We’ve had the annual Customer Service Week at my employers, and so on Thursday we didn’t work. Instead of that, we were gathering with our colleagues from other places whom we normally don’t meet, like some from Munich and Vienna. I took pictures of the whole day event which I cannot show here due to some non-written but still valid non disclosure agreement.
Yesterday however, Belen accepted to have her portrait taken:
Zuleikha was off with her class for three days, and is back as well. And when she went to bed, I looked at the sky which was more or less clear for the first time this week, so I decided to take out my telescope to have a look. This is what astronomers call “first light”, if it’s the first time you point a new telescope to the sky and the stars.
If you do that, first you will see – nothing much at all. You’ll see a faint and fuzzy shimmer of the stars, but the telescope has to cool down if you don’t permanently store it outside – expect something like 5 minutes per inch of opening, so in my case it was about half an hour.
And then you’ll go “Wow!”. You’ll see a lot more than you can see with the naked eye. More like this, which was taken with my wide angle lens (14mm, equivalent to 28mm on film) at ISO 3200:
What you see on the upper border is the balcony above our veranda, lit by a small 5 Watt LED reading light from our living room. The tree tops on the lower part are lit by the same light plus some of the neighbours above. In pretty much the middle of the image, you see a blueish (and slightly overexposed) dot, which is Vega. This you can see with the naked eye as well, because it’s very bright (in fact much brighter than the sun, just further away). What you do not – or hardly – see with the naked eye is the double star above it, in Lyra. Even in this wide angle shot it pretty much looks like one, but when looking through a telescope you’ll clearly see two stars, even if you use only some 30x magnification like I did with using my 25mm eyepiece (focal length of telescope divided by focal length of eyepiece equals magnification).
I tried “prime focus” with the camera, which failed. “Prime focus” means that you won’t use a lens at all, but bring the camera’s sensor into the focal point of the telescope which I couldn’t – have to get another T2 to 2″ adapter for that. Plus I also have to try during daytime when you see a lot more. The minimal focus distance of such a telescope is around 15 meters (my guess, depends on the length of your eyepiece holder/focuser), so I’ll have to try with some things like buildings which are further away than that.
What went very well was to “follow the stars” (which in fact means to counteract the movement of our planet) with using just the right ascension axis, even with my sloppy setup to roughly North (we cannot see Polaris from our place – the building is in the way). The stones on our veranda are more or less exactly aligned to the West, which greatly helps. And the 50° line (North of the equator) runs straight through our small town, which also helps in setting up the correct declination.
So here’s another photo of the tube, again in our living room, and in its “home position” (pointing to the celestial North):
I also have to get some short Vixen GP dovetail bar with a 1/4″ camera screw, so that I can use the NEQ3 equatorial mount with the camera instead of the telescope. Interesting that you can “follow the stars” with only one knob ( and only slight corrections from time to time on the other one). Once I’ll get the hang of this and it all becomes pretty much natural, I’ll care for a motor (or motors) to do that job.
Thanks for reading.