The Andromeda Galaxy

As the autumn nights are drawing quicker, I had the opportunity last week to have a longer stargazing session. I also got the chance to try out my new Revelation Astro Photo-Visual Eyepiece Kit which I recently bought. This has a good range of eyepieces and should be better than the ones that came with my telescope. The plan is that I can continue to use these whenever I upgrade my telescope for a bigger and better one. This kit also includes a moon filter, which I need and some of the eyepieces are specifically designed to use with cameras. Astrophotography is definitely something I would like to get into at some point.

M31 - The Andromeda Galaxy

As the autumn season moves on, the Pegasus constellation is rising earlier and goes higher at a reasonable time. Somewhat attached to the Great Square of Pegasus is the constellation of Andromeda. This is home to one of the largest celestial sights - M31, or the Great Andromeda Galaxy. I found this galaxy by identifying the Great Square, then star hopping two stars left to Mirach then aiming my telescope to the right of the second star up from there.

What I saw was a very big fuzzy light that seemed to have some shine to the edges of my view. The centre of the galaxy was very similar to M13 The Great Globular Cluster in Hercules but much brighter with the wider disc of faint light visible, although this was very hard to see given the amount of light pollution I was getting that night. I was also able to see M32, one of the two partner galaxies to M31 which I could see as a fuzzy star. I could not locate M110 which is the other partner.

M31 by NASA

M31 is very similar to our own Milky Way although it is much bigger. With its partner galaxies, it makes up the local group of galaxies with the Milky Way. It is approximately 3 million light years away with an estimated 300 billion stars. The thought of seeing an object that far away and that far back in time is quite mind boggling. Given I have trouble finding objects just a  few hundred light years away it shows how big a galaxy is!

61 Cygni, A Double Star

As I have mentioned before, I really enjoy looking at double stars so I tried one in the constellation of Cygnus (the Swan). I found it by seeing it as the fourth corner of a square made by the stars Deneb, Sadr and Glenah, all part of the Swan's tail and right wing. I saw 61 Cygni as two distinctly orange stars nicely separated.

This double star is one of the closest to us at just 11.4 light years away.

M57 - The Ring Nebula

Although it is getting later in the year and the sights I could see just a month ago are often already behind the house to the east when it gets dark, I noticed Lyra was still just within sight so I thought I would give finding the Ring Nebula a go. Last time I just could not find this but now I have Starmap Pro I thought I would try. This time was much more successful. It is situated pretty much midway between the bottom two stars of the Lyra constellation but very easy to miss if you haven't seen it before.

M57 The Ring Nebula is very small in my telescope and I would not have known what it was if I hadn't been able to use my iPhone app to find it. Initially is looks like a blurry star. Only after a long time looking at it and using averted vision did I start to see the famous "smoke ring" feature coming out. It was still very small and very faint.

A nebula is the gas emissions coming from a dying star. This particular nebula is some 1,000-5,000 light years away. Scientists have estimated that the gas cloud was formed about 20,000 years ago and is expanding at 12 miles per second.

Image courtesy of NASA

Starmap Pro

After the problems I had last time with trying to find anything I sought some advice on the excellent Stargazers' Lounge forum. I received advice about using my red dot finder and to use a star atlas to star-hop. As I like gadgets I decided to use my iPhone apps to do this instead. So this week I have been using Starmap Pro and carefully matching what that says I should see in my eyepiece against what I am looking at, and although it's a slow process it has really worked well this week. Following the app as a star atlas has meant I have found my targets much easier than before and should reduce the frustration that I had last time I was out. I have been able to get out a couple of times this week and here are the results.

Eta Cassiopeiae - A Double Star

In the constellation of Cassiopeia, Eta Cassiopeiae is a Double Star. I am beginning to really enjoy looking at these, especially when there is a colour contrast between the stars in the system. This one was a little bit trickier because the primary star of the binary is much brighter than the other. Star A has a magnitude of 3.6 and Star B is 7.5. Using a relatively high magnification I found there was a distinct colour contrast between the two with the Primary Star looking slightly off-white and the smaller star much more orange. This particular double is just 20 light years away and take 500 years to orbit each other. The primary star is a slightly bigger and shinier version of our own sun.

On the back of this success I tried to resolve Polaris and Iota Cassiopeiae. Neither of these would split for me at any magnification. I will try again another day on these!

Cassiopeia

The rain and clouds finally lifted for a couple of hours last night so I got out for a spot of stargazing. My plan for the short time I had before it was due to rain again was to use the October edition of the Sky at Night Magazine and use its Deep-Sky observing challenge to see some interesting sights. Instead of going all over the sky I thought I would just stick around one constellation. I thought this would be the best idea as the theory was it would help me become more familiar with the stars around that part of the sky and would therefore help make finding objects easier. This didn't go according to plan. I should have known when I saw the stars twinkling when I set up that it was going to be a difficult time.

Cassiopeia itself is an easy constellation to find for my as it is one of those that are close to Polaris so will always be accessible from my garden.

There were a number of objects I was interested in seeing. I spent a long time trying to find M52, then tried NGC 457 (The Owl Cluster), then tried to find NGC 7789. I failed with all of these. A significant problem I have come up with is that all the books and charts show simple targets but once I have pointed my telescope in the general direction or if I try to star hop I just cannot locate the object in question unless I have been particularly lucky and it immediately appears in my eyepiece. All of these objects looked simple to find using steps from the main constellation stars, but I just couldn't see any of them. The vast number of stars I can see through my scope compared to what I can see with the naked eye makes star hopping very difficult for me. I also have yet to work out how much of the sky I can actually see through my eyepieces which makes it difficult to know how far to move to reach my targets.

I will try again next time the skies are clear!

Epsilon Lyrae - The Double-Double

The weather hasn't been great recently but I managed to get out last night. After my failure to resolve the double in Polaris I decided to try another double star - Epsilon Lyrae. This is actually a system which has two lots of double stars orbiting each other - what a thought! This why it is also known as the Double Double.

To find it is relatively easy. It makes up the third point of an imaginary equilateral triangle between it, Vega and the closest star to Vega in the Lyra constellation.

I could resolve Epsilon Lyrae into two relatively easily using the lowest magnification possible on my telescope. Going up the magnifications didn't help to resolve the individual elements until I used a 10mm eyepiece with my Barlow lens, giving me magnification of 180x. This showed both double stars as slightly elongated stars although it was so subtle I couldn't be sure I had separated them or it could easily have been me not focussing correctly. Using my 6.3mm lens with the Barlow provided an excellent view of all four stars at once. This is technically beyond the highest power of my scope, but it worked wonders. Both doubles in the system were clearly separated. The view I got was pretty much like this photo:

Epsilon Lyrae is approximately 162 light years away. Unsplit the two double star systems of Epsilon Lyrae have a magnitude of about 4.6.

Astronomy Information

Since last week the weather has been too cloudy to see anything and now it's raining so I will just have to wait until the next good stargazing evening. in the meantime I thought I would mention a really friendly and useful forum I have joined. Stargazers Lounge have numerous forums (fora?) on all aspects of astronomy. Some of the members there have given me a very warm welcome and I recommend anyone new to astronomy to take a look. Here is a link to the site: http://stargazerslounge.com/.

When I first started thinking about getting into astronomy I bought a couple of books which have been really useful and reading these before I got my telescope has helped me get going quicker than I might have done.

Turn Left at Orion - This has been the most useful of the books I have bought. It is written specially with the owner of a small telescope in mind. Its main purpose is to provide a guide to sights you can see during the year just by star-hopping from easily found stars. It has a huge number of things to see. I have been picking sights from this book to help me have a target or two to focus on for each of my stargazing sessions. I find that if I go back the next day to something I have discovered the previous day using this book, I can pretty much find it straight away with no help. I think Turn Left at Orion will really help me fully exploit my telescope and show me all the wonders there are to see with the equipment I have.

Simple Stargazing - This gives a bit more science and lore about what stars are and how the constellations came to be known. Whereas Turn Left at Orion is like a guide book to the stars, Simple Stargazing is like a phrase/language book.

Stargazing for Telescopes - This was a book I got free with my telescope along with a planetarium and star atlas. It has actually been really useful to explain how my telescope and mount work.

I have come to recognise the importance of the weather in my new hobby. I have found a very detailed forecast using Astroweather Panel which can be found here. It looks scary but the website explains what ecah row shows. This is basically telling me to forget any ideas of using my telescope for the next few days!

Albireo - A Double Star in Cygnus

I was feeling tired from work today but it was a clear evening, and seemed darker than last night, so I decided to spend a short while stargazing. My aim for this evening was to view Albireo; the southernmost star of the constellation Cynus (The Swan). Albireo is relatively easy to find due to its position in Cygnus, although I found it easier by using the bottom two stars of Lyra to point to what is the next bright object along that line.

Image courtesy of Stellarium

Just from using the lowest magnification lens I have I could immediately see that Albireo is actually made up of two stars. Now I have always just looked at the night sky and assumed all stars are white. Well this certainly disproves that theory - the contrast in colours between the two stars was stark. The slightly larger one looked a light orange to me whereas its smaller companion had a distinct blue hue. Seeing the two together was a beautiful sight. I find the idea of two stars entwined in orbit somewhat romantic so I might try and find other double stars over the coming weekend.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

Albireo is approximately 380 light years away. The larger orange star (Albireo A) is itself a binary star, although splitting this is way beyond my telescope's abilities.

M13 - The Great Globular Cluster in Hercules

I tried resolving the double star of Polaris last night and frankly it looked like the same single star no matter how many different ways I looked at it so I gave up for now and tried something altogether bigger - the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules. This was rapidly sinking to the west behind the house but I aimed my telescope about a third of the way down from the top right corner of the square that makes up the centre of the Hercules constellation and spotted a small smudge of light. This square is also known as the Keystone. Unfortunately I lost line of sight behind the house at that point before I got a good look at it.

How to find M13

Image taken from Stellarium

I went out a bit earlier tonight to catch it higher in the sky and found it again pretty quickly. It had taken me a few minutes to get my telescope pointing the right way, which was not easy given that the target was right above me and I have an equatorial mount. What I saw was the small smudge of light I found last night. It was brighter in the middle and less so on the outside. The skies weren't very dark so I couldn't see much more than this, and I certainly couldn't see it with the naked eye, but it was good to view my first deep-sky object. Higher magnification eyepieces just made the smudge darker and despite spending some time looking at it I couldn't resolve any more detail.

The Great Globular Cluster in Hercules
Image courtesy of NASA

The Great Globular Cluster in Hercules, discovered by Edmond Halley in 1714, is home to approximately 1 million stars. It spans 450 light years which means it's pretty big! It lies about 25,000 light years away from Earth. It is said to be one of the older bodies in space, possibly over 12 billion years old.

Eyepieces

Last night seemed a nice clear evening but as soon as I walked out the clouds came over so I took the time to take a good look at the eyepieces that came with my telescope and the other two I bought separately.

The 10mm and 25mm eyepieces supplied with my Sky-Watcher 130 had no apparent marking on them, which makes me suspicious of the quality. Looking at the manufacturer's website I have worked out that they are branded Super like these below (although mine didn't have the handy sticker to say what they were!).

The 10mm should give me 90x magnification, 180x with the Barlow lens added, and the 25mm should give me 36x magnification, 72x with the Barlow. I also ordered 6.3mm and 40mm Super Plössel eyepices to give me more options. The 40mm Revelation Astro eyepiece should really help me find my way around as a novice because the magnification is only 22x (44x with a Barlow) - this will give me the widest view possible. Maybe I might be able to start identifying things now. The 6.3mm was bought when I thought I was being sent the 650mm telescope so it may be too powerful with the Barlow for my telescope (142x without, 284x with a Barlow).

The Revelation Astro Super Plössel 40mm.

For the novices like me I worked out the magnification by dividing the focal length of the telescope by the focal length of the eyepiece. For example for my 25mm eyepiece this was worked out by using 900/25=36 magnification.

On the plus side, by taking a good look at them yesterday, I worked out why I was having problems seeing with them. I hadn't realised that the eye-cups fold over when the cover is on them in the dark on Saturday and was looking through the eyepieces without the cups in place. At least it will be more comfortable this evening when I use them!

First Use

Last night was nice and clear, although very windy. My garden is sheltered with houses and trees pretty much surrounding it; this means it's nice and sheltered from the wind, but it generally means I only have a good view of the sky north and above (my latitude is approximately 51.8 degrees according to http://itouchmap.com/latlong.html ). To observe the planets and the moon will mean travelling to a more open area which makes receiving the longer telescope instead of the one I ordered more annoying.

My aim for the hour or so I was out was to learn how to roughly align the mount ("Polar alignment") with Polaris and just get the hang of moving my Sky-Watcher Explorer 130 around to look at stuff. When I get my head around my mount I'll try and make an equatorial mount for dummies guide because all the guides I have seen assume some prior knowledge, of which I have none. I am pleased to say I managed to swap eyepieces easily and move the mount around on its two axes in the dark. I practiced tracking some stars using the fine adjustment knobs and it wasn't as difficult as some have made it out to be. I managed to track my target easily using all my eyepieces, although forgot to try my Barlow lens, which probably would have made it more difficult.

I had a few issues that I need to resolve (excuse the astronomy pun):

1) Identifying Stuff I could only see a few stars with the naked eye in any one part of the sky, but of course the point of a telescope is to show much more than you can see. For a total beginner like me this made it extremely difficult to work out whether I was looking at the star I thought I was. Even using the lens with the least magnification I had no idea what I was looking at and couldn't find stars I expected them to be near. I think I need to spend more time just looking at the sky and understanding the constellations a bit more. I also need to understand how much of space I can see through my telescope to give me an idea of how far I need to move it to star-hop to what I want to view. I also had a lot of problem using the red-spot scope. I'm not sure it was adequately aligned and there seems to be a bit of a knack to using it which I certainly don't have yet!

2) Tracking Although I had no problems tracking my target (not that I knew what that target was), it didn't stay in the middle of my view. With an equatorial mount I should be able to track a target just using the RA knob but I tried this a couple of times and I had to use both adjustment knobs to keep it centered. I guess this means I failed at setting the mount up correctly or I didn't align it properly. It wasn't horrendous and I managed alright so that's one positive outcome.

3) Viewing Looking through each lens isn't as easy as I thought it was going to be. The advice I read was to keep both eyes open but this makes it very hard to see for a beginner I think. Also to see the full circle of view available I found I had to hold my eye different ways for each lens. I naively thought it would be like binoculars where you just whack them up to your eyes and look through them - silly me!

Next time it's clear I will try and actually aim to find something and hopefully with a bit of experience some of these issues will disappear.
 

Impatience and Disappointment

My son persuaded me not to wait until he was away to set the telescope up and that he was ideally qualified to help at 7am this morning when he woke me up. With some trepidation I set about unpacking everything and mustered the courage to look at the instruction booklet.

I needn't have worried - the instruction booklet that came with my Sky-Watcher Explorer 130pm was very straight forward to follow and gave simple steps that I could easily understand. In less than an hour me and my 6 year old son had put it all together. He is extremely happy as this means he has a big box to play in! Although when it's in the box it all seems too heavy to be portable, once it is put together it doesn't seem so hard to move around. Balancing the scope was relatively simple although i really need to get my head around the equatorial mount it comes with.

I understand the concept of the sky appearing to rotate around the north pole (and therefore pretty much Polaris). How that translates into the movement adjustments I can make on my mount is causing me to scratch my head a bit. Hopefully it will become clearer once I've pointed it at something and tried to track it for a while. Unfortunately we had torrential rain in the hour before sunset this evening and thick clouds are blowing over so I have been unable to try it out. It is supposed to be clearer tomorrow night so I'll try again then.

What I have noticed while I was looking at some of the documentation that came with my scope is that the tube seems longer than the picture on the advert when I bought it. It seems like I have been sent the Sky-Watcher Explorer 130EM and not the 130PM. The difference being the EM has a focal length of 900mm and the PM is 650mm with better optics and £20 dearer. On the positive side the shop I bought it from supplied upgraded eyepieces. I wonder if they knew it was wrong and have tried to somewhat make up for it? I'll give ScopesnSkies a call on Tuesday because I ordered the 130PM on the back of all the reviews I read online and not to get what I asked for is disappointing. Now the scope is all set up (and most of the packaging recycled already) I might as well give it a go tomorrow and see what it's like.

Delivery!

My Sky-Watcher Explorer 130PM telescope was successfully delivered today. I was surprised how big and heavy the box was. You don't get the sense of scale from shop photos - I feel very sorry for the poor delivery man who has had to carry the thing to the house twice now.

Unfortunately I was homeworking today so I couldn't open it all up immediately but I had a peak inside the box this evening...to find another box! And inside that box was...another box! I finally got to the individual boxes inside and looking at the instruction manual I think I'm going to need a good long evening to put it all together away from my enthusiastic but accident-prone 6 year old. This is going to be frustrating because I won't get a chance to set it up until Monday.

First impressions are that everything seems to be there and well protected in numerous boxes. it comes with the necessary tools which is a nice touch. The eyepieces I ordered seem to have been upgraded by the shop, which is nice. I'm quite looking forward to trying to put it all together on Monday.

My First Telescope

I am waiting for my new telescope I ordered. It should come tomorrow, which is exciting! I'm a big kid when it comes to parcels arriving.

After doing quite a bit of research online I decided not to jump in too deeply and I have ordered a recommended beginner's scope. After a great deal of internal debate I finally went for the Sky-Watcher Explorer 130pm. It seems to get a lot of good reviews and was less than £200. I could have gone for a more expensive one but I want to see if I take to my new hobby first. This is what it is supposed to look like:

The blurb on the website I looked at gives the following specifications for this scope:

Specification:

Eyepieces Supplied (1.25"): 10mm & 25mm
Magnifications (with optics supplied): x26, x52, x65, x130
Highest Practical Power (Potential): x260
Diameter of Primary Mirror: 130mm - 30% more Light Gathering than 114mm
ALL Sky-Watcher reflector mirrors are Multi-Coated with Silicon Dioxide as standard for Optimum Durability and Long Term Performance.
Telescope Focal Length: 650mm (f/5)
x2 Barlow Lens
R.A. Motor Drive (D.C.) (PP3 battery not supplied)
Parabolic Primary Mirror
0.5mm Ultra-Thin Secondary Mirror Supports
Red Dot Finder
EQ2 Equatorial Mount
Aluminium Tripod with Accessory Tray
*Sky at Night Magazine Group Test Winner*

Frankly I have no idea what some of this means but hopefully it will actually let me see the moon (if it doesn't I have problems because I can see that from here!) and some of the planets and interesting stars but we shall see. I ordered a couple of extra eyepieces so I can get the full potential power from the scope and to give me a few more options.

Welcome

Hello and welcome to my new blog.

I wanted to start this to share with others my journey into my new hobby of astronomy. After facing some upheaval in my personal circumstances I decided I needed something that allows some me-time. I have always felt insignificant when I consider how big the universe is. I will always remember sailing with my Dad at night on the Essex rivers and looking up to see the sky covered in stars and wondered...

Now this is not going to be some expert guide to stargazing. I don't know my Orion's Belt from my Andromeda Galaxy. I think I'm ok identifying the moon and that's about as far as it goes. I have never known the constellations. Oh, and I've never attempted a blog before either so this really is a leap into the unknown. Hopefully people new to astronomy will identify with my blissful ignorance, and experts and other interested readers might at least find some amusement in my bumbling attempts at observing the heavens.