Resident Astronomers tour Giza Pyramids, Karnak and Petra; still trying to photo Milky Way from cruise ship

Greetings from Palmia Observatory (now on remote location somewhere on the Red Sea),

Well the clouds and humidity and moon light and ships lights have not helped to get closer to the goal of photographing the Milky Way.  More about that later and some discussion of calculating the relative importance of ship lights versus moonlight on scattering into the camera lens, but first some travelogue discussion

Planning three tours of Arizona observatories; Photographing the Milky Way from a cruise ship? Underground liquid water lake on Mars; Star formation rate vs. redshift

Greetings from Palmia Observatory

Well this week has been again spent mostly inside, even though the smoky skies have pretty much abated, but we have been busy scanning the astronomy news and have been busy planning for travel and packing our bags.

Smoky skies; The value of image stacking; Moana Kea; ModRing space station; HR color index and Python code; How beauty leads physics astray?

Greetings from Palmia Observatory

Well this week we were looking forward to the monthly OCA star party, but it has been cancelled due to the many forest fires, especially the Holy fire, now raging in southern California.  But we have other, mostly indoor, topics for discussion.

Hooray, finally got a Barlow lens in focus; Jupiter's rings visible in LiveView, but not in photographs

Greetings from Palmia Observatory


Well, it finally happened this week, with Mars and Jupiter so bright in the night sky, I just had to try out the old Barlow lens to getter a better view.  Readers will recall that the 600mm images in the August 3 post were just fuzzy balls of light, so this week it was time to bust out the 2.5x Barlow and try to get it to work with the 80mm refractor telescope, which should result in an equivalent focal length of 1400mm.

Autoguiding discussion with PHD2 software; Acceleration mechanisms for cosmic rays; Images of Mars and Jupiter; Ruby's question about wet concrete?

Greetings from Palmia Observatory

Well, this week we attended a discussion on autoguiding and also found time to get some fuzzy DSLR images of Mars and Jupiter and also discuss a little bit more about cosmic ray acceleration.  But first we should describe one easy way to observe the effects of atmospheric refraction.

How can the atmospheric refraction effects, which makes objects close to the horizon appear higher in the sky, be measured?

Greetings from Palmia Observatory

We know that making astronomical observations of targets close to the horizon can be affected by atmospheric effects of reddening, extinction and refraction.  Previous posts have addressed some of these effects, and this post asks the question: How might atmospheric refraction be measured?