New World Datsuns...

It was nothing but a blue disc when I first seen it, within 2 hours it was just a blue smudge as conditions in the sky where it was by then were bad(right over Portland OR), but it was awesome to find it and get a reply on what it was so quickly, it gave me time to search for M72(globular cluster) that is very close to it, but it is a mag 9 object, too dim for me to see from my backyard on an average night like last night which is starting to feel like a good night the way things have been lately.

By the way, it took 4000 years for the light I was looking at to get here, some of the Egypt Pyramids were only 600 years old.

I have not been writing about my telescope stuff much lately, not even on the telescope forum, conditions have not been good much lately anywhere around here, but I have made progress on my 20" F/3.7 dob, I was able to get the primary mirror lowered as far as it can be lowered without making a whole new structure, but it was enough to get the eyepiece down to eye level, I can now be flat footed on the ground and look straight up at zenith, before I had to get up on my toes which causes pain as I am bone on bone in 2 or maybe 3 joints now in my right foot, this is why I am modifying everything to get the eyepiece at or below eye level, all my scopes are at or below eye level now at zenith.

My garden is not completely weed free, but most would say it was compared to their gardens, it was a cold start, but I am still eating tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, blueberries, and a few raspberries, I even had a few late strawberries, not sure the corn is going to bear much corn, they sprouted fast but grew slow, and wind blew a few over last week, my watermelon plant died, and the volunteer watermelon plant in the front yard has no watermelons starts, I have not had a lot of luck with watermelons other than having lots of starts that produce nothing in time.

It wasn't too bad when I was over there last week but we've got quite a bit of smoke here. Is that messing with your telescope outings?

DRIVEN wrote: ↑Sat Sep 17, 2022 4:29 am It wasn't too bad when I was over there last week but we've got quite a bit of smoke here. Is that messing with your telescope outings?

Smoke, even light smoke changes both transparency and seeing, I can see more blurry things that I cannot bring into sharp focus at a dark site than my backyard, but none of it can be brought into focus so what is the point of even driving 4+ hours and using $40.00 worth of fuel, I can see blurry things from my backyard.

What I mean by blurry is I try to use enough power so let's say Jupiter is large enough in the eyepiece to actually see details, what I mean by this is Jupiter has a "Great Red Spot"(GRS), if I do not use enough power, the GRS is nothing but a small bulge sticking out of the darker center band which is really several smaller/narrower slightly different colored bands clumped together in one wide darker band, if it is not large enough in my eyepiece I cannot see anything other than that is the GRS, I had one night last year where I could see thin light whitish spirals inside the GRS, and they were sharp/in focus, it was so sharp that I noticed 2 very small red spots on the other side of the center band that had black cores like Hurricanes have on earth.

Transparency is how clean the air is that you are looking thru, seeing is how steady the air is that you are looking thru, a good example is a stream with rapids and pools, if the water has some mud in it from up stream it makes it hard to see the rocks on the bottom in the pools(calm areas), the water is not transparent, so you may have to look at one spot for a while to get some details of the rocks on the bottom, you know they are rocks rather than sand, but that is all you can really say for sure, Seeing is like when you look in the same pool, if the water is transparent you can clearly see the rocks and see different sizes/shapes, you can even see different colors, but if to move to an area with rapids you can see rocks, but they are not clear, but it is a rock and the rock appears to have moss on it, that one is a big rock, and it is surrounded by smaller rocks with or without moss on them, but moving water is not transparent, so that is bad seeing.

So I can go to that dark site I go at 4000' to and see more because the river is shallower/not as deep(not as much atmosphere to look thru), but if the air has smoke in it, it basically turns the good/excellent seeing into average, if I stare at Saturn's rings for a long time every once in a while I can see the gap in the rings but it is not sharp/detailed, that is if the seeing to good/excellent to start with, everything has to be clear of clouds, transparent, and have good/excellent seeing to use high power and see details, and I know what an excellent night looks like when viewing planets, as when things are great planets become 3D looking, they have depth, they look like a sphere and not like a flat disc in a photo.

Between smoke and the Moon all my planned trips to the dark site have been cancelled recently, and the smoke has even made observing on the east coast bad recently, it does not take much smoke to ruin seeing, I am not the only one to cancel observing trips.

Hey Wayno, I don’t know if you’ll see this in time but tonight, Monday, Jupiter will be the closest to Earth it has been in 59 years. And it’ll be in opposition from the sun. I don’t know how conditions will be up there but it might be something to try to see.

Taterhead wrote: ↑Mon Sep 26, 2022 5:56 am Hey Wayno, I don’t know if you’ll see this in time but tonight, Monday, Jupiter will be the closest to Earth it has been in 59 years. And it’ll be in opposition from the sun. I don’t know how conditions will be up there but it might be something to try to see.

I did not know it is at its closest tonight, thankyou for telling me, but it will still be fairly close for a little while longer, and Mars is coming now, Saturn is moving away from Earth now, but I can still see it just fine if conditions cooperate, 2 days ago it was the best it has been all year, but everything I looked at early was the best it had been all year, I seen the Ring Nebula the best I have ever seen it 2 days ago.

Seeing conditions were not good last night, it was blurry even with my 30mm eyepiece, with my 10mm eyepiece it was just a simmering ball of fire, but I got a pretty good look at it a couple days ago, I was able to use 8.8mm and it would fade in and out of focus, but I got a pretty good look at it, it is not the Jupiter I remember from last year, but I am looking at clouds, ever changing clouds, I seen the Great Red Spot(GRS) which in reality it is slightly Orange/brown without any details inside it, it was basically almost boring as I could not use a more powerful eyepiece to coax out the hard to see details as conditions were not good enough, last year I seen white spirals inside the GRS, and lots of different color bands everywhere on the Planet, this year it is mostly off white, with a couple light brown bands, and a lot of very light tan bands that fade in and out on the top 1/3rd, the bottom 1/3 was just off white, no details at all.

I just checked, tonight is supposed to be the best night this week, better than it has been all year except for maybe two days ago, I will be ready.

I got the wife’s telescope out and could see some spots and a bright “white?” band but it as a whole was a little blurry. Her telescope only has 2 lenses for me to choose from and I don’t have much knowledge about telescopes at all.

The higher the number the lower the power, if you want to see the whole moon in my big dob I use a 30mm eyepiece, if I want to look at a particular crater on the Moon I would use a 10mm eyepiece or even a 6mm eyepiece if the conditions were good enough(excellent seeing).

Was the "white?" band at the equator(in the middle) with two narrow darker bands above and below it?

This is a rough sketch of what I seen 4 nights ago, the spot was a little smaller than the one sketched, the darker lines were brownish, the spot was a very light Tan/Orange, and the light bands on the top were tanish and faded in and out, the bottom was just whitish.

What I saw looked basically like this but a lot blurrier.

It was about this color even. Like I said, I don’t have much knowledge about telescopes. My wife does more so but she went to bed early so I just tried it figure it out. I most likely did not have it set up correctly.

I have never had that kind of detail of Jupiter in my eyepiece or that color, last year I was more than halfway there once, I see Jupiter as more of a yellow tinted Planet(yellow/white) with very light Brown bands, I have never seen the "Great Red Spot" with any Red in it.

Was the telescope you used a Refractor?

Yeah I didn’t have that detail either. That was about how it looked. A bluish color. I could see spots but I didn’t see the big one.

I honestly couldn’t say if it is refractive or reflective. I’m assuming reflective since the eyepiece is looking into the side of the tube and not the end.

It’s supposed to be able to take coordinates and track whatever you are looking at but I didn’t bother trying to set all that crap up.

That sounds like a DOB, does it look like this one below?



It could be smaller/skinnier but it would likely look something like this one in the photo above, they are very capable telescopes, someone with good younger eyes can see what I can see in a 10", but I need a 14" or 16" to see the same thing, and I know this because I let my neighbor look thru mine and asked him questions, he could see things in detail that I could not see, also he had to adjust the focus, the focus I use was not clear for him, my eyes are different/older than his.

Yes it’s essentially just like that. Although mine is on an irrelevant tripod. But like I said, I couldn’t get a good focus on it with the two lenses that I had.

Taterhead wrote: ↑Fri Sep 30, 2022 1:00 pm Yes it’s essentially just like that. Although mine is on an irrelevant tripod. But like I said, I couldn’t get a good focus on it with the two lenses that I had.

That could have been seeing, or maybe collimation was off, there are a lot of things that can make things fuzzy, I get frustrated when observing planets, it drives me crazy that I can see things quite clearly that are 1400 light years away from earth, but Mars is only 14 minutes light speed from earth and I can not see it clearly at all most the time.

Seeing is my biggest issue for Planets, your issue might be a thermal/heat issue, did you put the scope outside and let the mirrors acclimated to outside temps, this can take hours sometimes, it makes the view look like waves are going thru it, the outside edges of Jupiter would look like they are dancing, it also looks like when you are driving down a straight road in the desert and look off into the distance and you can see the heat rising off the desert/road, it makes the mountains in the background blurry/dance.

Negative. I did not let the telescope acclimate to the outside temperature. Also I have pretty decent light pollution at my house so that probably didn’t help either. I know what you’re saying about the heat waviness stuff and the edges were blurry so that is probably what was going on with that. I do remember years ago looking at the moon with that telescope at my old house that was farther out in the country and seeing how clear that was. The tracking part of the telescope was working good at that point and I didn’t have to adjust anything except for the focus. I remember that we really had to look at the edge of the moon where it goes dark as it wasn’t a full moon because if you look at the bright part of it it was so bright that it would damage your eyes.

Letting the mirror acclimate to outside temps is important on dobs/Newts, nothing seems to focus, not even at low power, not an issue with Refractors, my dobs I use most the time have sandwich mirrors, they are two plates of glass with glass posts in between them, they cool way faster so it is not an issue most the time for me as I keep them dobs in my shed, they are ready to use most the time.

The full Moon at night is a bright object, I don't like to observe it at night as it messes my eye up, when I look away and stand up I get disoriented and loose my balance a little, it also takes time for both eyes to equalize as my observing eye is much darker with the pupil so small and it feels weird, but I look at it sometimes during the day like late this afternoon, I noticed waves of heat going thru it, but tonight was alright, I had decent views at 188X(10mm eyepiece) of Saturn, but most the time it was fading in at out of focus, but I had a few fairly clear moments.

I live in Bortle 7+, sometimes I can only see 10 stars in the sky, but I have trees block the Southwest, West, Northwest, North, and Northeast, more sky is blocked than not blocked, but I can see straight up and that is a lot of sky itself, everything passes thru the sections I have at some point over the year, I can only see the Teapot for a month or so though, and it is right over my roof, and roof heat becomes an issue.

I went to Starbucks today to check my messages, I am without internet again, hope everyone is good.

And you as well sir

I made some changes to my garden, I removed the grape bushes as I was not getting any significant number of grapes anymore to eat, not even a handful of grapes, the water needed cost more than the grapes produced.

I forgot the before photos, it took the afternoon to remove the 6 bushes and roots, then I moved the railroad ties that separated the garden to the from the grapes, I put them on top of the railroad ties that formed the walkway between the fence and the grapes, then I hauled in 4 yards of 3-way soil 2 yards at a time, I had a half wheel barrow of soil extra.








I removed the wood stakes holding the water system in place and put metal stakes in, then I made these metal caps with a channel on top that the water pipe rests in, if I want I can zip tie the pipe in the holders, but I think the weight of the pipe will hold them in place as the wind has been terrible the last week and nothing has come out or blown over, I made around 3 different types of cap holders depending on metal availability.


















I think I will put my Tomatoes in this new area/soil next spring, I think before next spring I will bring in some compost and rototill it into the existing soil in certain areas where I have grown crops over and over to revive/replenish these areas.

I'm amending my soil as well, along with expanding. Were the grapes getting too much water and attention?