DeepskyWim

The sun is active again! We were in a solar minimum for a few years, but finally the solar activity is ramping up.  The solar cycle takes approximately 11 year from maximum to maximum.  I took the opportunity to use my 80mm telescope to project the sun on a piece of paper.  The larger sunspot (AR 2786) was also visible with the naked eye using solar eclipse glasses. WARNING: NEVER look directly at the sun!  It is only safe to watch the sun using dedicated filters! I took some pictures.  You can see AR 2785 (the smaller sunspot) and AR 2786 easily.  More information on the current status of the sunspots can be found at the  spaceweatherlive  website. Sunspots AR 2785 and AR 2786. Canon 80D, 300mm, f/22, 1/500s, ISO 100. In the evening, it was still clear.  Jupiter and Saturn are moving closer and closer to each other.  On the night of December 21, they will be less than 1 degree from each other.  The view through a telescope (or binoculars) will be really spectacular then.  Let's ho

After a long time of bad weather, we finally had some good nights in the beginning of November.  The moon was still close to full moon, so there wasn't a lot of time to spend observing.   On November 5, 2020, I had a lot of problems to point the finderscope.  I had to wait for Mars to appear from behind the house of the neighbours before I finally found an object that was bright enough to point to.  Once the finderscope was pointed, I did an alignment of the Argo Navis, and I calculated the mount errors.  It was the first time I did the extra pointings to be able to calculate the mount errors.  The result was indeed an improvement and the telescope pointed correctly over a large portion of the sky.  I will describe the steps I did in another blog post.   I observed some spectacular objects, but the humidity was very high which made the eyepieces hazy once they were put in the focuser.  I ended the observing evening by looking at Mars and the view was really amazing.  The FeatherTou

I ordered the SkyFi 3  together with the ServoCAT on March 30, 2020.  Because of the CoVID-19 pandemy, the SkyFi 3 only arrived on July 2, 2020.  This was the second day of our holidays...  I could only install the SkyFi on August 3, 2020.  The installation is very straightforward. The only thing I needed to do was to plug in a USB cable both in the ServoCAT and in the SkyFi.   Thanks to the SkyFI, I can now use SkySafari to do a GoTo with the ServoCAT.  This is very useful, because I can now slew directly to the comets, use DeepskyLog to create observing lists and put them in  SkySafari, and always see a map of the sky where the telescope is pointed.  The first time I could test the SkyFi was on September 13, 2020.  There was however still a problem with the powered ground board of the ServoCAT.  After fixing the problem a few day later, the weather became very bad and the first night I could really test the SkyFi was on November 6, 2020.  The SkyFi really works as expected.  It real