Month: December 2004
Cloudy Nights
The past few nights here have been completely overcast with not even a break in the clouds. The other night I went down to Company 7 and picked up two things – a upgraded finder scope that is of the same spec as the one that came with my XT10 Read More …
More on Saturn and the Moon
I dragged my scope up to UMBC tonight to get another view of Saturn. Despite the light pollution from Baltimore, I got a pretty good view and studied it for a while. Although my eyes were tearing from the cold, I saw a better picture of the Cassini Division in Read More …
Orion Inteliscope Cable and Adaptor
Alright, so now I figured out the RS-232 pinouts on the telescope control computer interface. On its 4 wire RJ-11 plug, I found that Pin-1 was xmit, Pin-2 was recv, and Pin-3 was ground. Pin-4 is apparently unused. Bare basic RS-232 with no handshaking or CTS/CTR. I managed to work Read More …
The Celestial Poles
Rob Carlson responded to my post last night about Precession and asked about the Northern Celestial Pole (NCP) I mentioned. Explaining this deserves its own entry, so here we go. We all know that Earth rotates on its polar axis. This gives us night and day. This makes the Sun Read More …
Hey baby, what's your sign?
I'm having a tough time trying to fall asleep tonight, so I figured I would write something here. Recently, as I educate myself on all things astronomical, I came across an interesting bit of info on the Zodiac. As you probably know, the Zodiac was originally laid out 2,600 years Read More …
First Light
In the very early hours of December 25, 2004 at approx. 1:30am at 39.39875º N, 77.10772º W, I made first light with my new Orion XT10i Inteliscope dobsonian telescope. The sky was very good with little surface winds with a temperature of 19 F, and a 13.28-day old waxing gibbous Read More …