Scattered Thoughts . . .

F or a few days there, it was looking like Waterbury was the place to be for the solar eclipse.  Tomorrow is the big day.   I set up a couple of telescopes this afternoon and we did a bit of solar observing with Lukey and Kenzie.  We also spent some time explaining things about the sun, moon and Earth using some visual props.  Today was a beautiful day.  It was clear and would have been a great day to observe an eclipse.   I just checked tomorrow's forecast to see if anything has changed...  well, now things aren't looking so great anymore for tomorrow after around noon.  We could still get lucky but we could also be socked in under overcast skies.  The truth is, I had forecast that this new weather system would hit us on eclipse day but none of the forecasts were indicating the same so I was hoping my forecast would be wrong.  Now...  things are iffy and the forecast is looking more like my own forecast that I had compiled about four days ago.   It was nice to be outside with

I 've made a couple of homemade solar finder scopes in the past and have written about them here in this blog.  I made two additional solar finder scopes over the past few days out of unused parts for two reasons...  first, I could always use an extra solar finder scope for a second or third telescope, and second, we have an upcoming solar eclipse and I plan to have a few telescopes set up for viewing that day.   The upcoming solar eclipse has prompted me to jump on this little project just in case the weather is good enough for us to view the eclipse (which still does not look promising).  I plan to have a few telescopes in the backyard so that a few people can view at the same time and there really should be a finder scope on each telescope to make pointing the telescope at the sun much easier.  You'd think it would be easy pointing a telescope at the bright sun but the sun is so blindly bright that this usually becomes an exercise in frustration.  I've had two small 30mm

The new saddle for my new SolarQuest mount arrived this morning...  finally (USPS shipping is horrendous) ...  so I spent a little time upgrading the mount this morning.  I did a bit of work upgrading it yesterday too but I had been waiting for this new saddle to arrive for quite a while and I finally got that done this morning. In the photo, below, you can see the original saddle that came already installed on the SolarQuest mount.  I've had some bad experiences with this type of saddle...  the cast aluminum tends to crack and break eventually, the single bolt damages dovetail bars, and the single bolt isn't a secure as it should be...  so I wanted to replace it with a better one to keep my telescopes as secure as possible. In this next photo, you can see the new replacement saddle.  It is a much heavier duty saddle and it is actually a large clamp to hold the telescope rather than just a single bolt holding the telescope in place.  Replacing this saddle was easy when the new

As expected, April's weather forecast has changed.  Unfortunately, it has not changed in the way we need.  Now, rather than there being only three clear days forecast for April, there are zero clear days in all of April!   It is not looking good for any sort of astronomy in April.   Of course, we could get extremely lucky and get a few hours of clear skies in the early afternoon of the eighth...  from 2pm to 4:30pm...  I'm not holding my breath though.

T oday is an exceptionally rare clear, sunny March day so I immediately collected some astronomy gear to bring outside.  There are a few things I want to try before the solar eclipse next month.  Really, I need all the practice I can get.  The weather has been so miserable for the past year that I haven't done any solar astronomy in almost a year! The temperature this morning was still only in the upper 30s (it is early March, after all) but I was comfortable in just a fleece sweatshirt.  Being comfortable helps.  Well...  I wasn't completely comfortable...  I'm still experiencing significant spinal pain and I'm still having difficulty putting weight on my right leg without my knee buckling underneath me.  I was more comfortable than I have been lately though so that helped. I set up the new SolarQuest mount in the backyard in the same area where we'll be observing the eclipse next month.  I could have used a small table too but I didn't feel like digging one ou

F or the past few years, I've been going back and forth on whether to purchase a little mount and tripod that can automatically track the sun.  This upcoming solar eclipse nudged me to go ahead and purchase this little piece of gear of convenience.  The solar eclipse happens very quickly so any automated gear will help.  I want to get as many exceptional photos as possible during this very short couple of minutes and this will likely be my last total solar eclipse of my lifetime. This mount with its lightweight tripod is quite small and lightweight which is nice.  Another nice feature is that it is relatively inexpensive for an automatic tracking mount.   This particular mount is made by Skywatcher and is called the SolarQuest.  After leveling this mount, you simply turn it on.  It will automatically connect to satellites to attain the necessary GPS data and then it will slew to the sun automatically and begin tracking the sun.  You can't get easier than that! This nice little

I did a little bit more research and testing of the custom spectroheliograph I am building yesterday.  This time I actually captured a single frame of data of one spectral line.  Honestly, I can't even remember which line this was...  Hydrogen alpha?  Sodium?  Continuum?  I honestly don't remember and I suppose it does not matter.  I just wanted to make a little more progress in this project. This image is just one still image of a spectral line captured without the use of a telescope of any sort.  I simply had the spectroheliograph pointed out our living room window.  My purpose was simply to see what a captured image would look like.  For collecting data to compile an actual image of the current sun, I would need to be connected to a telescope and then capture video...  from one end of the spectral line scanning toward and beyond the opposite end of the spectral line.  It would be a completely different process. One thing I did noticed in this image is that either my focus w

We are somewhere in the midst of unrelenting solid rainfall and flash flooding.  Fortunately, we are in a relatively safe area (meaning higher ground away from rivers) although I suspect the septic tank will be full of water for a while and the yard will likely be mush for a few days if and when the rain ever stops.  Downtown Waterbury, a small town that was devastated by Tropical Storm Irene and a town that just finished rebuilding its infrastructure due to Irene's wrath and high water within just the past month, is likely going to be flooded as badly as Irene caused or worse.  On the plus side, I can't think of any reason why we would need to go anywhere for the next few days and we probably cannot go anyplace because our roads will likely be under water and perhaps washed out.  Bridges and roads are being washed out across our area. In the meantime, I stayed indoors and worked on more adjustments on the rudimentary spectroheliograph I am building.  I am understanding more an

All the parts for the spectroheliograph I am making have arrived from France over the past couple of weeks.  Today is a day of thunderstorms so I decided to start assembling this instrument. The last parts to arrive were the optical parts...  two doublet lens assemblies, a tiny slit, and a holographic grating.  I needed to disassemble the 3D printed parts so I could assemble the entire instrument with the optical parts included.  Of course, I first cleaned up the room and removed as much dust as possible. Once I assembled everything, it was time to connect it to a computer so I could make some tedious fine adjustments and then test everything. The first obstacle to overcome was that the holographic grating was not in line with the rest of the assembly.  I needed to shim this significantly and it is still not right.  I might need to re-shim this part after more testing.   Unfortunately, it is quite dark outside today with dark clouds changing the light significantly within seconds.  I w

I 've been working on putting together a very small telescope for capturing the full disk of the sun in the Hydrogen alpha wavelength.  Actually, I've been working on two different solar astronomy projects.  This project should not be confused with building a spectroheliograph which is another project I am working on at the moment.  That spectroheliograph project is much more complex than this one.  I'm still waiting on the optical parts to arrive from France for that project.  In the meantime, I came up with an idea that I had written about here but it wasn't until this morning that I was able to get outside in the sun to test this new setup. When I put together this surprisingly tiny telescope (it is really a small 50mm guide scope), I wasn't sure of the spacing required to get everything to come to focus.  I wasn't even completely sure whether I would have success in capturing the full disk of the sun.  It was possible that I would still be too magnified and

T he other day, I went out to the shed in the rain to cut out a couple of aperture masks for my small 50mm guide scope.  I want to try to use this guide scope as an imaging scope for imaging the full disk of the sun.  I have previously worked out a potential configuration to do the same using my 72mm ED refractor but I want to compare the two and then continue to use the one that produces the best images.   I need these aperture masks because I need the guide scope's focal ratio to be in the f5 to f6.5 range.  Without these aperture masks, my guide scope is at f3.2 which is too fast for this particular use.  I'm using my Quark Chromosphere solar filter so I need the focal ratio to be between f4 and f8.  I'm thinking that closer to f4 might be better for capturing prominences while closer to f8 will be better for capturing details on the 'surface' of the chromosphere.  This surface isn't really a hard surface though...  it is a surface of plasma gas in the form o

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

I was imaging the photosphere of the sun one morning and noticed that a sunspot eerily resembled some skin cancer that I had around that time.   The sunspot was approximately twice the length of the diameter of Earth.  My skin cancer was only about 8mm in length.  Additionally, I was seeing a shocking similarity between granules on the surface of the sun's photosphere  (each approximately 1000 miles across)  and the speckled UV damage of my skin (approximately 1-2mm each)! I've always noticed that, in many ways, the astronomical world of vast and infinite space resembles the microscopic world.  Shapes, networks and structure are comparable.  Both are equally vast but the scale is mind-bogglingly different.  When I see how vast space really is, it has always made me a little queasy and gives me the heebie-jeebies!  This incredibly vast difference in scale between space and humans is stuff I've actually had nightmares about since very early childhood.  Actually, my earliest