{"id":96,"date":"2014-05-08T15:52:26","date_gmt":"2014-05-08T15:52:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/trappedphotons.com\/blog\/?p=96"},"modified":"2014-05-08T15:52:51","modified_gmt":"2014-05-08T15:52:51","slug":"visit-to-johns-land-on-20140503","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/trappedphotons.com\/blog\/?p=96","title":{"rendered":"Visit to John’s Land on 2014\/05\/03"},"content":{"rendered":"

After Thursday’s meeting John mentioned that he was going out to his new land on Friday or Saturday and that others were welcome to join him. \u00a0Pete and I couldn’t make it out on Friday so John said he would head out on Saturday so we could come along. \u00a0The price of entry, as John put it, was that we had to give our opinion about his various plans for building the cabin and observatory. \u00a0Since it looked like Saturday was going to be a nice clear night I decided I would bring my car so that we could carry more equipment.<\/p>\n

I originally planned on just doing visual observing but in the end decided to bring the adapters to connect my DSLR just in case the bug caught me.<\/p>\n

Pete and I met at John’s house around 4:30pm. \u00a0Tom decided to join us so we needed to stop in Lampasas to pick him up along the way. \u00a0After for stopping to pick up dinner in Goldthwaite we got out to John’s property\u00a0around 6:30pm.<\/p>\n

There is a good open field just as John’s new road ends with excellent views of the horizon. \u00a0We walked around his property discussing various options for a while. \u00a0Pete and I both felt like his observatory would be best situated uphill a bit, nestled in a\u00a0loosely wooded section of the property. \u00a0There was a good area around for observing as well. \u00a0It didn’t have the best southern horizon on the property but for that kind of viewing you wouldn’t\u00a0have to go far. \u00a0Because of the trees it seemed like it would be a little more sheltered from the wind as well.<\/p>\n

After earning our entry, Pete and I dug around the various limestone outcroppings for fossils. \u00a0It’s hard to walk anywhere and not find little fossilized shells or traces of them in the rocks. \u00a0I found several larger oyster fossils and one spiral snail which John let me take home.<\/p>\n

As sunset got a little closer I went over to start setting up my equipment. \u00a0As I wasn’t planning on doing any heavy imaging, if any at all, the setup went quickly. \u00a0I tried the polar alignment correction routing in my mount which went horribly and as I found out later actually put me further away from the pole. \u00a0I’ll have to look into that more.<\/p>\n

As it got darker it was clear that John did a great Job finding this land. \u00a0The Moon was in first quarter so it wasn’t as dark as it could\u00a0be but as the evening moved on we found that, despite the extra light, objects like Omega Centauri were visible naked eye. \u00a0Just as we packed up the summer Milky Way was rising and even low on the horizon the dark rift was clearly visible. \u00a0Very nice. \u00a0I’m guessing it would be on par with Eldorado without the Moon up.<\/p>\n

I viewed several objects through my scope as well as Pete’s and John’s. \u00a0We all checked out the Moon and planets early on and then as it got darker started finding fainter objects. \u00a0The seeing wasn’t the best but you could still see a small amount of detail on Mars. \u00a0We looked for and found comet C\/2012 K1 PANSTARRS. \u00a0I could see the nucleus and a small halo around it but could not discern any tail. \u00a0M51 showed some structure. \u00a0Tom suggested I look at the Sombrero galaxy and it was an excellent idea. \u00a0It was easily recognizable with the bright core\u00a0was clearly obstructed by the dust in the disk. \u00a0Pete found\u00a0several small galaxies, some globulars and open clusters which we all enjoyed. \u00a0I’m not sure what else John or Tom looked at.<\/p>\n

After a while, the photography bug took hold and I decided to image the comet. \u00a0This was kind of tough as I had no way to attach the camera to the mount or to piggy back it on the scope. \u00a0In the end I strapped it to the mount’s dovetail using\u00a0painters tape with Tom’s help. \u00a0I didn’t have my 250mm lens so I used the 18 to 55. \u00a0I first focused it on the Moon and then slewed over to where the comet should be and took some images. \u00a0After stacking it took me a while to find it as the field of view is so large (it covers most of the big dipper). \u00a0Here’s an annotated version:
\n\"2014_05_03_24mm_T3_UrsaMajor_32x30s_crop_ann_hist_annotated\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Given that Omega Centauri looked fantastic through some of our scopes I decided to give it a go photographically. \u00a0I put the scope back on the mount, attached the camera and promptly realized I forgot my USB cable. \u00a0Luckily John had one which I borrowed. \u00a0After several minutes of polar aligning the mount, which got me very closer to where I stared with just a compass and level, I got everything focused and started imaging. \u00a0Since I had no guide equipment I was limited to about 30 second exposures. \u00a0This worked out in the end since I think I would have overexposed the core with longer exposures. \u00a0Here is the result:
\n\"2014_05_03_HD800_T3_NGC5139_20x30s_crop_dbe_deconv_cb_hist_nr_sz\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I was quite please with how this turned out especially since I had no calibration frames.<\/p>\n

We started packing up around 12:30am and left around 1am. \u00a0On the drive back I wondered why John was driving in the left lane (I’ve always felt it put me closer to oncoming traffic which would be harder to avoid and more catastrophic if there were a collision) until I noticed that there was a huge number of deer along the side of the road. \u00a0We dropped Tom off and headed back home. \u00a0Since all of Pete’s stuff was in John’s car I decided to take my own route home. \u00a0I figured it might also\u00a0allow both of us to drive with our brights on which would be a little safer with all the deer about.<\/p>\n

I got back home a little after 2:30am and was unpacked and in bed around 3am. \u00a0It was definitely another fun night of astronomy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After Thursday’s meeting John mentioned that he was going out to his new land on Friday or Saturday and that others were welcome…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/trappedphotons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/trappedphotons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/trappedphotons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/trappedphotons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/trappedphotons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=96"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/trappedphotons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":99,"href":"http:\/\/trappedphotons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96\/revisions\/99"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/trappedphotons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=96"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/trappedphotons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=96"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/trappedphotons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=96"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}