Scattered Thoughts . . .

Observing on our deck. The past few days have been sunny so I've spent these past few days observing our Sun.  Observing our Sun through a telescope is something I never thought much about doing but various conditions at night have temporarily moved me away from nighttime viewing and toward viewing the sky during the day. My images of the Sun that I have been observing have been sharp and crisp but I've been a bit perplexed about why I'm not seeing any sort of detail. I'm just seeing a bright sphere in the sky with no detail whatsoever. The edges of the sphere are crisp but I'm seeing no detail on the surface of the disk no matter which way I attempt to turn the focus knobs. There are various ways to view the Sun and each way will show only a certain band of frequencies of light. I'm delving into solar astronomy at the budget end of the spectrum so I have been observing our Sun in white light. In this wavelength, I should be able to see sunspots, gr...

Imaged through a Celestron 70mm refractor. Back a couple of months ago, I wrote about rebuilding a cheap telescope we had lying around collecting dust and taking up space in our small home. I had rebuilt it using old parts from another cheap, useless telescope we threw away as well as a few new parts to increase the quality of this cheap telescope. Overall, I spent about $350 upgrading this telescope which could have bought me a decent telescope but then I would have thrown this telescope in the trash bin as well. I felt it was worth trying to rebuilt it and upgrade it so the grandkids could use it occasionally. For some quick, easy views of the night sky, this rebuilt telescope has proven to be a decent scope... not a great scope... but it is decent.  This telescope and mount is relatively lightweight and small which makes it easy to just grab and go out to the yard and that is a definite plus. As mentioned before, since I rebuilt it and upgraded it, this telescope now prov...

I've been waiting for the past week for another good day to observe the sun so I could try my hand at solar astrophotography yet again. This morning was finally a good morning to set up my telescope on the deck so I started moving gear to the deck early this morning. While waiting for two new solar filters to arrive and for the weather to be more suitable for astronomy, I've been doing a lot of research about our sun. I actually learned quite bit... some of it even a bit frightening... but I'll save that info for another blog entry which will be written solely for that particular topic. Last week, when I tried my initial attempt at solar astrophotography, I was left feeling a bit disappointed and later found that adding two additional filters to my telescope would allow me to capture more detail. Unfortunately, I'm still waiting on one of these filters to arrive but I did have one of the filters to use this morning. So, if I could see just a little bit more detai...