Mars 2018

Of course we had to observe Mars’ closest approach to Earth in 15 years! That occurred on July 31 when it was a “mere” 35.8 million miles from us. I was able to capture it right at that time from the Talavera Space Hut!    Unfortunately it is not favorably positioned for Northern Hemisphere imagers as it’s maximum elevation is only 29 degrees. Seeing at this low altitude even in the best conditions is not that great. Consequently it was very difficult to obtain quality images, but loads of fun to record the event! Interestingly I compared the images I took in 2005 when it was at around 43 million miles (7 million miles further) and at that time the planet elevation was much higher. You can see how even with way more modest equipment the resolution is better!

Mars is at “opposition” now in terms of it’s orbital position relative to Earth, meaning we are between Mars and the Sun. When the Sun sets, Mars is rising and at sunrise Mars is setting.

Here is a schematic diagram of Mars in 2018 with simulated images  courtesy of the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers website:

Of course this isn’t exactly what I saw but the other complicating factor was a dust storm that raged on the planet for months obscuring all surface features. Considering that and the low altitude position we didn’t do too badly. Note that the South polar cap is at the top here. One thing I did see that isn’t shown here is the North polar cap! You can barely see it in the fully processed images below but note the appearance in the blue filtered image. You can really see it there!

 

This is probably the best resolved image taken on the night of July 31. The blue glow at the bottom is caused by atmospheric refraction and very slight misalignment of the RGB channels. Equipment used was a Celestron 14″ SCT, Skyris 132M mono camera with filters. Each channel was about 30 seconds at 100 frames per sec.

 

Same equipment as the image above but just not cropped. It’s the same image scale. All images were obtained at prime focus around 4400mm. When I tried going up to 2x with a barlow the planet was “boiling” everywhere! Had to stay at prime

 

I thought this was cool! The Northern polar cap is very clear at the bottom of this blue filtered image!

 

These were images I took back in 2005. The lower image was at opposition. Equipment back then was a 10″ newtonian and at that time I was able to use a 5x barlow! The seeing was that good. From Western Massachusetts of all places! Camera was a simple color webcam called a Toucam pro! But again the altitude of the planet makes a huge difference. i don’t recall the exact position but I’m going to say it was at least 50 degrees or so from what I remember.

Well that’s about it for Mars opposition 2018! Until next time. Thanks for reading!

Dr Dave

 

First successful remote imaging session!

Alright , not exactly as dramatic as the Apollo Moon landing but for an astroimager it does represent a significant milestone! On July 17, 2018 the first totally remote operation of Orion’s Belt Observatory took place. I was operating the equipment from Las Cruces which is about 2 hours away. The first remote session took place without any major glitches. Basically I did what I always do: open the roof, turn on the equipment, boot all of the programs up and program the night’s session, except this time I was not at the observatory location at all. I have been operating my equipment unattended using CCD autopilot for years but since Orion’s Belt Observatory was built, now 2 years ago already, I still had to be physically present to open the roof and turn everything on….until now!

The evening’s targets were M51 and M20 which I had already been working on. It was a great night for once since now we are in the “Monsoon” season in the Southwest. Really the bottom line with the remote stuff is you do not want your equipment rained on. You must have a reliable weather / cloud monitor. The Boltwood II which I am using has an audible alarm feature you can activate so if clouds appear you will be woken up so you can shut everything down. In the future I will install a scope sensor so that the main program will be able to execute emergency shutdown automatically but the sensor will prevent the roof closing until the telescope is properly parked. That’s an extra detail you need to keep in mind when operating a roll-off remotely. For a dome you can close it with scope in any position, but then there are other issues to deal with for domes! Anyway here are the key elements you need for successful remote observatory control assuming you are already able to operate your equipment unattended:

1. Decent internet so you can reliably access your observatory computer. I use Team Viewer application for remote access which is pretty good and has a lot of features. It is also free.
2. Video cameras so you can see what is happening
3. Reliable software to control opening and closing your roof
4. Internet based “switches” to turn on and off equipment.
5. Weather monitoring. I have an observatory cloud monitor that also records wind speed, humidity etc
6. All sky camera- this is not a must but extremely useful. I am very lucky to have several neighbors up here with reliable already installed cameras that I can link to!
7. Ability to cycle power on your observatory PC. If the computer locks up you have to be able to turn it off and then back on again. This is possible for contemporary PC’s by going into the BIOS on your computer and setting that option, to restart after power is shut off
8. Back up battery power for all equipment. I use UPS devices. They can email you when power goes out. They will work for a couple of hours so you can at least shut everything down with power out
9. Ability to reboot your modem. When the internet drops you’re screwed unless you have a way of restoring it. Some internet switches have an “autoping” feature that will enable rebooting the modem if it does not get a response to pings sent to the router IP address

That’s really it in a nutshell! If you are able to operate your equipment unattended, this is all you need to get to the next level. Happy remoting! Thanks for reading!

Dr Dave

Dusk on 7/17/18. Observatory roof is successfully opened remotely. This is the indoor camera

 

Outdoor camera view with roof open. The 16″ is ready for imaging!

 

This is the principal web switch which operates the equipment. All it is basically is a power strip that has an ethernet connection to your network and can be accessed via a specific IP address. Once you get in to the controller you can turn on the outlets you need to to power up the equipment. This is the “Web power switch PRO” from a company called “Digital Loggers”

 

This is a screen shot of the remote session in progress. The Boltwood II weather monitor outputs to a software program that can display the current observatory conditions shown to the left

 

All sky camera view showing crystal clear skies in the immediate area overhead with the Milky Way stretching across the sky! Courtesy of Dimension Point observatory which is owned and operated by a friend of mine up there in Mayhill. His observatory is literally about 200 yards away.

 

The executive program CCD autopilot links together all of the operations required for successful imaging operations: camera, mount, focuser, rotator etc. The session is recorded in real time so you can see exactly what is happening. Here we are in the process of an exposure of a single 15 minute HA frame for M20 the Trifid Nebula!

The first remote imaging session at Orion’s Belt has been completed!

 

And now after the session completes, the telescope parks: https://youtu.be/po1nB5qmS5k

And the roof closes: https://youtu.be/mONzt5HO9xY

Here is a sample of what we did. This is a single 15 minute raw frame in hydrogen alpha,

using a 3nm HA filter, of the Trifid nebula taken with the 16″ RiDK telescope. The project calls for a total of about 20 hours of HA, SII, OII and blue channels!

The Trifid nebula is a combination reflection and emission nebula in the constellation Sagittarius toward the galactic center. This image is taken through a hydrogen alpha filter which allows only a narrow band of hydrogen emission to register thus revealing the delicate infrastructure of the emission nebula component. Looks very promising for the future result!

Control your Roll-off with a click of a button!

So now that you have your permanent set up in a roll-off, what do you do for automated roof control? Many of us get to that point where we can operate our equipment unattended, but we still have to be there physically to open the roof, not to mention turning on the equipment. That’s frustrating because especially if you are still working, you can’t get to the observatory often in periods of great seeing weather. I had my observatory built by Backyard Observatories, a well-respected outfit in the roll-off construction business and they had built several observatories in my area so I figured they must know what they were doing, Right? They were featuring an automated system called M1OASYS. Seemed like it was pretty cool. There were a couple of people in my area using it. I asked some people on Cloudy Nights. Yes it was “very robust”. Definitely worked according to my scientific sampling of 2 individuals. But was it worth the 2k additional to have it installed? I soon discovered that unfortunately in my case, it was NOT. The M1 Elk Gold as it is called is a well known home and business security system! Apparently for whatever reason it was modified so a roof control function could be added on. In other words, 99% of the system is designed to turn on and off lights, maybe your coffee maker, smoke alarms, shades, window and door sensors, and warn you of intruders in one of the 168 zones that it can cover. Maybe someone finds it useful to be warned of a “mouse in zone 35” or something. 1% is dedicated to astronomy related activities, like opening and closing your observatory roof! After literally months of struggling with this 1000 pound elephant, replacing ethernet adaptors that didn’t work etc, I pretty much had had it. Now I am not going to kill Backyard for failing to test their equipment. I was very happy with their construction quality. The roll-off is awesome. The warm room is terrific and the motor is going to last 100 years, but I screwed up, didn’t do my due diligence looking at my options for roof control and paid a price for it but often in life you learn from your mistakes!
Thankfully someone in the Mayhill astronomy community had a BYO roll-off installed, has an engineering background and told me about this outfit called “Foster Systems”. I looked into it. After purchasing a control board, 2 relay boards and a serial to usb adaptor, all for less than $200, it took about half a day to have a fully operational roof control system!
So that is the background to this . If you are a Backyard roll off owner or even if you are not I hope you can learn from what I learned! Perhaps you have an M1OASYS system installed and want to burn it! Now is your chance! One thing you can be happy about with the M1 install is that the wiring out of the roof motor has already been done for you so that is probably the hardest part of this project. Also the magnetic sensors have already been installed. Those can also be used. I looked at the interface for the AstroMC roof control from Foster Systems. What a breath of fresh air! I mean a button that actually says “open roof”, not a laundry list of alarms and “zones”.
I’m still putting the tutorial together but here is a short video in the meantime celebrating this milestone in remote astroimaging! Now I can go on vacations with my wife and not be upset about it!

Talavera 3.0

After probably a year and half of zero activity here we’re finally beginning what is probably the last iteration of equipment at the “Talavera Space Hut”, the first observatory I built when we moved out to Southern New Mexico. Here is a link to it.  It’s located right outside my house here in Las Cruces at the foot of the Organ Mountains. I started imaging here in 2014 and did get some nice results. After all we are in the High Desert and seeing is often excellent. Unfortunately the town is steadily growing along with light pollution. There are no light restrictions in the town. We are about 10 miles east so it’s not bad especially looking North and East but since the construction of Orion’s Belt Observatory up in Mayhill  in 2016, I no longer needed this facility for deep space imaging work. However with my interest in spectroscopy and planetary imaging, this was the logical choice to take that over. I sold my Astrotech 12 RC to a friend up in Mayhill and bought a used C-14, perfect for high res spectroscopy and planetary imaging! I still have my old trusty Paramount ME which I was happy to see is still operating just fine! So I dusted everything off, cleaned out all the spiders and bugs and started up the equipment, beginning the preliminaries, collimation, pointing models etc and started the new journey! Just in time for the “Mars show” at the end of this month!

Thanks for reading!

Dr Dave

Inside the space hut for the first time in over a year! No critters thankfully had taken up residence.

 

The “Talavera Space Hut” as it is affectionately called is a simple 8 foot square manual roll-off. It’s a wonderful place. Very intimate and hands on! Just enough space for me to maneuver around the equipment. Basically 360 degree unobstructed viewing! Here we are opening the observatory and viewing the amazing sunset at the same time!

 

The “final installment” equipment wise at the Space Hut consists of a C14 black tube version (not the HD) which is in excellent condition I purchased used off Amart which will be used for spectroscopy and planetary observing, a William Optics GT102 refractor used mostly for video astronomy and a Paramount ME mount I have owned since 2006. The focuser used for planets is a Moonlite CSL 2.5″ shown above. Cameras at this site include an Atik 460 EX for spectroscopy, a Skyris webcam for planets and also a ZWO174 for guiding when doing spectroscopy. The spectrometer is a Lhires 3

 

Eyes over the teapot!

As seen from the northern hemisphere, the constellation’s brighter stars form an easily recognizable asterism known as ‘the Teapot’. The stars δ Sgr (Kaus Media), ε Sgr (Kaus Australis), ζ Sgr (Ascella), and φ Sgr form the body of the pot; λ Sgr (Kaus Borealis) is the point of the lid; γ2 Sgr (Alnasl) is the tip of the spout; and σ Sgr (Nunki) and τ Sgr the handle. These same stars originally formed the bow and arrow of Sagittarius. (From Wikipedia, “Sagittarius constellation”)

In today’s “morning coffee” addition up at the observatory we turn our attention back to  early morning visual and binocular viewing! It’s 5:30 AM MDT. Spring has sprung and with it some of our old Milky Way friends in the South: the bright star clouds toward our galaxy’s center, the Lagoon nebula, Trifid, M22 globular cluster, M11 the Wild Duck cluster and others. However there was quite an unexpected surprise just above the constellation Sagittarius. 2 very bright objects, one red and one yellow nearly a fist width apart almost like 2 bright eyes! Yes, eyes over the teapot ,which is a known asterism for the constellation Sagittarius. The yellow object is Saturn. However the bright red object surprised me. This year, in fact by the end of this July, Mars will reach opposition and be nearly 2 times brighter than Jupiter! That hasn’t happened since 2003, when Mars was its closest to Earth in 60,000 years! Usually Mars is an inconspicuous rust colored dot lost amongst the stars. Not this year! It’s already making quite a show. Don’t miss it!

2 “eyes above the teapot” in early morning. Saturn is to the left and Mars right. Mars actually appears in the same binocular field as the Trifid nebula and the Lagoon nebula

Chile Dilly!

Recently I was browsing an online astronomy journal when I came across an advertisement for a remote imaging site in Chile: Chilescope.com. It was an attractive home page and of course being an avid astroimager I know about Chile, arguably the hottest property right now and home to all the latest and greatest ground based telescopes in the world. The Atacama Desert, driest place on Earth, could be the best observing site without actually being in outer space! Now I already own and operate a remote observatory in Mayhill NM, the birthplace of remote imaging so why would I be interested in anything else? Probably the main interest lies in the fact that I cannot observe the southern hemisphere’s sky from here! The fact that it is Chile adds a certain mystique to the whole picture. I decided to look into it further. The observing site is located in a remote part of Northern Chile. The nearest town is Ovalle, Chile which really isn’t that close to the Atacama Desert. It’s actually a good 700 km to the south.

X marks the spot where Chilescope is located. Atacama region is about 3 times the distance to the “Chile” label , north, on the map

Ok, perhaps I was a little disappointed, but after further research I discovered it still lies in an area in the North where the weather is superb and the climate is still quite dry. The site sits at a modest elevation of 5000 feet so quite a bit lower than anything in the Atacama region. The project was started by a group of astronomers in 2013 in collaboration with the University of Santiago.

Three observatories that were built are available for use. Two of them house identical telescopes and equipment, consisting of extremely fast (F3.6) ASA 20” Newtonians with direct drive mounts and FLI 16803 cameras.

Telescope 2 and 3 are 20″ ASA newtonians equipped with 4″ Wynne correctors for a corrected field of 50mm at an amazing F/3.6! An FLI Proline 16803 camera is used with a 10 position filter wheel. The mount is a direct drive equatorial mount which does not require meridian flip.

The third observatory houses a 1 meter RC scope! The site is directed toward amateur astronomers but also caters to professionals who are looking for quality telescope time. I am not generally familiar with “pay for play” telescope rental sites except for perhaps itelescope, which has, in my opinion, a very complex user interface and payment structure. This by contrast is extremely clean and simple. The cost for use of one of the Newtonians is 60 dollars per hour which is quite a bit cheaper than what I have seen for other sites. They provide the usual “Moon discounts” for imaging in moonlit skies. They also credit observers for mechanical problems and even bad frames. My estimate was that you could conceivably do a decent tricolor image project with the fast optics and discounts for perhaps around $400 or so.  I then looked at the calendar of availability expecting a long wait time but was surprised to see that I could start observing the next day! Of course the next thing to inspect was the images that were obtained by users. These were absolutely tremendous APOD quality images all the way! I was sold! A chance to image the famous Centaurus A galaxy and other renowned southern hemisphere gems! Luckily I had just sold some astroimaging equipment so I had some discretionary funds to test this out. My first target was of course Centaurus A! Payment is through PayPal either from your own account or via credit card. You have to register of course first and then your payment shows up as “chile points” where 1 point equals 1 US dollar.

The user interface is very simple and they walk you through everything.

The weather is recorded here as “unsuitable” but that is because it is during the day. You set up your times based on calendar availability. You have to check with your favorite planetarium program when your object will be visible. I use Stellarium, which actually has Ovalle, Chile in their database!  They do not image below 30 degrees so if your set up times are problematic either because of object visibility or conflicts with sunset or sunrise you will get an error message. Also of note is the late sunset time, around 9 oclock or so.

User planning page showing available observing time and overall image session

Remember it is Fall down there and they do not observe Daylight Savings! Currently you can easily image for 4-5 hours. They do reserve about 2 hours or so for non imaging functions. All of these details are explained both on the site and in a downloadable PDF . If you have any experience at all imaging the set up page is a snap. You enter the RA and Dec coordinates of your target, enter the number of subs you want to take, filter, binning, exposure time, how often you want to focus and even dithering. That’s it! When your session starts you get an email with a link to the session log which you can follow. At the end of your session your files are available for download. You can also download your bias, darks and flats at any time for free. They update their flats every week and darks every 2 weeks.

And now the results! This is a single 20 minute raw luminance image at 1:9 scale. The image analysis below shows the average FWHM is about 2.3 with this image scale (1 arc sec per pixel)  which is close to the lowest resolution I have seen here:

They tell you that their system is optimized for 20 minute exposures so that’s what I chose. On my first session there was a technical glitch and seeing was not good that night so I did get a 30% refund based on the number of frames I lost and/or had to throw out. Their customer service is outstanding. Emails regarding any issues are handled anywhere from within 1 hour to maybe a few hours but always resolved before the next imaging session. I checked all of my images in Pixinsight and my conclusion was that resolution in general was outstanding. On the best nights it was typical to obtain single 20 minute subs with an average FWHM in the 1 arc sec range. Less than great seeing was in the low 2’s. As mentioned the system is very fast and as a result is perhaps undersampling a bit with only a 1 arc sec per pixel image scale. The focal length of 1900mm (corrected) at F/3.6 demands precision focusing as the critical focus zone is a mere 20-30 or so microns! Consistent perfection in star quality is probably not realistic given this type of optical set up with the need both for absolutely perfect focusing with a minimal error margin, and field correction for a 20 inch Newtonian! As a result about 1/5 of the images I obtained had oval appearing stars in the very corners of the field at full resolution but I actually only had to discard a few that were frankly bad. The rest were acceptable to where I felt after processing would not be noticeable. The corrected field is 50mm so it is quite large considering the size of the optics! The other problem that came up was occasional failed plate solving which caused shifting of the target off center. These frames were credited back to me no questions asked. I was actually relieved to see that I am not the only remote observatory operator that has issues to deal with! The one variable there which seems to cause no trouble at all is the weather. I am into my second week of imaging and I still have not seen a single cloud on their all sky cam!

All sky cam near sunset.

All sky cam just before the start of imaging. The Milky Way is in full bloom! You can actually see Orion well to the north in the right upper quadrant. I believe that the Large Magellanic Cloud is visible in the south just to the right of center

In conclusion I would highly recommend this site for anyone who wants to image targets that can only be seen or optimally seen in the Southern Hemisphere. The cost is not prohibitive and the fast optical system makes it possible to obtain enough quality data in a reasonable time frame. The seeing at this site in Chile is excellent, and the resolution and image quality obtained make it well worth the expense, not to mention the excitement of seeing these amazing objects which we cannot see from Northern lattitudes! The user interface is very simple and customer service is superb. While you will have to throw out some subs like we all do at times, most of these will not come at additional cost. Best of all…they add 20% to your initial deposit if you are a Cloudy Nights online astronomy forum member!

Chile Dilly!

Thanks for reading!

Dr Dave

They blinded me….with Science!

Last month the first ever spectroscopy workshop was held in the US! It happened to be right across the street from my remote observatory at one of our good friends house. The first Sacramento Mountains Spectroscopy Bootcamp was hosted by Joe Daglen and Ken Hudson, 2 avid amateur spectroscopists. Now I do have a degree in astronomy so while I do have a passion for deep space imaging, it isn’t always about the nice pictures!

The amazing fact to realize is that most of what we know about the large scale structure of the universe, about how stars work, about how stars live and die and I would say most of the physical properties of the universe in general, is made possible by the analysis of light from distant objects using devices called spectrographs, similar to what you did in 3rd grade when you held up a prism in front of a light source and marveled at the colors of the spectrum. Spectroscopy is an extremely captivating facet of astronomy, very popular in Europe. Not so much here in the US…yet, but having meetings such as this will certainly go a long way toward getting more amateurs involved. The details are of course well beyond the scope of a single blog entry, but I invite you to read this introductory “primer” I wrote for Reflector Magazine 3 years ago.

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The first ever Sacramento Mountains Spectroscopy Workshop was a great success! An all star faculty made the trip up there including Francois Cochard, founder of Shelyak Instruments, the main amateur source of numerous spectrographs including the high resolution LhiresIII. There were a couple of professional astronomers and also an appearance by Stella Kafka, PhD, director of the American Association of Variable Star Observers. Currently the AAVSO is mostly involved with photometry but wants to become involved much more in spectroscopy and is assembling a variable star spectral data base. We had the opportunity to learn how to collect spectra using the high resolution spectrograph and how to process the spectral data. The astronomers who attended gave some fascinating talks on unusual stars, called Be (Type B spectral class with emission properties). These are stars that have orbiting shells of gas surrounding them that produce emission type spectra, rather than absorption (see the PDF primer above!). At any rate the meeting energized me to get my own equipment up and running here in Las Cruces (stay tuned for more on that!) We are all looking forward to SMSW-2 hopefully next year!

The first ever spectroscopy workshop in the US! That’s kind of a big deal I think!

 

The weather up here in the mountains is superb 300 days out of the year but not today! Fortunately we had a window of about 1/2 hour at night where we were able to collect spectral data

 

Outside the observatory at Joe Daglen’s in Mayhill NM which is right across the street from my observatory up there!

 

Inside the observatory participants can see the equipment used, which for spectroscopy is the scope on the right, a C14 on a Paramount ME

 

Here is the equipment mounted on the scope. The arrow at the bottom points to the spectrograph, a Lhires III. The camera labeled A is the one which records the spectra. The one labeled B is the guiding camera

 

Here we are! About 21 attendees and 4 faculty members. I am located under the white arrow 🙂

 

Well stay tuned for more spectroscopy coming up soon!

Thanks for reading!

Dr Dave