Physics colloquia and travel containers for new scope and mount

This week the weather has not cooperated for night observing or solar observing during the day.  So, I spent the week at physics colloquia at CSULB and preparing for our upcoming road trip to Northern California.

The colloquia included one discussion on CIB (Cosmic Infrared Background) and the other was on metamorphosis of Cooper pairs in superconducting materials adjacent to ferromagnetic materials.  The CIB study, as you might of guessed dealt with the observations made like that of CMB with WMAP and Planck satellites, but in the infrared, and you would be right.  It was very neat to see the other spectral observations and how they all

American Physical Society Meeting in Baltimore, met Dr Gary, fellow traveller on the physicist wannabe path, and success with 2X Barlow to fix solar scope focusing issue

Greetings from Palmia Observatory

Well, I'm finally back to the observatory after a wild week of indulging in physics lectures at the American Physical Society general meeting in Baltimore.  It was neat being surrounded by over 1000 physicists where we had presentations and discussions on astrophysics, dark matter, dark energy, inflation, cosmology and the 100th anniversary of Einstein's general relativity.

Although a lot of the topics were way beyond my current understanding, there were many that were right on.  I summarized the presentations that I attended and forwarded my comments back to the other members of "science squad" of

Poor weather for observing, travelling to Baltimore for APS meeting, and Mike Brown's Solar System (Free) Course

Greetings from Palmia Observatory,

Well, this has been another tough week to get any astro images.  We had a little rain and clouds , but I spent a couple of days trying to focus my hydrogen alpha scope and had to relearn all over again that I can't get the camera mounted close enough to get a good focus.  So, I've been out on the Internet and calling Mike and my other experts to see what to do.  Also, I've been trying to align the new finder scope so that the view through the finder scope is aligned up with the view through the main scope.  The finder scope is aligned with

More poor weather whining, need new finder scope or break my back, and Caltech Mike Brown(free) Coursera course

Greetings from Palmia Observatory,

Well, it's been a hard week to get any observing in.  Can I just whine a little bit about all of the interruptions that can attend the amateur astronomer?  Maybe you have already gone through these travails, but I'm suffering through them this week.

First, the weather didn't cooperate and high clouds were an issue even though there were a couple of hours here and there that would have been good.

Second, I had to wait for the finder scope to arrive in the mail.  So, my first attempt at using that last night didn't go too well.  My new Explore Scientific telescope is much longer than my other reflecting scope, so when I first try to use