While my success with observing may not have always been the best, I was very lucky to spend a good portion of Sat night with two of the club’s lovely and talented astro-dollies.

Seeing that the new Binbrook Conservation Area Clear Sky Chart was indicating some promising conditions, which I verified on the weather websites, I sought out some compatriots to join me at Binbrook for observing. While many were away for the long weekend or working, I was fortunate enough to get replies from Jackie and Ann.

I joined Jackie at the main gate about 8:20 as the clouds were just starting to clear as predicted. We headed over to the hill to set up and caught a very nice sunset with some interesting lavender colours.

A young couple enjoying the sunset.

Ann joined us by around 9 and we got busy setting up our gear. Ann had her new Orion EON 80ED and Jackie had her trusty SkyWatcher Celestron ED80. Both are excellent scopes with nice sharp views.

I’ve been trying to get set up to collimate my Mak since I’ve noticed that the focus hasn’t been as sharp as of late. If I succeeded with this, then I felt I’d have a better chance of nabbing Comet Boattini faint and low on the horizon. With the promise of clear skies, interspersed with the occasional cloud, I thought it would work out.

Alas the clouds were more prevalent than anticipated. Unfortunately the clear spots didn’t last long enough to finish the collimation. So I’m not sure if my efforts improved things, or we just got lucky we very good and steady seeing between the clouds. We did get some sucker holes and had a nice time looking at the moon and a brief glance at Saturn and 4(5?) moons in the Mak.

Ann managed to get some nice shots of the moon and hopefully she’ll post 1 of them.

Moon shot by Ann Tekatch

During one of the cloudy periods, waiting for them to pass (which they did move rather quickly considering the very light winds), we enjoyed watching some fireworks in the distance and hot chocolate.

Finally at around midnight, we decided to pack up, mostly due to frustration with the clouds. The seeing was quite good if one ignored the clouds (and we tried), the humidity was low and the temps were mild so otherwise it was a good observing night.

And sure enough as we were pulling away, the clouds finally seem to part completely and mocked us with clear skies for the 2 hours Jackie and I sat having coffee at a local coffee shop afterwards. But as I said, I had a very nice time with 2 great young ladies and that is always lucky in my books.

Tuesday night promised the last clear skies for a while, so Jim, Jackie, Ed, Ann and I met at the alternate site at Binbrook to try and find Comet C/2007 W1 Boattini. Low to the southern horizon in Hydra this 7th magnitude comet was going to require clear horizons and transparent skies. Sadly, the atmosphere didn’t cooperate, and despite Ann being well prepared with current coordinates, our attempts to find the comet failed. We did, however, get in some good star-hopping practice. But no comet. We have had to console ourselves by looking at Bob Christmas’s excellent photos.

We certainly did enjoy ourselves though, and had a nice tour of the solar system. Aside from the very identifiable red of Mars, there was also Saturn, that looked particularly good through Ed’s 12″. Perhaps the biggest treat of the night though, was Mercury. Following the Sun into the west, it showed a clear crescent phase through all the scopes that were pointed at it, including my little 80mm refractor. It had a nice warm brown colour, but I think that had more to do with the low altitude than the actual colour of Mercury.

After Mercury had set and we had abandoned all hope of finding the comet we turned out attention to the moon. High in the sky and showing a nice terminator, it pleased all who observed, in any instrument. Of particular note was the Straight Wall, that showed clearly at this phase.

A couple of weeks earlier I had tried to point my little point-and-shoot camera through the eyepiece of my scope, and had some surprising success. Here is a shot from that night.

A nearly full moon from the hill at Binbrook

At Bayfront on Saturday night I took the fuzzy shot (thanks to the clouds) that I posted on the blog’s entry for our public night. On Tuesday I thought that I would try again, and here are the results.

The southern highlands

Ptolemaeus, Alphonsus and Arzachel

I offer these shots not as the best you have seen on this blog (hi there, Kerry and Bob and Tim and…) but as an example of what we all could do, even if we aren’t the skilled and experienced astrophotographers we would like to be. My camera has a small zoom (the 35mm equivalent is 24-85mm) and is nothing fancy, and the scope was my small but mighty Orion ED80, an 80mm refractor. I simply hand held the camera in front of the eyepiece (a 10mm that shows the entire moon in the field of view). Yup, hand held. No attaching gizmos, no accessories of any kind. Others that have stronger zooms have had success just by using the telephoto function on their camera and no scope.

Try it out! There might be great lunar shots waiting for you in your future! Of course I would be happy to offer any tips, but our club is full of others that have much more skill than I. The HAA is a wonderful club indeed!

Click on the title of this blog to go to my HAA Gallery page, where the first 3 photos are of the Whale Galaxy, the Whirlpool Galaxy and Comet Boattini, which I took last week at Spectacle Lake Lodge, near Barry’s Bay, Ontario.

Cheers,

Bob Christmas

Below: The Whale and Hockey Stick Galaxies

From John Gauvreau

This is the moon from Bayfront, through the clouds and shot by pointing my point-and-shoot camera through the eyepiece of my 80mm scope. Despite the clouds the visitors seemed to really enjoy the views!

A fine assortment of HAA members and their scopes, ready to host the public.

_____________________________________________________________
KerryLH Update:

Daytime solar and lunar observing at the Nature Centre (Hamilton beach). It was a perfect day with many curious people passing by.
Many still enjoyed the view of the sun even with no sunspots. The waxing cresent moon had some interesting features.

Evening session:
Excellent turnout of people looking at Mars, Saturn and the moon.

All scopes pointed at the moon

________________________________________________________________
A couple of shots from Don Pullen

New members and winners of telescope at May meeting

Here’s an excerpt of an image of Comet Boattini, in Hydra, that I took at Spectacle Lake on Sunday, May 4, 2008. Equipment: Canon Digital Rebel 300D, Tamron 300mm lens at f/2.8, Super-Polaris equatorial mount. Exposure: 130 seconds.

More, and larger, images coming from my Spectacle Lake trip soon…

Looking like it might be the best opportunity of the week, Jim, Jackie and I headed out to the alternate site last night, to brave the damp and cold for a chance to do some viewing. When we arrived there were already two scopes set up, and their owner Brett there to watch over them.

The sky was not at its best, but the views of Saturn were lovely, with moons seeming to duck around each other as the ring plane closes and their orbits are seen close to edge on. All four scopes present gave excellent views. Visitor Brett was showing off a new Celestron 80mm apo, which, not surprisingly, gave almost identical views to my 80mm apo! He also had a Celestron 120mm achromat, which showed some purple fringing around the bright planet, but that did not detract from the excellent view that it gave. As more good quality large achromats like this one become available on the market, they really are an excellent value considering the very cheap prices that they sell for. Jim’s 8″ Schmidt-Cassegrain certainly showed the fainter moons that the smaller scopes didn’t show. His is an excellent scope and its larger aperture pulled through for us, and not for the last time of the night.

I had brought my camera with me, along with hopes of a few wide field shots. Last week I had pointed my little point-and-shoot camera through the eyepiece of my scope and came away with some surprisingly satisfactory pictures of the moon. This time I brought my trusty old Olympus OM-1, a fully manual film camera. I was lucky enough to get an excellent polar alignment on the first try (whew!) and used a 300mm lens to photograph the lovely pairing of Saturn and Regulus. At least, that was my intention until I ran out of film after two exposures! These are the kind of things I should check before I leave home, right? Oh well, I only need one good shot.

Galaxy hunting let us compare the wide field view of M84 and M86 together through my 80mm scope with the very detailed views of each individually through Jim’s 8″. Jim also took in M51 and I took in M65 and M66. We followed up with a few favourite open clusters, from the vast Beehive (M44) to the tiny but lovely NGC1502. We all topped off the evening with hearty welcome to everyone’s old friend, M13, the globular cluster in Hercules. Here again, Jim’s 8 inches of aperture showed detail that the smaller scopes couldn’t quite resolve. It was so nice to see this harbinger of the warmer seasons rising high enough to view properly.

Despite a glimpse of the summer constellations like Lyra and Cygnus rising in the east, the cold and damp finally defeated us and it was time to head for warm confines and warmer coffee. Good conversation always accompanies these gatherings, and this time included tales of adventure from past star parties and other places.

Large gathering or small, good skies or bad, observing with the HAA is always a great time with a great club.

Over the past month on clear nights where I am not too busy I have been trying to catch up on some imaging of the galaxies. I love galaxy season! There are so many countless targets to keep you busy with such beautiful/unique shapes and colours.

ANyway M51 is a target I tried a few times last year. I decided to image this one again because I wanted to see if I could get more detail out of it with better tracking and improved processing. Since this is a small target I stacked it in deep sky stacker with a 2x drizzle. I think it really helps when trying to process for intricate detail.
This was imaged with the C6 SCT @f6.3 ~ 945mm focal length

Another interesting target…
The Whale Galaxy
Click link for the wide view with the unusual Hockey Stick Galaxy…
http://www.weatherandsky.com/main.php?g2_view=core.ShowItem&g2_itemId=1483&g2_imageViewsIndex=2

M81 was imaged over two seperate nights. One from home and the other night at Binbrook.

… and finally last night before the moon rose I wanted to catch as many frames of the Virgo Galaxy Cluster/Markarian’s Chain with my Canon 100-400mm lens. I imaged at 300mm, f5.6, ISO 800, 22x3min. In the high res version you can see my tracking was horible due to poor alignment and breezy conditions… so really it is not a great judge of this lens. Overall though, I am really happy with it and the stars (when tracking is good) appear to be sharp across the field.
Large view: http://www.weatherandsky.com/main.php?g2_view=core.ShowItem&g2_itemId=1504&g2_imageViewsIndex=3

My setup with the Canon 100-400mm f4.5-5.6L lens.

You can see all these images at higher resolution in my latest images gallery. Just click on the individual image and then look for the size options on the right side.
http://www.weatherandsky.com/main.php?g2_view=core.ShowItem&g2_itemId=101

KerryLH

We had another large gathering at Binbrook last night. The viewing conditions weren’t that great (what with the haze and near full moon) but the company and warm weather more than made up for it.

We started with another colourful sunset.

(calender cover shot?)

As the sun was setting – we were joined by a kayaker (Martin).

Contrails in front the moon made for interesting views.

When not block by contrails – the moon was in full glory.

The following is the same shot after stacking and drizzle resampling 80 images using Registax

The gathering.

All preceding images were taken with a Canon EOS 40D using a Sigma 50-500mm APO.

Although there were only 3 members and 2 visitors at the alternate site last night, we were accompanied throughout the night by another very strong presence; the moon. Bright enough to read our maps by, it not only provided a lovely terminator through the scopes, it also determined what other objects we would be viewing.

I was fortunate again in getting a lift out to the observing site from Jim, where we found two well equipped amateurs already set up. With the addition of Jackie, we had a good crew that was ready for a night that promised transparent, if unsteady skies. Of course, Saturn and the moon were our starting points, and visitor Brett offered a lovely view of Saturn through his old 4″ refractor. Jim’s 8″ Schmidt-Cassegrain and my trusty 80mm refractor rounded out the selection of scopes available, and both were in fine form, as always.

I had noticed on the heavens-above web site that the former asteroid Ceres was going to be placed in Taurus, among a bright grouping of stars not far from the Hyades, where it would be showing off it’s new Dwarf Planet designation. I wanted to spy this little fellow before the changing season carried it into the west, and my Small But Mighty ED80 did not disappoint. Armed with a hand drawn map, Ceres showed itself to be an easily identifiable intruder, at mag 8.8, and we all enjoyed a look. With my objective for the night accomplished, I joined with the others for a tour of the night sky.

Allowing ourselves to be guided off the beaten path, Jim’s “sky tour” feature led us to some fine objects that would have been otherwise overlooked. Jim started us out with Kemble’s Cascade, a lovely line of faint stars in Camelopardalis that are named for a Canadian amateur. At the end of this string of pearls lies the open cluster NGC1502. When invited to look at what Jim and Jackie were seeing, I was delighted to share in their enthusiasm for this delightful cluster. Through the 8″ a few dozen stars were visible in an elongated shape, but running through the middle and along the short axis of the oval of stars was a cluster within the cluster, of brighter stars. Most remarkable though, was how these stars seemed to be laid along this axis in pairs. We counted 7 pairs of stars, and then once we had raised the magnification, we noted that two of the pairs contained stars that were again pairs. The bottom two provided a nice colour contrast of brighter yellow and fainter blue. A truly charming cluster that invites lingering observations.

Inspired by these double stars, Jim took us to several other, including 38 Geminorum and Eta Puppis, which is also a subtle yellow and blue. Delta Corvi, known as Algorab, Theta Toucan, 54 Leonis, 24 Coma, Iota Cancri, and Tegmen, another double in Cancer kept our attention on binaries. One of the most spectacular of the night was Beta Monoceros which is a bright and very clean white, triple star. All three dazzle at about the same brightness, making for an almost unnatural, contrived look. Its discoverer, William Herschel, called it “elegant”, and I agree. This is a very pretty system, and I recommend that you get a look before the season carries it into the west. Zeta Cancri also carries the name of Tegmen (there are variations on this spelling) and was a beautiful yellow pair. We rounded out this part of the night with a view of Gamma Leonis, also known as Algieba. This very pretty (and easy to find!) pair showed both components to be yellow, with one being just a little warmer than the other.

Jim had anticipated our need for refreshment at this point, and provided all with hot chocolate to keep us warm and strong through the night. Revitalized, we were ready for the next phase of our tour.

At this time we enjoyed comparing three different planetary nebula in the spring sky. Starting with the NGC2393, the Eskimo Nebula, we used high power and an OIII filter to detect both the irregular inner core and the wispy outer “hood”. NGC3242, the Ghost of Jupiter, was small but bright. We were well aware of our constant companion through the night: the moon. Aside from stellar sources (like the binaries and clusters we had been observing) it allowed only the brightest non-stellar objects to pass its unrelenting glare. Finally we looked up to M97, the Owl nebula, and though it is big, it was unable to show itself this night without the use of the filter. Passing the filter in front of the eyepiece made this planetary blink on and off!

Jim’s scope guided us on not only a fine tour, but gave excellent views of these objects, but I had one more that I wanted to see with my little 80mm refractor. Over the course of the night the sky had lost much of its transparency, but had given us the consolation of better seeing, and a steadier sky. Looking to Bootes, I pointed my scope at Izar, easy to find just along the left hand side of the Kite asterism. Although separated by only 2.8 arc seconds, this uneven pair was very cleanly split with true black space between the components. I couldn’t help but show off this view, proud of what a small scope can show. But my scope still had more to show off. Before turning in, we turned for a last look at the ringed planet.

Now nearly midnight, the steadier air provided a much improved view of Saturn, with four moons visible through Jim’s scope, though the reduced transparency allowed only two to be seen through my smaller aperture. Each scope showed banding on the cloud tops, which has become easy to see as the rings have closed, and rich colour on the planet. Cassini’s Division was still visible through both our scopes, the only ones remaining at this time.

Bidding goodnight to the frogs whose song had provided the background music for the night, we packed up and adjourned to the home of the club’s unofficial honorary member, Tim Horton, who always provides coffee and doughnuts, like the good host he is. As good as it is though, the coffee can not provide the warm feelings that come from the good company of my fellow members of the HAA, and the beauty of the night sky. Next time you are out observing, whether alone or with other members, wander away from the sky?s show pieces, and try something different. Make your own tour through the quieter parts of the sky. It never disappoints.

Tuesday April 8 promised one of the most beautiful sights that the night sky can provide; the pairing of a young crescent moon with the Pleiades. This early evening event would start with the pair side by side, and as they slowly sunk into the west, the moon would drift across the open cluster, occulting several of the Seven Sisters before they set. Unfortunately, as the evening fell it became apparent that many people were going to be deterred by the increasing cloud, and the big event would be unobserved due to far too few people and far too much cloud.

I headed out to the alternate site with my friend Ted, and was soon joined there by my fellow adventurers, Jackie and Ann. No cloud nor fog was going to keep these intrepid observers from attempting to see the occultations, and a combinations of perseverance and the magic of Binbrook came together to provide a wonderful evening.

We were armed with several pairs of binoculars, both handheld and tripod mounted, and an 80mm apo scope. A widefield eyepiece encompassed the entire cluster and moon, giving a pleasing view, even if it was somewhat diluted by the cloud. Over the course of the evening the pairing appeared and disappeared between bands of clouds, and at one point, certain that the western sky was lost for the night, we turned our attention to Saturn. Soon, though, the magical qualities of our observing site asserted themselves, and the moon reappeared! We were joined by our always welcome visitor, Martin from the conservation area, and he provided a much appreciated addition to the conversation, and we provided him with some equally appreciated views through the scope. Our only other visitors of the night were a pair of amorous raccoons, who let us know in a most vocal way that they were taking advantage of the night for their own lovelorn purposes.

As the pair lowered themselves toward the horizon (the moon and the Pleiades, not the pair of raccoons, although they may have done the same; I couldn’t say), the increased fog and mist gave a soft yellow cast to the moon, which took on the rich yet delicate feeling of watercolour. Along with the subtle ashen light on the dark side of the moon, the effect of three dimensionality was quite striking. Only after the pairing finally succumbed to the fog of the lower elevations, and the rest of the sky yielded to the ever increasing cloud, did we finally pack up and give ourselves over to the warmth and comfort of coffee, hot chocolate, conversation and laughter at the local coffee shop.

Many will have fine pictures from under clear skies, and some will say that the night might not have provided what would be considered ideal observing conditions, but it all seemed to work out just right after all. Somehow, observing with the HAA always does.