Gregoria Luna's Astronomy Blog

 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.