Astro Webcam test

So what do you do in this digital age with the excellent lenses you purchased over the years for your 35mm film camera? Well one thing you can do is purchase an adapter from an Australian company that will mate your beautiful Minolta 250mm f/5.6 RF Rokkor-X mirror lens with your trusty Philips ToUcam Pro II Web camera. What you get from that is a very good Web cam with excellent optics for all sorts of uses -- especially in getting "live" images from a telescope into a computer and, potentially, on to the Web.

I did my first test imaging with the rig Saturday night (Feb. 16) with the Moon at waxing gibbous phase. The image shown here (test image #5) was made with at 7:22 PM using my Toshiba notebook computer and Microsoft Vista, CoffeeCup Software's Webcam 4.0, the ToUcam and 250mm telephoto lens . The camera setup was attached to a simple fixed photographic tripod. Looks good! Not quite as sharp as I remember the Meade images, but not bad for a first try! Excellent color and detail. Mount this rig to a telescope with a clock drive and we'll have something!

In late 2004 I began doing some digital imagery, first using the Philips Web cam and my 1,000mm Meade 390 refractor. I was very pleased with the results. I even used the setup to webcast the total lunar eclipse Oct. 27 - 28, 2004 from the roof of Westlake (Ohio) Porter Public Library! My only disappointment was not being able to show the entire lunar disc -- the small size of the CCD chip made for magnified views of the Moon and I was unable to test and correct the setup before eclipse night. It was fun, however, and people enjoyed it (from as far away as Texas), and mine was one of the few "live" transmissions on the Web! Now, with shorter focal lengths and excellent optics, I can image the entire face of the Moon or, with proper filtration, the Sun.

I'll need to do more testing: For one thing, the CoffeeCup Webcam software, though it does have some excellent features, doesn't seem to allow control of camera exposure and the image preview was inaccurate.

Unfortunately the weather doesn't look promising for the Feb. 20 total lunar eclipse and my observatory lacks high-speed Internet connectivity. I may, however, take that fancy new notebook in and see if I can reach my dialup connection toll-free --doubtful-- and if I can, that would open some new possibilities!.

Beginning

This is the new home for my astronomy journal formerly hosted on member pages at EarthLink. Much more content will be added in the coming days and weeks as I move it here.

Mars strikes again!

What a night! Thanks to a Page 1 story in the Ravenna Record-Courier about Mars with references to our January 12 Open Night, more than 184 visitors looked through the old scope!!! There was a line of people literally out to the street! Of course the disappointing reality of Mars observation presented most folk with a small featureless pale disk in the eyepiece --the night's sky was clear, but seeing was fair to poor-- still, there was a lot of excitement and interest. Many assorted questions about the telescope, the Observatory, Mars, and astronomy. If you were good and lucky you could see a hint of shadow within the disk representing surface markings. That's the mystique of Mars for you: lots of interest and potential disappointment! I'd wanted to show off other objects but had to stay fixed on Mars until just before 10 PM. I was able to give the last group a look at the Orion Nebula which was spectacular before clouds finally began to close in. I'd printed 10 star charts as hand-outs before driving out to Hiram ... I didn't want to print too many! Yeah... 184+ visitors! I still can't believe it.

Winter Solstice

The weather forecast gave us great doubt for the open night at Stephens. There was, however, an opening in the all-day cloud cover coming our way. Hiram College rented the StarLab portable planetarium and staged a Winter Solstice program earlier in the evening that led nicely into the Observatory's 7:00 PM opening. The sky, by then, had cleared and with temperatures of about 40 degrees (F) opening the dome was tolerable. Though transparency was only fair at best, the nearly-full Moon presented an interesting target and the Cooley Telescope did its usual job in knocking the socks off new visitors. The lunar image was glorious. Turning the telescope to Mars, however, really didn't reveal much. The not-so-good sky conditions prevented us from seeing any surface markings even though Mars was only four days past its closest approach in this opposition cycle (opposition to take place on Dec. 24). Hoping for better viewing conditions in January with Mars still fairly close. By 9:00 the sky had closed in completely hiding Mars, even from unaided eyes, and obscuring any detail from the lunar disk. Still in all we had about 48 visitors over the evening -- one of our best nights!

Comet Holmes flares up

October 27 & 28: A formerly very dim comet called Holmes (17P) flared up October 24th growing many magnitudes brighter -- it went from 12.5 to 3rd magnitude which is about 1 million times increase. It's currently outside the orbit of Mars and in the southern portion of the constellation Perseus. Saturday night, Oct. 27, a day of clouds, mist, and rain, I stepped outside to a clearing sky. It took me only a second to find Holmes and view it through my 10X50 binoculars. It was a beautiful sight, though to the uninitiated, it's just a big fuzzball. That is, of course, how it actually looked... a large, brightly glowing puff with a bright dot in the center; that's how comets look "head-on" with any tail streaming behind and away from the viewer. The glow was slightly yellow or golden... quite an unusual object. Sunday night I opened Stephens for a special astronomy class observing session. I spotted the comet in the big telescope at 7:45 PM and was surprised... Two bright spots were right in the middle of the cloud looking like they might be part of the comet, oriented directly across the nucleus from each other. I watched excitedly to see if there were any changes. Alas, as the evening wore on the bright specks appeared to move off center and away from where the nucleus lay confirming they were background stars and not a part of the comet itself. Only three students showed up but it gave me two hours in which to observe the comet and attempt some images using the old nine-inch scope. They're my first telescopic comet photos. Here's one that has been heavily "Photoshopped" but it basically shows what I saw... Comet 17P/Holmes moving with three background stars showing through its coma. The comet has the astronomical community excited and that has been fun all by itself. I'll probably offer a public viewing session for Friday, Nov. 3 when the weather is predicted to bring clear skies.

Photo: Comet 17P/Holmes as it appeared at 9:34 PM, October 28. Two stars shine through the coma like headlights through fog. Photo was made using the century-old Cooley Telescope (a 9-inch refractor) and a Canon Digital Rebel XT camera - 2 seconds at ISO 1,600. Photo: James Guilford, Stephens Memorial Observatory, Hiram.

Chilly glimpse of Comet Holmes

It was cold (about 30 degrees) and breezy at about 9:30 PM when I went outdoors to check on Comet Holmes. The weather lately has not been hospitable to observing what with clouds, rain, and even a bit of snow. Tonight the sky was briefly very clear overhead in North Royalton. Aiming into Perseus with my binoculars I fished about only briefly before spotting the cometary cloud. It has grown even larger than it was but has faded dramatically. Even with our "clear" skies light pollution and the dimness of the object made it impossible to see without the binoculars. Predicted weather for the next few days call for mostly cloudy with rain and snow so this glimpse at the sky is apparently about all I'll be seeing for a while.

Open night and photo attempts

I had scheduled an Observatory open night for Friday, Nov. 2. The weather and observing forecasts agreed that Friday night would be, at the very least, a very good night to view Comet 17P/Holmes and that's just the way things turned out. Friday night, for a good couple of hours after sunset, boasted an outstandingly transparent sky. Because the local daily newspaper, The Record-Courier, was kind enough to run our event announcement and our photo of the comet, we had a very good turnout. In all 37 folks of all ages came to see this most unusual celestial visitor. The century-old telescope performed outstandingly keeping good track on the moving object. We could see at least one background star shining through the huge coma. The sky was so clear that I could make out the Perseus Double Cluster (NGC 884 & NGC 869) with my unaided eyes! A glorious sky, indeed. Visitors asked many questions about comets and the Observatory and seemed to have a very enjoyable evening. The event closed out at 10 PM and I shot a number of sky photos with and without the dome in the foreground -- I need to process those images but they look very promising. With this entry is a medium telephoto shot of the triangle Comet Holmes formed with two of the southern Perseus stars. Got home rather late after a most enjoyable night under the stars.

In the picture: Comet 17P/Holmes floated through the southern portion of constellation Perseus in October and November 2007 as it flared to a million times its normal brightness. It became a naked-eye object and formed an easy-to-spot triangle where normally there was no such figure. The comet is the yellowish orb in the lower left-hand portion of the triangle, seen here near the center of the picture. Image recorded at 10:14 PM, Eastern Standard Time, Nov. 2, 2007. Canon Digital Rebel XT, 10 seconds, 112 mm, f/6.3, ISO 1,600. Photo by James Guilford