astroblog

Nielson observatory 10th anniversary

Steve Johns — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 02:49:57 +0000

As part of the 10th anniversary of the Nielson observatory on August 27, we were donated a 14″ Meade Cassegrain from Oberlin College. It rests on a Losmundy equatorial mount. Soon after the re-dedication, we had a public star party and a lot of people had attended. The big observatory telescopes were a hit and my 10″ Meade was very popular. The event started at 6pm and we had the solar telescopes out and operating first.

Jack Horkheimer, Star Gazer passing

Steve Johns — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 18:58:36 +0000

The Miami Herald has reported the passing of Jack Horkheimer, the astronomer who was a major influence on me as an amatuer astronomer in the 1980’s. He had a regular 5-minute show on PBS for a time, and taught the public naked eye astronomy. I rarely missed his program: it ran for over 20 years on PBS. He is missed by thousands. Here is the article from the Miami Herald:

By ELINOR J. BRECHER crline ebrecher@MiamiHerald.com
Jack Horkheimer, Public Television’s “Star Gazer,” died Friday afternoon of a respiratory ailment, according to a spokesman for the Miami Museum of Science and Space Transit Planetarium.

Born June 11, 1938, he was 72.

In an e-mail to staff, museum officials said they were “very saddened to have just learned that our resident Star Gazer, Jack Horkheimer, passed away today after being ill for quite some time.

“Jack was executive director of [the] Planetarium for over 35 years and was an internationally recognized pioneer in popularizing naked-eye astronomy. He was also a recognized media celebrity, often being the foremost commentator on all astronomy related happenings nationwide.

Horkheimer was best known as the creator, writer and host of public television’s “Star Gazer,” the 30-year weekly TV series on naked eye astronomy. Seen on PBS stations nationwide, “Star Gazer” reached millions of people, helping create a love of the stars for several generations of enthusiasts.”

Arrangements are pending.

Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/08/20/1785361/star-gazer-host-jack-horkheimer.html#ixzz0xMWDjy7O

Observing log 8/16/2010

Steve Johns — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 06:22:32 +0000

Experimented with dark frames and exposures. The dark frames removed a lot of noise, except for the picture here of a section of Cygnus in the vicinity of Deneb: the color stars you see are not stars at all – they are ’hot’ pixels that have to be removed with software. This can be a big problem – so take those dark frames. On the right is a pic of Epsilon 1 and Epsilon2 Lyrae. Bottome image is a quick image of the Hercules cluster (Messier 13 ).

Observing log 8/13/2010

Steve Johns — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 05:08:49 +0000

Star party at the Nielson Observatory with the Black River Astronomical Society. Good turnout: we had a lot of visitors of all ages. They installed a new 14″ Celestron Cassegrain with equatorial mount – this was donated by Oberlin College dept of science. Shown here is the origional 1980’s model Celeston: picture of the new telescope will be posted soon.

This was a night of visual observing only – no CCD cameras: it is nice to get back to the basics without all of the technology and see those faint fuzzies first hand. M13, M57, sights in Cygnus and clusters in Sagittarius, finishing up with great views of Jupiter rising and the Andromeda galaxy. On the 14″, I observed the great red spot on Jupiter for the first time: it was easier to see due to the enhanced contrast produced by the dissapearance of the central cloud belts on the planet.

Space Weather News for August 8, 2010

Steve Johns — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 16:25:21 +0000

Space Weather News for August 8, 2010 from Spaceweather.com.

SOLAR BLAST JUST MISSES EARTH: On Saturday, August 7th, magnetic fields around sunspot 1093 erupted. NASA spacecraft and many amateur astronomers photographed the blast, which produced a strong M1-class solar flare and hurled a coronal mass ejection (CME) into space–apparently just missing the sun-Earth line. The explosion also made whooshing sounds in the loudspeakers of some shortwave radios. Visit http://spaceweather.com for audio recordings and movies of this latest solar event.

AURORA RECAP: Last week’s geomagnetic storm sparked Northern Lights as far south as Iowa in the United States, and some nice Southern Lights over Antarctica. For the latest images, start browsing here: http://www.spaceweather.com/aurora/gallery_01aug10_page4.htm

Reference:

Retrieved August 8, 2010 from http://spaceweather.com/.

* Access Space News archives on OFN Message Gateway - a free public internet newsgroups portal.

Lyra observing targets for August

Steve Johns — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 14:45:58 +0000

With the constellation Lyra high near the zenith this time of year, I will be targeting a few galaxies in the vicinity. These are very small and faint objects – should be a challenge for amateur equipment. Look for results here throughout the Summer.

M56, an globular cluster at 19h16m36s

The following are in the same area between Vega and e1 & e2 Lyr:

NGC 6675 18h37m24sec at magnitude 13

NGC 6663 18h33m30sec at magnitude 15

IC 4772 18h39m54sec at magnitude 15

NGC 6686 18h40m6sec at magnitude 15

NGC 6695 18H42M42sec at magnitude 14

Observing log 7/27/2010

Steve Johns — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 04:43:28 +0000

Full Moon tonight, so faint deep space objects were out of the question. Had some tracking issues with the LXD75 mount – I had to park the telescope, turn it off, and then power on and re-align a couple of times. Here is an image of Deneb in Cygnus, and the Pinwheel galaxy (also known as Messier 101 or NGC 5457) in Ursa Major. This is a first attempt at capturing the image of M101: taken in monochrome (and yes, the lense was a little dirty). This galaxy has a low surface brightness and the default magnification of the Meade DSI CCD made it difficult to find. Using the DSI is like trying to find faint objects while using a 9mm eyepiece! I have an Opticstar F0.5 Focal Reducer for standard 1.25″ focusers on order from Scope City to help out with this. The Moonlight did not help either…

Remembering the MIR

Steve Johns — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 02:28:00 +0000

The MIR was a Russian space station that operated from 1986 to 1996 and was the first continuously inhabited station. After a long successful life, it was manually de-orbited in 2001 and allowed to reenter the Earth’s atomosphere and burn up, as it was becoming obsolite and expensive to maintain. See the article at WikiPedia for a history of this important step in space science.

“The station currently holds the record for the longest continuous manned presence in space, at eight days short of ten years, and was occupied for a total of twelve and a half years of its fifteen-year lifespan. Mir had the capacity to support a resident crew of three but could also support larger crews for short-term visits, the largest crew simultaneously aboard the station being six” (WikiPedia, 2010).

Star party 7/16/2010 with the Black River Astronomical Society: random pics

Steve Johns — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 16:39:28 +0000

Good attendance at the 7/16/2010 star party. The Celestron 14″ Cassegrain was used, and people brought thier own scopes also. A couple of pics of the moon are included: These shots were obtained during my testing of the camera. They had to be sightly edited, as they were over exposed on the edge.

Star party 7/16/2010 with the Black River Astronomical Society

Steve Johns — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 06:13:51 +0000

Great night. It was clear and the Milky Way was very visible. We had a great turnout of members and had about seven telescopes brought by the members. My quest for a better image of the Whirlpool galaxy (M51) is being realized: using long exposures of about 40-50 seconds, the spiral is showing through. These two images were patched up with Photoshop to get rid of some random noise from the CCD, and the more experienced John O’ Neal from the Black River Astro Society is going to do some more edits on these – stay tuned.