Amateur Astronomer

Too much light and clouds

I’m not going to complain about living in California; it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world with the best climate. But living in the middle of a suburban sprawl makes any but the most basic observing pointless. Luckily that’s exactly the level I’m at right now, so it’s not an issue yet. I know it will be in a couple of years when I’m bored with binocular observation and have moved on to a nice telescope. Which is why I’m working on my wife now to move somewhere at least a little outside the city limits. I know moving to the country is too much to ask for, but away from the worst of the light pollution might be a possibility.

I’m an early riser, especially on days like today when I forgot to turn off the alarm. And when I say early, I mean before 5:00 am almost every day. Most days I’m too sleepy to really think about looking at stars, but every once in a while I wander outside before the sun rises, like today. So of course most of the times I manage to grab my cup of coffee and toddle out the fog and clouds anticipate me. Clouds and the flood lights from the condos behind my house do not make a good combination, no matter how light the clouds. There was a very pretty shot of the moon in the clouds that I tried to get in the camera, but it became very obvious that I wouldn’t be able to get much without a tripod and a long exposure. It’s too early in the morning to even try.

Eventually I’ll move someplace with less light pollution and a good view of the sky. Or maybe not, since a high speed internet connection and a host of other things are higher on the list than the star view. But at least that’s on the list. I just don’t think my wife will take “too much light pollution” as a reason to not buy a house if it’s got the things she wants. And it’s not like I’m going anywhere with the current housing market.

Why don’t I like Google Sky?

I’ve been using a number of programs to help me navigate my way around the night sky for the last few months. I started with Cartes du Ciel on my desktop and both laptops, have been experimenting with Stellarium on my Mac Book Pro and discovered Google Sky in Google Earth several months ago. Now Google has release Google Sky as an online tool as well. It seems like a great project; there’s only one problem: I hate it.

Cartes du Ciel (2.76)isn’t a great program from a user interface point of view, but then it’s several years old. Version 3 is in development, but it’s a labor of love for someone and it’ll get done when it gets done. I’ve got enough beta software on my computer causing problems already, I don’t need to take a chance with one more buggy program. So I stick with the latest stable version. And I like it. It’s a bit hard to understand at first, but I like being able to switch to a horizon view with a single mouse click and see what I’d see if I was outside looking in a particular direction. It’s got more stars, nebulae and galaxies in the database than I’ll be able to see in a lifetime, which is a good thing. As with all the star programs I’ve looked at, it’s got depths I’m sure it’ll be years before I’m able to fully understand and make use of.

Stellarium is another good program. It’s very intuitive, what you see pointing your mouse south is going to be what you see while pointing yourself south. It has a smaller database (I think) than Cartes du Ciel, but it’s still much larger than what I need. I was able to understand this program quickly and used it when I was in Montreal watching the lunar eclipse in February. That was a happy accident, since I was there on business and my home was apparently clouded over. It’s good for a quick snapshot or to check the position of a particular planet/star/constellation on short notice, but for regular planning I prefer Cartes du Ciel.

I love Google Earth; I’ve been using it since several weeks after it came out. I love Google Maps; I have a friend who’s driving one of the Googlemobiles to map a large part of Northern California for Google Streets. But when I tried to use Google Sky, as part of Google Earth, I found it to be cute, but useless as a tool to help me find stars in the sky. The interface is unwieldy and paradigms that work well for Google Earth and Google Maps just leave me confused when it comes to Google Sky. I was hoping that the online version of the program would be better, but the truth is, it’s almost exactly the same. They have added some interesting tools like a link called Hubble Showcase and a Backyard Astronomy tool for looking at the Messier objects, but it’s not of much help for me when I go outside to look at the stars from my back lawn. Some day I’ll get to the point of doing a Messier Marathon, but that’s a way off.

The next toy to come out is going to be Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope. When Robert Scoble blogged about how it made him cry and when I watched the video interview he did, I was really wanting to get my hands on it. But having looked at Google Sky and the pictures it offers again, I’ve realized that being able to look at other people’s pictures of the sky is not really what I want. I want to learn enough about the sky to be able to find things myself. Google Sky didn’t offer that and the more I think about the WWTelescope, the less I’m feeling confident it will help me either. Pretty pictures are great, but they’re not nearly as good as finding the same thing with your own telescope, or in my case binoculars.

That was quick: Harvard Micro-Observatory

I’d played with the Harvard Micro-Observatory Guest Observer Portal yesterday, but I didn’t realize that it’d send me my own picture overnight. True, there’s only a few real choices, but that’s still more than enough to see what the MO is capable of. I chose to get a picture of the Hercules Cluster, something I can’t really see from my backyard. The picture came in this afternoon and was surprisingly clear. I could do more with it if I used their FITS software, but I’ve got more than enough software already installed on my system. I’ve place the picture in my gallery, but something you might notice fairly quickly is that I’m still working on getting the Gallery2 software set up just the way I want it. In any case, at least I didn’t hose the whole site in the process of getting it set up … this time.

Wired: Four Online Telescopes

It’s funny how when you get interested in something it just starts popping up in your life; at least that seems to be how my life works. So I wasn’t all that surprised that once I got interested in astronomy and astrophotography, I suddenly started seeing more astronomy articles pop up. One of the first ones I’m really excited about its a Wired article about four online telescopes you can use to take your own pictures of the night sky.

I’ve signed up for an account on the Bradford Robotic Telescope, since it has the advantage of being free and being in color. The disadvantage is that you have to wait an indeterminant amount of time for your picture to be taken and sent to you. In todays “give it to me now” internet culture, that may be too much for some people to handle, but given it’s just a hobby, I’m willing to wait a little while. I’m sure the Wired article has made the wait a little longer than it was before, but I can live with that. I’ve put in a request for pictures of the Great Orion Nebula (M42) and the Beehive Cluster (M44) since those are things I can see here and would like to compare what can be seen in the Canary Islands to what I can see in my backyard.

I looked at the other three sites, and for now I’m going to experiment with the Bradford project and leave the others alone. I’m tempted by Slooh, but I’d rather save the $100 annual fee towards my own telescope instead. Given that my budget for a first telescope isn’t too much more than that, it’s probably a good idea.

Are there any other free astrophotography resources?

Welcome to the Amateur Astronomer

When I was a kid, my parents often took us camping in Northern California on some land they owned. The nearest town was a dozen miles away, the highway was about five miles away and even the main dirt road was a couple miles away. I remember looking up one summer and actually seeing the Milky Way in all it’s beauty and glory. There were only two problems: I was extremely nearsighted and when I asked my parents to show me the constellations, all they knew were the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper.

It’s now thirty years later. I had eye surgery with the result of 20/20 vision. But more importantly, I’m married with two small boys of my own. One night several months ago our family was coming home from a dinner out as the sun went down and we saw Sirius as it rose above the horizon. The only problem was, I didn’t know it was Sirius at the time. I realized that I still didn’t know any of the constellations beyond the Big Dipper myself, and that if I didn’t change that, neither would my sons. The night sky is too vast and too beautiful for me to allow my sons to grow up as ignorant of it as I was.

Since that night I’ve purchase a number of books (mostly on bargain table) and several magazines. I’ve been to the local observatory, both by myself and with the boys. I’ve even used my youngest son as an excuse to attend the local junior astronomers club. Neither of the boys are certain they want to spend much time looking at the stars, but they do like spending time with Daddy. And there’s little in the world that compares with a six-year-old exclaiming “I found it! I found Mars!” as he looks through the binoculars.

I have a several pairs of decent binoculars and I’m looking to purchase my first telescope as soon as I can afford it. I’m searching the web for astronomy resources. I’m joining the local astronomy groups and even trying my hand at a little astrophotography. This is the place I’ll be writing about it all. And I have a little bit of experience at blogging, since I’ve been running the Network Security Blog since 2003.

One last note: ‘amatuer’ is how you spell ‘amateur’ if you rely on Wikipedia to do your spell checking.