for deep-sky observations; the Messier objects I tried for — galaxies in Leo, Hydra and Coma Berenices — were awfully dim, but perceivable. A bit of a jumble since we were poking around galaxy clusters, and I was losing track of which galaxy I was looking at. We’d probably have done better had we stuck around, but it was getting cold as well as late.

All in all, a good dry run with the new equipment. We may get another chance this week, if the weather holds, which will be quite nice. I wonder what we’ll look at next.

Of course I’m not going to stop at just one telescope. The NexStar 5 SE I bought last fall is a fine scope, but it has its limitations. For one thing, 125 mm isn’t a lot of aperture. It’s also limited to a maximum 1.2-degree field of view (some astronomical targets are wider than that). And while it’s luggable at 12.5 kilograms, there are times when something even more portable — the vaunted “quick-look” category — would be more desirable. Especially when the NexStar’s electronics require additional setup time.

These desires — more portability and more aperture — can be addressed relatively inexpensively. (I said relatively. Let’s not talk about astrophotography rigs for the time being.)

Continue reading this entry »

The night sky in Shawville is darker than Ottawa’s, but it’s not as dark as I would like; there’s still a bit of ambient light pollution, some from the town itself, some a result of being an hour’s drive from a million-strong metropolis. (For more on light pollution, see this post on The Map Room.)

So it has occurred to me that I could tie my desire to see the stars under some truly dark skies with my often-procrastinated desire to get some camping in. Problem is, most campsites are in wooded areas, presumably because most people aren’t comfortable camping in open, unsheltered spaces. Some investigation, I thought, would be in order: it would be nice, for example, if Bon Echo Provincial Park had campsites with good astronomical sight lines, because according to the maps it’s in a really dark area.

Fortuitously, there was this Ask MetaFilter question about where to travel to observe under dark skies, which I stumbled across the very same day I had been reviewing SkyNews’s list of dark-sky observing sites in Canada. From the former came a link to a brief list of dark sites (PDF) from the International Dark Sky Association; from the latter, a link to Gordon’s Park, a site on Manitoulin Island. Gordon’s Park caters to astronomers, providing a dark-sky campsite and cabin, plus interpretative programs. It’s also the subject of the Arrogant Worms song, “Mounted Animal Nature Trail,” which is a weird coincidence. It’s a seven-hour drive — and, suddenly, on our summer to-do list.

Update, April 6: I should also mention Phil Harrington’s ObservingSites.com, which includes a reference to a site in the nearby La Vérendrye reserve.

You may be surprised to know that a key tool in astrophotography is the lowly USB webcam. In fact, most amateur lunar and planetary photography is done with webcams: the Celestron NexImage Solar System Imager, widely considered the best camera of its class, is from what I’ve read, essentially a Philips ToUCam Pro modified to fit into a 1¼-inch eyepiece barrel. Webcam astrophotography is essentially a low-cost exercise in adaptive optics: the camera shoots 640×480 video, and you use software to select the best frames (shot in rare moments of atmospheric stability), stack them to reduce noise, and apply an unsharp mask to draw out features. The results are surprisingly good, considering. (For more on lunar and planetary imaging with webcams, see these presentation slides (PDF).)

The software is the key link, and of course the fact that I use a Mac complicates things somewhat, because the telescope companies bundle their lunar and planetary webcams with Windows-only software. Doing it on a Mac requires a couple of extra steps.

Stop right now and read Webcam Astrophotography on the Mac, which covers the same ground that I’m about to (and is actually written by someone who knows what he’s talking about).

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I just finished reading Timothy Ferris’s Seeing in the Dark, a book about amateur contributions to astronomy. This is something I’ve been struck by the more I get into astronomy: it not only accepts amateur contributions, it relies on them. While professional astronomers compete for limited time on research telescopes, the sheer number of amateurs looking skyward allows them to do things that professionals simply can’t (because there are fewer of them looking through fewer telescopes). Such as long-term observations of single objects (like variable stars), and searching for asteroids, comets and supernovae. (The subsequent PBS documentary did not emphasize this point to the same extent.)

I’m struck by this partly because it’s not the same with herpetology, or at least the wildlife conservation part of it, where amateurs are frequently seen as part of the problem, rather than part of the solution — with the notable and important exception of frog monitoring. (On the other hand, you can’t poach a comet.)

But Ferris points out that amateur astronomy is a relatively recent phenomenon, a result of larger apertures and digital cameras passing into amateur hands; a half-century ago, amateurs were limited to long-focal-length, small-aperture refractors and reflectors, and planetary observations. A lot has happened to empower amateur astronomers since then. In the meantime, amateur herpetologists have been facing increasing regulations and sharp professionalization, both of which restrict the lay enthusiast from doing meaningful work in the wild, and send many of us to our basements to focus on exotics.

Seeing in the Dark by Timothy Ferris

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Seeing in the Dark (DVD)

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The HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has managed to photograph avalanches in progress on the surface of Mars. Beyond amazing. Wow. Photo credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona. Via Bad Astronomy.

Out observing for the first time in two months last night: we finally had a combination of (reasonably) clear skies and (relatively) warm temperatures (i.e., warmer than -10°C); besides, Saturn was at opposition. So Saturn was our primary target.

To avoid getting run over by snowmobiles, we set up our telescope by the back step; planetary observing doesn’t require dark skies. A rough two-star alignment (Regulus and Rigel) proved adequate. Saturn was visible in the 25mm Plössl (50×) as well as the 10mm Radian (125×), as were at least two of its moons — Tethys and Dione. Titan was probably visible as well, but I didn’t identify it. Atmospheric turbulence was not good, so the viewing wasn’t exactly sharp, but Saturn was recognizable as Saturn.

Also tested out the lunar filter on the gibbous Moon, which would normally be excessively bright in the eyepiece; the filter made it quite viewable. We also tried out the narrowband nebula filter on the Orion Nebula, which is bright enough to view from a less-than-dark site. It was visible enough in the non-filtered eyepieces, but adding the filter brought out more expanse and more detail. The Trapezium could be seen in either case; the filter made the stars greenish.

At around -6°C, not so cold that the electronics or battery were impaired; I’m sure I didn’t leave the optics enough time to cool down. In any event, we were going after targets that weren’t very challenging, optically speaking. Though Saturn and the Orion Nebula are impressive enough never to be taken for granted.

The first close-up images from the MESSENGER probe — images of a part of Mercury we’ve never seen before — are beginning to come in. Discussion at Bad Astronomy, the Planetary Society (also here) and Universe Today.

Previously: MESSENGER and Mercury.

(Photo credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington.)

The lawsuit against Meade has been settled. Meade’s “Advanced Ritchey-Chrétien” telescopes — the LX200R and RCX400 series — aren’t actually Ritchey-Chrétiens. A Ritchey-Chrétien telescope is a form of Cassegrain reflector that uses hyperbolic mirrors to eliminate coma; these telescopes are modified Schmidt-Cassegrain catadioptrics that achieve the same effect. Ritchey-Chrétiens are also insanely expensive, so a couple of companies who manufacture them sued Meade for deceptive trade practices — Meade’s scopes are considerably cheaper than the real thing. As part of the settlement, Meade can’t use the RC initials in its products, but can continue to claim “Ritchey-Chrétien-like” benefits, since the scopes in question do eliminate coma, and are by all accounts impressive enough, reliability issues notwithstanding.

Update, Jan. 24: More from Sky and Telescope’s news blog, including new names for the contested telescopes, which will now have an “ACF” (“advanced coma free”) suffix.

The MESSENGER probe makes its first flyby of Mercury on Monday. The first probe to visit Mercury since Mariner 10 in 1974 and 1975, MESSENGER will make two more passes of the innermost planet before settling into orbit in 2011. What makes this probe particularly interesting is that it’ll map the half of Mercury that Mariner 10 missed — 33 years later, and we still don’t know what half the planet looks like. Here’s a good article from the Planetary Society.

Last night we could see some stars, but it also proved that cold nights aren’t much use for stargazing. Too much goes wrong with the telescope: the optics never quite settle down due to the temperature, so nothing stays in focus; the batteries drain rapidly; the LCD on the Celestron controller goes wonky. We had the power die on us during the alignment, forcing us to start over, and we lost tracking while at high power. And meanwhile we’re freezing our extremities trying to control the scope and handle ice-cold metal eyepieces. Mental note for future reference: try not to go out stargazing below, say, –10°C.

Our purpose last night was to test our new acquisitions: a 10-mm Radian eyepiece (125× in our scope) and a 2× Barlow lens, both from that manufacturer of astronomical holy grails, Tele Vue. We were especially hoping to test them on Mars, which is bright and nearing opposition this month. We’re going to have to wait for more favourable conditions.

For future reference, because there are an awful lot of them and because Jennifer will, I think, appreciate having it, here is a list of Wikipedia pages describing the various deep-sky catalogues:

• List of Messier objects
• List of NGC objects
• Index catalogue (no list)
• Herschel 400 catalogue
• Caldwell catalogue
• List of dark nebulae (i.e., Barnard objects)

(For all of Wikipedia’s faults, it does astronomy relatively well, I think.)

See also the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada’s Finest NGC Objects List, an illustrated guide to the Sharpless catalogue, and, of course, Wikipedia’s list of astronomical catalogues.

Last night, I plugged my digital SLR into my telescope (via an adapter), pointed it at Comet Holmes, and tried to take a halfway-decent picture. This was the result:

Not the best photo of Holmes by a long shot, but not bad for a first attempt, with limited equipment.

The most important accessory for a Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope — or anything else with glass at the front of a telescope tube, for that matter, including Maksutovs and refractors — is something to prevent dew from accumulating on the glass. There’s nothing more annoying than having your telescope fog up shortly after you start observing. Among the preventative measures are a dew shield, which reduces the glass’s exposure to the outside air, and a dew heater.

The store was fresh out of dew shields of the requisite size, so we decided to improvise one of our own for our first observing session last Friday:

The material in question is a Neoprene back wrap. It came with a hot and cold gel pack, of which, thanks to my little disease, I have several. It has Velcro, so all we had to do was wrap it around the telescope and voilà! Instant dew shield. Serviceable, if a little floppy and funny-looking.

The highlight of last night’s observing session — our first serious use of our new telescope — was Comet Holmes. Even in the 10×50 binoculars (another purchase), it presented a round, fuzzy disc that was nevertheless sharply defined; in the telescope, it was huge. (To see what I mean, Astronomy magazine has a collection of submitted photos.) To the naked eye, it’s just another star, though rather a bright one by now.

Otherwise, we ran both the telescope and the binoculars through their paces. I was able to spot not only the comet, but the Andromeda Galaxy and the Double Cluster well enough through the binocs (and the Pleiades were wonderful); the scope was able to pick out M81 and M82 in the same field of view, plus the usual suspects (M13, the Dumbbell Nebula and the Ring Nebula, which was tiny but its shape apparent).

Atmospherics weren’t great, though it was an ostensibly clear night: Altair, Deneb and Vega had halos around them when I looked at them through binocs. There was more ambient light from the town than I was prepared for, too.

And I don’t think we set up the tripod very well: it shook too much — more than it did in our previous test — and I think the fact that it wasn’t level affected the computer’s accuracy. But we had to walk a couple hundred metres to get to our site, and moving the scope was relatively easy: we didn’t even bother separating it from its tripod.

I won’t know for sure what this telescope’s limitations are until I try a higher-magnification eyepiece (say, a 10-mm Plössl for planetary observation) and do it under better skies. But so far, so good.

We could see stars on Wednesday morning, so we decided, spur-of-the-moment, to do a quick test of the telescope before I left for work. I had twenty minutes or so — plenty of time, right?

The computer wanted latitude and longitude in degrees, minutes and seconds, and I’d written down our coordinates in decimal format, so I had to run back up and pump them through an online converter. Filling in the date, time and location was fiddly, mostly because it was my first attempt and I was rushing.

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In the end, after much deliberation, we chose the Celestron NexStar 5 SE: we decided that it was the most portable option we were considering, and that portability trumped other considerations at this time.

We picked it up this evening, after work, at Focus Scientific, the local telescope store.

Now all we need is some clear, dark skies.

When it comes to buying a telescope, I’m stumped, simply because there is no one single “best” telescope to buy. In The Backyard Astronomer’s Guide, authors Dickinson and Dyer recommend that a first-time scope be portable and simple enough that it will actually be used. I’ve narrowed it down to three candidates, each with their own pros and cons. Trouble is, Dickinson and Dyer recommend all three (or their equivalents) in their book. Picking one is proving difficult as a result: all are probably good choices, but one is probably more suitable for our needs.

The three candidates are Sky-Watcher’s Dobsonian reflector (in either the 8-inch or 10-inch versions), Celestron’s NexStar 5 SE, and Sky-Watcher’s 5-inch Maksutov.

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My interest in astronomy has been lifelong, though varying in intensity over the years, but I only saw the Milky Way for the first time a couple of months ago. It was an epiphanic moment akin to the ending of Isaac Asimov’s classic short story, “Nightfall,” in which a civilization sees the stars for the first time in millenia. Knowing that it’s there in theory is one thing; seeing it for yourself is quite another.

My earliest observation was the 1979 solar eclipse, which I saw from my front porch in Winnipeg, but most of my astronomy, growing up, was theoretical rather than observational. In other words, I read a lot of books. Family finances precluded me from ever owning a telescope (especially in the early 1980s), so all my childhood observations were naked-eye views from my backyard, usually in winter (so that I was awake when it was dark). Because it was a suburban sky, and with considerable light reflected from the snow, I didn’t see much. Nor did I necessarily appreciate how much I wasn’t seeing. Milky Way? Forget about it: sky conditions were so poor that I couldn’t even see the Little Dipper.

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I received a copy of Cosmos on DVD from my brother for Christmas — too late for me to blog about it as part of the Carl Sagan blog-a-thon that took place on December 20, the tenth anniversary of his death, but here it is belatedly.

It’s safe to say that I grew up on Cosmos: portions of the series have persisted in my memory since it was first broadcast (when I was eight); I also had a copy of the companion book which I have since, I guess, lost. It made a big impact on my impressionable mind, but only in its discrete parts; it was only now, when I was able to watch the series, beginning to end, as an adult, that I was able to appreciate the whole.

Sagan was making an argument with this series, and each episode, and each point within each episode, illustrated with an historical analogy or with a simple demonstration, contributed to that argument. To point out that complex organic molecules are easy to make, and that the laws of science — of physics and chemistry — are the same throughout the universe, is to support the argument that life on other worlds is not only possible, but probable. A parallel argument is our connectedness to the greater universe: how, for example, supernovae essentially built us, by providing our planet’s heavy elements and the cosmic rays that enable mutation-driven evolution. And so forth. This was never a mere science program, or even a science program with a lot of neat material on the history of science.

One unexpected reaction — we must be getting old — was that despite our strong interest in the series’s subject matter, Jennifer (and I, to a lesser extent) had real trouble staying awake. PBS programming was slower paced in 1980, and Sagan’s manner of speaking and tone was surprisingly soothing.

To pick up on Megnut’s and Damien’s memories of the 1986 Challenger explosion on its twentieth anniversary:

When it happened, I was in Grade 8, a space-crazy kid filled to the gills with Star Trek and histories of NASA, and the deaths of seven astronauts was more than just a shock. I found out at the noon hour — I’d come home to make myself lunch and had flipped on the television for background. I was stunned, riveted — but of course, I had to go back to school, where I could think of little else.

At that time the Winnipeg Free Press was published in the afternoon, and I had a paper route after school. It was late that day; in a rare move, the paper had stopped the presses and remade the front page, which now read, in the biggest type I would see until Gorbachev was ousted in a coup, “Shuttle explodes.” Later that night, as I was collecting my paper money from my customers, I couldn’t help myself from talking about it with them — or with anyone.

It might be that for my generation — those of us who were children then, in our late twenties or early thirties now — it was our Kennedy assassination, our Pearl Harbor, our 9/11: the event that brought us to a collective halt.

(I live-blogged Columbia’s destruction three years ago.)

Why should I go to the trouble of tracking down and blogging all the news and photos from NASA’s Mars landers when there’s already a blog out there that covers that very thing? Have a look at Mars Rover Mission Blog.

The Stardust probe performs its flyby of the Wild 2 comet today. It will collect samples from the cometary tail and return to earth in January 2006.

A Globe and Mail article uses the fact that tonight Saturn will be closer to Earth than it has been since 1975 as a segue into the arrival of the Cassini-Huygens probe at Saturn (and Titan) in July. Also mentions a Canadian astronomy magazine, SkyNews. (I’m starting from scratch, here.)

Bob and Ann are friends with reptiles and a telescope. I wrote Bob with advice on getting started. While he’s dubious about the entry-level refractor in question — he says that they’re frustrating to use — he recommends as a starter Exploring the Night Sky by Terence Dickinson. Now that’s a young-adult title, so I spelunked a bit on Amazon to find a couple of other beginner titles that may be more suitable, also by Dickinson: The Backyard Astronomer’s Guide and Nightwatch: A Practical Guide to Viewing the Universe. Will investigate. More suggestions welcome.

Jen gave me a 420×60-mm refractor telescope for Christmas. We’d been discussing getting into backyard astronomy again — both of us were interested as children, but neither of us had the hardware to do much about it — and this entry-level scope will give us the opportunity to try it out. Unfortunately, neither of us seems to have the astronomy books we had as kids, so we’ll have to start from scratch again in that department. Time to do a little browsing.

In the meantime, there’s a ton of astronomy software out there. I have, or had — time to go rifling through boxes — a copy of Redshift that should run on Jen’s old Windows laptop. As for Mac software, it’s fortunate that Applelust has been providing saturation coverage, thanks to the interests of its contributors: Night Sky, KStars (revisited), Starry Night Pro, Stellarium, Equinox, AstroPlanner, and more.