Category: Astronomy
The stars within us, the stars above us.
Because I care
Law of Universal Gravitation Every object in the Universe attracts every other object with a force directed along the line of centers for the two objects that is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the separation between the two objects. God I Read More …
Well, they did it.
Scientists, using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile, have finally imaged for the first time a planet outside our own solar system. The planet is 225 light years away from us (that's 225 times 6 TRILLION miles away) and is about 1.5 times the size of Jupiter. Read More …
Mr. Spacely
Counting stars by candlelight, all are dim but one is bright; The spiral light of venus, rising first and shining best, On, from the northwest corner, of a brand new crescent moon, While crickets and cicadas sing, a rare and different tune, Terrapin station.
The gods must be teasing me
Warm weather at night, but skies completely conceiled by a high overcast. For the past week. With light pollution to add insult. All the well, I've taken a sturdy cardboard box and a sharp knife and began constructing my aperture mask. I did the calculations and I'll need to make Read More …
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 …