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The Writing Life of a Tadpole

My view from the lilypads

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
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Tag Archives: Venus

Boy with tongue out while looking through telescope

Bad astro alignment if I don’t listen to myself

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
May 11 2018

So I posted earlier that my astronomy season has kicked off, and I’m good to go. With the news that Jupiter was in opposition this week (the closest it will come to Earth all year, hence LOOK NOW for your best view), I thought, “Well, yeah, I want to set up”. And because it’s a PLANET, not some dark sky object, I can do it from my backyard.

So on Tuesday, I was in a hurry to set up before Venus disappeared behind a house, and I wanted to show my wife and son, so I set up the scope on our deck. Anyone who knows scopes knows a deck is a bad idea unless it’s cement. Otherwise, they jiggle if anyone walks. Hard to get vibrations out, but whatever. Anyway, got it set up, quick solar system alignment on Venus, good to go, showed the family, all good.

Then I did a quick sky tour, realigned on Procyon and Capella, not bad, and then I started doing a quick sky tour while I waited for Jupiter to come up over a house. Not awesome, but then again, I hadn’t done ANY OF THE PROPER ALIGNMENT THINGS I know I need to do.

Did I put on the vibration suppression pads? No.

Did I set up on actual ground and not a deck that bounces with every move? No.

Did I put in my most accurate time, location, etc.? Nah, general ballpark.

Did I level the scope? Nope.

Did I choose two good stars fairly far apart in the sky with different altitudes? Nope.

Did I do a careful alignment for RIGHT/UP? Yes! I’m not a neanderthal. Well, I mean, I didn’t do the proper doughnut thing to align or use a reticle, I just eyeballed it, but I did do RIGHT/UP at the end.

Gee I can’t imagine why I didn’t have great alignment. If only I had a post where I could refer back and teach myself how to do it correctly. (Best alignment process for the Celestron NexStar 8SE). Stupid lazy git.

Anyway, I really wanted to get to some astrophotography of Jupiter. It wasn’t awesome but I got a white blob. Wasn’t really expecting anything.

But it was promising enough that I started my “new project” anyway. I have my wife’s old iPhone, and everything I’ve read says iPhones tend to focus better on EPs than Android for their camera design, and the best software on the market seems to be Night Cap(ture) which is only available for iOS. So I decided I would repurpose the phone that is sitting unused, basically an iTouch / iPod at this point, and use it as my dedicated astro camera.

I charged it enough to boot and discovered I couldn’t go any further without a SIM card. What? I don’t want it as a phone, why do I need a SIM card???? Dang it. Researched ways to bypass, and while there are lots of sites that say you can do it, one of the FIRST steps they say is to borrow another SIM card. Umm, which part of “I DON’T HAVE A SIM CARD DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND?”, which is pretty much 75% of the comments on those articles too. Or I could jailbreak it. Or I could find the original SIM card. I called one of the repair places that fixed my tablet, talked to the tech, and he basically said any SIM card for an iPhone should work, and my wife DOES have a new one, soooo…anyway, I tried my Android SIM card first, no joy in Mudville. My wife’s sister had used the phone at one point for a camera on some trip, so she got it working somehow, and it turns out she did have a/the card for it, but well, I was impatient. I popped out my wife’s card from her current iPhone, and guess what? They’re totally different sizes. Great. What the hell. I popped it in, and tried to put it in the card slot anyway. No way this should work. It doesn’t even “fit” in right…smaller than the old one.

And the phone moved to the next step. While I held it in place, it let me activate the phone again, register with the app store, all of it. Then I put the SIM card back in my wife’s phone, rebooted, all good there too. Onward!

Found the app store, connected to wifi, went to NIGHTCAP, tried to download, it needed a code from my wife’s account, annoying but manageable, all good to go. Then it tells me NIGHTCAP requires iOS version 10+. The iPhone 4S? Limited to v.7. No joy in Mudville.

I tried it in the scope on Wednesday night anyway, and the controls seem just too basic with the stock camera app. Can’t change ANY settings. Sigh. Okay, well then. On to the Android phone.

The best app for Android is apparently Camera FV-5. I downloaded it, got set up, mounted the Android phone, played with the layout and setup of the physical adapter to figure out the “best way” to align. I went out to the scope, and couldn’t see anything on the screen.

Now I have a good option for this…often the problem is that the scope isn’t “focused” for that EP, and when you do get set up, you can’t go back to look through the EP as it’s now mounted to the phone. So the easy solution was to pick up two cheap EPs at the same magnitude as the other two I want to use…a 25mm and a 15mm. So I can focus with the first 25mm, get it lined up, and seeing “something”, and in the meantime, I can mount the second 25mm to the phone adapter. When I’m ready to take a pic, I just need to swap EPs in and out. I can do the same at the 15mm level if I ever get that good at the basics.

I couldn’t get ANYTHING to work at 15mm. I switched out to 25mm, and again, I was having no end of challenges to get it lined up in the EP. I’ve done this before with the moon, with no trouble, and even on Tuesday night, I could get SOMETHING. Not last night, not at all. Now, part of it is a challenge figuring out the app settings, mainly around three parts:

  1. White balance — when you do night shots of the sky using your DSLR, most of the astrophotography sites suggest the tungsten setting (good to get rid of fluorescent light normally) as it balances things better. You might have to soften or adjust lighting afterwards, but a good option. Yet I’m not taking a shot of the night sky directly, this is a shot of the EYEPIECE basically. No idea what is the best setting and my tweaks weren’t producing any noticeable improvements.
  2. Light metering — Which option to use for this is almost anyone’s guess…balanced across the image, focused on the dots that are the planets, moons and stars, or something else entirely?
  3. Focus — for DSLRs on the night sky, you generally want it at “infinity” to be in focus for star points. But this isn’t the sky, again, it is of the EYEPIECE that is basically millimetres from the camera. Do you go Auto? Macro? Infinity? As with metering and balance, tweaking wasn’t giving me any better results.

I posted a question on Cloudy Nights in their Astrophotography area, but no guidance yet.

So I said “screw it”, I’ll just do a bunch of visual observing. And hey, maybe I can try out the Ultrablock that is supposed to knock out man-made light pollution. If it does, I have no way of knowing. My alignment was so far off that at one point, I told it to go to Jupiter, and it pointed to a spot where Jupiter had been almost 90 minutes earlier! It had aligned previously, but then I changed something, replaced a star somewhere and obviously screwed up. Because when I told it to go to Jupiter, and it was off, I manually adjusted to Jupiter’s real location and told it to align again. It thought about it for about half a second and said, “Nope, that’s too big an adjustment for me, not going to do it, try again tomorrow, ya lazy git who didn’t bother to follow the right alignment procedure at the start!”. Okay, maybe the wording was something like “unable to adjust”, but that’s what it meant.

Good thing the star party is tomorrow. I need to do some serious observing with the RIGHT alignment process from the start.

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Posted in Astronomy, Photography | Tagged alignment, android, astronomy, astrophotography, house, iPhone, Jupiter, lazy, Venus | Leave a reply
Boy with tongue out while looking through telescope

A sky tour with my new setup

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
June 24 2015

As I mentioned earlier, I have my Celestron NexStar 8SE setup finally working (Finally learning with the Celestron NexStar 8SE). So last Friday, when the night was promising good seeing, I headed over to the local park that I frequently use for viewing. I’ll confess it isn’t a “great” location in terms of light pollution. It’s just off Knoxdale and you can see streelights about half a block away, plus I’m in the middle of a suburb. It’s darker than most areas, and I have decent horizons, but that is in comparison to most suburban areas, not against a true dark sky site. But it’s close and I wanted to test the setup.

I did my new routine — vibration suppression pads, wifi link, app on phone, 17.3mm regular + 12 mm illuminated cross-hair reticle for centreing and aligning, stars far apart. When it finished, and the alignment was successful, I started with simply telling the scope to show me the moon. It was disappearing behind a streetlight and a couple of houses, but it was a few blocks away before the horizon interfered, so it worked well enough to show me the waxing 4 or 5 day old moon.

I tried Venus next, and the computer told me “no”, claiming it was below the horizon. It wasn’t easy to see but it was NOT below the horizon. I moved manually, saw it briefly, pretty close to horizon so as to be practically gone, but not completely. Good slew settings to protect scope from going too low, no complaints here. Tried Jupiter next and it was pretty accurate. However, while there was supposed to be way above average seeing for the night, the haze before Jupiter was preventing seeing the bands clearly for more than a few seconds before they would waver. I name-checked Saturn just for fun, but then it was time to move on to a real test of the new setup.

Arcturus was my first stop. One of the top ten brightest stars, and 100+ times as bright as our own sun, it was easy to see why it is a popular stop for sky tours. A red giant, it did appear orange/red although the brightness hides some of it.

Next up was Vega. Blue / white? Yep, no problem. Very tall in the sky, not surprising the science geeks calculated it as the former North star. With Vega already located, I hopped quickly over to nearby Altair to check it out. Not quite as bright, but still easily found. I added Tarazed to the mix, but mostly just saw it as white, not the reported orange-ish colour.

But stars have always been relatively easy to find and see. Time to up the ante. I went for Messier 27, aka NGC-6853, the Dumbbell Nebula. I was pleasantly surprised to find it. It may be one of the brightest, but other than the Ring Nebula, I have never really found ANYTHING of note with my old setup. I was, however, a little stretched to consider the blob to have a dumbbell shape. Looked more like a bowtie to me and kind of blobby in the middle too. But I saw it, yay!

My new best friend, Messier 57 aka NGC-6720, the Ring Nebula was my next stop. My view certainly wasn’t as detailed as the NASA image 😛 but it was definitely a doughnut/ring shape.

Astronomy Photo of the Day, June 5, 2013, NASA.

Next I went for NGC869 and NGC884, a double cluster. Unfortunately, I only found one of the clusters, and I’m not sure which one. No matter, moving on! I slid over to M81, Bode’s Nebula. Wasn’t in a good position with some hazing, and a stupid tree (!), so thought I would jump a bit. One of my favorite stars in the sky is Antares, mostly because it constantly seems to be twinkling and almost changing shades of red, orange and yellow. It’s easy to spot, and right now is hanging out near Saturn. I haven’t been able to resolve the light blue star next to it (Antares B), but the haze and neighbourhood light pollution might have something to do with that (or I just don’t know what I’m doing!).

Messier 23 and Messier 18, both double clusters, were easy to see when I slewed to them, which is nice for a change. I’ll have to go back to look at them again — one definitely seemed to have swirls in the patterns, I think 23, but my notes weren’t as detailed as they should have been. The Trifid Nebula and Lagoon Nebula were too low on the horizon and lost in ambient haze, but I thought I would try for Messier 17, the Omega Nebula to finish things off. I didn’t see much that looked like a nebula though, so those are going to take more work for me to figure out what I’m supposed to see. It’s supposed to be pretty bright, but can’t swear to it by me!

A highly enjoyable evening, although I need to do some better planning in the future with maybe 4-5 clear targets in mind to find and study. My app comes with info on all the objects, and some of the big ones have audio to listen to as well as a couple of screens of text. A great resource in lieu of taking a book with me.

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Posted in Astronomy, Computers, Experiences, Goals, Learning, To Be Updated | Tagged alignment, Altair, Antares, Arcturus, astronomy, Bode's, double cluster, Dumbbell, Jupiter, Lagoon, M17, M18, M23, M27, M57, M81, moon, NGC869, NGC884, Omega, Ottawa, ring, Saturn, Tarazed, Trifid, Vega, Venus, viewing | Leave a reply
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