Hurricane Wilma scraped by us to the south yesterday. The good news is it would seem I was just out of her reach. We got very little wind and rain to speak of. Yesterday afternoon after the storm had cleared, the sky became a cloudless blue and the temperature dropped 20 degrees into the 60s… amazing. With the low humidity, cool temperature and clear skies it was “scopin’ time!”
I hadn’t had the scope out since May 20th (according to the Autostar controller) so it took me a while to get set up and oriented. The one thing I REALLY noticed now is that my clock drive has ALOT of slop and my focus is jerky at very fine adjustments. Perhaps when I can afford it I’ll have the whole thing supercharged. This service is praised by the leading ETX expert Mike Weasner. At any rate, once I had my target centered, the scope tracked fairly well and it was almost 10 minutes before I started to notice any drift.
My initial intention was just to observe Mars and call it a night as I had gotten a late start. Even at 276X, Mars was a nearly featureless pale pink disk… rather unimpressive. So I broke out my iBook G4 and the Meade Lunar Planetary Imager (LPI) and did half a dozen runs at varying exposures. The processed results came out a bit better than I expected.
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Even for nearly “ideal” viewing conditions locally, the was STILL alot of atmospheric turbulence. 🙁
Well, it was super clear last night (for Florida) and in the mid 70s. I REALLY thought about taking the scope out but it was already about midnight so I went to bed. Unfortunately I now see that the weather is not going to be very nice for the next 5 days or so. Catagory 5 ?!?! I live under the yellow asterisk.
The iSight is a fantastic and versatile quality firewire camera and until now there has been (and continues to be officially) no retail device to mate it to a telescope. Apparently this person has stumbled upon a simple method already available to most of us ETX owners whose scope arrived with the stock 26mm eyepiece!
I can’t wait to try this in the coming cooler months.
Here is an image I snapped of the moon last week that I keep meaning to post. It was taken with my new Canon Digital Rebel with a 300mm telephoto. I’ve probably mentioned this before but I’ve already got my t-rings for this camera (actually it’s the main reason I’m building a counter weight system) and it’s on my list of things to try out this fall!
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Lastly, Perseids were a bust. I saw nothing over 40 minutes during the local peak. I had high hopes as the Perseids of a few years back were simply inspirational. Ah well, nothing ventured. I can sleep anytime right?
I was just watching Conspiracy Moon Landing on the National Geographic Channel (don’t ask me why… I was bored I guess) and it just kind of underscored something I’ve always known anyway. To be perfectly candid, if you subscribe to the notion that the moon landings were faked in any way, shape or form… you are quite honestly an ignorant boob.
There is really nothing else that needs be said. That’s it… no discussion required. You are an ignorant, STUPID, pathetic boob.
PS – For crying out loud take a freakin’ shower once in a while and get yourself to a dentist.
