Jedolby

  Near the end of April, I was hunting for supernovae in galaxies at 14 hours of Right Ascension, and I saw in my planetarium software that a couple of minor planets were in the same field as NGC 5468. As is often my custom, I shot some pictures of the galaxy and moved on, planning to sort out the asteroids later with the assistance of the time filter .  Following another one of my frequent customs, I then proceeded to forget all about the asteroids! But every now and then, I refresh my memory of recent minor planet targets by searching through my images and looking for asteroids that I added to the file names. If I find some that I never processed, I'll spend an hour, or so, putting together an animated GIF. And so, yesterday morning, I discovered the files containing the pair of forgotten planets with NGC 5468 and I went to work on them. To my surprise, although NGC 5468 is a nice, face-on spiral galaxy (a good target galaxy for supernovae), it wasn't on my 14-hour targets l...

  The sky was clear, but a bright full moon was rising low in the southeastern sky. My solution was to shoot galaxies in the northwestern sky, far away from the moon. Although my sidereal clock showed 14:33 at the start of my session, I chose my list of targets at 13 hours of Right Ascension, an hour-and-a-half west of the meridian.  I like the 13-hour list of galaxies. It includes the impressive Whirlpool Galaxy, M 51, the curious Sunflower Galaxy, M 63, and at the southern end of the list (for me, in the northern hemisphere), there is the beautiful face-on spiral galaxy, M 83, in Hydra. I never tire of these targets. They are standouts amongst the many smaller and uninteresting elliptical galaxies on my lists.  Last night, I moved on from M 63 and shot NGC 5005, which is a smaller version of M 63. Nothing new there, so I sent the scope onto my next target, NGC 5033. Although the bright center of NGC 5033 appears smaller than NGC 5005, its faint but sprawling spiral arms...

  Possible weather balloon Along with the flowers and the increased daylight hours, May seems to bring odd sightings in the sky more than the other months. Last year, there was the unusual aurora borealis visible from here in Tucson. Also that month, I tracked a strange pair of satellites across the sky that were accompanied by a small cloud. The satellites were moving way too slow to be in low-earth orbit, but they were also moving too fast to be up as high as the geostationary satellites. They were both moving in the same direction (generally south to north), but they also drifted further apart as they went, and the cloud faded from view after half an hour, or so. Interestingly, it was the cloud that was noticed by the unaided eyes of my daughter, who pointed it out to me. One very tiny cloud in an otherwise clear sky. Weird! When I got my telescope aimed at the cloud and started shooting some pictures, that was when we saw the short satellite streaks. The satellites could not b...

  When I read the news in early 2023 that David Crosby had passed away, I was saddened and told myself that the next time I listened to CSN's "Southern Cross," I'd have to be reminded that Crosby is no longer with us.  Strange. Although "Crosby, Stills, & Nash" is like a household word to me, I had to admit on that January day in 2023, that the only song I could immediately think of by them was "Southern Cross." Didn't they have tons of hits? Hmmm. Well, more than the few that I could come up with, anyway.  Even stranger, however, is that when the news of Crosby's death led me to visit the Wikipedia page for "Southern Cross," it was then that I learned for the first time that Crosby wasn't present in the studio when the song was recorded! His voice is not heard in the song! He had parted ways with the band and was just coming back in the middle of the making of "Daylight Again." His picture on the iconic cover of...

Sunspot group AR4079 In my previous post, I discussed using a HyperStar lens to turn my 11-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope into a Schmidt camera. And while it does a superb job at f/2 imaging, the real beauty of the HyperStar is that it can be removed again, restoring the SCT to its native f/10 focal length for purposes other than fast, wide-field astrophotography. For example, I also enjoy white-light solar viewing and photography with my SCT. Although a large aperture for light-gathering purposes isn't required by the brilliant sun, the large aperture of an 11-inch SCT provides better resolution of fine details of sunspots compared to smaller scopes. I bought the HyperStar and Celestron CPC-1100 from Starizona in 2007. At the time, the HyperStar was the only game in town for fast f/2 shooting through a telescope. Celestron developed their "Fastar" lens in the 1990s, but discontinued them for some reason in the early 2000s. Starizona's HyperStar is similar to the F...

  Meade Schmidt Camera Ad In the 1980's, Meade Corporation advertisements in the astronomy magazines were mesmerizing. Their products were beautiful, but they were mostly unaffordable to people like me. I could only dream of owning one of their telescopes. Until one day, when I just had to get my hands on one, I worked out a deal to sell my pickup truck to my uncle for just enough money to buy a Meade 8-inch SCT (Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescope). And, boy, was it worth every penny! For him, that is. Just kidding. Honestly, I loved my Meade 2080 LX3 for 20 years, despite its poor optical quality. Since I mainly used it for low-power astrophotography at f/6.3, I wasn't really bothered by the defects. It was only when I tried to resolve tight double stars or planetary detail at high power that I was met with disappointment. Meade was really in a bind over Halley's Comet in 1986. Everybody wanted a telescope to view the comet, so Meade and other telescope manufacturers cranked up ...