Category Archives: Equipment

New website!

I have moved my website from webs.com (who are truly excellent, but a tad limited) to a new host and I have my own domain name fjastronomy.co.uk. The reason I changed was that I was in PC World yesterday, looking for some new web-building software, and the program I bought included free hosting. How good the host is remains to be seen but you can’t go wrong if you don’t have to pay. If they prove to be unreliable with loads of down time then I will move in due course to another host, but they are supposed to be quite good and, normally, their hosting starts at £33 per year but they have done a deal with the makers of the software.
My new site looks great and I am really pleased with it as the software was incredibly easy to use and comes with an FTP client, which is always better than cumbersomely using a web browser. Click here to see it: FJ Astronomy

Off to TSP on Friday, all being well. I leave home on Thursday and fly to San Antonio via Houston on Friday. I’ll spend a couple of days in San Antonio with Robert and Mary Reeves before driving out with Robert on Monday to the Prude Ranch. The couple of days in the city will be spend birding (I am hoping to photograph Cardinals among others) and shopping for those bits I’ll inevitably forget to bring from the UK.
Eyjafjallajokull is still erupting, with ash blowing south over the Atlantic. I have my fingers firmly crossed that the winds, which are currently keeping the ash away from the UK continue to remain favourable and I can get away ok. I don’t mind being stranded in the States but I’ll be pissed off if I can’t get there! Funnily enough I’ll be going through Heathrow Departures on my way to the States and my sister, who has been to a wedding in the US Virgin Islands, will be coming through Arrivals at the same time.
I have bought myself a sweet little laptop to take with me, for blog updates, which I got in PC World yesterday. My other laptop is a big heavy thing but this is small, with a 10 inch screen and will easily go in my camera bag. It has a 250GB hard drive so I can put my photos on it as well.

Observing, April 8th 2010

The first clear night in April so far that I was able to observe. While I am a deep sky observer, I do like to look at the planets now and then and it would be a shame to ignore Mercury when it is favourably placed as it is at present. Both Venus and Mercury are low in the western sky just after sunset and, through my birdwatching spotting scope, I saw Mercury as a disk. I also took a couple of – bad – photos with my Canon 40D and 400mm lens, one of which is this one. I labeled it as Mercury doesn’t show up that well (click for larger picture):

By the time I’d finished messing around with planets and finished setting up the scope and gathering all the observing bits and pieces together it was time to observe. Unfortunately it wasn’t as clear as it promised, with a very thin haze which scattered light around, making the naked eye limiting magnitude a very poor 5.8 to 6.0.
Conditions:
Clear, but with a very high thin haze.
Cool: +6C, down to +2C later.
Very slight breeze now and then
Seeing: Ant II; Transparency: III
NELM: 5.8 to 6.0 due to light scatter caused by haze – poor for here.
Instrument: 12 inch f5 Dob, 22mm Televue Panoptic (69x), 15mm Televue Plossl (101x), 11mm Televue Plossl (138x), conditions not good enough for higher magnifications.
I spent most of the session in and around Ursa Major which is rich in galaxies but no so rich that you’re overwhelmed by sheer numbers of the things, which is the case once you get into Virgo and Coma B. All these observations are of galaxies.
NGC 3613 UMa: roundish, fainter than 3619 (which is in same f.o.v at 69x) with a much fainter core. Well defined against the sky.
NGC 3619 UMa: Bright, oval, small. Well defined. Bright core.
NGC 3610 UMa: Small, bright and round. Bright core.
NGC 3556 (M108) UMa: Yep, a Messier, but this has shown up on the H400 list, so here it is – Large, almost edge-on. Can see dust lane. Star superimposed on top of galaxy; it looks like a stellar core, but isn’t.
NGC 3982 UMa: Not quite round. Bright. Bright core surrounded by halo.
NGC 3972 UMa. In same field of view as 3982, but much fainter. Elongated. brightens somewhat towards centre.
NGC 3998 UMa: Much larger than previous two galaxies. Round with some brightening towards centre.
NGC 3992 (M109) UMa: Large, oval and featureless. Uniformly bright with three foreground stars superimposed on it. Quite boring, really.
NGC 3953 UMa: This one is very nice. It is large, elongated north-south and is bright. It also has a large nucleus which is brighter than the surrounding galaxy.
NGC 4026 UMa: Bright, elongated NE-SW. Lovely edge-on spiral with a very bright nuclear bulge.
NGC 3729 and NGC 3718 UMa: These make a nice pair. Both are oval and pretty faint, although easy to find. Both are uniformly bright with no hint of a nucleus. 3729 is the larger one of the two galaxies. Hickson 56 is nearby but the crap hazy conditions made this invisible.
NGC 3631 UMa: Round with bright compact core. Pretty large and pretty bright. Bit of a bugger to find though, due to its location out on its own, just below the Dipper bowl. Hint of spiral structure with averted vision.
NGC 4565 Com: A perennial favourite! This is an edge-on spiral and is spectacular to look at. At 138x it stretches right across the field of view. Very bright with very bright nuclear bulge and a very prominent dust lane which cuts it in two.
NGC 4494 Com: Near 4565 this is another bright galaxy. Round with bright core.
NGC 4448 Com: Located just off the apex of Mel 111 (the Coma Berenices Star Cluster) this is a bright not-quite-edge-on galaxy. Nice bright compact core. Elongated east-west.
NGC 4559 Com: Large spindle-shaped even glow. Well defined against background sky.
NGC 4278 Com: In same f.o.v at 69x as NGC 4283. One is elongated and brightens towards its centre and the other is smaller, brighter, rounder and has a more compact core.
NGC 4274 Com: Bright oval. Almost edge on. Brighter middle.
By this time it was getting late, thanks to that thief of observing time BST. As I had to be up at 6am for work, it was time to pack up and head in.

At the Isle of Wight Star Party back last month, Owen Brazell was selling off a few spare eyepieces, which he’d replaced with Televue Ethoses and I bought a very nice 22mm Panoptic from him, which has now become my main ‘searching’ eyepiece. The barrel is scratched but the e.p. is in otherwise excellent condition and it has replaced the 20mm and 25mm Televue Plossls in my collection – now I have two redundant eyepieces!

Aperture fever strikes!

Having caught a dose of aperture fever just recently – starting with a mild attack a couple of weeks ago and steadily getting worse with a couple of sessions on Owen Brazell’s 20-inch Dob at IWSP last weekend – I have decided to get myself a large Dob. I am looking to get something in the range of 18 to 20 inches (preferably 20 inches), probably a David Lukehurst 20 inch. I am also looking at the Obsession scopes, but they have to be imported from the US, are more expensive and, quite apart from the shipping costs, I don’t see why I should pay HM Revenue and Customs (who already take £70 a week in taxes off me) over £500 for the privilege of importing the thing. I was also thinking about a 16 inch Meade Lightbridge, but by the time I’ve saved for one, currently priced at £1839.12, I’d be halfway to affording a David Lukehurst 20 inch and I want something larger anyway – and besides, I think that a custom-built scope is a much higher quality product than a mass-produced item (good though LBs are). 
However, whatever I go for, I am going to have to save and, as I have calculated it and if the temp jobs keep steadily coming, I should be able to save the money for a 20 inch within 7 to 12 months. I hope David is still making them by the time I can afford one if it takes me longer than that!
But, in the meantime, I have TSP to save for (the flight’s paid, but there’s the accommodation and spending money to save for – and it will definitely make the aperture fever worse!) and also my car’s MOT test in June will also set me back a fair amount as I know I need a new exhaust, brake linings and shock absorbers (although I might sell the car, and get an older, bigger, one for not much money as I am not sure my car, a little Citroën C3, is big enough to carry a 20 inch scope – and money left over will help pay for the new scope). However, after that, I can start to save and, all being well, I will be able to get a new scope by the end of the year.

The 2010 Isle of Wight Star Party – hypothermia and the Horsehead

I have just returned from the 3rd IWSP and, while it was an enjoyable event, I have decided that camping in March is a Bad Idea. Never, in my entire life, have I been so cold so, next year, I will get a chalet instead. Because it was so cold, I ended up sleeping on someone’s chalet floor (thanks Iain!)!
One corner of the star party site, showing the kitchen (self catering), the dining room area (left) and various attendees.

Some of the chalets

The Island coastline, looking south-east, seen from the campsite.

Looking south, over the English Channel. There’s nothing between here and France except sea, the only light pollution comes from ships, such as the container ship heading down the Channel from Southampton seen in the distance.

The star party began on Thursday, but as I was stuck in my temp job until lunchtime Friday I didn’t get there until late Friday afternoon. After going home and packing my stuff into the car I went to Brighstone via the VAS Observatory at Newchurch, which was hosting an open day for star party attendees. On leaving the observatory, the heavens opened and it was torrential rain for the next ten miles to the star party site – not a good omen. I put up my tent, amid much swearing – and with help from fellow star party attendee Richie Jarvis – in rain and wind, and wondering just what the hell I was doing.
On check in at reception I had been told that I was doing a talk and that it was on the Texas Star Party and that I was doing it that evening at eight o’clock. There’s nothing like being well prepared to do a talk and I wasn’t, but fortunately I had brought my remaining working laptop with me which, even more fortunately, had a load of hitherto-forgotten photos on it – including a bunch of ones from TSP 2006. With the help of Power Point I managed to cobble something together, gave the talk and it went down well, initial technical issues with my slow old laptop and the projector aside.
During my talk, it had cleared so we all got ready and went outside. We got an hour in before clouds rolled in again and I spent most of it observing with Owen Brazell and his beautiful 20″ Obsession. I also took peeks through a 14″ Orion Optics (UK) dob and a 12″ Skywatcher dob.
The sky closed on us and we went back inside for a talk by Owen on observing galaxy clusters, which was a very interesting talk, as this is a subject I am very interested in, galaxies being my favourite deep sky targets. Once Owen’s talk was complete we looked out but the sky remained obstinately shut so I headed off to my tent. This is where things started to go a bit pear shaped. I am not much of a camper but, so I thought, I’d brought enough blankets, sleeping bags and clothes that I would not go cold. By 2 am I was very cold and decidedly not happy. I got out of the tent and went over to the kitchen, where other party goers were gathered: ‘Fuck camping, I’m freezing!’ were, as I recall, my exact words – in fact, I was so cold I was considering gathering my valuables, putting them in my car and heading home but Richie lent me a cable and Iain Melville lent me a fan heater and I spent the rest of the night a much warmer and happier person, lying in my tent and listening to the patter of rain on the fly sheet.
The next morning, Saturday, dawned sunnier and much more pleasant. The wind was cold but, out of it in the sun, it was reasonably warm. The vendors set up, although, there was nothing I needed, and there was an astro-jumble where we could sell any unwanted items. Owen Brazell had a selection of TeleVue eyepieces he no longer needed, including a 16mm Type 2 Nagler. I didn’t buy the Nagler (beaten to it by Iain) but I did bag a lovely 22mm Panoptic which has now joined my other eyepieces, snug in their case. It’s made my 25mm TeleVue Plossl redundant, so I am going to have to find a home for it. I am looking forward to trying out the new arrival!
The afternoon was spent sitting around and periodically checking the football results online, via BlackBerries, iPhones and laptops. Among the amateur astronomers gathered were a QPR fan, a Spurs fan, a Southampton fan (me – and I am pleased to say Saints beat Leeds 1-0), a Crystal Palace fan and fans of various other clubs. People were also checking the Six Nations rugby scores (England could only manage an abject 15-15 draw against Scotland) and the Formula One Grand Prix qualifying session in Bahrain.
A couple of people were observing the sun, with a Coronado and a Lunt solar telescope. The Sun had some spots and the most spectacular prominence which later detatched. I tried taking a photo through the Coronado’s eyepiece, with mixed results. I couldn’t get the prominence but did get the spots and granulation (click for larger photo).
There was a spectacular sunset, which promised at least some observing the coming night:
After dinner, we got ready and uncovered the scopes. I am going to put the observations in a separate post, but I again joined Owen and the 20″ and we looked at both the bright and famous as well as the faint and obscure. I suggested we have a crack at the Horsehead Nebula, something I have never seen, despite several attempts. We indeed saw B33 and the bright nebula it is in front of, IC 434. If it wasn’t for IC 434, B33 would be invisible as it is highlighted against the ‘bright’ nebulosity of IC 434. Once I got my eye in, the shape was obvious and, after a minute or two of looking, could just about make out the horse’s nose as well as the rest of the head. This was even better than Saints beating Leeds and was, for me, the observing highlight of the evening.
Other highlights included Abell 21, Jonckheere 320, Jonckheere 900, M42 (which was absolutely spectacular in the 20″), M82 and the Trio in Leo.
The Obsession 20″
and an Orion Optics UK 14″ Dob.

After about three hours, the weather decided that it was going to be a pain again and shut us down. After listening to a late talk by Richie, we looked outside again, but the sky was so bad it wasn’t worth the bother, so I headed to my tent. It was then that a mini-disaster struck, as the fan heater I was lent decided not to work anymore. By then I was cold and I certainly wasn’t going to shiver in my tent all night so I found Iain and told him that his heater was either buggered or I was doing something wrong. Iain declared it ‘buggered’ as it was quite old and told me to get my sleeping bag, etc, and doss on the chalet floor. So, I fetched my valuables, sleeping bag and mattress from the tent and spent what was left of the night on the floor which was warm and pleasant after the tent.
After the raffle I decided to pack my car and head home. I would have liked to stay on, but work on Monday morning and the horror of the tent made it not possible so, after farewells, I came home. Between Wroxall and Whitely Bank I had a brief moment of confusion when I tried to remember where I was. I think that mild hypothermia and sleep deprivation were the cause of this and I am glad I got home in one piece.
It was a good star party, although my ‘domestic arrangements’ were a disaster with the conditions being so cold the tent was untenable. Next year, I will get a chalet. If it hadn’t been for Iain helping me out, I’d have packed in and gone home on Friday, as I had mild hypothermia and was not a happy person. Also, the communal shower area was hideous. It wasn’t dirty, but it was freezing, the stone-tiled floor was horribly cold on feet, painfully so, and the shower was uncontrollable – but at least it was hot, rather than freezing.

And, why do I never do anything in raffles? But the raffle was still worth attending, just for Owen’s reaction to winning a Revelation eyepiece set! It was negative, but hilarious.

On the upside, when it was clear, the observing was good, and I managed to bag the Horsehead for the first time. There’s no substitute for aperture and good, dark skies, and it shows. I now have aperture fever and am wondering how long it will be before I can afford a 20″ of my own – I hope that by the time I have saved £4000 David Lukehurst is still making his big scopes.
I will make a separate post about the observing and put it up tomorrow.


Sky Quality

I borrowed Vectis AS’ Unihedron Sky Quality Meter a couple of weeks ago, to see what the sky in the back garden is like. I live in a rural area, although light domes are apparent in the distance from Newport, Sandown and Shanklin, and during nights when the Moon is not about I often get skies of NELM (Naked Eye Limiting Magnitude) 6.5, although usually it’s anything between 6.0 and 6.5. Someone mentioned the SQM at one of our observatory nights a couple of weeks ago so I asked if I could borrow it. Unfortunately, I have only been able to use it on one occasion, due to the awful weather just recently. However, I took several readings over the course of the evening, which I’d describe as a very average evening, and got readings of 20.9 which correspond to NELM 6.1. I need to take the SQM back in time for the IW Star Party but I’ll borrow it again and try it on a very dark night after midnight, which is when I suspect I’ll get even better readings.

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked if I could step into the breach and do a talk on visual deep sky observing at the February VAS monthly meeting this Friday just past. I agreed, as I don’t mind public speaking, and I’m pleased to say that, despite me forgetting I was doing the talk until Wednesday and therefore not doing any practice with it at all, it went well, with no inadvertent swearwords, no collapsing into giggles and no stuttering! I think I managed to convince at least a couple of people that visual observing is a viable alternative to imaging.
I mentioned my clear night spreadsheet and eyebrows certainly were raised when I mentioned that, in January and up to 25th February we’d had a decent proportion of nights – apart from a long cloudy spell between 9th and 24th January, then another seven nights of clouds between 11th and 17th February – when some observing was possible, corresponding to 33% of all 56 available nights to date. I pointed out that it is a far from scientific method and it only highlights observationally usable nights, where you can get any observing in from a long session with the big dob to an hour with a pair of binoculars – if I was only including totally clear nights, then that total would easily be cut by half to two thirds. However, I have still not managed any observing since 4th January (the night before the snow), mostly due to laziness and cold – we got some nice nights when the snow was on the ground but sheet ice and compact snow made conditions that were bordering on lethal and it was just not safe to lug the scope out.

Life – and observing – in the freezer

Or ‘Christ, it’s cold!’ could be a subtitle. The UK, unusually, has been in the grip of subzero temperatures for a couple of weeks now, with daytime temperatures barely getting above zero and night-time ones plummeting down to minus ten or colder. A lot of the country has got snow – except us on the South Coast, fortunately (or is that ‘unfortunately’? If you have to have precipitation of some form, at least let it be of the picturesque-but-not-a-chance-of-getting-to-work-today type), instead we have had sleet, freezing rain and black ice making lethal driving conditions…and a few clear nights. In fact, 2010 is off to a flying start and out of four nights I have had three observing sessions, two binocular and one telescopic.
Tonight was the telescopic night. The Moon, which is 77% of Full, wasn’t to rise until 2131 GMT so when I arrived home from work, via a doctor’s appointment, I set my scope up and left it to cool for an hour.
Conditions:
Very cold -6C, No wind, icy underfoot (frozen dog pee!)
No Moon (rose at 2131 GMT)
Seeing Ant III-IV, transparency II
NELM 6.2
Instrument: 12 inch (30 cm) f5 Dobsonian
I will update this post when I get home from work tomorrow, with the objects I observed, except for Abell 12 which I’ll mention now. I reobserved it this evening and this time it DID pop out with the OIII filter, as described by numerous people. I know, such a doubting Thomas…
Other objects I did observe were NGC 1514, a planetary nebula in Taurus, NGC 1980, NGC 1981 and NGC 2024 (a poorer view than the one I had a couple of weeks ago – if the Flame’s crap, don’t even bother looking for the Horsehead). I also looked for Abell 4 in Perseus and didn’t find it, although it is fairly near the bright open cluster M34, but I really need to download some charts with that in, as it wasn’t on my Sky Atlas 2000.0 (didn’t try Uranometria, though). Not a hefty return from an evening’s observing, admittedly, but I wasn’t out there that long, too bloody cold.

NGC 1514, planetary nebula in Taurus. This was a piece of cake to find. At low power, and at first glance it looks like a bright, if fuzzy, star – indeed this is the 9th magnitude central star – but with averted vision a halo of fuzz pops out at you. Popping in the OIII filter really brings it out. At a higher power (190x), I could see darker areas between the outer halo and the central star and there are brighter areas in the halo itself. Slightly elliptical. As well as the central star, there is a much fainter, smaller, star next to it probably a foreground star. 61x, 190x + OIII

NGC 1980, open cluster in Orion. North of M42 this is a nice open cluster which is richer than nearby NGC 1981. I counted around 31 stars of which 10 are fairly bright, All the stars are white. 38x

NGC 1981, open cluster in Orion. Beautiful but sparse. Dominated by very bright white star plus a slightly fainter double which is also white, plus 17 other, much fainter, stars. 61x

I couldn’t track down Jonckheere 320 again, but as I was having problems with the icing up of my finders I will give that another go before the end of the winter. I have read reports of it being seen in a 10 inch under comparable sky so there’s no reason I shouldn’t see it.
It was ‘one of those’ sessions again – my OIII filter fell to bits, a retaining ring-type object dropped out of it and the thing just fell apart. Fortunately I screwed it back together again, only to drop it onto the concrete of the patio five minutes later with, luckily, no harm done. I also dropped eyepieces, charts and gloves, but that’s because, despite gloves, my hands were a bit cold. I was definitely fortunate in that nothing actually broke; fell apart yes, but actually broke as in completely destroyed, no.

I packed up just after 9pm, and after bending over the eyepiece (my final objects of this short session were in southern Orion) I couldn’t straighten up properly, a combination of lower back pain and stiffness due to cold and bad posture from being hunched over the eyepiece meant that I shuffled indoors to warm up looking like the Missing Link between humans and apes – that almost-knuckle-dragging stance of something that can’t quite walk upright… Once the Missing Link phase had passed I carted everything back in, pleased I had done some observing, but not too pleased that I didn’t do as much as I had intended.

I’ll chuck in the descriptions tomorrow and maybe a drawing or two, if I get them tarted up and scanned in, which is a tad unlikely as I don’t get in from work until nearly 6pm and if it is clear again I’ll be observing.

Photoshop sketch experiment

A couple of weeks ago, I tarted up some sketches in Photoshop. A couple of these sketches were of portions of the Veil Nebula in Cygnus, and I decided that maybe they didn’t look quite nebulous enough as my sketchbook doesn’t have an entirely smooth surface so I tried an experiment with the Photoshop Elements Smudge Tool. I also made the stars rounder with the Blur Tool, although they turned out a bit fatter than intended, but I suppose they represent the sort of seeing we often get here!

It definitely needs a lot more experimentation to get it exactly right though. Here are the first sketches treated in this way, these are scanned straight from the original sketches as I did not bother re-drawing them from their raw state. Click for larger image.

NGC 6992/6995 above

NGC 6960 below

Observing by 97% moonlight

After what has seemed like an absolute eternity (in reality it was around two months – but that’s plenty long enough), I finally managed an observing session. Sure it was a very short observing session of one hour, but it was an observing session nonetheless.
The reason for this was that not only has the UK been battered by a succession of Atlantic storms leaving half the country under water, work and illnesses (a succession of nasty abcsesses) have also interfered with any hope of getting outside on the rare clear occasions.

It was clear this evening, so I set up my 12 inch Dob, despite the rising Moon which was one day past full so, as you’d expect, it was washing out the sky quite badly, an effect exacerbated by mist and high thin cloud. Despite this I decided to try an experiment. I wanted to see if NGC 404 was visible. This is a galaxy in Andromeda, adjacent to Mirach (it has the nickname The Ghost of Mirach) and it was visible. It’s not that faint anyway, but it’s the sort of thing you’d expect the Moon to kill stone dead. It was, as you’d expect, fainter and harder to see than usual, but otherwise visible.

Cygnus was getting low in the west but I decided to poke round there for a bit partly because it will soon be gone until next summer but also it was in the part of the sky opposite the Moon. Obviously I wasn’t going to be silly and hunt for nebulae that I had no chance of seeing in those conditions but I did seek out some clusters instead, open clusters are pretty immune to light pollution. One of the clusters observed was Collinder 419. To say that this was unspectacular is an understatement. ‘Boring’ is probably a more accurate description. It’s composed of three or four brightish stars and a few more nondescript fainter ones.

The session was short, due to the conditions, only an hour but after two months without, even an hour in crap conditions is better than nothing! Roll on the next clear night that has no Moon in the way!

It was also my scope’s first outing since I made the modifications to the mirror cell, with the new collimation springs from Bob’s Knobs. When I took it outside and set it up the collimation was only slightly out and it took hardly any time at all to get it spot on, a major improvement on before. My new laser collimator also works nicely.

Minor scope mods

My new collimation springs and secondary screws arrived from Bob’s Knobs last week and today (I have no work at present, so I have plenty of time on my hands) I decided to make the necessary modifications. The secondary collimation screw change was as easy as I expected, quick swap, like for like, the work of less than a couple of minutes.

The primary collimation spring change was also a piece of cake, something I did not expect. I had read of people doing GSO/Lightbridge collimation screw/spring modifications by removing the mirror cell, taking the mirror out of the cell and then replacing the springs, a prospect which, frankly, filled me with horror as I did not want to be fiddling with the cell and mirror and, quite apart from the prospect of the risk of damage (and when you are dyspraxic like me breaking something is a real possibility!), I really did not want to bother with fiddly stuff, I just can’t be arsed with fiddly stuff. However, you DON’T need to take the cell out. You can easily change the springs, one at a time, with the mirror and cell in situ. Obviously this applies to GSO/Meade Lightbridge scopes, it might well be different for other makes.

What you do need to do is slacken off the collimation screws (black) and the collimation locking screws (white) and then remove each collimation screw – one at a time. This leaves the spring to be slid sideways out of place and the replacement spring to be put in. Once the new spring’s in place, all you do is screw the collimation bolt back in; repeat the process for the other collimation springs, tighten everything back up and there you are, job done. Just make sure it goes back in as it came out (the bolt has a kind of washer/sleeve thing which fits inside the screw hole on the circular black frame at the rear of the cell) and you won’t go wrong. Bob’s Knobs provide a leaflet with the springs explaining the process and it is advisable to follow their directions.


This pic shows the rear of the scope with the collimation screws (black) and the locking screws (white). The pale round area inside is the back of the primary mirror itself. Click on pic for larger version.

Re. the collimation springs themselves, the new ones from Bob’s Knobs are far heftier and more robust than the, quite frankly, flimsy things which came with the scope. How the manufacturers expect their scopes to remain in alignment when the springs are so thin is anyone’s guess. I am hoping – expecting, actually – collimation to be easier and less frequent with the new springs. I wish I had taken comparison shots between the two springs to show the big difference between them.

Now to recollimate the scope and hope this all works…

——————————————————————————————————————————

2110: How’s this for frustrating? It has been a beautiful autumn day, without a cloud in the sky. It is still clear in that you can see stars, but as murky as hell with a wee bit of cloud about. Jupiter has a bloody great halo round it… I think the scope mods won’t get tested tonight. I am not lugging the 12 inch out for anything less than a proper observing session.

Couple of new (small) purchases

My new Skywatcher laser collimator arrived yesterday (Tuesday). That’s excellent service from First Light Optics although I was surprised it turned up at all, given that there was a local postal strike yesterday.

The collimator looks good and feels quality, although not as solid and as heavy as the sporadically defunct Revelation one is (I might keep the Revelation one – it might come in handy as a cosh if I decide to go observing along the Military Road one night and uninvited guests turn up!). It also has seven brightness settings. Sadly no instructions were with it, which would have been a bit of a bugger if I had been someone who didn’t know how to use the thing!


Today, while I was in a local art shop I came across a handy-looking clip-on LED light. It looks just the job for observing, because ‘juggling’ torch, sketchbook, pencils, blending stump, etc AND keeping the object centered in the field of view becomes old very quickly! Making the white LED red might be a bit of a challenge but I bought some red acetate and some red tissue paper and this should make a handy sketching aid, particularly as there’s no annoying ‘bullseye’ effect which you do get with some lights. It’s also incredibly lightweight which is a big plus because you don’t want a heavy object hanging from your sketchbook! However, as it is rather too lightweight, I hope it lasts, especially as it cost a rather extortionate £9.99.