Vern’s Weblog

A group of us from astronomy clubs in Boulder, Longmont, and Fort Collins met this weekend at Crow Valley Campground just north of Briggsdale, CO in the Pawnee National Grasslands. Due to snow and cloudy weather it was the first night since last October we were able to enjoy some truly dark skies.

It was a fabulous night! The sky was clear all night, turbulence was 6/10, no wind, the transparency was excellent, and humidity was low. We were in shirt sleeves until about 8pm (temperature in high 50s) and we didn’t have to put on much winter gear until the temperature dipped to freezing around 1 am.

I succombed to Messier madness for the first time. I cheated and used the Nexstar 11 “goto” to locate most of them. Except for M74 and M55 all 109 objects were trivial to locate. The scope performed flawlessly and put most objects within the middle 1/3 of a 30 arc-min field. Only a few were off a half a field — and it did it all night long without even a resync. I’ve recently had problems with “goto” accuracy. A few days ago I located a loose connector going to the altitude sensor micro-switch .

While waiting for some Messier objects to rise in the early morning, we had time to visit some favorites like the Veil nebula, blue snow ball, blinking planetary, NGC 4565, ghost of Jupiter, and many others. Saturn was excellent and even Jupiter was looking good in the steady air despite being low in Sagitarius.

I didn’t try for the 110th object, M30. We had a tough time locating globular M55 shortly after 6. M30 wasn’t due to rise for another 20 minutes. I’ve read that M30 is extremely difficult, and maybe impossible to locate unless the date and everything are just right if you are north of 35 degrees latitutde.

Only downside was that I had planned on doing a couple comets and the Pluto occulation with the Stellacam2. Unfortunately, the driver for the video card I use crashed the notebook and removed all the other video drivers in the process. The video card is going to be reassigned to the trash shortly.

Below is the best of several  images of Saturn from last evening shortly after 11pm MDT.

Seeing was good, about 6/10, clear, temperature 57°F, and no wind.  Celestron Nexstar 11 telescope and Phillips Toucam 840K. Aligned and stacked with Registax4.

I spent some time recently to create my own WordPress blog theme. I couldn’t resist using Dan Laszlo’s excellent mosaic of Long’s peak and comet McNaught from last January. Dan is a member of one of our local astronomy clubs NCAS in Fort Collins, CO. After the comet disappeared for us in the northern hemisphere a member of the Boulder club, Paul Robinson, determined that it might be possible to still observe the tail and in fact did so. Dan was the first to photograph the comets tail extending above the horizon.

I’ve updated the Aurora add-on for NASA’s World Wind. The recently released (Feb 14) version 1.4 of World Wind now monitors cache files and updates them if they are expired. The Aurora add-on needed only a minor change to expire the cache so it will retrieve the current Auroral PMAps from NOAA National Weather Service Space Environment Center. You can download the updated plugin from http://www.sec.noaa.gov/pmap/GEpmap/

This works although the Earth/LayerSet.xsd that comes with WW-1.4 should technically disallow the markup within an ImageLayer. Apparently the LayerSet.xsd is not current.

My scope’s been broken again lately so I haven’t had a chance to take any images. Fortunatley, I used a local astronomy club member’s C11 telescope (thanks Pete!) to take the following on Saturday night.

Equipment was a Celestron C11 telescope mount on Losmandy G11 equatorial mount, Televue 2.5X Powermate, and Phillips Toucam Pro webcam.