2017 was a great year for me and Astronomy, Astrophotography, and my Sky Guy shows. Attendance at the Stargazes every Monday Tuesday and Wednesday is really picking up with the (finally!) warmer weather and I'm hearing "saw you last year and it was terrific!" a lot. Every now and then I'll get a story of one of the kids who 'has their own scope now' and who knows where that could lead to! It's great to know that I might have cracked open a door for them that might lead to a life in science; or financial ruin from buying larger and larger telescopes. I can stop any time, really…
This year's Obsession is literally that: An Obsession 18-inch Dobsonian mount telescope which is a true thing of beauty and craftsmanship. I found someone selling a barely used Obsession in the Cloudy Nights online classifieds and it was within driving distance! So one day I drove to Tallahassee (5 1/2 hours) went through things with the owner and then drove back. I've got it set up in the living room and it almost reaches the ceiling!
I've been familiarizing myself with the setup procedure, accessory placement and all that while I wait for some moonless nights next week so I can give it "First Light".
One drawback about this scope is that it's not motorized to move, compensating for the Earth's rotation. or have automatic GoTo capabilities. It does have "PushTo" ability where I can use a digital "setting circle" box that will tell me when I've manually moved the scope to the correct part of the sky which is pretty nifty and it moves so smoothly it's a joy to operate! But still…
However, there is a retrofit that will give the scope full Tracking and GoTo functions which I have ordered and should have on the telescope by early June so I'm really excited to have all this in place in time for Mars' big show in July and August.
Astrophotography This Year
If you've been reading my Blog, Facebook or talked to me personally you understand how much I want to take good photos of the sky; it's been something I've wanted to do since I was 7 or 8 years old. I actually still have the first successful astrophoto I ever took which was a pic of some sunspots I took through my Sears Explorer telescope by holding my Mom's Instamatic camera (with the cartridge film canister) up to the eyepiece! I was hooked! My trials with astrophotography are well documented elsewhere on this site so I won't go into them here but in the last couple years I've really tried to get it right which has involved spending a truly ridiculous amount of money on quality tools.
The number of things that have to be right to take good astro photos of deep-sky objects like galaxies and nebulae is truly staggering and one by one I'm getting them right. I have purchased another telescope besides the Obsession (perhaps I should call it the 'Overly Obsessed'?) in the form of an Astrograph style scope, 10 inches in diameter. I wanted to buy this scope last year but the mount I had then couldn't support it.
So I bought a new mount with real load capacity and truly fine motor control and feel that with this scope and mount I'm going to get some decent photos to work with in the image processing software!
It's a 10-inch Ritchey-Chretien Astrograph scope and there's some real potential there; very solidly built, much easier to adjust the mirrors than last years' astrograph and ten inches is a manageable aperture size and weight to carry around when I have to use it visually for stargazes.
So far I've had it up twice and was able to take a test shot of globular cluster M13 with it that came out surprisingly well so early results are promising!
This is a stack of ten 90-second exposures
PoleMaster
In order to take long exposures of the sky not only does your mount have to run smooth as silk it also has to sit on the ground in a very specific and precise way; it must be 'polar aligned'. That is, one of the two directions the mount rotates must be exactly aligned (and I have found out the hard way) exactly aligned with the Earth's spin axis so your stars don't end up like streaky blobs when you leave the shutter open for five minutes at a time.
Honestly, I have never gotten this exactly right and even though I have a few decent deep-sky shots now I always had to shorten my exposures and do other 'cheats' to compensate for this random error in my procedure.
Enter technology to provide a path. The QHY company out of China has produced what is going to be the Holy Grail of polar alignment for me and probably thousands of others by making the PoleMaster Alignment Camera.
Basically you attach this camera to your mount (not the scope) hook it up to the USB port of your computer and run through a 5 step procedure that will get you polar aligned to 30 arc-seconds every time, no muss no fuss. And it'll do it in 5-10 minutes instead of the usual half hour or more using the traditional 'star drift' method.
So I'm really feeling like 2018 is going to be the start of my 'modern era' in observing and astrophotography. Now if I could just do something about that Moon and clouds…
Carpe Noctem!
Bill the Sky Guy
April 28th, 2018