Observations on June 11

By -
On June 11, the weather was not so good, but in the evening, the clouds suddenly went away.  As the predictions for the night were good, I took the Obsession outside to do some tests and observations.  

The ServoCAT did follow the objects very good, but the slewing towards new objects was not very accurate...  I will need to do some fine tuning on the azimuth axis.  The encoder of the altitude axis did not change, so I don't suspect that the problem lies there.

I did enjoy some showpiece objects.  The summer constellations were already high enough in the sky to enjoy the view of the Crescent nebula (ngc 6888), the Veil nebula, the Ring nebula (M57), M 13...  I also enjoyed some nice galaxies (like M 82).  The nights are very short this time of the year, so I did not observe for a long time.  The quality of the skies was less than during the previous observing nights.

Location: 3370 Roosbeek, België

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Installing an ASA AZ800 in the observatory at work

By -
Image
On August 30, 2023 we installed an ASA AZ800 telescope in the observatory at work, at the  Institute of Astronomy  of KU Leuven .  The telescope will be one of the telescopes of the MARVEL project, an array of four telescope we will install on the Roque de los Muchachos in La Palma,  It was a very rainy day, but we managed to put the telescope in the observatory.  Enjoy some of the pictures! The upper part of the telescope in the corridor. The lower part of the telescope ready for lifting up. The lower part of the telescope going up. The lower part of the telescope entering the dome. The upper part of the telescope entering the dome. The installed telescope.
Read more

Interstellarum Deep Sky Atlas

By -
Image
For Father's day, I got the field edition of the  Interstellarum Deep Sky Atlas .  In the past, I always used the first edition of Uranometria 2000.0 by Will Tirion, which was published in 1987!  I was always very happy with the Uranometria and I always preferred the first edition over the second edition.  I never took the book outside, but I made a copy of every page which I put in a sheet protector.  I took the pages in a big folder outside to starhop through the skies.    The Interstellarum Deep Sky Atlas comes in a nice sturdy slipcase. The last years, I mostly observed from home (Bortle 5), so I mostly observe bright objects.  Since last year, I added a SkyFI 3  to my Argo Navis / ServoCat so I can use SkySafari to always have a map on my phone or my tablet.  However, a real star atlas has a nicer overview, which is very useful when observing.  Under dark skies, a good star atlas is really needed to find the faintest objects. A nice card with the legend of the atlas The nice t
Read more

One observing night at the Roque de los Muchachos at La Palma

By -
Image
I was on La Palma from January 15 to January 21 for a technical mission at the Mercator telescope.  The weather was not very good, but I managed to get out the Orion Skyquest XT12i IntelliScope  we have in the Mercator building on the first evening I was there.   I forgot already that the sky is so unbelievably good from the Roque de los Muchachos.  There was quite some wind, but I could hide behind the car, so the wind did not disturb me that much.  The telescope has a right angle finder and a telrad, but the batteries of the telrad were empty, so I could not use the telrad.  Pointing the telescope with only a right angle finder is very difficult, so it was not easy to find the objects I was looking for.  It was quite cold, with a temperature of 2.3° when I started observing around 19h40 and a temperature of 3.7° when I stopped around 22h15.  The humidity fell from 57.5% to 33.2% and the wind speed was around 6 m/s.  I did not observe for a very long time, because I had to wake up ve
Read more