Observing with Street Lights

Observing with Street Lights
Dark sky sites not always necessary to see the Milky Way (This image was taken ouside of a B&B in Julian, CA)

Sunday, November 29, 2015

Trying low cost commercial fiber optic spectrometer, full moon through the clouds, just arrived Astronomer Assistant Ruby, and Ryden's book on cosmology

Greetings from Palmia Observatory

This has been a busy week with mostly inside activities with just one quick photo shoot of the full moon.  One such activity was my decision, after much dithering, to get more involved with shooting stellar spectrograms.  As you might remember from last year's posts, I briefly tried this before with a Star Analyzer diffraction grating.  This grating could be installed in the telescope optical path, just like an optical filter, and the resulting diffraction pattern could be photographed.  But, I found I had a hard time getting good calibration of

Sunday, November 22, 2015

Thanksgiving Holiday, Lie Algebra with Math Guru Dave, OCA general meeting about asteroseismology,

Greetings from Palmia Observatory

As we move into Thanksgiving holiday mode of structuring our time, it's been hard to schedule more time for observing.  Resident Astronomer Peggy has been busy with decorations and holiday partying preparations.  As the other resident astronomer, I have been busy completing two online courses and just finished the final exam for the Exoplanets  course and getting ready for the final exam for the climate science course and the ongoing study of Lie Algebra with

Sunday, November 8, 2015

Nightfall Festival in Borrego Springs, Large Scorpian, Always remember to take the lens cap off, M31 long exposure image and Strange Light in Sky

Greetings from Palmia Observatory,

Well as you know we have been offsite at the Nightfall astronomy festival in Borrego Springs.  The location has very dark skies and is about a 2.5 hours drive outside of Orange County.   We had three good nights of observing and it was a lot of fun and I have four photos to share.

The first shot I wanted to share is of the telescope setup area where there is plenty of concrete parking lot.  The building in the background is one of the hotel buildings so you are really close if you want to stretch out to rest.  The area to the right side is another