Any astronomers here?

Count me in for sure.

 

Can I come over too? I'll even bring my scope so we can compare night time junk.

 

volunteering my place if it's in the metro area - less light pollution. even then, could always do my folks place up in cartersville

 

My place isn't too bad, it's about 10 miles west of Barrett Pkwy/120 intersection.

However, it would be awesome if JP could host it :naughty: Pretty sure he has almost all of us beat

 

yeah, my setup is perfect for Venus, as the orientation of my townhome means my back porch door faces directly south. Step out onto the deck, turn West, you have a clean sightline to the horizon.

I'm definitely up for some night viewing, though. Camping wouldn't suck, either

 

Bit of a drive but I have 600 acres of zero light pollution ya'll are welcome to at the millpond.

 

I've never looked up from your deck with nighttime interest - what's your field of view like from your deck? We could always go to the front of your neighborhood, or the park down the street, whichever has the lesser amount of street lights

 

:drool:

--> Click Me <--

Edit - holy MASSIVE picture. Probably the coolest sequence shot I've seen yet.

 

pretty poor actually. deck faces south west with trees around. you'd have to catch it overhead

front of the neighborhood would be good. also, red top would be an easy drive up there to camp and check it out

 

I'm always up for hosting something out here.

Google maps won't find my street address, but this is right in front of the neighborhood:

953 rider rd 30534

 

half moon and Mars tonight

 

yeah, nicad and I were looking at the moon and saturn last night. Mars if you're facing south, Mars will the planet with the reddish hue towards the southwest. Saturn is just above Spica in the southern sky, about two fist lengths west of mars (still facing south).

The moon, btw, is one of the coolest things to look at. With the moon filter on mid-magnification (around 150-200x) is amazing - you can see craters inside of craters inside of craters. It's amazing how much topography you can see when you're looking at something in that much detail.

 

Hey, are we still doing a g2g for the Venus transit? I'll bring beer!

 

You should do a gtg for the alignment of the planets on dec 21st....

 

haha - sure, i'll get something put together by this weekend, the transit is on Tuesday, starting around 6pm for our area.

On a side note, I found my first cluster last night, the M5 globular cluster. It took about an hour to star hop to it, as I still haven't set up the tracking yet and you can't see anything w/ the naked eye from my house. I had to look through the scope, memorize the extremely small FOV star patterns and then try and find it on a star chart, then track using only the scope. I think i could find it in 10-15 minutes now, but it took me about an hour to figure out what i was looking at and get my bearings.

It looked very similar to this, but my contrast wasn't nearly as sharp (thanks light polution), causing some of the dimmer stars (probably 60% of those shown in this picture) to be washed out.



Edit - link to good article showing credit for that picture here. In the sticks, I think my scope would show an image very close to that above.

 

take it out to the lake with you the next time you guys head out there. im sure the light pollution is significantly less and you'd have more horizon to work with on a dock or something

 

docks move too much

 

I use this to find not light polluted areas. http://www.jshine.net/astronomy/dark_sky/

 

:ddirty: my xt8 just arrived... I'm going to be busy tonight

I'm in the light green on that map. Need to find a good place to post up in the forest and go camping with the scopes.

 

you're in the green that's right before blue though right? not the one after yellow?

 

I was thinking stationary, not floating dock. But I suppose there is movement in even those.

 

^^^

Correct

It appears most of our camping spots are in the blue, but i don't know what the foliage looks like and how it will affect the views. Even in the green zone, you'll see everything and then some. Which finders scope did you get? I got the 9x50CI piece, it's almost as cool as looking through the main scope

 

On that site is blue less light pollution than green?

 

yeah - i think so. Most of the national parks we camp at were blue. Look out west - they don't even have a color. Makes me wish sometimes the power would just crap out for a couple hours around 10pm

 

Hmmm I guess the map isn't that accurate. Our farm is located where there is absolutely no light at all for miles yet it's listed as green. But I guess since it's a small area it doesn't register.

 

just dump a chaff canister on the local power sub-station, guaranteed two-day darkness

http://homepage.mac.com/carolepellatt/No Apology/gaochaff.pdf

 

Mine came with the basic "EZ finder II" even with the cloud cover I managed to sneak a peek at saturn and mars last night. Now I need more eyepieces .

I think that map is showing general levels of light pollution. I'm in the light green portion just west from Dahlonega (yellow).

 

get a barlow - it doubles your eye piece collection. I have the 25mm and 10mm, along w/ the 2x barlow, so I effectively have 25mm, 12.5mm, 10mm, 5mm (magnification is taken by dividing the focal length by the eye piece size, in my case it's around 1200mm. Maximum usable scope magnification is typically the mirror size [in inches] multiplied by 50).

I think my next piece will be a 2" 120* FOV eye piece, probably in the mid-teens in size (or adjustable). They have some really nice pieces...but DAMN they're expensive

 

I got a 2x barlow and a 25mm eyepiece with the scope. The barlow is nice, but does change the the view. I was able to take pictures with my phone with just the 25mm by itself, but after I added the barlow I couldn't. Instead of buying a bunch of eyepieces I'm looking at a nice zoom eyepiece and then 1 that maxes out what I can do with this scope. I think x480 is the max.

You can easily spend more on eyepieces than the scope itself. 120* FOV would be awesome.

 

Is it possible to put a 2x barlow inside another 2x barlow?

 

no, i don't think so. I think the refractor mirror in it would distort the image too much if you put two on top of each other. Even on the edges of the eyepiece i can pick up some distortion when using the barlow

They do make 3x barlows, though

 

Do you have a camera adapting lens for that thing so you can take pictures?

 

they make them...but the short answer is, no. These scopes aren't really meant for photography, you have to hover the camera around the eye piece until it picks something up, then snap it before you lose it. The problem is, the camera focuses on the lens, not the object through the lens. Given the proper time, you could adjust the focus to make the picture more crisp, but you seriously have less than a second to snap the shot, and it hauls ass through the scope.

 

And that is almost impossible when using a Barlow. I was able to snap a few with my phone with just the 25mm eyepiece in.

 

I'm going to try this out with my old telescope in my attic.
http://transitofvenus.nl/wp/observing/build-a-sun-funnel/

 

I apologize to everyone, but I've had some stuff come up and I won't be able to host any g2g's tomorrow for the viewing. Bad timing on my part, sorry guys

 

for the Venus transit:
http://sunearthday.nasa.gov/webcasts/nasaedge/

If weather is nice I'll be out at night this weekend if anybody wants to throw a star party here.

 

this one updates every 15 minutes

http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/assets/mov/depot/APOD/latest_APOD_HMIC_FR.jpg

 

taken behind cloud cover, but you can still see Venus and a couple of the sunspots

 

I took these pics...projected the image through my scope into a cardboard box.

 

that's actually a great idea. i was on my break at work and couldn't see diddly even with a welding mask

 

I wanted to get a solar filter but had to get my car running again so I ended up without one. It worked out because I found some information about viewing without one, and this was the safest and easy way to do it. I actually gave up because of the clouds, but then decided to give it another shot because there was a small break coming up. Persistence won, I got my images and was pretty excited.

 

So since I missed out on a solar filter, I instead bought me a zoom eye piece. It has 4 zooms in one piece, just rotate it to zoom in / out. It goes from 24mm to 8mm. It's a lot better than having to switch out to different eye pieces. I can go from 50x zoom to 150x with one piece. I also have a 2x barlow lens so basically from 100 to 300x.

Unrelated to lenses, I found the Ring Nebula last night. Was a little disappointed at how faint it is, thanks to light pollution. I was still able to make out the doughnut shape. I'm having the hardest time trying to find the Pinwheel Galaxy (m51). m13 is easy for me to find, once the focus is super sharp it's amazing to see all those little dots so close to each other.

 

Zoom eyepiece is what I'm in the market for next. What brand did you get?

 

Zhummel. It was only 60 dollars on telescopes dot com.

 

we took the scope up with us on the white water rafting trip, it was amazing. M5 popped, you could see hundreds of stars. We also found another globular, but I don't remember which one (nicad?).

The vertical sensor on my scope isn't working, not sure what's wrong with it. Think I'm going to have to take it back apart and either get a new sensor or find out why this one isn't working (all warrantied, if not working). The reaction from all the drunk people checking out Saturn was amazing (there were a couple hundred people camping that night with us)

 

I bet. I was not happy I had to cancel :-(

 

too drunk to remember which one it was

 

was thinking M13...but i was just as "drunk" as everybody else