I arrived at Binbrook at 8:30 and joined some other intrepid observers and the keyholder.

The moon was high in the sky and quite bright… you could read by it, (unfortunately).

I set up the (Great White Scope) GWS and its trimmings, intent on performing the key experiment to determine what needs to be done with my XTi to get it imaging on the GWS… and with a sheet of paper i projected the moon into space in front of the open eyepiece portal.

It comes to a focus about 1.5 inches away from the edge of the scope, which is just a shade too short
to bring it to a focus within my Xti, so i guess i need to get fancy with the Crayford Focuser.
Jackie was amazed i could bring the moon to a focus on paper beside the scope.
Even more amazed when a large version of the moon appeared on paper when the eyepiece was returned.

I tested out my newly constructed switch for holding the ‘bulb’ mode of the camera, and made some time exposures of Andromeda, while Ann did the same. I noticed a difference in the amount of background glow and noise in ISO 1600 vs ISO 100 mode. Using the GWS as a mobile tracking camera mount was not my style, and i was finished after 3 exposures. The focus was good though. ISO 1600 really brightens up the photos.

We set the camera up to lock the mirror with a separate operation, to eliminate vibration when the exposure starts. I guess it’s overkill for the kinds of photos i was taking, but i am still keen to stretch Andromeda out of the noise.

Despite the sacrilege of using the GWS for astro-photos, i still want to see if it’s possible.
My next project will be to shorten the focuser and get a low profile t-ring so that the camera can snuggle close enough to the scope to get a focus. I guess i have not completely exhausted the chance to adjust the location of the primary mirror, which might propel the focal plane a bit further out of the focuser.

In one of my longer time exposures, i got some star smearing, indicating as misalignment of the EQ platform, (which i had set up by eying Polaris at the start of the evening).
I guess this is a case for using the DSI Pro as a tracking aid, along with a laptop and the tracking port on the EQ platform.

I did not have the luxury of waiting for the moon to set, even though i wanted to seek
M46 and M47 (as part of the Sequential Messier Marathon), which should be rising in the early morning. It turns out M49 is very near the sun right now, so that it will likely be mid October before that hurdle is cleared. By then it will be easy to get from M46 to M53, but M54 is in Saggitarius and will be setting too early. (I think i might be planning too far ahead here).

It’s going to be at least mid December before i get to M68, i reckon, so this is not going to be a quick romp. Some of those galaxies will be pretty low on the horizon, further complicating things.
So, with the SMM on hold…

I found a pumpkin orange star in Perseus, and noted it in my star charts. It does not have a name, and it’s probably 7th magnitude, but it sure is a nice colour. Definitely want to trot it out on visitors nights.
I was able to find for the first time Rho Cassiopia, and see it as a normal looking, if bright star.
There’s an open cluster not far from it, which i was also able to find.

I looked up M15, not far from the moon. The zoom eyepiece eventually served up a smatteing of individual stars, but the moon was definitely working against the deep sky objects.
The moon shining into the GWS caused all kinds of distraction in the eyepiece, as i could see the interior of the scope as i approached for a view.
Things were dewing up but my dew busters and primary fan kept everything nice and dry.

Time to make lemonade, and observe the moon, i guess.

I put a heater on my eyepiece, to keep it dry. It worked fine that way.

I finished the evening with a hunt for M74, brushing up on when i will need it first thing for the (non-sequential) messier marathon in march. I had the stars all aligned, and centered it nicely in the finder and the GWS, but i could not see it with the moon high in the sky.
That’s a clue to how hard it’s going to be.

It took 23 minutes to pack everything back into the car and i was out the gate before 12:15 am.

There’s plenty to see through the GWS whenever the SMM is not on, and the dew busters are working just fine. I now hear about frost, a whole new dimension of telescopic entertainment.

Got to Binbrook for a 3:00am gate opening – Jackie was soon to follow. The sky was crystal and calm as predicted (the CSC is going to get it right once in a while – it’s just a matter of odds). The moon had just set – the Pleaides were high in the sky and Orion was just clearing the trees.

After setting up and polar aligning I started testing my new IDAS LPR filter – first with the Pleaides – then with Orion’s belt and dagger.

It was the first time I saw Venus since it crossed over to the morning – it sure is high and bright.

Watched the Timothy Ferris TV special “Seeing In The Dark”, last night. Overall, I enjoyed it; it was well produced and had a nice feel to it, and it was nice to see a program that was centered around “our” aspect of astronomy.
However, I did feel it didn’t quite reach its full potential in a few places:

1) More time might have been spent interviewing passers-by at the sidewalk astronomy event to illustrate the interest of, and the impact on, the general public when amateurs put on these events.

2) More time might have been spent on star parties and the participants, particularly throughout a night of observing and imaging.

3) Although, he was trying to dramatize his own youthful experiences stargazing, by going back to the fifties (a la Beach Blanket Bingo), I think he missed a golden opportunity to grab today’s youth with footage of high school observing groups – or young astronomy award winners.

4) After professing the wonders of viewing the night sky, the end of the film shows him and his son inside playing guitars, while a computerized astrophotography set-up does all the astronomy. After the time he’d spent infecting the viewer with the lore of astronomy, that just seemed to be an odd way to end it.

But, for all that, the photography and graphics were really well done, and I’d watch it again. 8/10

Set up last night on the driveway to start imaging and wouldn’t you know, the minute I started, I noticed a smokey smell in the air. I looked up and I could barely make out the milky way. I measured an SQM of 19.47. Surprisingly the NA Nebula managed to show up in the frames. This was first time trying out my Celestron LPR filter. I really got lucky with the framing of this object, since it is so large that it took up the entire frame and I could barely even see it on the camera display.

Canon 300D, 80mm Equinox,10x4min, lpr filter

Later in the night the SQM got up to 20.17 and I thought it would be nice to try M33.
Canon 300D, c6 SCT @f6.3 15x4min, no filter

By Kerry LH

I arrived at Lynden at about 10:30 pm and it was already starting to get foggy.
I set up the Great White Scope (GWS) out in a field where long views to the east and south would be available, and was appalled by the fog. There was so much fog i could play my laser through it and cut it in cross section. It was intriguing to see there were areas of no-fog embedded in the fog, and that it extended between 10 and 50 feet above me. At times there were layers of fog with fresh air between them.

Should i have known from the weather reports? They called for clear skies. I see the CSC still reports good transparency for Wednesday morning. They have not swept it under the rug yet. I do see a bright red patch on the Humidity line though. That will be a clue for next time.

Rather than take down the scope and try again tomorrow, i decided to wait out the fog, if that’s possible. The key curiosity was whether waiting out the fog is ever rewarded. I planned to use this evening as a standard to decide when to pack up in the future, if fog was coming in. I wanted to know if the skies could be redeemed. So i waited.

The Kendrick dew guard (DG-3) powered by a tiny 9v battery, on my secondary kept it fine all night, and although the scope was dripping wet by morning, the mirrors persisted just fine.

I also had a dew heater resistor-strip made by Tim on my findersope, and it was keeping it dry to the touch on the outside and just fine on the inside.
I lacked a dew heater on the eyepiece of my finderscope, which eventually needed some sympathy. I took the red dot finder off for a while and kept it in my pocket, in anticipation of clearer skies.

I perched my XTi on the GWS and took some constellation photos of Orion, and worked on getting the focus just right. I used my F1.8 50 mm lens. It fits the entire constellation of Orion into one shot.

I really need a gadget to support time exposures now. 30 seconds at a time does not yield much detail in each frame.

I had some fun with my laser watching tiny fog particles blowing through the beam,
and thought about what gets rid of fog… wind. But there was really only the gentlest of a breeze, and it was not blowing anything away. I wondered if starting the car could create some kind of fog-busting updraft, but i could not drive around in circles because that would kick up a lot of dust on the field. It was interesting to note that in some directions the laser seems to expire in the fog, and in others, it breaks through and the beam can be seen dimly extending further into the sky.

A big enough scope can see through fog – not.

But higher up the sky looked fine. The pleiades were shining out at me, so i trained the scope on them for a while. I would get them again much later after my Sequential Messier Marathon (SMM) made some progress.

Mars was bulging and contracting, occasionally looking round for a second or 2.

I decided to make sure the fog was not going to block all progress by looking for and finding M1. It was easy to see once i had the right spot in the sky. Thus encouraged, i went for a stroll, after putting the cover on my GWS and leaving the dew busters running.
I returned to the scene at about 2:30 am.

As the 3:45 am rise time of M41 approached, i started picking out stars near Canis Major. It turned out the sky was adequate above the horizon, but the horizon was completely fogged in.

I found the open cluster M41 at about 4:34 am, and made a sketch of it. It looked fine in the GWS, at 73x magnification. M42 and M43 were easy to find and see in the night sky, by then Orion was quite high up. M42, and M43 yielded some details and nebulosity which i also tried to sketch. The trapezium was easily split by the GWS.

M44 was a real devil to find in the fog. I could only see Castor and Pollux in Gemini, and there’s a page break in my sky atlas between there and M44, so judging distances and angles was really hard. The fog made star hopping almost impossible, and too difficult for me either way.

Venus was a nice sharp crescent moon shape. It is indeed very very bright. When it first showed up it was high enough that i did not see it rise, and i thought it must be an approaching plane. About 10 minutes later when it had not moved i realized my mistake.

Noting that both Venus and M44 were on the ecliptic helped to find M44, and eventually i could spot it in the fog, in the finderscope, and bring it in with the GWS.

M46 near Canis Major was to prove too difficult to find. Then the fog came in so thick i could hardly see the buildings, and the laser showed it to be a solid layer more than 50 feet thick. It was time to stop. The sun was going to rise in an hour and there’s no way i could see DSO’s against this background. I started the car and put the heater on, making a bit of a drying kiln, to put pieces of the scope in, after toweling them off. It took a while but my buddy and i had a chat while i disassembled the GWS and put it safely back in the car.

It never occurred to me the CSC would report clear skies all night but i would be fogged in. Now i have a new appreciation of what can go wrong at a star party. I would say it was not the best of nights, but now i know that the dew busters i have can stand up to anything. I just need some eyepiece heaters now. I am looking forward to crisp winter nights with good seeing, where dew will not be able to send me home, no matter what.

Just a heads up that the Timothy Ferris documentary, Seeing In The Dark, will be broadcast on PBS (WNED HD) tomorrow night (Wed.) at 8pm.
However, from my interpretation of the TV listings, you will see it only if you have a “digital” connection – otherwise you’ll be watching the Monterey Pop Festival 🙁 followed by an Elvis special (I’m not kidding).

Seeing In The Dark will be shown on “regular” WNED on September 26th at 1am (hey, we’re astronomers – we’ll be up, right?)

If you can’t get to a digitally-connected TV, try your feed anyway – programming often changes.

UPDATE: – if you have Bell ExpressVu it is on channel 284 – Wed. 8pm

It was a nice calm, quite, and not too cold night. Three of us set up for observing and imaging for a few hours. I tried my 70mm f/2.8 (not an APO though) to see how it would do. It had some CA but it certainly is fast compared to the lenses I normally use. The following is a very bright portion of the Milkyway (including a number of Messier objects). The image has been drastically reduced and compressed.

UPDATE: reposted image – with a little less saturation…

Kerry?s recent blog about the Astro-dollies reminded me that I hadn?t posted about my first digital imaging session earlier this month. I?ve managed to retrieve my pictures from the depths of our computer?s reluctant hard drive and the better ones (Ha. Ha. Ha.) are posted with this report.

During the night that followed our perfect HAA Binbrook picnic (thanks again to Glenn & Gail for organizing it and delivering perfect weather!!), I had an absolute blast learning to image with my new Rebel Xti and Celestron GOTO mount. Both Jackie and Kerry were ?instrumental? (sorry ? bad pun) in showing me the ropes and making my first attempt mostly successful. Jackie acted as my imaging guru and Kerry patiently lent her eyes to the task of composing and/or confirming focus for us when we were having trouble. Thank you, both!!! Having such a high level of expertise so close at hand made the whole learning process great fun and very effective.

I can?t recall a time when I laughed so hard during an observing session. (Lesson #1: don?t laugh while you?re holding the camera?s cable release. You?ll end up with an image that looks like a flock of seagulls flying in the shape of the Andromeda galaxy.)

As I mentioned earlier, here are a few trophies from my first imaging session. The images are unprocessed (I haven?t got a clue how to process them!!!) and compressed to fit this page. (That?s astro-code for: they look a lot better in person or they will (I hope!) after they?ve been processed.)

Astro-dollies rule!!

Ann T.

M27 – Dumbell Nebula

Andromeda Galaxy (M31) & friends (M32 & M110)

LOL… OK Astro Dollies is a name some of us active women HAA observers and astrophotographers like to call ourselves. For the record I didn’t come up with it.

Last night after having a nice quick dinner at Tim Hortons/Wendys, Jackie, Steve and I headed for Binbrook. We were greeted with beautiful clear skies to the south and only a few big patches of cloud to the north (probably over Hamilton city). We set up at 9pm and started observing right away. I opted to put my 6in SCT on the camera tripod since I have been a little burned out from setting up the portable astro office. We hunted down many DSOs and spent some time looking for the Stephens Quintet. We found ngc7331 easily but had a difficult time finding the nearby magnifincent five. We thought that we might have found them in Steves scope but it could have been our averted imagination playing tricks on us. We should be able to see them in a 12 or even 16 in scope but perhaps we weren’t looking in the correct position. Near midnight Jackie and I were starting to feel the cold and we wanted to pack it up a little earlier than planned. Steve wanted us to all wait around for m41 to rise so that he could continue his messier marathon in order…. we had to tell him no way are we waiting till past 4am. So he reluctantly started to pack up as well. Sorry Steve. Well I think 3 to 4 hours of observing is not bad at all. Tonight I’m sure they’ll be out for a much longer time. I won’t be able to join in though.

Below is my feeble attempt at the milkyway from early last night. About 6 x 30 second exposures taken with my 18mm lens on the Canon 300D. I used a small $15 table top tripod (I bought off of Tim H) for stability.
By KerryLH

Oh ya I almost forgot to add that Steve was nice enough to let me check out his Sky Quality Meter. Binbrook was about 20.16 and on my drive home it ranged from 16 to 20…. and at home in Grimsby I measured 20.06 overhead/south, but a poorer quality (but still not too bad) 19.47 to the north. THe SQM is a cool gadget. I would love to see how it ranges on different clear nights with varying seeing and transparencies. Apparently last night the CSC was saying seeing and transparencies were to be fairly poor quality. Didn’t seem all that bad though.

The Clear Sky Clock (CSC) called for a few clouds till 9 PM.
So it turns out that the only clouds were centered over Hamilton, far to the north, and Binbrook Hill was pristine. The Sky Quality Meter (SQM) read 20.15 and the milky way spilled all across the zenith.
I made my way with Jackie and Kerry to our hilltop observatory.
It was nice to arrive together, since the headlights could light the setup process without trashing anyone’s night vision.
I think an improvement to the CSC would be to lift a small sub-bitmap for each cell, rather than just expanding a single pixel to fill the cell.
Then, at a glance, you could see the extend and proximity of clouds at each hour, without having to poke around.

My next Sequential Messier Marathon Object (SMMO) was M40 and although i set the Great White Scope (GWS) up dangerously close
to a spot where a tree would soon hide M40, i managed to get setup,
collimated and align the finder to the main scope with lots of time to spare.

Kerry broke the news to me that M41 does not even rise till 3.53 AM, and by then will be low behind trees, so the rest of the evening was spent trolling for other DSO’s.

While Kerry and Jackie did unguided shots of the sky with their cameras,
i pointed out that an EQ platform is effectively tracking, and can be used to support a tripod in any direction. We started conspiring to do an EQ platform clinic and make one for each participant.

I patrolled around the sky looking for things i could remember how to find… and I brought in M28, Jupiter (which required more counterweights), M34, M57 and was going to ask for a 5 mm eyepiece to try to bring out some detail in it (M57), but the GWS had stopped tracking (The battery on the EQ platform was dead)… i was able to attach the standard connector on my scope’s primary fan to power it though, so i was back up and running in a few minutes.

but soon we were off on other pursuits…

We went on a search for Stefan’s Quintet, and although a fine faint fuzzy just south of NGC7713 could be barely seen in the GWS, even i had to say ‘bring on the cameras’ because no amount of averted vision was going to help get detail on that one. (Turns out it was discovered in a 16 inch scope, so perhaps it’s worth another look, now that we know how to find it).

The counterweight issue with the GWS is starting to get more troublesome.
I need to get a new case for the water bottles as it’s getting hard to keep removing and replacing them in there.
The concept of some heavy chain is starting to sound better all the time, although it would only work if it was allowed to touch the ground, not just the EQ platform.

The Helix Nebula was seek’d and not found. The sky in the southern direction was actually rather dull, and i could not make out guide stars very well at all.

I put my XTi onto the water bottle holder and snapped a few 30s time exposures, and a single 30S Dark frame. It turned out that the BULB mode requires the finger to remain on the button till the exposure is over, which is actually a bit of a problem because the support on the scope for the camera is not strong enough to drag me along with it.

I guess i will soon be in gadget building mode again. I would like to make something which can time an exposure and a repeat rate for exposures.
Preferably without requiring an entire laptop running to do so.

One more try… M74. But it was not to be. Kerry was packing up and Jackie was soon to beat a hasty retreat, well in advance of fabled 3 am endurance records. Even before midnight there was talk of packing up. I ended up packing up at about 12:30, intent on doing some early morning set-up on Monday to bag M41-M45.