Sunday, February 7, 2010

11/05/2006 Give Me the Sun, Moon, and Stars


I just can't get enough of this stuff. There are so many fascinating aspects of astronomy that it can sometimes get overwhelming.
This afternoon I got together with a couple of friends, Larry and Dean, to work on equipment preparation for the upcoming transit of the planet Mercury across the face of the Sun. Hopefully the sky will be clear on Nov. 8th as we have big plans. We will probably be imaging through 2 or 3 scopes and also observing it visually. Transits such as this have some historical scientific significance but these days they are observed by many amateurs for fun. I believe the next transit will be in 2016.
I plan to use a webcam to image the event, and since I have never used this particular camera before I spent some time today working on it. I plan to use K3CCDTools to operate the camera and record the data. I'm out in the backyard imaging tonight, so I decided to plug in the webcam and take a few lunar images. Here is one of them, taken with a Phillips webcam and the 12" LX200GPS.
I'm also working on a H-alpha project that I started last week of IC1805. The field has turned out to be much larger than I realized so it's looking like I may need to mosaic about 6 different sets of data. Which translates to an awful lot of imaging time. I've got a few such projects that have been started and not finished, we'll see if this one goes to completion.

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