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!

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!

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.
 

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.