Starstruck

This is the first day of a short vacation, and I spent part of the night observing Mars. The sky was clear, but there was heavy dew towards dawn, and my finder—without a dew heater—fogged up badly. Still, a very enjoyable night. Looking at the results of combining images taken through the FLT-110 and a [...]

Let’s begin by saying that I know this image is based on a flawed series of captures. The alignment was slightly off, and I idiotically decided I could fix it without stopping the whole sequence and re-aligning the mount properly. Things went rapidly downhill, and all of the stacked images show some motion in right [...]

At the end of each observing session I park the scope and put everything away. Here’s some quick views of the surroundings and the interior:

The door is ajar as the main light streams out across the garden. Note the light on the building across the way. It’s almost always on at night, so the walls [...]

I tried to image the Ring Nebula again on Friday night, and managed to completely screw up the alignment. I noticed a bit of motion in the test image and figured I was slightly out of alignment still, so I tweaked the east-west settings. That made things worse, so I tried again – all without [...]

I finally relocated my reticle eyepiece, which apparently went for a walk when I changed my observng setup last year. Of course, at that time it was all set up for use with the Meade mount, which had support for the illumination built-in. The G11 has nothing like that, so I’ll have to come up [...]

I first ran across Elizabeth Moon a few years back when her series The Deed of Paksenarion was released. That told a powerful story which went beyond the coming-of-age genre to which I thought at first it belonged. Her latest novel, The Speed of Dark, is a good attempt at a different genre. I was [...]

A visual bleah, yes, but not all that great photographically either, due to a persistent red glow which didn’t really fade until about 3.30 am (by which time I had already started to pack up). I continue to fumble with my current arrangement – the lack of a reticle eyepiece is showing up in the [...]

I thought I’d try a visual observing session for tonight. The sky was good for an urban evening, though still with the usual light sources around the observatory. My neighbour’s yard lights are still on as I write, and won’t go off until around 1 am, and more distant house lights—so-called security lights—won’t go [...]

After the distressing news from London earlier in the week I decided to escape to some extent by working on my scope alignment. The G11 mount has a setting which helps you to correct a bad alignment. I messed it up initially and made the alignment even worse, but finally I was able to bring [...]

News that a Russian astrologer is suing NASA for $300 million because supposedly NASA’s Deep Impact probe has disturbed her astrological calculations fills me with dismay. It’s bad enough that people look at the trash in the papers, but at least when you catch someone reading their horoscope there they have the grace to look [...]