astronomy

[mic-d]

Any casual astronomers hiding in the forums?

[Skew ChiDAMN!!]

http://www.ubeaut.biz/wave.gif

Sorta.

Got a couple of Meade's but there's too much ambient light and overhead/surrounding impedimenta for any decent viewing where we are now. :sigh:

[RufflyRustic]

Veeerrrrry casual. More of a make-an-effort to look up and identify night sky objects, get up at odd hours to view events and the like. Fascinating though.:)

[Ian Smith]

Yeah - just built this...why??

[Cliff Rogers]

TerryB has a good set up.

I have a 4" reflector & an Autostar controller but I hate the mount, the drives have plastic gears & it is very disappointing.

[mic-d]

http://www.ubeaut.biz/wave.gif

Sorta.

Got a couple of Meade's but there's too much ambient light and overhead/surrounding impedimenta for any decent viewing where we are now. :sigh:

Argh, same here :sigh:


Veeerrrrry casual. More of a make-an-effort to look up and identify night sky objects, get up at odd hours to view events and the like. Fascinating though.:)

I like satellite spotting too and one of my favourite sites is heavensabove.com for the night sky and satellite info


Yeah - just built this...why??

why? You built it, you tell us why! :p:) That looks like a serious telescope Ian, did you grind the mirror too?

Just wondering was all... I've always been interested in what's out there, sort of keeps me grounded when you contemplate the size of it all.
I have a small 114mm newtonian I made from a kit a few years ago and it serves me OK for looking at the moon and planets and a few other things. I was just having a look at Saturn tonight.
The thing that gave me the biggest buzz didn't need a telescope though, it was learning to see venus during the day. When I read that venus is visible most of the time it is above the horizon even during the day I just had to try it. Took a while to learn to focus on infinity and I think it helped initially that the moon was nearby to help focus, and binos helped too.

[graemet]

Thought I'd better put my hand up, otherwise everyone will think it's only canetoads that stargaze. I have realised an ambition to learn more about the heavens in the last 2 or 3 years, with an 8" collapsible Dob, and more recently with a 2nd hand Meade ETX105 as a grab-n-go. I joined a local Astro society and have had lots of advice and encouragement. The rewarding challenge is learning the night sky, being able to identify the constellations and star hop to the object of interest. The ETX has Autostar which is a pain to use, much easier with the Dob.

[graemet]

It's quite satisfying to be able to use my wood and metalwork skills in the hobby. I've just completed an equatorial platform for the dob, which keeps the scope tracking, rather than nudging the mount every 30 seconds.

[wheelinround]

:C don't tease please :U although I have been through the inner sanctum of Anglo Observatory Coonabarrabran with Fred Watson

[snowyskiesau]

Regular astronomer when weather permits.

Just swapped the skies of Syhdnehy where I couldn't see the stars because of the light pollution for Tasmania where I can't see the stars because of the trees. :;

I mostly use a pair of 20x80 binoculars on a parallelogram mount. The telescopes are still in storage.

[Ian Smith]

why? You built it, you tell us why! :p:) That looks like a serious telescope Ian, did you grind the mirror too?.

Sorry mic-d - didn't mean to sound trite - just noticed your post as I was heading out to use the thing. - not a bad night here in Brisbane, 11 degrees and a clear sky but a bit of dew.

It's a 10" Newtonian reflector on a dobsonian mount. My youngest son just happened to mention he'd like to get a 'scope of some kind and I'd always been interested but never done anything about it ..so he sowed the seed and 3 months later it was done.

I bought the optics ( 2" thick 10"pyrex mirror 60.2" focal length, 2" secondary , spider and eyepiece holder) from a bloke named Kevin Dixon, a member of the Southern Astronomical Society, here in Brisbane. So, no, to answer your question, I didn't grind the mirror - not that keen.:)

Total budget was $1500 ( originally $1,200 but once started there was no going back)and then you add eyepieces and filters - bit of a slippery slope really, but it has been a worthwhile exercise.

You might take a look at his thread - http://www.woodworkforums.com/f15/bevel-ripping-guide-workcentre-135195/ classic hi-jack, even if I do say so myself, but the OP encouraged me so I guess it's OK and it'll tell you most, if not all, about it

Ian

[fxst]

yep hand up here as well. I have a 25acre block about 10ks out so a loverly dark sky most times. Being a pensioner now I make do with 4" & 5 " newts the 5" has motordrive as I am thinking of going astrophotography.(made a ccd camera to that end) trouble is tools take my cash away before a new scope though they are getting cheaper so who knows? Spend time on Ice in Space don't post much but learn a lot. Use Cartes du Ceil (freeware) and Stellarium (freeware) depending on the mood. No club here but there is 1 in whyalla (70 kms) but can't seem to get there (mainly fuel costs) but one day :2tsup:
Pete

[Skew ChiDAMN!!]

Wowsers. Nice work, Ian! :2tsup:


On a slightly different note does anyone else here play with FITS data? ie. access the Hubble's (or Spitzer's or GLAST's or...) raw data from any Science Data Archives and create their own imagery? (I'm no researcher, but by dang they can look mighty purdy! :U)

If anyone is interested, the FITS Liberator enhancement SW for Mac or Win is free and made publicly available at the Hubble website. Or link here. (http://www.spacetelescope.org/projects/fits_liberator)

It's easy enough to learn... and the same site gives instructions on how to access various public access Data Archives. (LH list, click "Example data sets and links to archives" )

NB: Adobe Photoshop's needed to "assemble/colourise" the images after enhancement!

[jchappo]

114mm newtonian, which I built a dobsonian for.
6" Celestron SCT with a GoTo mount.
Just made a full aperture white light solar filter for the Celestron - which is why its been raining for 3 weeks in Sydney :((
First light for the filter yesterday showed a very nice sun spot :)

[mic-d]

No you weren't Ian, I was just being cheeky.:D That sounds like a nice scope Ian and good bang for your bucks. I'll have a look at the link later today. Mine is a truss scope too so ambient light is more a problem.
I was half thinking of getting something bigger but given the light conditions and my sporadic use, I don't think it is worth it. I do like to idea of getting one with a go-to facility.

Cheers
Michael

Sorry mic-d - didn't mean to sound trite - just noticed your post as I was heading out to use the thing. - not a bad night here in Brisbane, 11 degrees and a clear sky but a bit of dew.

It's a 10" Newtonian reflector on a dobsonian mount. My youngest son just happened to mention he'd like to get a 'scope of some kind and I'd always been interested but never done anything about it ..so he sowed the seed and 3 months later it was done.

I bought the optics ( 2" thick 10"pyrex mirror 60.2" focal length, 2" secondary , spider and eyepiece holder) from a bloke named Kevin Dixon, a member of the Southern Astronomical Society, here in Brisbane. So, no, to answer your question, I didn't grind the mirror - not that keen.:)

Total budget was $1500 ( originally $1,200 but once started there was no going back)and then you add eyepieces and filters - bit of a slippery slope really, but it has been a worthwhile exercise.

You might take a look at his thread - http://www.woodworkforums.com/f15/bevel-ripping-guide-workcentre-135195/ classic hi-jack, even if I do say so myself, but the OP encouraged me so I guess it's OK and it'll tell you most, if not all, about it

Ian

[mic-d]

Wowsers. Nice work, Ian! :2tsup:


On a slightly different note does anyone else here play with FITS data? ie. access the Hubble's (or Spitzer's or GLAST's or...) raw data from any Science Data Archives and create their own imagery? (I'm no researcher, but by dang they can look mighty purdy! :U)

If anyone is interested, the FITS Liberator enhancement SW for Mac or Win is free and made publicly available at the Hubble website. Or link here. (http://www.spacetelescope.org/projects/fits_liberator)

It's easy enough to learn... and the same site gives instructions on how to access various public access Data Archives. (LH list, click "Example data sets and links to archives" )

NB: Adobe Photoshop's needed to "assemble/colourise" the images after enhancement!

Hi Skew, I never heard of being able to download raw data before. How does it work? Can you select the part of the sky you're interested in and what's the advantage/additional attaction over googling the image?

Cheers
Michael

[Skew ChiDAMN!!]

Hi Skew, I never heard of being able to download raw data before. How does it work? Can you select the part of the sky you're interested in and what's the advantage/additional attaction over googling the image?

You can select the data sets you're interested in, yes. There's an extremely wide range available. If it has a catalogue number, there are pix available.

The advantage? Well, the telescopes don't send back their data in the form of those pix. They send back what are basically greyscale images that have been taken thru various filters.

Someone takes that data and manipulates it to create those images. Most of the ones people Oooh and Aah over on Google are the pretty ones... which don't necessarily show the features that I'm interested in.

It's a bit like a smorgasbord; you can grab a plate someone has already pre-loaded for you or you can go and select tucker that you really want. :U

eg. enhancing a UV layer so that newborn stars can be seen more clearly thru dust clouds, while also including an Infrared layer so you can still see the dust cloud structures fairly well.


The whole process is to download the images/filter ranges you want for a particular region, then use something like FITS Liberator to adjust each image so the features you're interested in are most visible. (This is necessary as these images have a far wider range of data than can be shown on a 'puta monitor.)

Each enhanced image is then saved as a TIFF and loaded to photoshop, where it's assigned a colour - and more enhancements done - until you have a final composite that clearly shows the features you're interested in.

Personally, I just like making even more pretty pictures. ;) Especially of Eta Carinae. That place is amazing!

[mic-d]

Fascinating. Eta Carinae, even more fascinating! Can you post some of your pics?

Blast, another thing to do! :D
Thanks Skew.

[BobL]

Any casual astronomers hiding in the forums?

In 1986 I was an Ansett In-flight astronomical commentator for the 6 Halley's comet flights out of Perth - It's a long story . . . .

This guy (http://brendanmitchell.net/) is one of our students and - nothing to do with his Uni course as he is a Civil Engineering Student - has to be one of the best young astrophotographers in Australia. I regularly post some of his pics in our Departmental Newsletter.

[Skew ChiDAMN!!]

Fascinating. Eta Carinae, even more fascinating! Can you post some of your pics?

Well, here's an example of what I like to do.

Pic 1 is ŋ Carinae in "natural light." ie. using the Red, Green and Blue optical filters. (Not my pic, taken straight of NASA's site. :;)

I made Pic 2 using the same data set as was used for Pic 1 - I think - but implementing just the UV and Red filters.

See what I mean about showing different detail? The other stars are either much fainter or missing altogether and considering that I scaled the UV layer logarithmically, this means that the energies involved in there are just... WOW! :oo:

(Both pix lost a lot of detail from the forum's scaling process... But still, you should get the idea. :shrug:)


Blast, another thing to do! :D

Yeah, it gets like that, doesn't it? :U

[BobL]

Nice work Skewy!:2tsup:

[Cliff Rogers]

Be good to look at it again in a couple of thousand years. :think:

[mic-d]

Thanks Skew, that's interesting stuff. It'd be interesting to see the gamma radiation emission from that. I recall last week(?) watching Stephen Hawking talking about gamma ray bursts from super nova and the image of Eta carinae reminded me of the show.

[artme]

First got interested in the sky when in scouts. Went down to the local footy/cricket ground with a map of the sky and located as many constellations as we could.

Been to Parkes and Coonabarrabran and a few smaller private 'scopes as well.

At teachers' college was fascinated to watch Saturn rising across the sky when doing one of the elective courses.

Was lucky enough to actually witness the explosion in the Magellanic clouds in 1986,
Just happened to be in the right place at the right time!!:)

SWMBO says I can't have a " scope AND a lathe!!:C:C

Nice photos Skew.!!

[mic-d]

First got interested in the sky when in scouts. Went down to the local footy/cricket ground with a map of the sky and located as many constellations as we could.


The sky must have looked very different back then. :p:D

[Terry B]

I'm more of an astronomer than a woody sadly. My interest is in variable stars. I have a roll off roof observatory in my paddock with scope and cameras etc. Recently I've been making a spectrograph. There are plenty of resources on the web for astronomy.
Enjoy.:D

[Cliff Rogers]

.... I have a roll off roof observatory in my paddock....
Nice shed. :2tsup:

[RedShirtGuy]

Not quite astronomy per se but if you're interested in radio astronomy and the SKA (Square Kilometer Array) radio telescope, there's a free lecture by Dr Virginia Kilborn going on at the Ballarat Observatory on Sat 25th June from 6pm-10:30pm

Coming events (http://observatory.ballarat.net/events.html)
Starry Winter Nights Festival - Listening to the Night.

[artme]

The sky must have looked very different back then. :p:D


Enough of that young Mic!!:D

[Cliff Rogers]

Just say "Yes, it was clearer." :D

[mic-d]

O-oh, I meant there wasn't as much light pollution then...

:wink:

[mic-d]

Thought I'd throw up a few pictures of what I've been dabbling in since I started this thread way back. I had a little Maksutov scope for a while, which I found in a clients backyard rubbish pile. Refurbished it, since given it away. Then I bought vintage Vixen telescopes, a 60mm refractor and a 100 reflector on a Great Polaris equatrorial mount - I use this scope for long exposure shots with an SLR camera, using the refractor as a guiding scope - I made an Arduino unit to control the mount via a laptop. Not as good as an EQ6 mount but not bad for as much as I want to do.

Then I answered an ad for someone selling a 14" Orion Dobsonian, but it had been left in the weather for years and the chipboard base was toast and the mirror had lost some coating - I estimated 5% of the reflective surface was lost. They ended up giving it to me just to be rid of it. I tidied it up and built a new Dobsonian base out of scrap board from kitchen fitouts. I also bought a secondhand dolley for it (It is as big as a hot water system) so it is easy to roll out. I was happy to take it because 95% of a 14" mirror is still a lot of mirror! I use this scope often with my iphoneSE to take happy snaps which I posts on various social media apps to give people their daily awe, show people/kids it's easy to do and promote a bit of science/give the trolls something to argue about. With the iphone shots on the big scope, I don't stack images, I only tidy up a bit in Lightroom on the phone. Here's a few images and I can post more if people show interest.

The first is a shot of the Apennine Mountains on the border of Mare Imbrium. I like to shoot this area at a particular time of the lunar cycle because it includes the landing site of Apollo 15. In fact I've highlighted a yellow box that surrounds the area. The little crater in the box is Hadley C crater and it has a diameter of 6km. There is a rille visible (the sinuous line - Hadley Rille) which is about 1.5km wide and Apollo 15 landed at the righthand side of this. This is a single image on my iphoneSE using Nightcap app and my 14" scope.
532277. 532278

The next image is a 30second exposure on my Nikon SLR with my vintage Nikon f/4 200mm AI prime lens mounted on my Vixen 100mm reflector on the Great Polaris mount (just tracking, not guided). This is the waxing crescent Moon conjunction with Venus. The long exposure brings out the shadow-side of the Moon illuminated by Earth Shine.

532279


cheers
M

[EagerBeaver71]

Always had a keen interest in Astronomy and all the sciences for that matter. Had refractors/reflector telescopes in my youth but haven't got anything now. I find it amazing how Astrophotography has developed over the years for the amateur Astronomer.

[mic-d]

Always had a keen interest in Astronomy and all the sciences for that matter. Had refractors/reflector telescopes in my youth but haven't got anything now. I find it amazing how Astrophotography has developed over the years for the amateur Astronomer.
Yes it’s impressive how far amateur astrophotography has come

[mic-d]

Here's some more happy snaps of the Moon, taken with my IphoneSE at the eyepiece of various telescopes. I clamp the phone to the eyepiece with an adaptor for these shots. It takes very little time to set up and very little time to shoot the Moon or planets because they are so bright. I use Nightcap app on the phone which automatically takes shots until I stop it, then it's just a matter of choosing the best one with the lowest atmospheric disturbance to process.

This is probably my best 'Mineral Moon'. I think I did stack video frames from my iphone to improve the signal/noise and I think this was on my old Celestron Maksutov scope. By turning up the saturation of the image it brings out different mineral contents in different areas of the Moon. With modern technology it's possible to create this image in a matter of minutes whereas when it was first done it would have taken days and days.

532387

This is another 'Mineral Moon' of last months full Moon, but processed from just one image from my phone mounted on the 14" telescope. There is so much light from this scope, I can actually see colour differences in the unedited image, the Moon is not monochromatic!

532388

A First Quarter shot and a daylight shot taken with my IphoneSE on my little Vixen 60mm f/15 refractor. Great optics, just a little tight for light.

532389

532390

[Mr Brush]

Very nice images !

[AlexS]

Just to introduce some woodwork content. This is an astronomers' chair I made for a local amateur a few years ago.

532440

[mic-d]

Just to introduce some woodwork content. This is an astronomers' chair I made for a local amateur a few years ago.

532440


That's a nice chair Alex, for a person with a refractor or binoculars I guess. I have the opposite need with my scope, getting up high enough, especially for short people. So I added these quick knockdown handles to a little ladder so people have a step up and also something to steady themselves, otherwise they invariably grab the scope and yank it, which makes it hard to show them something! Bonus is, it's a pretty useful addition as a work ladder too
532455

[EagerBeaver71]

That's a nice chair Alex, for a person with a refractor or binoculars I guess. I have the opposite need with my scope, getting up high enough, especially for short people. So I added these quick knockdown handles to a little ladder so people have a step up and also something to steady themselves, otherwise they invariably grab the scope and yank it, which makes it hard to show them something! Bonus is, it's a pretty useful addition as a work ladder too
532455

Nice Dobsonian.

[Log Dog]

Here's some more happy snaps of the Moon, taken with my IphoneSE at the eyepiece of various telescopes. I clamp the phone to the eyepiece with an adaptor for these shots. It takes very little time to set up and very little time to shoot the Moon or planets because they are so bright. I use Nightcap app on the phone which automatically takes shots until I stop it, then it's just a matter of choosing the best one with the lowest atmospheric disturbance to process.

This is probably my best 'Mineral Moon'. I think I did stack video frames from my iphone to improve the signal/noise and I think this was on my old Celestron Maksutov scope. By turning up the saturation of the image it brings out different mineral contents in different areas of the Moon. With modern technology it's possible to create this image in a matter of minutes whereas when it was first done it would have taken days and days.

532387

This is another 'Mineral Moon' of last months full Moon, but processed from just one image from my phone mounted on the 14" telescope. There is so much light from this scope, I can actually see colour differences in the unedited image, the Moon is not monochromatic!

532388

A First Quarter shot and a daylight shot taken with my IphoneSE on my little Vixen 60mm f/15 refractor. Great optics, just a little tight for light.

532389

532390
Some great pics there!

Log Dog :)