Astronomy Bug blog

I've been in and out of amateur astronomy for decades. I'm now retired for a few years and am taking it up again. I don't expect to post anything mind boggling here but I do like to document what I'm doing and perhaps someone will find it interesting. The peak of my astronomy adventures was about 8 years ago when I had an excellent 15" Dobsonian that I built myself around a Swayze 15" f/4.5 mirror. It was beautiful. And stupidly, I sold it. 

I now have a 10" Orion dob, a little Orion 4.5" mak-cas, and a Dwarf 3 smart scope (just acquired). The mak needs a better mount, right now it's one of those pressed wood tabletop mounts.

My first love is optical observing. Astrophotography is kind of neat, but I was never willing to put the time or money into it. The Dwarf 3 is easy and cheap enough, and produces extraordinary results for the money, so I gave it a whirl.

But mainly I like star-hopping to find faint stuff at the limit of what my current scope can do.

It's been long enough since I have done any serious observing that I'm doing a full reset and revisiting everything in the sky from scratch. 

My long term goal is to save up enough to buy a 16->20 inch dob. I think 18" is about right, but if I find a 20 at a good price... I originally decided on a 15" because at zenith, the eyepiece is just at my standing eye level. But during my time using that, I realized a few things: 

  • I'm very rarely observing at zenith
  • Most of the time I'm still ducking down or on a chair or kneeling to look through the eyepiece. 

So I'm now thinking 18-20" would be about right for this consideration. When at zenith, one of those still wouldn't need a ladder but just a few inch step around the scope, and the rest of the time it would be less crouching down.

I do already have a reasonable eyepiece selection, so the raw scope will be the only purchase goal. Unless I find a new income source, it'll probably be a couple of years, as I need something like $3500. I might beg from the house account if I can keep my normal motorcycle expenditures to close to zero for the next year. 

"Astronomy Bug" because I just seem to occasionally get bitten. I hope this time it lasts longer. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Luminous red nova AT2025abao inadvertently imaged!

Image
I just went back to my 4 hour exposure of M31 taken on October 27 and found the luminous red nova AT2025abao lurking there! It was only discovered 10 days prior to that. Luminous red novas are very rare, they are the result of a merging of two orbiting stars, rather than the end of a star's lifetime, or a cyclic expulsion of stellar "ash" that are the normal kind of nova. I've drawn arrows on these two crops from the original image  Here's a wider image so you can see where to look:  
Read more

Astrophotography

Image
(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...
Read more

Photos from October 20-25, 2025

Image
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. 
Read more