Northwest Astro

Went down to OSP this year, and it was a great experience, minus the heat and the sun which I was very unprepared for. This was also a perfect place to test out some new gear, get access to really dark skies, and let loose.

Unfortunately, I’m still recovering a bit from the amount of sun exposure I got, so I only did some quick work to get the images I captured finished up and posted. They are in the gallery.

More on the trip itself later after some rest.

So, a couple days after getting the shot of M81 and M82, I took the scope out again to experiment with shooting M81 by itself through the LX200. Although I made a couple mistakes. First, I shot on the day after full moon, and second, I ran shorter exposures on the LX200 than I did with the Orion and the widefield shot. Some napkin math tells me I should have upped the exposures to 9 minutes from 5, but I was trying 2 minute exposures instead. So the end result is that I got pretty much nothing for my hour of exposure time.

But, determined to not let the clear night go to waste, I turned the scope to the moon, and tried out a polarizing filter I picked up awhile back. I knew a lot of people swore by these things, but I didn’t quite expect what I was able to see. I saw quite clearly, all the gradients in the surface of the moon. The sort of things you can usually only make out on a super-saturated photograph. I thought I saw color, but at the same time, it could have been false color introduced by the filter. I’ll have to try it again to know for sure.

I also noticed Saturn was up for the first time since I got the LX200, so I pointed the scope at it as well. With the ETX-125 that I had previously, I only ever saw Titan next to Saturn when I was at home. At a dark site, I was able to pick up a second moon (never knew which one). The first thing that jumped out to me was that I could see 5 moons. My collimation was off, but I could make out the gap between the rings and the planet, and 4-5 different bands across the planet itself. More detail than I had ever seen of the planet to date. I’ll definitely have to revisit Saturn later and try some planetary imaging again.

The clouds haven’t been cooperating for the majority of the winter this year. Unusually strong winter conditions have kept clouds sitting over the Seattle area for the last few months.

What few nights have been clear enough, I’ve run into some issues trying to autoguide with the LX200. I picked up a camera aimed at being a planetary camera awhile back, and it throws most of my settings for guiding out of whack. It has also taught me quite a bit about some of the math behind getting good guiding with two cameras. I’ll have to make a quick post behind some of these new things I have learned.

AT66ED

LX200R

47 Megapixel

As a sort of ‘well, duh’ moment, I finally got the new scope collimated properly for the first time since I got it last night. The results were immediate and obvious. First thing I did after collimating was to point it at the moon that was just starting to wane as Jupiter had already sunk too low.

The resulting detail was pretty amazing. I went ahead and grabbed a shot from the AT66ED and the newly collimated LX200R to compare between the two. I also posted a full 47 Megapixel version of the LX200R image that lives outside the gallery for those curious about the full-resolution mosaic.

Tonight I was able to get out early enough to get a little visual observing in on Jupiter, but no chance to capture any video to see the difference it will make when trying to stack up an image. The views I got were rather impressive though. Jupiter’s bands were well defined, and I could make out the northern bands quite clearly. Also I caught a moon’s shadow on the face of Jupiter, clearly defined as a black spot, the first time I have been able to see that level of detail visually. Hopefully this will become a treat once I get the chance to point the scope at Jupiter for imaging purposes.

As of this posting, I just got back from a trip to Sandpoint, Idaho for a week. Why Sandpoint? It was a chance to take the train and find out what that was like, get away from the bustle of the metropolis I live next to, and also turns out to be a place that provides some nice dark skies. We were only able to fit in a few hours of observing across two nights, but I would still call it worth it.

I couldn’t figure out how to bring the ETX-125 at this point, and wound up picking up a used AT66ED and an ultra-cheap tripod (think less than 10$ US) to mount it on during the trip. It vibrated horribly and took over 5 seconds to dampen if you touched it, but it did the job of letting me see things through the eyepiece if I was careful enough.

The train trip there actually gave me my first ‘wow’ view. We wouldn’t arrive in Sandpoint until early in the am, so we were on the train late into the night. To let others sleep, the lights were turned down and so we were able to see out the windows into the dark skies of Eastern Washington in the middle of nowhere. The Milky Way was obviously visible, and for the first time I was able to see the dark lanes running through the light. A definite ‘wow’ moment for anyone who hasn’t yet been able to just open your eyes, look up, and see detail in our own home galaxy’s arms. Later on, the Pleiades rose, visible to the naked eye. It looked like a large smudge in the sky, and again was a first for me. I even mistook it for Andromeda briefly until I looked it up in a Sky Atlas. 

The first night, we went out to a park right on Lake Pend Oreille. The great thing about this place is that because of the lake, you had low horizons in nearly every direction except west. After sunset you could see straight into Sagittarius with Jupiter hanging over it. We spent most of our time in Sagittarius looking at M22 (a bright globular cluster like M13), M20 (Trifid Nebula), and M8 (Lagoon Nebula). For a 2.6″ scope, the views were rather impressive. We also attempted to look at Jupiter, but a 400mm f/6 scope just doesn’t have the magnification to get in close enough to get much detail. We were able to make out the shadow of a moon in transit, though. Shortly before the sun fully set, we even caught the ISS screaming across the southern sky. While it was hard to track manually, we were able to make out the general shape of the station itself, but beyond that it was a white blob.

The second night, we went to bed early so we could get up early and take a look at Andromeda and the Pleiades. We didn’t quite get dark adapted like we did in the park the previous night, so Andromeda was really just a blurry galactic core with M110 (a small partner galaxy to Andromeda) visible nearby. The Pleiades didn’t give up any real nebulosity, unfortunately. You could make out a slight hint that the stars were lighting something up that wasn’t haze in the air, but we couldn’t get enough detail to actually say “we saw the nebula”. 

As a sort of lucky treat, we wound up in Sandpoint during a week that they were starting a weekend festival, and had a Smokey Robinson concert lined up for Thursday night. We were planning on leaving Friday night on the train heading west, so things lined up perfectly and the tickets were pretty reasonable. Even better, is that as the skies got dark, there wasn’t a ton of light being used, and allowed us some really good views of the stars while we listened. So while Smokey Robinson joked about Stevie Wonder’s habits of driving too fast, and recounted through songs he wrote while he worked in Motown, we leaned back and watched the stars move slowly through the sky. Being able to patiently just look allowed us to catch no less than a dozen satellites crossing the sky (a lot in Cygnus) in under a half-hour. At one point we were watching 6 at once. 

We didn’t get any chances to do much more observing than that, but then again, if you feel like you have to rush through a list of objects during a vacation, you are doing it wrong. I got to see 3 Messier objects are always hidden by trees and buildings otherwise, and had a couple ‘wow’ moments under dark skies.