First look at Pan-STARRS C/2011 L4

It’s been a fairly blue day and I had hopes of glimpsing Pan-STARRS.  I went out after sunset, and between the crescent moon and the sun is a beautifully textured but mostly opaque mass of cirrus.  Quite a lovely evening but not a glimpse of the comet through the binoculars.  I was helped by Callie … Read more

Time repairs

Periodically there’s a thread on the AstroPhysics forum on why the scope isn’t exactly on target, and sometimes a lot off target, after start up and un-parking.  There are lots of mechanical reasons for this:  if the optics of the scope are not parallel to the scope’s axis (“unorthogonality”); flexure of the scope in relation … Read more

NGC 2775

On a rare clear night, I wanted to improve the auto-focus routine, and spent some time getting it pretty close,  Then I picked a promising object somewhat at random, which turned out surprisingly well. NGC 2775 has a very tight spiral structure with very fine detail that reminds me of M63, the “sunflower” galaxy, but … Read more

NGC 2371 aka NGC 2372 or NGC 2371-2 or whatever

Yet another weird entry in the NGC, NGC 2371-2, is a lovely bi-polar planetary nebula that got two names because it visually looks sort of like two separate objects. Images make it clear that both objects are part of the same expanding shell of a fine planetary.  This was a really crisp clear night, in … Read more

MacBook Hibernation Weirdness

My new MBP (ML 10.8.2) has an unexpected morning behavior.  Instead of just popping the lid and getting started, I’m now treated to the “wake from hibernation” screen, and it takes a minute or two to get working. Apparently there’s some new power management thing going on,  so it’s time to poke around in the … Read more

How to save man pages from Terminal

One would expect it should be easy to save a man page from terminal for review, and it is, but it doesn’t work the way you expect. I would expect that “man col > col.txt” should save a nice text file in the home directory, but the results are strange: COL(1)              BSD … Read more

Getting organized

My friend and neighbor Mel is going to help me make my first Dob.  He’s a retired tool-and-die guy, and knows how metal works.   I’ve been studying  David Kriege and Richard Berry’s excellent book on the topic, The Dobsonian Telescope.  Per their recommendations,  we are beginning with the mirror cell, and  between the odds … Read more