This evening Jim, Mario and I had the opportunity to test out the new loaner scope that has been donated to the club. It’s a 90mm achromat refractor from Skywatcher on an alt-azimuth mount with slow motion controls and a couple of eyepieces.

There was a light cloud but Jupiter proved bright enough to shine through. Often this can enhance planetary views, as the clouds cut down on glare. The seeing was quite steady and the scope proved worthy.

Using eyepieces of 25mm, 12.4mm, 9.7mm and 6.4mm we were able to obtain a variety of magnifications. The scope held up well even with the highest magnification of about 150x. Jupiter showed all four moons on one side of the planet, with one quite close to the planet’s limb. Jupiter itself showed both equatorial belts, the temperate belts, darkening at the poles and the red spot. Detail was visible in the main belts, and the views were very pleasing. One aspect that could use improvement is the diagonal. The scope came with a correct image Amici prism, which is great for terrestrial viewing, but doesn’t give as good a view as a good quality right-angle diagonal. Maybe somebody out there has a spare that can be used with this scope.

All three of us were very satisfied with the new scope. This is a truly fine beginners scope. The clouds prevented us from any other observations, but I’m sure that those who are lucky enough to use this scope under the loaner program will have many enjoyable views.

Today, there will be a Total Solar Eclipse. Sadly for those of us in North America, we won’t be able to see it since the angle between Earth, Moon and Sun doesn’t align for the Moon’s shadow to fall on this part of the Earth.
However, it is visible from the South Pacific area, including Australia. The event begins there just after sunrise.
There are going to be many teams in the area watching and recording this event.
The 2 links below will be providing Live Streams of the Solar Eclipse. (A Google search will likely turn up others.) You can watch all of this celestial rare event from either of these links. The Live Feeds will begin around 2:30 (Slooh) or 3pm (Ustream) Eastern (EST) time. The Slooh page has some interesting tools to allow you to take snapshots of the feed for saving or posting to your page.
I hope you’ll find the time to watch this. It’s bound to be very interesting.
I’m sure both of these sites, plus others will provide playback later if you can’t watch this afternoon.

Slooh: http://events.slooh.com/
Ustream: http://www.ustream.tv/cairnseclipse2012.

The software that I use for making my illustrations in the EH and at the meetings, and the software that I demonstrated at the most recent meeting is called Stellarium. It is a free, open source piece of software. Try it out yourself, and enjoy!
http://www.stellarium.org/

I stepped out this morning before the sun came up (seriously, what was I thinking?) and there was the moon. I took a few shots, just handheld with my 70-200mm zoom lens, and cropped the best one.

Morning Moon

The Taurids Meteor Shower is nearly here, and although it is a fairly weak shower, the meteors that you see are likely to be good ones. With two streams of meteoroids to pass through, we should see a peak on the night of November 4th and then again on the night of the 11th. Since they are faily broad streams that we are passsing through, you may see the shower as a very long but weak one lasting most of this week.

The Taurids are rather slow moving but large meteors, so they tend to look slow and bright in the sky. This shower produces a fairly high proportion of fireballs. You never know when you might see a meteor that will be the talk of the next meeting, so get out and observe the Taurids!

Later this week will see the peak of the Orionid meteor shower. Although you can see a meteor any night, meteor showers are caused when the Earth passes through the debris left behind after a comet passes. In the case of the Orionids, the source comet is Comet Halley. In a way, this is your chance to see Halley’s Comet!

This year a fairly weak showing is anticipated because we are expected to pass though a particularly thin part of the debris trail left by the comet, but take heart! Not only is there a fairly small moon for this year’s shower, meaning a fairly dark sky, but the Orionids are known for producing bright meteors, so the few that we get could be good ones! (and let’s face it; meteor showers are somewhat unpredictable, so even though we expect a weak show this year, that is not a guarantee. Anything could happen!)

Although the shower doesn’t hit its peak until Saturday night (October 20th) the Orionid shower is rather spread out, so you could see meteors any time this week or next. Enjoy!

Comet Hergenrother has unexpectedly brightened to about 9th magnitude and should be visible in small telescopes or large binocs. More information, including a finder chart and co-ordinates for the comet can be found here:

Comet Hergenrother

Update October 12 – took some unguided images of the comet tonight from the backyard using our 7″ refractor and a dslr. The image below is cropped from a single 1 minute exposure. The comet is small, dim and star-like. I could not see it at all in the binocs.

Comet Hergenrother – October 12, approx 10:30pm

The cosmology group met last night, in the rec-room at my apt. bldg. 9 People showed up and we watched a ½ hr. DVD lecture on light elements created in the Big Bang. We then had a discussion on the video we where able to stay on topic for quite some time, before the conversation wandered of to Star Trek, Star Gate, and many unrelated subjects. We also talked about new equipment purchased by club members, and other club related subjects. I?m sure everyone enjoyed them self.
The next group meeting in the rec-room will be the Astro Photography group. This will be the fist meeting for this group, so we will be looking at what peoples concerns and problems are and the types of equipment they are using. Feel free to grab your gear and join us for more info e-mail me at jimwamsley7@sympatico.ca. See you there

Well, you can plan for lots of things and control many events around you, but darn it – weather isn’t one of them.

The skies ended up being clearer for most of the day than had been forecast. I was hopeful it would last into the evening for our Public Stargazing Event at Spencer Smith Park in Burlington. However a last minute check of the Clear Sky Chart before leaving home indicated it was going to be cloudy, but only for 3 hours – exactly during the time of our event. And wouldn’t you know it, it was exactly right.

I arrived early to try and get a decent parking spot since it’s often a busy location. On arrival, the skies were still clear. But on schedule, it started to cloud over just before 8. Undeterred, Bernie and I set up our scopes, followed a little later by Alec. We saw tantalizing glimpses of the Moon through some very temporary thinning, but nothing persistent. Other HAA members eventually joined us: David and Tanya, Steve, Ann, Mike – but wisely they didn’t bother with their scopes. Even with our small set up, we still drew about 20 curious people over to inquire about our activities and ask about astronomy. One family had come from as far as Pickering. Lots of good questions and information flowed, but sadly no eye-candy for our visitors.

By 10 the park was very quiet and it didn’t look like the sky was going to improve so we packed up early. While chatting about a coffee location, sure enough, it started to clear. And by 10:30 as we were pulling away, the skies completely opened up. Oh well, sometimes you just can’t win. But at least it was a fun night and those who did visit found it worthwhile.

The BFSP was packed with people and scopes and most prime spots on the field were taken by Thursday noon. Janice and I went down Thursday and met up with Les and Terry Webb, Don Pullen and Robert Smoke. Over the course of 3 nights, we got in a total of about 9 hours viewing. The sky had a lot of moisture in it and the dew was very heavy. Saturday night provided the best viewing (for us anyway). I spent my time in Capricorn, Aquarius, Andromeda and Pegasus. I was able to find lots of objects for the first time, including the Saturn nebula. A fellow by the name of Shawn was set up beside us with a `16″ SCT and asked us what we would like to see. I requested that we try for the moon Triton which orbits Neptune. We had to look long and hard for very brief moments of stillness in the atmosphere, but all 3 of us agreed that we could see a tiny dot almost touching the edge of Neptune. We got out the Astro software, adjusted for the view through his SCT and sure enough, Triton was right where we saw it! That was a first for all of us. I also saw Jupiter through a 25″ Obsession at about 3:30 am of the first night. Jupiter is huge in the eyepiece of a scope that big and the eclipse shadow we could see on one of the equatorial belts was inky black. All in all, a great time!