John McClintock I find that I take a lot of pictures of seasonal stuff, and I wondered how to find images taken at the same time of year but in different years. As it turns out, there’s no obvious way to do that. Computers keep time by counting the number of ticks or seconds since an arbitrary … Read more
After the crazy weather we’ve been having , it was a treat to see Venus, Jupiter and Mercury crammed together into a neat triangle after sunset. Mercury can be hard to find in the twilight, and it sure makes it easier to have Venus or Jupiter as a marker. Tonight we have both! Mercury is … Read more
Last year I discovered that the Geological Society of America (GSA) has annual regional meetings with really great field trips to local geological locations of interest. So I joined up, and last year paid a visit to the Serpent Mound Disturbance, a fairly ancient meteor impact site in southeastern Ohio. This year a trip was … Read more
I intended to get a good hour in for LRGB on this, but as it turned out the guiding was intermittent and I really only got 4 each good RGB frames for 20 minute total exposure. So the image is not deep. I’ve started using CCDStack and, when calibrating the frames, was getting a “negative … Read more
We’ve had a rainy week and 5 or 6 inches of rain, but it cleared up nicely. I planned a run on M99, which I had botched a few weeks before. i unparked the scope, fired up the camera & coolers, opened the roof and aimed at Denebola to check the aim. That accomplished, I … Read more
In my continuing, ongoing shakedown, I set up a full LRGB series of M65 (NGC 3623) on the clear, moonless night of April 3. The forecast was good, so I set things running and went to bed. Somewhere in the green series, things murked up a bit, and the tracking crapped out for some of … Read more
I use TeamViewer to control the PC in the Hut, because it’s free, and it often works quite well. The thing that drives me most nuts about it is how to right-click remotely. I’m working from a Mac Book Pro with a trackpad. I suppose I could actually use a two button mouse, but I … Read more
I had a few hours before moonrise, and wanted another stab at NGC 4435 & 4438. I thought I had good focus, and was getting about 5.5 FWHM on the focus run, but it looks like the focus drifted quite a bit during the run. NGC 4435 and 4438; 5 x 300 with 12″ LX-200 … Read more
For amateur astronomers, a “sucker hole” is when it looks clear enough to set up, but as soon as you’re ready to get started, it clouds up again, and you feel like a dope. We’ve been waiting for Spring to get started for what seems like forever. I first heard spring peepers March 9, and … Read more
After I got a glimpse of Pan-STARRS, it looked like it would be clear enough to open the Hut. I wanted to run some more v-curves (calibration runs) in FocusMax, but apparently I had the steps set too small and the center focus position set too far off. So the run took forever and didn’t … Read more