Scattered Thoughts . . .

T he sky was clear this morning so I decided to do a little solar observing rather than woodworking.  I'd really like to get the two woodworking projects I am working on finished but I couldn't pass up the clear skies especially since I haven't really done any solar observing yet this year.   I had a couple of things related to solar observing that I wanted to try so it seemed like a good morning to do some experimenting with astronomy gear.  The weather should be nice for the next few days so I could easily put off the woodworking projects for a day so I could finally get to spend some time observing the sun. I had a lot of nice success with a larger telescope when using my new binoviewers while viewing the moon, Venus and Mars last night so I wanted to try solar observing with the same binoviewers for solar observing.  Viewing with two eyes provides far less eye strain than viewing with one eye and eye strain is something I have been experiencing lately.   Last night I wa

M any  nights before heading to bed, I continue to try to refine my workflow for processing my solar imagery data.  I'm definitely beginning to understand what needs to be done in this process because I feel my resulting images are getting better and better.  This photo, below, is a photo I compiled and processed from data collected just a couple of days ago on July 31st.   I've found that when I black out the disk/sphere of the sun, everything on the limb of the sun really stands out.  The fine hair-like spicules of red-hot plasma are clearly visible all along the limb.  In this particular shot, there is a rather large prominence too which really is the main subject here.  This is red glowing plasma consisting of hydrogen and helium.  This prominence is flowing and looping along magnetic fields about 24,000 miles into the corona from in front of the limb to back behind the limb in this photo.  Generally speaking, prominences can flow and loop into the corona upwards of tens of

I am still feeling rather lousy and lacking energy so I didn't think it would be wise to do much today.  My plan was to lay low and recover.  I want this virus behind me...  once again!  (Perhaps the third time is the charm.)   The lawn is in need of mowing but I have been putting that off for the past few days in an attempt to recover.  This morning was a fairly clear day outside though so I mustered up the energy to drag one of my telescopes outside to do some solar observing again for a short while.  This wouldn't require nearly as much energy as mowing the lawn or any other project that needs to be done so solar observing was the thing to do this morning. This time I grabbed my longest telescope so I could do some closeup observing. I haven't used this telescope in a while.  This telescope is fairly long at 1000mm.  When we combine that with the internal Barlow lens of the Quark Chromosphere hydrogen alpha solar filter I was using, that put my total focal length at 420

I 'm still feeling rather lousy and coughing whenever I move so I'm laying low at home.  This morning, however, I accomplished a few small maintenance tasks on my astronomy gear.   First, I wanted to install a better saddle on my newly converted EXOS2 manual mount (photo at right).  I don't care for saddles with a single bolt holding my telescope on the mount.  I prefer two pressure clamps holding my telescopes.  I had ordered an appropriate saddle a few weeks ago and it arrived this past week.  I just needed to drill a hole and then assemble it so that was a small and easy task that proved to be unremarkable.  Then I moved to my best telescope.  My Explore Scientific 102mm APO refractor recently developed a sticky focuser.  It wasn't sticking to a complete stop but it was not as smooth as I like it.  Any bit of stickiness in the focuser causes some vibration in your view so I new I wanted to resolve this little problem before I got worse.  This task was a little more i

M y little project for yesterday morning was to get the spacing adjusted correctly so I can capture the complete full disk of the sun including any prominences that may be extending from the limb in Hydrogen Alpha (Ha) with my current telescope and camera.  This little project was actually a tedious process of trial and error but I succeeded as seen in the photo (at right).   In hindsight, I should have set up my new mount for this project so I didn't have to constantly spend time tracking the sun manually.  Instead, I used a lightweight manual mount that has no slow motion controls because I am still quite sick with either COVID or a bad respiratory cold.  Setting up the new mount would have required more energy than I have right now so I opted for a much smaller mount.  Unfortunately, this smaller mount made this project a bit more tedious than it needs to be.  I was constantly nudging the telescope to keep it in my field of view as the sun slowly moved across the sky.  If I used

After I finished converting my old EXOS2-GoTo tracking mount into a fully manual mount, I went outside to check on the gardens around the house.  I noticed that the moon was in the sky!  I don't remember the last time I saw the moon in the sky and I know I haven't observed the moon through any of my telescopes since last fall.  I decided to head back inside to grab one of my grab-and-go telescopes...  a small telescope on a lightweight tripod.   This particular telescope is a Skywatcher 72mm ED refractor.  It is small and lightweight but has excellent optics.  I often use this same telescope for solar astronomy.  One of these nights, if we ever have a clear night when I am feeling well enough, I hope to do some nighttime imaging with it too.   When I stepped outside with the telescope, the first thing I noticed was a bird up high in a nearby tree so I pointed the telescope at this bird....  it was a dove and the view of this bird was surprisingly crisp.  I was actually hoping t

M y slow motion control knobs arrived this morning.  I quickly pulled the gears off each axis of my old mount and installed these new knobs in place of the gears.  I had been, very briefly, using the old gears as slow motion control knobs until these new knobs arrived.  These new knobs make it very easy to slowly track astronomical objects manually as the objects slowly drift across the sky.  Well...  really, the Earth is rotating and the astronomical objects are stationary by comparison but they appear to drift across the sky in an arcing pattern.   The upper photo shows the Declination axis while the lower photo shows the Right Ascension axis.  These knobs are just the right size for easy fingertip control of slow tracking.   Here, below, is a photo of the Declination axis gear that I removed this morning.  The gear shaft is a standard 1/4" shaft so finding nice knobs to the replace the gears was very easy.  For a short while, I thought about just using the gear as a slow motion

Old mount on top, new mount at bottom. I already wrote about my problems with my old primary telescope mount so I won't get into the specific issues I have been experiencing with that old mount here in this blog entry.  A couple of days ago, I was able to take the new mount out for a spin out under the sky for a bit of visual solar astronomy and I was very pleased.  This new mount is simply incredible by comparison and is a tremendous upgrade from the old mount!  It worked exactly as it should from start to finish.  There were no unpleasant surprises nor any frustrations with the mount itself whatsoever.   Whenever I used my old mount, my focus seemed to be more on the mount and its quirkiness rather than the object I was trying to view or image.  These quirky traits could easily be justified as truly being faults and poorly written code.  The term quirkiness is just a bit kinder and gentler.  Really though, that old mount has always had many frustrating faults most of which I di

I had previously written about a morning of solar observing .  This time, I am going to write about a morning of solar imaging . I was excited to do some imaging because my previous morning of observing-only was exceptional.  The atmospheric conditions (astronomical "seeing" as it is rather unscientifically and rather ridiculously called by the astronomy community) were well above average when I was observing the previous day.  Those kinds of seeing conditions are rare so I was hoping that this morning of imaging would have skies that were just as good.  Sometimes good seeing lasts only an hour, other times it will last for a couple of days.  It was clear on this morning, there was a deep blue sky, and the weather was beautiful.  Above average seeing conditions would be awesome for imaging.   After about a half hour of setup time, running in and out of the house collecting the necessary gear and assembling it all, I was ready to fire up the computer and point the telescope to

I've been overwhelmingly exhausted this past week so I really haven't been doing much other than sleeping, eating and using the bathroom.  This morning, however, we had an unusually clear, sunny sky so I decided to do some solar observing with a couple of telescopes.  I felt that I had enough energy in me to drag a couple of telescopes out of the house for a simple observing session so that is what I did.   I had quickly decided to just make this an observing session only though.  To do a "proper" imaging session would require far more equipment including a computer and associated cables and thus would require far more energy.  This was energy I still didn't have just yet.  Honestly, I was still feeling as though I could sleep for another week before diving into anything too taxing.  My plan was to just observe the sun for about an hour or so while saving enough energy to then put everything back in storage.  (It turns out that I did not have enough energy to prop

I made two solar filters relatively recently.  One was made a little over a year ago (pictured at right) and the other was made a little over two years ago (next picture, below).  I was happy with these two filters but rarely used them because I have far better types of solar filters to use.  I think my primary reason for this exercise in making these filters was simply for the experience more than any other reason although there were a couple of other reasons (which I'll address below).  But let me start this blog entry by saying that I will never again use one of these piece-of-garbage, flimsy, and consequently, dangerous Baader film solar filters! I haven't used either filter more than three or four times each in this two year period and they have been handled exceptionally carefully ( never touching the filter material) and stored in protective zip-lock bags and these bags placed inside protective boxes for storage until the next use.  Even though these two filters were

I had previously written about having problems finding the sun with my telescope while using a finder scope called the Sol Searcher.  I resorted to removing the Sol Searcher and going back to using my homemade solar finder scope instead.  My homemade solar finder scope works very well (pictured at right with the bullseye on the back end of it) but, when I'm using more than one telescope for solar astronomy, it is best to have a finder scope for each telescope.  I was hoping this little, lightweight Sol Searcher finder scope would be the ideal solution but I was quite disappointed until the other day.   When viewing the sun, your body is situated at the rear end of the telescope where the eyepiece is located.  You would naturally want to also view the solar finder scope from this position as well and that is what I was doing.  The problem is that when you are back behind the Sol Searcher finder scope, you cannot see where the sun is on the Sol Searcher until you are dead center pos