Astronomy Bug

On April 8, 2024, I loaded up the truck with a few things and a few friends, and headed south to Ohio to view the total solar eclipse. Having learned my lesson in 2017, I stayed away from both expressways and larger cities. We went to a town of a few thousand and viewed the event from a small city park. The trip down and back were entirely unencumbered by traffic since we went on small two lane country roads. By contrast, in 2017 we went on expressways and spent hours sitting stopped on the road. We did set up some camera equipment, but an important rule of solar eclipses is to NOT spend all your time messing with cameras. Your first priority should be to EXPERIENCE the eclipse. Photography comes second   Other than eclipse glasses, I set up a 360 camera to run the whole time, plus an SLR with a 600mm lens and solar filter.  I put an intervalometer on it and set it to take a photo every 30 seconds, and started it a few minutes before first contact. I loaded an app that uses my...

I'm afraid I've overdone it a bit in the last few weeks. First, I found a first-gen 8 inch LX200 on Marketplace for a decent price (about what the optical tube is worth, which is what the experts suggest for this generation). The mount seems to work well. It came with some other stuff, mostly not that useful but there were two decent eyepieces in the bunch, a Meade 4000 series 26mm plossl, and a TeleVue 32mm Plossl. I took it to the lab and did some playing with it. It appears to be functioning well. The sellers had attached it to a 12V power supply. It should have 18V. I'm working on getting 18V sources for it for both AC and battery. I did replace the capacitors in the hand controller, that's mandatory on these early models.    LX200 in a very messy lab The first thing I ordered for it is a 2" dielectric mirror diagonal. I put one on a C8 that I owned years ago and it was a FANTASTIC upgrade. Super solid, very bright, makes using 2" eyepieces possible and pl...

It's been cloudy almost constantly for the last week or so. I've been reviewing my telescope plans. Short term I really think I want to pick up an SVBony MK127 scope to put on the Explore Scientific mount (I currently have an Orion 90MM on there). My main interest is visual observing, though there is some thought that this scope would be a reasonable platform for imaging smaller objects than the Dwarf 3 can do, should I want to do that in the future. I did manage to collect a few photos by shooting through holes in the clouds. C2025-A6 (Lemmon)       IC 1805 - Heart Nebula The comet I kept short to keep it from blurring as it moves. Six 15-second exposures. The Heart Nebula got 90 exposures, 60 seconds each at 120 gain. The deep sky stuff really would do a lot better with 3 hours or so of exposures but the clouds only stay away for an hour or two at a time. 

I've been working on getting my visual stuff up, but in the mean time plopping the Dwarf 3 in the driveway and imaging random things.   From October 12: Open cluster M39:  From October 15: IC 1848 (HD237023), the "Soul Nebula" Duo-Band filter, 150x 60second subs, 120 gain, uncropped   Open cluster M29, the "Cooling Tower" Globular cluster M56:    

I've been out of astronomy for probably 10 years. Unfortunately I foolishly sold my 15" dob, but I do have a 10" and a 90mm mak and a decent selection of eyepieces. I've been working for a couple of days renewing my knowledge and getting my equipment back in shape. On the equipment side, my dob has some rubber parts that have perished and a snapped-off nylon thumb screw. I've got replacements for those in my Amazon cart. The focuser rings have rubber traction rings that have long since fallen apart. I am having trouble finding a source for those, so I'm probably going to just 3D print replacements, maybe make them a bit fatter while I'm at it. On the software side, I've dragged up the Pro version software I had before - SkyMap 3 Pro and SkyTools 3 Pro. SkyMap is now dead and buried, but there are plenty of available replacements; KStars, Stellarium, Cartes du Ciel, etc. There's no replacement I know of for SkyTools though. After confirming the old ...

(copied from my DragonflyDIY blog) I have been somewhat interested in astrophotography in the past, but have only done camera-lens wide field stuff with no mount (30 second exposure type stuff). I just wasn't interested in spending the time or money to get into what can be a VERY expensive hobby. However, at this year's Astronomy on the Beach (29th annual, in Island Lake State Park near Brighton, Michigan), I went to a talk about smart telescopes. I had been only vaguely aware of this new phenomenon, and went to the talk very skeptical. Long story short, about 3 days later I laid down $550 for a Dwarf 3 smart telescope. The front runners in the $500 class scopes right now are the Dwarf 3 and the Seestar S50. The Dwarf has a newer generation 8 megapixel imaging chip and a wider field of view. The S50 is more telephoto and has a previous generation 2 megapixel chip. I find that a lot of what I'm interested in are larger objects, and I like the newer chip. Those co...