The Astronomy Files

I've spent the past week or so getting stuff together for the Texas Star Party.  We leave tomorrow and it's none too soon for me.  I'm ready to get out town and see something in the sky other than light pollution.  But I'm not looking forward to a 10 hour drive.

This image is a jpeg of a star field in the constellation Gemini.  I shot this image on April 7, 2005 at around 9:00 p.m. local time.  If you click on the image, you will see that I have marked a very dim star about in the middle of the photo.  This is an object known as a blazar.  These are very strange stars that change their light output on a routine and unpredictable basis. 

Blazars and quasars are related.  A quasar is enigmatic but generally accepted to be a black hole that is accreting matter.  The process of accretion produces jets that extend away from the object.  A blazar then is a quasar with it's jet pointed directly toward Earth.  The output of the black hole seems to vary over short periods, causing the jet to vary.  The attendant light generation then varies directly with the jet.  Bottom line, these are variable stars with a very short period sometimes on the order of hours.

I've been getting my equipment together for the annual trip to the Texas Star Party.  Spent most of yesterday putting things in a pile and building an enclosure for my laptop.  The skies in west Texas are so dark that even the slight glow of a darkened,  red laptop screen bugs fellow observers.  So the enclosure will block light from my computer and give it a modicum of protection from the sand storms that blow through on a routine basis.

I had been noodling an enclosure design around in my head but while I was in Target yesterday morning, I saw one of those build-it-yourself kits for a storage chest that looked like it would fit perfectly on my portable observing table.  The pieces were cheaper than the price of material so I put the thing in my basket

It wasn't hard to build but it didn't take long for me to see that modifications were in order.  I finally wound up using only the top, sides, and back, making kind of a bottomless box that I could slide on top of the table.  I drilled holes in the back and side for the various cables that run from computer to telescope.  Checked it out last night and it works well. 

I had also been trying to get my 10" SCT and new (since last November anyway) Takahashi mounted together on the G-11.  I have one of those Losmandy side by side mounts so I attached all the stuff to the mount including my little Orion ST-80 mounted atop the SCT.  I thought I had the stuff balanced well but after I took it out to the patio for a checkout the clutches lost their grab and the scope started rotating in RA as I was doing a slew.  It scared the crap out of me because I almost didn't catch it as it took off.  Had I not, the scope would have rotated very hard against the side of the mount, causing God only knows what damage.  I've now decided to not mount both at once.  It's just too heavy and unwieldy.

Soon after buying my Takahashi, I did a really dumb thing.  I mounted a Telrad on the scope tube using double sticky back tape.  It looked awful and didn't work well, either.  I was never able to make the Telrad mount stay in place so I put more and more tape on the scope.  Today I decided enough was enough.  I scraped all the tape off, not an easy job considering how well it stuck.  Finally had to use lighter fluid and paint thinner to get off the residue.  After getting the tape off and cleaning up the tube I fabricated a metal bracket that mounts on the tube ring bolts. Now the Telrad mounts on the bracket which can be removed if necessary.  The only problem is if I remove the bracket and tube from the rings, the Telrad won't be in the same position when remounted.  Guess I'll just have to live with it, though.

I'm thinking about not taking the SCT to Ft. Davis.  After using the Takahashi for a few months, I now realize how crappy that thing is.  There's nothing like a good refractor to wake you up to the fact that SCTs are second rate.  But light grasp is a factor and everybody goes to TSP for deep sky observing.  I do have the truss tube reflector but that means setting up two telescopes.  Maybe I'll take it and just use the Takahashi for CCD.  Decision, decisions, decisions.