The "Super" Moon

So I managed to make one good reasonable photo of the so called "Super" Moon – enjoy!

The "Super" Moon

They Are Here! *

* Let me explain:

• By "they" I mean ET, extraterrestrial intelligent life. 
• And by "are" I mean "maybe, possibly", IF ET exists (and that is still a very big IF). 
• And by "here" I mean the Kuiper belt and Oort Cloud, several dozens AUs out there (so not actually "here")

On the blog Centauri Dreams there was a nice series (Parts one, two and three) how humanity's sphere of existence could gradually, over generations, spread out, hopping from comet to comet, until it reaches our neighbouring solar systems.

And well, if there is not a "Great Filter", and if we presume that ETs exist (and came into existence long before us), they could have settled our Milky Way galaxy within a mere 100 million years (hopping from star to star, as I read somewhere, I unfortunately forgot). So it is is possible that ETs came already to our solar system, and has settled in the Oort cloud, waiting until we come to make first contact (ala the Zoo Hypothesis).

So lets get going, lets go explore the Oort cloud, see what's there, make our living there. Even if ET does not exists, we need to go out there – for science, and for humanity.

Mind Blowing

Cosmography of the Local Universe from Daniel Pomarède on Vimeo.

(via)

Triple Conjunction – Second Try

Second time's the charm for my image of the triple conjunction? Well not quite. While I managed to make a decent photo (this time from the right site, with the right lens and the right framing), the weather was more hazy than the last time. It makes for a nice red evening sky, alas it clouds the planets a bit. And as Jupiter has sunken much lower it was not visible when the Sun set behind the hills – that is the thing with such a motive that obstructs the horizon.

A very faint Mercury (left above center) and a much brighter Venus (above the tree-line)
If you click for the larger image you can see ε Gem (Epsilon Geminorum), a star with an apparent magnitude of 3, above and to the left of Mercury.

I am happy with the results.

After I got some shots of the triple (double?) conjunction I took some photos of the stars just to see what is possible with a 50mm (f/1.8) camera lens (aperture about 28mm) and a APS-sized DSLR on a simple tripod.

Just pointed the camera the brightest star, Vega, and took this photo with f=50mm (f/1.8) at 2.5 seconds exposure and ISO 400. 

(Contains some image editing)

The constellation Lyra – cropped from the image above.

The bright star on top is Vega (one of the brightest stars in the sky), and on the left top one can see Epsilon Lyrae (with 208 arcseconds separation between ε1 and ε2). Notice how the Ring Nebula (Messier 57) is not even a smudge with this bad seeing and in this short exposure…

[Update]
I let astrometry.net do a "blind solver" for the full size image: FOV is 24.4 deg x 16.3 deg, and pixel scale is 22.6 arcsec/pixel.

[/Update]

[Update2]
I just realized that is close to Kepler's FOV!

[/Update2]

DSLR with 50mm f/1.8 photo lens pointed in the general direction of the Big Dipper (part of Ursa Major) – colors slightly changed.

I think I got the three stars γ, δ and ε from Ursa Major (or known as Gamma, Delta and Epsilon Ursae Majoris). Pointing a DSLR at the night skies with the built-in optical viewfinder is nearly impossible for me.

Definitely not clear skies… Notice the the streak left of centre – probably a satellite. Also at the right edge of the image one can see the colourful stars 4 Dra (red giant), Kap Dra (blue giant), 6 Dra (orange giant) and HD109822 (orange giant). At the lower right one can see 2 Dra (orange) and Lam Dra (red).

[Update]
Again astrometry.net: FOV is 24.6 deg x 16.4 deg, and pixel scale is 22.7 arcsec/pixel.

[/Update]

It is a nice step for me

Triple Planet Conjunction – Observing Venus, Jupiter and Mercury

Yesterday I got a chance to observe the triple conjunction of Venus, Jupiter and Mercury this month. It had been awful cold and cloudy weather the past weeks, and it is again cold and cloudy today (and for the next weeks, I presume). So when yesterday we had one sunny – but cold – day, with blue skies and only a few small clouds interspersed, I had to see the conjunction for myself.

Shortly after sunset

The good news: I saw the conjunction. The bad news: I didn't manage to take a photo of it.

This photograph captured a glimpse of what I saw…

 

What was there to see…

Naked eye observation:
Venus was first to become visible, at about WNW. It was something like 15 to 20 minutes after the Sun had set behind some hills that Venus became visible in the West, very bright, slightly over the horizon (about a hand's width). No stars were visible at this time.

After some time a slightly dimmer Saturn appeared to the lower left of Venus.

This was followed after some more time by a Mercury (that was first noticed with an 8x21 binocular), to the left and higher than Venus. With the naked eye Mercury was barely noticeable.

The angular distance between Venus and Mercury was about twice (give or take) that between Venus and Jupiter, with Mercury being vertically above Jupiter (give or take).

Without my glasses I was not able to notice any of these three planets – not even Venus.

Observation with 8x21 binoculars:
All three planets were clearly visible in small 8x21 binoculars. But I spend little time with binoculars as I moved on to the telescope.

Observation with 76mm/700mm Optus refractor telescope:
The distance between Venus and Jupiter filled almost the field of view both with the CZJ H40mm eyepiece (about 1.5 degree FOV and about 17x mag) and with the LOMO Sym17mm eyepiece (about 1.4 degree FOV and 42x mag). So the apparent separation between Venus and Jupiter was about 1.3 degrees (give or take).

Both Venus and Jupiter were clearly discernible as discs at both at 42x with the LOMO Sym17mm, and at 70x with the Spindler Ortho10mm eyepiece – albeit small discs. Jupiter is about 45 arcseconds in diameter at the moment, and Venus about 10 arcseconds.

For Jupiter I thought I could discern horizontal stripes at 70x mag, but conditions were not good (my very small experience, cheap and not properly collimated telescope, Jupiter barely above the horizon and still much light from the Sun) – with that I would not say I saw the actual stripes of Jupiter.

I attempted to view Mercury in the telescope, but gave up after a short time as pointing the telescope (with its awful, awful, awful az-alt-mount) was very difficult for me.

The pointing of the telescope was made worse by the fact that I used the telescope without glasses (short eye relief of 8mm for the Spindler eyepiece), but had to put my glasses on to use my improvised finder (a simple tube in lieu of an real finder)… So either I need a finder system that – for me – works without glasses (that would rule out any "telrad" type of finder), or I need eyepieces that work with glasses. I'm not thrilled as I don't want to spend any money for this at this time.

Before packing up I tested the collimation on some stars, but couldn't get a proper focus. The collimation is still off, it seems… Will try to collimate the telescope with an artificial star.

A photo taken while the conjunction was visible, just to the left of the frame… ;-(

Photography:
The problem with photography was that I set the camera's field of view while the Sun was still up, and forgot to adjust it once the conjunction was visible. Too many instrument (two cameras, a binocular and a telescope) and too little focus on the task. Oh well.

As it turns out I also took the wrong lens anyway. I took my 17mm-85mm telezoom, which of course has an high f-ratio of f/5.6 at 85mm. This means long exposure time and long streaks. What I should have taken instead was my 50mm prime focus lens (that was still in some package from my last move) with an f-ratio of f/1.8 – with this I could have used shorter exposure times at the fully opened aperture. The things I should have known since long – but have long forgotten, it seems.

Also, I probably should have switch to a higher ISO setting. I used ISO 100 (as I do for the daytime shots), but ISO 200 or maybe even ISO 400 would have been much more sensible…

An additional problem with photography was that I wanted the conjunction to be close to the castle (to mimic Thierry Legault's wonderful shot of the conjunction above Mont-Saint-Michel), but from the observation site I choose (with the help of Google Earth and a little bit of scouting by binocular) there was too much distance between the two – the conjunction further south, the castle further north. Next time I should choose a site a bit further north, but don't know if I can see the city as well from there…

Loose ends:
After I was packing up – it was cold and my muscle ache was no longer ignorable – I saw for a second a very bright thing, about NNW, maybe 30 or 40 degrees above the horizon. This was possibly a satellite flare I guess.

Telescope Magnification Comparison

I made a (daytime) comparison of what the different eyepieces will do with the telescope I have. The telescope is a cheap used "OPTUS" Newton reflector, with a spherical 76 mm (3 inch) mirror and a focal length of f=700mm. I gather it was made long ago by "Synta" and you could get it under many brand names like Skywatcher/Sky-Watcher, Konus, Bushnell, iOptron, Tasco, Celestron or Bresser.

My telescope came without eyepieces, but can handle eyepieces in the 24.5 mm (0.965 inch) diameter, so it readily accepts the microscope eyepieces I have with 23,3 mm (0.92 inch).

In the spirit of the 5€ telescope I used a small and cheap point&shoot (Canon  A800), which I held by hand to the eyepiece. A small camera can be held directly to the eyepiece to easily make images.

The camera was "modded" with CHDK, which makes it possible to set all kinds of things to manual (like exposure). But CHDK is a pain in the ass to use – it is written by people who couldn't care less about user interface it seems. Seriously, you can set "Disable Overrides" to "Disable" and "Off" - WTF????

Don't know yet how these eyepieces will do with nighttime stars instead of daytime sculptures – but here are some daytime images for your pleasure:

My f=700mm telescope with different eyepieces (larger image)

I tried to keep the images consistent (same exposure, same focus, etc.), but couldn't quite manage it...  I haven't yet managed to switch off autofocus, so I had some focus problems. Especially the image of CZJ 6,3x is out of focus due to camera problems, but the telescope/eyepiece was focused.

The "No Zoom" images were all made with f=37mm (Full-frame equivalent), 1/500 second exposure and f/3.0 aperture. The "3.3x Zoom" images were all made with f=122mm (Full-frame equivalent), 1/250 second exposure and f/5.8 aperture.

With this fixed exposure/aperture/focal-length one can see nicely the differences in brightness. Especially the Spindler 25x is darker – with the eye (or with longer exposure) the image by the Spindler 25x is bright enough though.

The Spindler 25x with proper exposure (but decisively unproper focus…)

A hand-held Canon A800, a 700mm telescope and a LOMO 15x ocular 

– who needs expensive DSLR telephoto lenses?

I will probably not use the Noname 6x and the CZJ? 15x, as they don't seem to offer any advantage. The wide-field of the LOMO 15x is really apparent, it has nearly the same actual FOV as the CZJ 6x. Though finding the Moon was much easier with the CZJ 6x than with the LOMO 15x. BTW: The FOV of the Spindler 25x is bigger than what the camera can capture.

Let's see how it will do with some night sky – but again not tonight, as it is overcast here…

Addendum:
One thing I noticed during the daytime is that in low power (e.g. f=40mm eyepiece) one can almost "see" the spider/secondary, which causes a sort of "shadow" in the middle of the image (one can see the spider/secondary once one steps away from the eyepiece). Here is what I found (about a different telescope):

The StarBlast is not a very desirable scope for terrestrial observing: first, its image is upside down/reversed (common for astronomical scopes); and second, it won't focus close-up. Furthermore: during the day you are very likely to see a vague shadow of the secondary mirror in the field, at low power; this disappears at night when your eye's pupil opens up, within the proper "exit pupil" range. Normally the StarBlast works easily at the maximum dark adapted eye entrance pupil (in fairly young folks) of 7 mm, using about a 28 mm focal length eyepiece (16x, at 3.6 power per inch of aperture). One might be tempted to use a rather commonplace and easily available 40 mm focal length 1.25" ocular. I'd rather not be too dogmatic (as no actual 'harm' will be done): but DO NOT DO IT! For, an eyepiece of this focal length produces an exit pupil of 9.9 mm: way too big, causing a light loss and vague optical aberrations.

First Light!

As the sky cleared up in the afternoon and an waxing Moon was hanging in the sky, I thought best not to wait for the nightfall, test the telescope right away and make some images – which was a good decision. It was a cold day and later the night it was very cold, as the entire spring was very very cold here (probably due to global warming, hah!) and I really don't feel that good, so I did not went out again at night.

So, only some images of the Moon in the daytime. I used a "point and shoot" camera, which I held by hand to the eyepiece, and I used a bit of the optical zoom of the camera to fill the frame.

At about 17x magnification.

 f=700mm with f=42mm eyepiece

At about 42x magnification. 

f=700mm with f=17mm eyepiece.

At about 70x magnification. 

f=700mm with f=10mm eyepiece.

The images seen directly by the eye were better than what the camera could capture – not much better, but noticeable better. No camera noise, and the eye (or rather the brain) can filter out the movement of the air, and use clues to enhance the perception of features.

I need to clean the eyepieces! And I should remove the reticle from the f=10mm eyepiece. Oh well. :-) At night, the imagea should be a lot clearer without the sky's blue shine robbing contrast.

But not bad for a 5€ telescope! Sure, the eyepieces would cost a lot more, but I had them already, so I still consider it a cheap scope.

While the optics are fine (considering the price), pointing the scope is truly horrible, the az-alt "fork"-mount is awful, awful, awful. I made some slight improvements, so the telescope does not shake that much. Before the modifications it used to shake like a leaf for 2 to 3 seconds, after the modifications it only wobbles a bit for about 1 to 2 seconds. But pointing the thing remains awful. And at 70x magnification, the sky (and everything in it) really moves! The reticle makes that nicely visible. And when I tighten down the screw for azimuth, both azimuth and altitude change by about a third to a half of the FOV of the 10mm eyepiece!

Still, I could see Mare Imbrium half in the shadow. Luna 17 and Apollo 15 had landed there, and carried with them the very first rovers! Lunokhod 1, the first uncrewed rover, and Apollo's Lunar Roving Vehicle, the first crewed rover. And at the edge of Mare Imbrium were very prominent the Montes Caucasus and Montes Apenninus mountain ranges, and Archimedes Crater – the angle of the Sun at the moment really makes them stand out now. Too bad I didn't make a photo with the 10mm eyepiece of that area.

Instead I made an image of the lunar craters in the south. Wow, that thing has some scars!

So much for first light. Despite its deficiencies, this scope is nice.