The Scruffy Astronomer

1 March 2019 You can do this! I've been contacted by a couple of people who say that the photos I publish don't give a realistic impression of what a customer can expect to be able to get. So, in something of up-to-date news, I'm in the middle of evaluating (see also playing with) a saxon FCD100 127mm triplet APO refractor (https://www.saxon.com.au/saxon-deluxe-127mm-apochromatic-air-spaced-ed-triplet-refractor-telescope.html). The idea here is to see what sort of photos you can get with JUST this telescope and a DSLR (and a $30 t-ring to hold them together). Yes, that's right, no chilled CMOS, no filters, no autoguiding, no autofocus, and no magic post-processing. Just a tracking mount (in this case an unvarnished, slightly used, NEQ6, driven by a handbox). So last night I went out into my front yard, under the street lights and Kew's light pollution, polar aligned by finding Sigma Octantis with my binoculars (which was pretty rough), and fired off a SI...

27 February 2019 We're always being asked how to get a good polar alignment on an equatorial mount. There are several ways, and how you do it is going to be determined by what hardware and software you have, so I won't bore you with details (although you can ask us). But the most important thing that helps is being able to locate the pole in binoculars. It's difficult, especially in the inner city, but with a bit of practice and perseverance (and insect repellent) you can find it, and then come back to it again. Then, once you've got it in your sights, you'll know immediately where "roughly polar aligned" is, so you can get your mount set up quickly. Even some experienced photographers think this is too hard for them. It's not! The first big tip is don't start with your polar scope or telescope - those magnify too much. Start with low power binoculars. My first photo shows you (best on a screen) how to get into the area from the South...

25 February 2019 I don't often get to post my own astrophotographs, but this time I'm going to. I know I sound smug, but I'm pretty pleased with this one. But you can do this too. This is NGC 2736, which is also called, weirdly enough, the Pencil Nebula. Personally, I don't think it looks like a pencil at all. Maybe a quill, I guess...? I took this photo at the new moon about six weeks ago and hadn't had time to do the processing until yesterday. It's a combination of seven different colours. It starts with 20 minutes of red, green, blue and "luminance", which is a techy way of saying "I'm not using a filter". There's also just over three hours of hydrogen alpha, two and a half hours of oxygen and a fraction under two hours of sulphur. These last three are called "narrowband" filters. It sounds complicated, but they work exactly the same as the others. They're good at picking up little fine details that wider b...

22 February 2019 Last Tuesday was a full Moon. Big deal, it happens every month. But it was also a super Moon. Apart from a comic hero, what is a super Moon? The Moon orbits the Earth. Seen from above, it's as though the Earth and Moon are doing a dance. Imagine a pair of ice skaters, one large and one small, spinning while holding hands. But the Moon's orbit is "eccentric". It's not a circle, but an oval, with the Earth slightly to one end. So the Moon gets closer and further away from the Earth as it goes around. So now imagine our two ice skaters not holding hands, but joined by a spring that expands and contracts. Sometimes the skaters are further away from each other, so they'll look smaller to each other. Sometimes they're close, so they'll appear larger to each other. Now imagine there’s a spotlight on our skaters, shining from the side. As the skaters spin around, sometimes the spotlight illuminates one skater’s face, and sometimes it i...

20 February 2019 The end of Summer is coming, and the Sun is starting to move towards Orion. For astronomers, this means that the Horsehead season is drawing to a close. Adrian Stanyer sent me this excellent photo of the Horsehead Nebula the other day. The Horsehead is one of the most recognisable and pleasing nebulas anywhere. Photographically, it's quite a challenge, as it's not bright. Adrian is pretty new to astrophotography, having just been in it for 5 months. He says it's an extremely rewarding hobby that is highly addictive. Even though, the whole experience has been a very steep learning curve. This Horsehead is taken with the saxon 200DS astrophotography telescope Adrian got from Optics Central. The scope is on a saxon NEQ6 Pro go-to mount, also from Optics Central. The photo itself was taken with an ASI 294MC Pro, which is a colour CMOS camera, hooked to a laptop. Adrian uses autoguiding, which is a way of improving the mount's ability to track the ...

18 February 2019 NGC 2516 the Diamond Cluster This is an excellent illustration of this delightful cluster, and also an example of how to process the photo. ASV member Russell Cockman shows how to process the image to retain the star colours. Anyone with a modest telescope, a tracking equatorial mount and a camera can have a go at this, it just takes care and practice. The cluster is in the constellation of Carina (not far from the Southern Cross). it's about the size of the Moon and contains 80-100 blue-white stars, some red giants (which are easily seen in the photo) and a handful of double stars. Russell took the photo using a monochrome camera behind red, green and blue filters. For each filter, he took ten 60 second exposures, and then combined them to make a "stack". Stacking (using free software) enables a computer to ignore pixels that are much brighter or darker than the majority of pixels. The result of each stack is a single photo that has much less...

15 February 2019 Telescope simulator - such a handy website! Probably the number one question we get from our customers is what they'll be able to see in their telescopes. I have to say, it's the first thing I'd be asking too. Mostly, people want to know about magnification. How big will Saturn be in the scope? Will the Moon be larger than the field? Well, you can find out using this website! Go to 12 Dimensional String's field of view calculator website. Here, you can input your telescope's optics, set a target and see a photo in a circular field that will show you how big the target is going to be. (Watch out though, it's only about magnification. It doesn't show you how bright it's going to be.) First, set the mode to "eyepiece", and set a target. M42, the Orion Nebula, is the default, but you can select other Messier catalogues, solar system objects like Saturn or the Moon, or NGC catalogues like NGC 2516 - the Diamond Cluster. ...

13 February 2019 Some things are cool but won’t last forever Iridium flares The Iridium communication (well, actually navigation) satellites has been flying since the late 1990s. The initial plan was that there were to be 77 of them, however only 66 of the original satellites were launched. These original Iridium satellites are now being superseded by the next generation Iridium NEXT satellites. The thing that most people will miss about the old satellites is their habit of "flaring". There are flat panels hanging off the sides of each satellite, and these reflect the sun like a mirror, causing a bright flash as they fly overhead. These were quite predictable, meaning that you could stand there and count down before one went off. Very cool. This photo was taken through my study window! The Hubble Space Telescope   (Image: NASA) The HST is also getting a bit long in the tooth, and is starting to have reliability problems. The latest one is that its main camera went...

11 February 2019 Citizen Science! Birds on Farms Last weekend I did four bird surveys for Birdlife Australia’s Birds on Farms project . This project has been going for more than a year now, and landholders all around Victoria are acting as citizen scientists to help Birdlife Australia learn more about birds and their habitats on private rural properties. They’ll use this information in woodland bird conservation and protection. My involvement started about a year back when I was contacted by a friend who has a hardwood plantation in the Strathbogie Ranges in Central Victoria. About a third of the place is covenanted land for wildlife, with natural regrowth after being cleared about a century ago. I’ve been birding there a few times when visiting and the place is pretty good for natives. My mate had met with Chris, an ornithologist from Birdlife Australia, and together they’d set up four survey sites on the farm. Surveys are done quarterly, and the first couple had been done by ...

8 February 2019 I got to spend some quality time with one of our larger telescopes last week, including mucking about with the iPhone app that hooks up to the mount's WiFi. I even took it up to the dark sky site for a few test shots using my DSLR and an Orion Starshoot 5MP colour CCD. More practice with both would have got much better photos, I'm sure, and the hot weather and full moon pretty much ruined the seeing on my test night. After all that, the initial results did look pretty good. The scope is a monster, and is really cool, albeit with a couple of quirks. I've never really played with a scope of this focal length, and I hope to be able to have another go, particularly as Jupiter gets a bit higher later in the year. My review is here .

6 February 2019 We don’t have an image of the week going here, but occasionally we see photos that are something special. Tony Cordaro posted this on the Australian Amateur Astrophotography Facebook page the other day. Wow. This is a stack of 15 five minute exposures, shot through an Astrodon Hydrogen Alpha (Ha) filter. The camera is a cooled monochrome astronomic CCD behind a Samyang 135mm lens at F3. All the subframes are unguided, so polar alignment was critical. I do have a personal failing for Ha photographs, not only because I’m of an age where I remember processing my own black and white film, but also the aesthetics. Also, I happen to think that the Orion area is about the coolest emissions anywhere, apart from NGC 6188. Ha photos have a particular sharpness to them, as the narrowband filter rejects other spurious frequencies enabling a razor-sharp focus that highlights all the swirls and mystery of the nebulas. The field covers everything from the Great Nebula (M42)...

4 February 2019 People in the Astronomical Society of Victoria will have heard of the Leon Mow Dark Sky Site (the LMDSS). You may have been there. But I was surprised at how little I know about Leon Mow. Leon Mow AO had a keen interest in astronomy. As part of his extensive philanthropic activities, he donated the facility to the ASV in 1990. Since then, the site has been upgraded, with a kitchen, bathroom, a club room, a dome with a telescope for use by qualified members, and most recently a number of very comfortable sleeping quarters. All these are freely available to ASV members. I use them often, and apart from walking past the plaque, I normally didn't give Mr Mow a second thought. The Leon Mow Radio Observatory is in the same location, and is fast becoming an impressive sight, with a number of aerials and (soon) a large parabolic dish antenna on a large tower. What I didn't know about Mr Mow was that his philanthropic activities extended well beyond astronomy. ...