Gregoria Luna's Astronomy Blog

  Sketch of the comet, when I finally saw it.     A few days ago I went out to try to find the comet. I left my yard, travelled across another set of back yards and front yards to get to a street with a better treeline, and stared for like 30 minutes with binoculars, trying to find the comet. And I succeeded! I even found it again, by accident, when I returned to my yard. (the asterism i used was gone, so i couldn't repeat my fluke recovery) Sky conditions have been pretty bad lately so it wasn't until today, the 22nd, that I could actually go back out and try to find the meteor. Looking at the position of the comet in Stellarium, I figured i'd be able to see it from my yard more easily this time. I went out at about 5:40 with my Zhumell Z130 OTA on a Vixen Porta Mount & Tripod (which, being fairly tall, would see slightly higher above the trees), and a 16mm Nagler eyepiece. It took a while of just scanning around in the rough viscinity with the 8x40 finderscope I'd...

Two new reviews are up on AstronomySource.

 Finally the conditions are starting to favor good seeing, and I've been able to do some high-resolution observing with the FlexTube 250P, primarily involving the Moon. I've also done some interesting things with smaller scopes.

I Picked up a Zhumell Z130 for a review. It has flaws, but for the money it's absolutely terrific. A review on AstronomySource will happen eventually. For now, here's four sketches from tonight.

Something has gone horribly wrong. But we all know that. A couple weeks ago we had a set of virtual TriStar lectures, an attempt to run the TriStar amateur astronomy conference online. It worked great, though it rather lacked the social aspect found in real-life TriStars at GTCC. One year prior to TriStar 2021, we had TriStar 2020. By then we were already beginning to see how the coronavirus disease was changing our lives. We were encouraged not to shake hands and to take extra care if we were ill, but we still had the meeting, and we still had the special Saturday observing session at the Cline Observatory. I hosted in the dome that night. Next Friday was cloudy, and by the Friday after that the WHO declared COVID-19 to be a global pandemic. There hasn't been a Cline Observatory viewing session since TriStar 2020 and as of yet none are scheduled. Prior to this, I had been volunteering at the Cline Observatory since April 7th 2017. It was nearly my 3rd anniversary of getting into ...

 A discussion of finderscopes on astronomical telescopes.

For Christmas, I bought my cousin Quinn (19) an Orion SkyScanner 100, one of the telescopes I recommend most for beginners on a budget, especially but not limited to kids. As noted in my review and pretty much any time I talk about it, the position of the red dot finder and the eyepiece is... frustrating, to say the least. The eyepiece ends up too high and the straight-thru finder too low. While teaching Quinn, how to use the telescope, we found that due to some motor disabilities she deals with, the telescope was ergonomically almost unusable. So I had to work to fix the eyepiece and finderscope problem.

 I got a new telescope. Oh golly!

For the astronomy classes at GTCC, home of the Cline Observatory I volunteer for, students must fill out an observing report. But not everyone can do night time observing, so we provide solar observing opportunities several times a semester. We use two telescopes typically, an old Meade 8" SCT (it's gotta be 25 years old or so) with a sub-aperture solar filter for white light viewing, and a Coronado PST for hydrogen-alpha viewing.

I haven't posted in a while. I think I've said this before, but after a while, the weight of everything that's happened and the fact I could never hope to keep up with it all builds up, I procrastinate more, and well, I never get around to talking about what's happened the past month or so. I must confess, I have been worse about keeping observing log records as well for the past month or so, which has contributed to this problem. And, perhaps this blog doesn't get enough readers for me to bother apologizing, but a blog isn't necessarily only for readers from the present. The Great Conjunction was over quicker than it began! I observed it the week leading up to the 21st, with both my 6" Dobsonian and the new 10" Dob. It was a thrilling sight to see them come closer and closer, and I measured their approximate separations based upon with which eyepiece they could just barely be seen together in the field of view.

 I have found three winter open clusters in Auriga and Gemini to show sketches of.

 My 10" Dobsonian (SkyWatcher FlexTube 250P) finally gets its first reasonably dark test.

Though the weather forecast was not very hopeful, I stayed up late so I could peek through sucker-holes in the clouds, intent on feeding my new ten inch telescope some astronomical photons. I was surprised to find that it wasn't too difficult to just lift the whole telescope up and take it outside all at once. What the telescope gains in weight it makes up for with having easy to use handles. I wouldn't carry it up or down stairs or anything, but it will go sideways just fine. Maybe I gained a bit of muscle mass by carrying the DT6 in and out all at once the past month.   The seeing was really bad, the cloud cover was really bad, and the conditions did not provide an opportunity to really test the performance of this telescope, but the one thing I did notice was that it was bright as hell. I've seen the nearly full Moon at the same magnification, and at the same surface brightness, but combining the two concepts together puts a bright disk of energy shining into my eye. Mar...

 "...and they don't have ANY interest in making these replacement characters well developed. It's all abo--" "GREGORY!" My mother hollered, interrupting the video . "Yeah?" I hollered back. "COME HERE!" And so I did, thinking she needed help with her online teaching. Instead, she was at the front door, and a very large package labelled "SkyWatcher" was outside.

AstronomySource and TelescopicWatch, which had been in the process of a merger (being owned by the same company), are being unmerged. So now I have a job again. I wrote two new reviews, and a guide to buying telescopes for kids is coming soon.

First night of decent seeing for a while, so I took my dob out to look at planets. Last night I went out to observe Mars late, but the darn scope wouldn't cool down and the image was horrible . Tonight was pretty good. In addition to doing some planet viewing, I got some exploration done, and it's always a nice night when you get to see something new.

 A few days ago I became aware of comet C/2020 M3 ATLAS, which was passing through Orion. I resolved that I would give it a try with my 6" f/8 Dobsonian some time. The past few days have had excellent transparency, so I've been using most of them to get some observing done. Two days ago I first tried the comet, but couldn't confirm it. Tonight, I went out again, and I'm pretty sure I got it. Despite not intending to make a big deal of it, I stayed out nearly an hour, did some exploration and found some star clusters.

 On October 25th, my family moved out of our old house and into a new one not too far away. The old one was falling apart due to age, and being a two-level house, my aging parents were having trouble getting around. The new one is smaller but I'm really liking it--especially because I can observe much more easily.

There was some pretty good seeing conditions last night, so I took my dob out for a few hours until things started to get uncomfortably dewy.

We've all seen the advertisements for cheap toy telescopes advertising 400x Power! 700x! 10,000x POWER! And if you do a little reading you'll probably have found out these claims are hogwash. Yes, you can technically enlarge an image in a telescope by whatever factor you want if you have barlow lenses and short-focus eyepieces. But a telescope's maximum magnification is related to its aperture, and you can't do much better than 50x per inch or 2x per millimeter of aperture. So a 50mm toy telescope can't really get much better than 100x. Now you and I both know that this is only a rule of thumb. I had to do some digging around to get to the bottom of the problem, of where "2x per mm" etc comes from, why that's the limit, and why some people claim to get 3x per millimeter or better when discussing very fine telescopes.