Jedolby

  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 ...

The year was 1987. I had been a backyard astronomer since 1980. During those 7 years, I felt like I had made good progress in the hobby. I was on my 4th telescope, a Meade 8-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain. I had tracked down nearly half of the Messier objects. I had seen the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn. I was practiced at the art of astrophotography with color negative film, having shot a lunar eclipse in 1982, Halley's Comet in 1985 and 1986, and numerous deep-sky objects at the prime focus of my 8-inch f/5 Newtonian reflector. So, when I received the May issue of Astronomy magazine in 1987, and saw the article on page 100, titled "Where to Find Pluto[:] Spring and Summer 1987," I felt ready to accept the challenge to take a photo of the most distant planet in the solar system.  To be honest, before reading that article, I had never given any serious thought to hunting down Pluto. I didn't know much about it. Nobody did. I knew that it wouldn't look like m...

I checked in on U Geminorum again last night and found that it was still hanging in there at near maximum brightness. Blinking last night's image with the one from three nights prior revealed that the star dimmed very slightly. Perhaps by a tenth of a magnitude. Difficult to notice without running it through the "time filter." Although the brightness difference in U Gem is subtle over a period of just three nights, another "star" in the field became very noticeable! It turned out to be the asteroid (240) Vanadis. On the night that I took the first image, the asteroid was just outside the frame. Three nights later, the asteroid had moved into the field of view, below U Gem. The time filter gave very good contrast to the asteroid!  Like other filters, the time filter doesn't show you something that you couldn't see without it. It just makes it stand out better. If you've ever used a UHC (ultra-high contrast) filter to look at a nebula through the teles...