Gregoria Luna's Astronomy Blog

 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...

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.

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.

I believe the Moon/Mars conjunction was October 2nd-3rd. Earlier that night I visited my grandma's house and I showed my cousin and my brother some constellations, as well as peeks at Jupiter, Saturn, and Arcturus using the Galileoscope. When we got home we could see the Moon & Mars peeking through the trees, they were very close.

I really like the Galileoscope. It's the only scope I have which can be used with no table, chair, or any surface other than the ground. It has two accessories which are sturdy enough I feel comfortable putting them in my pocket. And it's surprisingly capable for planets.

I sort of procrastinated writing this and it is now kind of leaving my mind, so here's a very rough and quick summary of my sidewalk astronomy adventure on September 26th, 2020, or International Observe The Moon Night. I had been aware of NASA's Observe The Moon Night for about a month, but I was gonna let it slip by with perhaps just a passing glance through my Galileoscope. It was just too dangerous to do a sidewalk astronomy session during the pandemic. But that all changed two days before the night. I saw this reddit post about a Radical Astronomy Vehicle for Educating Neighbors, a sidewalk astronomy setup on a push-trolley which included a 10" Dobsonian, a homemade radio telescope, a laptop, a phone camera on the dob, and a large monitor to display the phone picture. After messing around trying to find a solution for showing my phone's view on the television screen, I realized I had everything I needed to make a video astronomy setup myself. One which would be co...

I had no idea, going in to creating a blog, that my very first observing report for this blog would be so eventful. Not only did I have an amazing night, but it had a rocky start. I got great observing done tonight in the end.

This is a short report of an experiment I attempted on 2020 July 14, wherein I tilt a tabletop dob so it becomes equatorial mounted.