Search Results for 'Join'

[Nick James]

COVID meant that I was at home a lot more than I would normally have been, particularly in the Spring and early summer when the weather was excellent. I managed to do some imaging on 170 nights in 2020 (compared to 90 in 2019). Some of this was due to the better weather but most was due to the fact that I was around to use the telescope! Less subjectively the number of sporadic meteors picked up by my two meteor cameras remained similar to previous years (see the graph below).

There were many observing highlights in 2020. Sitting out in wonderful weather each evening in the spring and early summer watching Venus gradually sink into a contrail-free twilight, capturing an outburst of comet 29P just a few minutes after it had started, watching the breakup of C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) in night after night of clear skies and then, of course, there was the wonderful C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) in July. One of my most memorable nights was on July 11/12 when that beautiful comet was joined by bright NLCs on a perfect summer evening. Sadly, the following week I should have been on La Palma and I wonder what comet images I would have got from there but COVID put paid to that.

Finally, at the end of the year, I was amazingly privileged to see the December 14 Total Solar Eclipse from Argentina as one of less than 100 foreigners let into the country. Many thanks to AstroTrails for managing to arrange that despite the international travel situation.

All-in-all a very memorable year from an astronomical viewpoint but I do hope that things start to get back to normal in 2021. I do miss travel and pubs and all the things of normal daily life that we used to take for granted.

[Bill Ward]

Hi,

There was some correspondence on the nemetode.io group (which I heartily recommend you join) about peculiar captures…

Are you using Windows 10 by any chance…?

If so, the conclusion, after exhaustive tests just like you describe, seemed to be to change to win 7 or even XP. I have systems using both these operating systems for over 10 years and they’ve never hiccuped. I’m not an expert and I don’t know why but Windows 10 does seem to have some issues.

That may be the main issue but I could also add, from experience, stick to onboard hard drives, using external ones seems to cause problems with recording. Mine was/is a western Digital USB3 model and it just didn’t seem happy…

Not much of a solution but I hope it helps.

Cheers,

Bill.

[Hazel McGee]

Several BAA members (including Nick James, Brian McGee & Mike Frost) have made it to Argentina despite everything (it’s been a pretty weird year…) and are set up now on their site in Patagonia!  Join them by livestream this afternoon (2nd contact is at 16:13 UT) — see links below

 

Watch the Solar Eclipse Live with Eurotur!

 

 

This year, Argentina will be the stage of a rare and unique event: a Total Solar Eclipse!

 

Eurotur is on site at Fortin Nogueira (Piedra del Águila, Neuquen) operating a closed bubble group of over 40 passengers, specially authorized for this astronomy event!

 

We are very happy to welcome this group of over 40 international astronomy enthusiasts, and our first overseas passengers since the sanitary crisis started.

 

You can be part of the backstage through our social media accounts, and we invite you to watch the Total Solar Eclipse that will happen on Monday 14th December at 11:30 Argentina Time (14:30 UTC/ 9:30 a.m. EST/ 6:30 PST).

 

Live Streams:

NASA: https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html#public

Canal 10 (Spanish): https://diario10.com.ar/en-vivo/#fvp_6,4s

 

[Dominic Ford]

Hi Alan,

Thanks for your kind words! Plate-solving refers to the process of looking at the pattern of stars in an image, and attempting to match it against a star catalogue in order to work out the celestial coordinates of the image. We use a piece of software called astrometry.net to do this. However, the software takes a few minutes to run, and newly uploaded observations join a queue to be processed, which means there is a delay between you uploading an image and the celestial coordinates appearing in the associated metadata.

When the plate-solver finds a match, you should see a panel to the right-hand side of your image with a tick-box “Enable overlay”. This will overlay a star chart over the top of your image.

Best wishes,

Dominic

[Dominic Ford]

Yes – unfortunately CUP is going through a lot of changes currently. You may have heard the news that CUP is going to merge with Cambridge Assessment in 2021. The university says there will be lots of exciting opportunities for CUP to produce “digital education” tailored to exam syllabuses. But at the same time, they’ve admitted they will be laying off a significant number of staff:

https://www.cam.ac.uk/news/cambridge-university-press-to-join-with-cambridge-assessment

I fear the future is not very bright for the bits of CUP not connected with “digital education”, given it will soon be a sub-division within an exam board.

[Daryl Dobbs]

One way to go about it is to find a comfortable position to sit or stand and measure your eyelevel from the ground. Subtract from this the height of the mount from where it would join the pier to the position of the eyepiece when your telescope is at the lowest practical observing position and also when the telescope is at it’s highest practical observing position. That should give you an idea of the pier height. depending on your interests and location you might find there’s a certain ‘band’ of altitude your favorite objects reside in I’m thinking of planets or the Moon which will make choosing the pier height a bit easier.

Another method may seem a bit odd. But if you get a pole higher than the top of the sides of your observatory you wedge it in the vertical position. This simulates the pier. Next take another pole which will simulate the telescope and tie it with string to what you think is a suitable height to the vertical pole. You then can pivot the pole simulating the telescope up and down to find out if the observing height is practical. If not just untie the ‘telescope pole’ and move it up or down the vertical pole until you are happy with the range of heights from the viewing end where an eyepiece would be. Measure on the vertical pole the point where the ‘telescope pole’ is to the ground and subtract from this the height of the mount and you will arrive at your desired pier height.

If you change your telescope you might have to put an extension piece on top of the pier or use steps. 

I hope this helps

[Neil Morrison]

I have a book  Lessons in Astronomy by  Norman Lockyer first printed in 1868. My edition  is the  revision  of April 1889.

There are two plates in it   Page115 paragraph 256   “”Let us  begin with Mars .. We give in Plate IX  two sketches taken in the year 1862. ,Here at once we see that we have something singularly  like Earth. The  shaded  portions  represent water , the  lighter ones land , and the bright spot at the top of the drawings is probably snow lying  round the  south po0le of the planet  which was then visible. The upper  drawing was made on the 25th september ,the lower one on the 23rd In the upper one a sea is seen  on the left , stretching  down northwards ; while , joined on  to it  as the Mediterranean is joined on to the Aatlantic, is a long  narrow  sea , which  widens at its termination.  Paragraph  259 Mars not only  has land and water and  snow ‘but it has  clouds and mists, and these have been watched  at different times.  The land is  generally  reddish  when the planets atmosphere is clear ; this is due to the  absorption  of the atmosphere, as is the  colour of the setting  sun with us.  The water  appears of a  greenish tinge.     

Paragraph 259a   A  very  curious  feature  of the surface of Mars was detected  in 1877, when the planet made  one of its nearest approaches to Earth.  the so called “continents” were then seen to be  divided into innumerable  islands  by a network of ” canals”, or long and narrow  arms of the seas, some times running  almost in a straight line for 3,000 or 4,000 miles.  It was on the same occasion that the moons of Mars  were discovered by Professor Hall at Washington

 There is no credit given as to whom the  observer was who made the drawings “The   book was  prepared as a Science text book  for  schools.   Very interesting to read the  ideas of 1862 and what  we  understand today  with our modern in situ  exploration of Mars. 

[Stewart John Bean]

Hi, Just  found this thread and wondered the current status?

I use the itelescope network and might consider joining a BAA group

Stewart

[Stewart Moore]

Hello James,

I agree with Owen’s list and don’t think there are any other books I’d add. Many past editions of The Deep Sky Observer (the Webb Society in-house journal) will be found to contain articles on planetaries so it’s well worth joining Webb!  Also, if you use the Uranometria star atlas then the associated Deep Sky Field Guide to Uranometria (Willmann-Bell) gives useful short summaries of planetaries appearing in the atlas.

Hope this helps, Stewart

[Peter L J]

Hi Everyone,

Please could anyone tell me if it will be possible to view a recording of today’s Webinar after the event?  I particularly wanted to join Owen’s session today but unfortunately, I have a clash of commitments and cannot.  If a recording is made, please would anyone post the link so that I can access it tomorrow.

Many thanks and best wishes

Peter L Jennings

[Nick James]

The latest edition of the BAA Comet section newsletter, The Comet’s Tale, is now available for download from https://britastro.org/node/6812. The newsletter is freely available to all but it is backed by the BAA so if you enjoy reading it please consider joining the Association.

My thanks to everyone involved in this publication but particularly to the editor, Janice McClean, who has done a fantastic job of putting it all together and dealing with an, often distracted, section director along the way.

Comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) features on the cover in a beautiful image from David Swan but it came a bit too late for inclusion inside. We’ll rectify that in the next edition.

I hope you enjoy reading it. As always, feedback is very welcome.

[Tony Morris]

Hi

Carbon composites can be tricky to mechanically fix together or join to other structures

For ideas have a look here:-

https://www.rockwestcomposites.com/shop/connector-accessories/carbonnect/fixed-connector/ce-cl-05-group

Tony

[Kevin Gurney]

Hi all,

I just thought I would let you know what I concluded after much experimentation with the Lhires on various reference stars and with/without filters

I bought a Baader orange filter (as per Robin’s suggestion) with a view to eliminating any higher order contamination and it worked well. Compared to the no-filter option, things at least seemed more consistent. But the prior inconsistency was, I thought, a clue in itself.

My backyard is subject to quite a lot of stray light, what with street lights, my drive lights on a motion sensor (the dog has to come  outside occasionally !)

I looked at some of the raw spectra in Pixinsight and used the various stretching tools to examine luminance gradients across the entire image. There was some evidence these were larger without the filter.

I then looked again at my efforts to seal the joints between the plate components with tape and there were still some possible entry points for light. In particular, there was a gap around the rear end where the grating sits. (I am talking <= 1mm of course). I used a plastic box, sprayed with matt black paint there. Then at the front there was a seam that I had left for some reason – I taped it up.

The result was that, without the filter, the ‘up tick’ at the red end was much reduced, although IRs were not quite as consistent as using the filter as well. I conclude that there probably was some light ingress and that this was reduced by the sealing at joints, and possibly further by using the filter (it’s near the sensor).

Kevin

[Robin Leadbeater]

I remember Gordon Myers talking about transformations (and extinction)  at the 2018 BAA/AAVSO joint meeting.

https://britastro.org/video/13862/14771

He put some numbers to the size of the effect for different systems he tested (6:39)

At the end of the day though these are still approximations dependent on the actual spectrum and can be way out in some circumstances. As an extreme (though real) example, a Nova spectrum dominated by H alpha. eg

https://britastro.org/specdb/data_graph.php?obs_id=650

A significant fraction of the H alpha flux would appear in the standard Johnson-Cousins V passband but would be completely missed by the Chroma version. Spectroscopy is much more straightforward 😉

Robin

[Eric Watkins]

Ernie, the details of that object are on the image. can’t locate original thread.  Nick also caught this one. I’m pleased that this thread has made you re-join the BAA. I have recently had my 50 yrs of continuous membership acknowledged.

It may be better to locate the original post and carry out any discussions  of this object  there to avoid confusion.

Eric

[stan armstrong]

arthritic fingers

[stan armstrong]

A week ago i wrote the following on the Facebook visitors page..

• …’Americo Watkins asked about a ‘Previous fireball’ to the Exploding one. If he gives me the time and date I will see if i have anything.. Further..’mike.german’ ..the disappearance of Power and Doppler in your graphs..is with the Eye of Faith..to be seen in the video track in attached shot’. My guess is that few members would expect to receive information via this method?

  I Attach a frame from my video of the event..and as my location is ‘Lngtde Offset’ from Nick and Eric hopefully this will help the accuracy of the path..

  I usually monitor UK Met on twitter for daily meteor mentions and IMO for others.. If Eric let’s me know time date of his previous interest Meteor I will see if i captured it too.. Apols for lack of immediate clarity but thought to Real time my input.

[stan armstrong]

A week ago i wrote the following on the Facebook visitors page..

• …’Americo Watkins asked about a ‘Previous fireball’ to the Exploding one. If he gives me the time and date I will see if i have anything.. Further..’mike.german’ ..the disappearance of Power and Doppler in your graphs..is with the Eye of Faith..to be seen in the video track in attached shot’. 

  I Attach a frame from my video of the event..and as my location is ‘Lngtde Offset’ from Nick and Eric hopefully this will help the accuracy of the path..

  I usually monitor UK Met on twitter for daily meteor mentions and IMO for others.. If Eric let’s me know time date of his previous interest Meteor I will see if i captured it too.. Apols for lack of immediate clarity but thought to Real time my input.

[Gary Poyner]

Hello Roy,

There is no formal way to join the VSS, as long as your interested in VS we’ll welcome you!  

To submit observations to the database, you will need an observer code and login details.  Have a read of this and it will advise how to go about it…

https://britastro.org/photdb/notes_submissions.php

I’ll leave it to one of the CCD observers to comment on your set-up, but it looks fine to me.

Don’t forget the VSS Circulars – free to everyone!  https://britastro.org/vss/VSSC_archive.htm

Gary

[Roy Lemmon]

Hi,

I have recently joined the BAA without much prior experience, but I am particularly interested in variable star observing. At the moment I am learning the basics by observing visually with a pair of binoculars, which is already challenging but fun ! I will submit some measurements soon but do you have to join the VSS to do this ?

However, I am thinking ahead and my aim would be to build a setup for CCD/CMOS variable star photometry. I was wondering if you had any comments about the suitability  of a setup such as:

• good quality German equatorial mount
• 80-100mm APO refractor
• guide scope
• CMOS mono camera with filters

My main question is whether a good quality refractor of this size is suitable for variable star CCD/CMOS observing ? With the above setup, I could also do some visual and imaging work. I am aware that a small refractor will be much easier to track with and balance the imaging equipment on for a beginner.

Thanks for any help.

Cheers
Roy.