I Want to See the Sun III (Not) Unfiltered

I Want to See the Sun III (Not) Unfiltered

Here Phaeton lies, in Phoebus' car...

-Ovid

Here is a photo I took of the solar flares (upper right) shooting off the sun and into space. I used a cheap cellphone held up to the eyepiece of a Coronado PST...but we'll get to that later in this post.

We're going to explore the methods I've used over the past couple years to stare directly at the sun. We'll start with the simplest and cheapest and work our way up.

The easiest is to just look up and stare at the sun with bare eyes. This is a fantastically bad idea invented by the ancients. Galileo went blind from doing this.

Here is a picture of a sun dog (aka parhelion) false sun I took on 5/11/2017 in Michigan. Somewhere on this blog I have a better, earlier photo.

This particular sun dog looks like a rainbow. One time I saw a sun dog (aka False Sun) in which there appeared to be 3 suns in a row! The middle sun was the real one. All three suns were identical in shape (round) and brightness (bright as the sun). It was very weird and made me research what the heck was happening: sun dog aka false sun(s) aka parhelion aka mock sun(s).

Another terrible idea: Above is a green glass "Sun" filter. It screws onto the end of the eyepiece that goes into the telescope and gives nice crisp images of the sun that are tinted green. This will  only let you see sunspots, like in the photo below:

The photo is a tag blurry, but that's not the sun filter's fault, just bad focus. The little dot is a sunspot. The edge of the sun on the left side is crisp. These filters are really cool and come free with many old Tasco garage sale telescopes, but they have some serious drawbacks.

Walking around a church widdershins (against the sun / counterclockwise is considered unlucky or dangerous in Britain, but not in Eastern Orthodoxy.

They are usually found to fit small, 0.965" cheap eyepieces. A couple posts ago I detailed the problem with using these smaller, not so great eyepieces. Because this filter screws onto the eyepiece the burning hot sunlight has to enter your telescope Unfiltered until it hits this filter, which is about an inch from your eyeball. This works ok with really small (weaker) telescopes, but larger telescopes or any telescope using a mirror (reflector) will burst into flames if you point it at the sun, no matter of you have this filter in place or not! The sunlight is only filters for the last inch before it hits your eye, the rest of the time it's melting things in your telescope.

Another problem is that these glass filters have a habit of heating up and shattering! You'll be treated to flying glass and full, magnified sunlight blasting into your eye. They don't seem to sell these anymore, i got mine free from a friend. If you're smart you can use them relatively safely...except that they are not labeled as to manufacturer so they're mystery material. Some are 13 welder's glass but some might be a different version, some are just green glass, some are even cheap plastic. Never use these!

Beyond catastrophic failure of the glass, the most common injury is that while the light coming through the eyepiece is filtered, the light going through your little aiming/spotting scope isn't. People routinely burn their cheeks or set the shoulder of their shirts on fire. The spotting scope magnifies the sunlight. Leave the cap on the front of your spotting scope! Or take it off entirely.

Smaller telescopes and binoculars can be pointed at the sun and instead of shoving you're eye up to the eyepiece you can hold a piece of paper a few inches away from where your eye would normally be. This will project an image of the sun onto the paper. However, you can end up overheating and melting parts of the telescope or binoculars. Some cheap (and some super expensive) telescope eyepieces are epoxied together and may come unglued from the heat-and I wouldn't want to try this with and nice eyepieces. Strictly garage sale finds for the solar projection method.

The next step up in price (less than $30) is solar film i picked up cheap online from Draco Productions. It's made by Baader (make sure you get the film for in front of telescopes and NOT the naked eye version). It's available elsewhere, but Draco was cheap and shipped fast:

The tiny dot showing through the film is the sun...but this is NOT made for naked eye viewing.  If you hold this up to one side of a pair of binoculars (left eye side, held in front of the binoculars) remember to leave the cap on the other (right eye side) or else your left eye will be treated to a beautiful view of the sun while your right eyeball/eye-lid will be melted off your face! People forget, think before you do-your eyes depend on it!

In the above photos you can see the silvery solar film. It's over the objective end of the telescope which gets pointed at the sky: all of the sunlight has to pass through the filter before entering the telescope. It comes in squares and you make a round cardboard frame to stick on the end of your telescope or camera or binoculars. Everything is nice and cool and safe, just as long as you secure it strongly so the wind doesn't blow it off.

So, your can use this on bigger/better telescopes with any eyepiece that fits the telescope (1.25" and 2" eyepieces), not just the puny 0.965 eyepieces. Solar film can be held up to your camera, binoculars, cellphone or camera.. The green glass filter only screws onto toy-quality 0.965" eyepieces and is off unknown safety. Solar film is safer, and more versatile with slightly more surface detail.

As you can see, the silver foil is almost as wide as the opening of the telescope. This is actually too much. There should be a wider cardboard frame and less silver. That's a 3.5" diameter silver circle, or should be 2". This will let less light into the telescope which means less internal glare and less heat. If your telescope has a secondary mirror centered in the objective end, make the hole in the cardboard off-center. You'll have a big cardboard circle with a small silver circle not centered.

The photo below shows my bigger telescope with a bigger mask (and smaller filter letting in less light). To the extreme left edge there is a big plastic cover over the 8" telescope with a tiny cut out showing silver. Ignore the silver camera and lens at the center of the photo, it's the little circle on the budget one almost touching the middle of the left edge of the photo:

Your Reflector mirror telescope won't mind an off-center hole, because the spider 90 degree mirror blocks the center of the telescope. Your view will also have more contrast! With the light gathering power of my 8" telescope I used the plastic end cap with a small hole cut in it (as shown in the above photo) which tones down the internal light reflections. This beast of a telescope is made to grab all the light it can from dim deep-space objects-firehosing (even the filtered) fury of the sun down it is a case of less is more!

So, what do you see? Again, only sunspots and associated phenomena.

Here's a picture using the above telescope with solar film, set up just light it's shown. You can see 9 sunspots. Sunspots are almost always in pairs and have magnetic interactions with each other, but as you can see the highest one near the center of the sun is all alone! Neat.

You'll also notice the sun is white, not green. That's less annoying and also let's more fine detail be resolved by the human eye.

What else can you see with these simple two filter systems? Well, if you pop in more powerful (smaller number in millimeters) eyepieces you can zoom in and see light and dark structures in and around the sunspots and of you get the size of the filter (smaller is better) just right some orange-peel solar surface may be visible. Light grey surface with slightly lighter grey wisps. Anything else? Oh, you better believe it! How about the silhouette of anything that gets between your telescope and the sun: airplanes, satellites, the International Space Station and even planets like Venus. Venus? Yep, here's my photo of the planet Venus passing between the sun and the earth:

Venus is the big dot at the bottom. I took this photo of the Transit of Venus on June 5th, 2012 (my best friend's birthday-the same friend who gave me the green glass filter and a pile of telescopes). Toward the top you can see some sunspots too. Venus is about 84% the size of earth, the only reason it looks even as big as it does is because it's close to us-like how you can take your tiny thumb and block the sun with it.

While tracking Venus moving across the sun I also did my first act of "sidewalk astronomy". This is where astronomers set up a telescope in a weird place, like the middle of the sidewalk and give free views to anyone passing by. It's usually at night of course. I had my solar freak-show set up obviously while the sun was out on the middle of the afternoon, one of my neighbors came by and I gave an explanation and a free peak at a cool event. I'm extremely shy, but I was happy for the company while self-consciously operating this weird silver foil contraption.


What's the next method? Well, you can get a 90° eyepiece holder with a fancy (super expensive) glass filter called a Herschel Wedge. In addition to practically inventing or vastly improving many forms of photography (including astrophotography) he was a great astronomer not only on observing (he named a bunch of moons of Uranus and Saturn) he solved technical problems such as: how can we stare at the sun without going blind like Galileo did? He made a special prism (wedge) and added polarizing filters around it. They're cool (but blast out heat by diverting around 95% of the sunlight), pricey and only good for use with refractor (lenses, not mirrors) telescopes. The glass of the prism messes with the light waves and as mentioned in my previous post, reflector telescope mirrors focus all light at the same point, not different points like lenses.

I opted not to go the Herschel Wedge route since my best telescopes are not refractors. So, what did I do? I bought a really expensive refractors telescope-that can only be pointed at the sun! Didn't expect that did you?

I had been thinking for about a year over a solar telescope. I noticed that at almost all the websites the price of the model I wanted jumped up by more than $100! It was now or never, so clicked over to Amazon, which hadn't raised their price yet and I purchased my very own Coronado PST (personal telescope):

It's a strange beast indeed. My new solar telescope, was worth the wait and expense. Its manufacturing tolerances are 4 times tighter than the Hubble telescope's were. It uses a Fabry–Pérot interferometer / etalon to dump out light and get only 656nm wavelength light to the eye, which is the hydrogen-alpha band of the sun. It's plus or minus 1/10 of a nanometer. The upgrade to make it plus or minus 5/100 of a nanometer would have added almost $2000 to the price (I'm happy with what I got).

So, what does this method do? In addition to sunspots, surface orange-peel wisps and other details the Coronado PST let's you see huge solar flares blasting off the surface of the sun into space. You can also refocus and see an extremely pronounced alligator-skin surface which also shows black lines of cooler areas of the sun. Here's some of my quick snapshots (the real view is much crisper):

That little spike shooting up off the upper right edge of the sun is actually a geyser of fire as tall as two planet earths stacked on top of each other!!!!

These are probably the worst photos I've taken in my life, but when I'm using my PST I just can't be bothered with taking photos. I just get memorized by the awesomeness! 

Here's a review I wrote for the Coronado PST:


THE SHORTER REVIEW/QUICK SETUP GUIDE

Mount on camera tripod. 

Aim at sun.

Lefty-loosey the big tuning ring where the gold tube attaches to the black box until the sun looks like a reasonably crisp circle and not fuzzy.

Adjust the little focus knob at the back bottom of the black box until you can see details (either sunspots, orange peel surface of sun or huge spikey solar flare prominences).

Then slightly adjust the big ring again until you can SEE THEM ALL AT THE SAME TIME.

Yes, using the this scope you can see sunspots, flares and surface detail all at once. There was even a crazy `fault line' of dark red running almost the entire diameter of the sun's surface.

Fiddle with the little focus knob if needed. That's it!

THE LONGER REVIEW
Unboxing must be done carefully since the foam grabs this telescope insanely tight. Be careful you don't break the plastic (nylon) eyepiece thumbscrew. Some people complained that this screw was plastic-but that's a good design feature since it won't scratch, ding or dent your eyepieces. In fact an upgrade on some telescopes costing way more is to throw out the metal thumbscrew and put in a plastic one. It's a good thing to have. Some people have five or six hundred dollar eyepieces that they don't want marred by metal-on-metal contact.

The telescope is extremely heavy compared to its size. The black box is only two pieces: a milled out brick and a cover milled from the same brick of metal. This is very solid and nicely done.

Mounting is easy since there are two holes in the bottom of the black box that can each accept a standard camera tripod screw. Easy.
The eyepiece that comes with the telescope is just a silver plossl, nothing special. It's actually not bad at all except for the fact that it's a relatively weak (magnification-wise) 20mm which gives you a view of the entire disk of the sun and lots of black space around it. I suppose this low power makes it easier to find the sun.

Finding the sun: if you put your hand near the front of the telescope (like when you're adjusting the big ring) you can block the solar sun-finder. You can waste a lot of time panning around with the sun finder blocked. The sun finder uses a hole in the front of the black box--it doesn't use actual telescope to get the image of the sun. If you block the whole with your hand (or part of your tripod) you will never see the sun in the sun finder. ALSO, since the sun finder uses a small hole and not the main telescope-it works EVEN WHEN THE DUST CAP is on the main telescope. I have to admit that was pretty embarrassing. A perfectly centered bright sun dot in the sun finder on the top of the black box just gets you close, you'll still have to center the sun by panning the scope a little.

Focusing: this telescope has a big ring (tuning ring that is between the black box and the gold tube) and a small focus knob. The eyepieces don't rack in or out like on most telescopes. Because of this can supposedly make getting some eyepieces to focus hard or even impossible. I had no trouble using three different eyepieces before the clouds came out and ruined my fun. At first I was scared because the sun just looked like a dark red blurry blob: just like those awful youtube videos that don't do this telescope justice.

Lefty-loosey almost to where the big tuning ring stops is where I ened up. That gives a solar disk that is red and pretty crisp at the edge. Then I turned the little knob sorta in the middle? Not sure but keep at it, it was like 10 turns and then a sun spot seemed to appear and darken out of nowhere, I turned a little more and the sunspot resolved into light and dark portions with fine detail while at the same time prominences (spikes) appeared and lots and lots of surface orange peel, crackle-effect and even a long `fault-line' looking thing that was almost the entire diameter of the sun!!!!!!!! The longest part was dialing the telescope in using the ring and the knob--after that it was smooth sailing.

Eyepieces: the included 20mm plossl isn't bad at all. It's just low power. I could see sunspots which showed black and lighter grey areas. This was the same but crisper than what I could see using Baader Solar film. I could see an incredibly sharp orange peel effect all over the surface of the sun that looked like alligator skin! The photos online that you find do not do the orange peel effect any justice at all: it is insanely cool to look at and very well defined, like a crackle-paint effect. Prominences on the limb looked like geysers of flames spitting out into the black of space. There were four or five on 10/24/2014 that were awesome. There wasn't too much detail using the included 20mm eyepiece for the prominences but only because the magnification was low. So I popped in a higher magnification eyepiece.

I tried a 9mm plossl eyepiece that came free with my Zhumell Z8 reflector telescope. The lower the mm number the higher the magnification is in telescopes. The 9mm no-name brand gave better magnification and maintained almost all the brightness and all detail of the 20mm eyepiece. Awesome, I didn't view too long because I wanted to try another eyepiece. I was really just testing whether they'd come to focus or not, but the views remained awesome. Also, I believe I still had a view of the entire disk of the sun: only with a lot less black space around it and more `zoomed' in.

UPDATE: I also tried a Zhumell 9mm Planetary eyepiece. With its 55 degree field of view the entire sun was still visible (just barely). I then added a 1.25" 2x Barlow (a celestron #93640) which makes this eyepiece into a 4.5mm eyepiece. This made me have to re-focus using the little knob on the bottom/rear of the black box. It took about 8 or 10 turns of the knob to bring to focus and the view was more magnified ("more zoomed in" as newbies say). It was much crisper in focus and brighter than the 3mm (see below) that I tried. BTW: if you click "see my other reviews" on page 5 is my review of the Celestron T Adapter/2x Barlow, which is a pretty useful piece of equipment to have for various reasons besides just 2x your eyepiece collection.

At 40mm aperture the PST only can take about 94x magnification {40mm = 1.5748" x 60 = 94x useful magnification in perfect conditions. 400mm f/length pst + 4.5mm eyepiece = 88x magnification so this is pretty close).
It's a balancing act on the higher powered eyepieces before everything is just "more zoomed in blurry dark garbage", at any rate a 4.5mm will always look better than a 3mm all things being equal. The 4.5mm was a lot better than the 3mm (below) so if you have a 9mm maybe try a 2x barlow than buying another eyepiece.

I tried a 3mm Zhumell Planetary eyepiece. These are long and heavy, not like the cheap plossls. The view was dimmer and I felt that I could focus okay--but the view was dimmer and softer (blurrier) but THAT IS THE EYEPIECE and what happens when you put in higher magnification eyepieces in any telescope. The lower the Xmm number the: higher the magnification but the blurrier and darker the image. Fact of physics, but also the fact that it is a forty dollar eyepiece and not a six hundred dollar one. Anyway, I was pleased with these three eyepieces. It was here that the clouds rolled in-while I was fiddling with the little focus knob trying to get the 3mm sharper. In the PST (400mm f/length) the 3mm eyepiece yeields 133x magnification which is way more than the theoretical limit of 94x for this telescope. It's "empty magnification" which means darker and blurrier, but it still was neat. The point here is: if you have no other eyepieces, a 4mm would be a much better buy than a 3mm for THIS particular telescope. A 4mm eyepiece would produce 100x in this telescope--close enough to the 94x limit.

I suppose one might fiddle with the little focus knob AND the big tuning ring when changing from eyepiece to eyepiece.

What do you see? A deep red sun disk with lighter red crackle effect and black and grey sunspots surrounded by the jet black of space being pierced by deep red spikey prominences spouting off the surface.
Totally worth it! All you need is this telescope and a photographic tripod. You might want more powerful eyepieces to zoom in more. Possibly a 4mm / 5mm and maybe a 9mm / 10mm would give you a nice range of low (20mm that comes with this scope), medium and high power magnification.

Also, anything you can stick your eyeball up to and see through you can stick a camera or cell phone up to and photograph. Search "afocal astrophotography" for various cheap and easy methods. I took no photos because I was so happy and stunned at what I saw that the clouds rolled in on me. Forecast is for clouds and rain.

The sunspots looked much like when using my Baader solar film. The surface detail is way more than I expected. The prominences are awesome as well: they only way to see 99% of the surface detail and any prominences are to use a Hydrogen-Alpha telescope like this. Solar films don't let you prominences at all and only a vague hint at the insane orange-peel effect and what I call "fault-line" activity of the surface.
After researching this product for over a year, I have never been so nervous ordering and so happily surprised (immense surface detail and prominences and all at same time.

So, in summary:

Glass Filter: sunspots
Solar Film: more detailed sunspots and slight surface detail
Coronado PST: detailed sunspots, immensely detailed surface and solar flares shooting into space!

Glass Filter: leaves telescope unprotected, only fits some eyepieces, green sun, can shatter, might not filter UV! Don't use.

Solar Film: can fall off if windy, have to mount yourself. Buy the telescope version, not naked eye version. 

Coronado PST: expensive.

Here are some photos I took of the Transit of Mercury on May 9, 2016:

At some point I'll post about some devices I made myself that allow me to see the sunlight that cannot be seen: infrared!

Alright, you've convinced me to spend some of the two hours a day I'm awake staring at the sun...after my nap. Now go away. Meow.

BY THE ZOMBIFIED HORNS OF ISHTAR (VENUS)!

BY THE ZOMBIFIED HORNS OF ISHTAR (VENUS)!

(Okay, I know this isn't Ishtar, it's a bust of Nefertiti I'm restoring).

In my last post I mentioned that Mercury and Venus go through phases like our own moon. Here's a video Venus in about a half, but horned crescent phase that I took with a cellphone through a telescope back in April 2012. I mumbled the word 'Venus' into the microphone: 

The Mesopotamians/Babylonians/Assyrians knew that Venus (Ishtar the Queen of the Night) had horns sometimes. That's pretty astute viewing that ancients accomplished. 

In many ancient texts Venus/Ishtar threatens to raise all the dead so they can eat the living! High up, a changing, mysterious glowing god-menacing doom, destruction and devouring. 

Kitty would devour all the living, but she can't find a chair tall enough -meow!

TAKE THAT COPERNICUS! with a COMET LOVEJOY POSTSCRIPT.

TAKE THAT COPERNICUS! with a COMET LOVEJOY POSTSCRIPT.

The Moon has left the sky;

Lost is the Pleiads’ light;

It is midnight

And time slips by;

But on my couch alone I lie.

-Sappho (circa 580 B.C.)

Copernicus never saw Mercury? What follows are some of my quick photos of Mercury which serve to prove that I'm a better astronomer than Copernicus. 

Well...not exactly: you see, while Copernicus never bothered to write explicitly  in his journals that he did indeed see Mercury (I suppose he was much more modest than me ), he almost certainly did see Mercury! Further, he did extremely complex mathematical calculations which involved all he known planets--including the path of Mercury!

He did write in one of his works that were he was there was lots of fog in the mornings and evenings and lots of tall trees, etc. that made viewing Mercury difficult in Poland. "Difficult" as in annoying or hard, but not impossible. Remember, whenever Copernicus was trying to view Mercury (or any other star/planet) it wasn't for pleasure-he needed precise measurements so he could work on mathematical theories of planetary motion such as slight trepidations (oscillations) caused by gravitational forces and their orbits, etc. 

So, what did Copernicus do while in the foggy forests of his native Poland? He just wrote letters to his friends in other places who sent him measurements of their observations of Mercury. He then went inside his house and did maths. Very groundbreaking, difficult, awesome maths.

Even with a smartphone, calendar app and plenty of email alerts to notify me exactly when and where to look for Mercury it took me two years of trying! Mercury hugs our sun. Most of the year it's hidden in the blinding sunlight of day. However, a four to five times a year it strays just barely away from our sun so that you can aim a telescope at it (Mercury, not the sun) and watch it. You get a week to get it early in the morning and then wait months later to see it at sunset (meaning, literally like a few minutes after sunset).

I'm not a morning person, I sleep until 10am most days. So the morning appearances were ruled out. I had to wait for evening sunset Mercury appearances. The first few times I missed even seeing it as the 'bright star' everyone else (seemingly) on Earth was marveling at. I was at work (in a library) and grabbed my HUGE Konus 20x80 binoculars and ran out the front door:

  

So what did I see? Well, here's the thing: it was the same night that the International Space Station was flying overhead so everyone in the parking lot (an annoying large amount of people) were asking me about the ISS. I got so flustered (I'm shy) that I forgot I was using binoculars (which show a normal right-side-up image) and not a regular telescope (which shows an upside-down image). I kept going from Saturn up to Venus instead of Venus down to Saturn and a little further down to Mercury. It would have been so easy to see had I just swiveled down instead of up.

Another time I had everything lined up and just as the sky started to dim just a tad as our sun dipped below the horizon: boom, I noticed a HUGE tree limb in the way. I big tree, so I jumped in my pickup truck and drove about a mile away and STILL was blocked by other trees. Normally I would have been irritated but I just laughed it off, "now I know what Copernicus felt like". 

Finally, over a year later, I was able to see Mercury. I watched it for over half an hour! I used my big binoculars and it looked like a bloated, fat dot the color of pinky-orange Neapolitan ice cream:

There it is in the photo above. Dead center, the orangey-pink dot poking through the clouds. I took this picture by sticking my cellphone up to one of the eyepieces on my binoculars (which were on a tripod at the time).

After seeing it in my telescope I moved to my 8" Zhumell reflector telescope. What I saw was pretty amazing: it looked like the old Apple Computer logo: a three-color-striped blob with a bite taken out of it! Mercury goes through phases like our Moon and the planet Venus. Full round circle, mushed oval, crescent horn sliver, etc. At first I thought my telescope was broken, but no: being so low in the horizon made its light refract through the atmosphere (and smog) and get all distorted color-wise, and it wasn't in a full-round phase at the time.

I was so happy after my two year hunt that I forgot to take photos.

Here's one I took recently--it's a casual shot. Why? Mercury was right next to Venus so it was extremely easy to view. I grabbed a better eyepiece, put it in the telescope and just as I was about to look I noticed a wall of clouds coming: so I just peacefully observed instead of rushing to take a photo in the few seconds I had. Here's the crumby pic I did manage when Mercury was in a fuller phase and higher up in the sky:

Due to the bloat of Mercury, I'm thinking the above picture was taken with a 3mm or 9mm eyepiece in my 8" telescope. Anyway, that was at 6:30pm January 12, 2015. It was 19 degrees outside! So I went back in due to the cold and clouds. I was happy. 

Then at 9:30pm I ventured back out and was treated to The Comet Lovejoy just below the Pleiades! Each night during about a week-and-a-half of observations Comet Lovejoy moved closer and closer to the Pleiades. It looked like a hazy grey blob, possibly on one of the nights I may have sensed some slight green color-but no tail. Too much light pollution in Metro Detroit.

Anyway, that's why I started this post with the Sapho poem mentioning the Pleiades: it paved the way for Comet Lovejoy after viewing Mercury earlier in the night, along with Jupiter, Jupiter's four Galilean Moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto; our own Moon, Venus and even the Orion Nebula (which was so bright it was visible with the naked eye as a blue smear). 

Not a bad night. Not a bad night at all...

I'm Opposed to Saturn...We All Are at the Moment

I'm Opposed to Saturn...We All Are at the Moment

At the end of May 2015 Saturn is at opposition which gives us the best and brightest view of it all year.

Here's a lousy afocal astrovideo I took of Saturn through my 9mm eyepiece and 8" Zhumell reflector telescope on May 23, 2015. The actual view was much better than the cheap cellphone could convey.

A cheap telescope will show you at least the ring, which with even the cheapest binoculars on a tripod will look like Mickey Mouse ears. Early astronomers thought it might be a moon on each side. I thought, "how could a ring look like two moons?" but I went out with cheap binoculars and lo and behold! It did look like a big circle with two smaller circular 'ears'.

A small 40mm tasco type should still let you see something. Jupiter is even easier because its bigger and almost straight west to the right of the moon.

Here's another video with a 2x barlow attached to the 9mm eyepiece, making it a 4.5mm with higher magnification. 

More zoomed in but darker and less crisp focus. Such is the physics of optics and light. 

A great free phone app for astronomy is SkEye...which you'll need because the planets move around quite a bit (planet is Greek for "wanderer").

I also feel elated after getting some cosmic photons in my eyeballs. 

"The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed."

-Teilhard de Chardin

Good night and clear skies to you!

Afocal Astrophotography (is really simple)!

Afocal Astrophotography (is really simple)!

What follows is an afocal astrophotograph I took of Saturn. Afocal astrophotograph is a fancy term for just sticking a camera up to where you normally put your eye to look through the telescope. Afocal: just held up to the regular eyepiece of a telescope, or microscope or binoculars. Astrophotography: when you aim at something in the sky that isn’t a bird or plane. It’s that simple! 



Here is the resulting photography through my 8” Zhumell reflector (mirror, not lens) Dobsonian (mounted on a lazy-susan swivel) telescope. I was using a high magnification eyepiece. I think it was my 3mm Zhumell Planetary eyepiece. That’s why it’s dark and kind of fuzzy. The smaller the mm number in a telescope eyepiece: the higher the magnification (zoom in) but the less light and less sharpness you’ll get:

And that photo above (on a 19" screen) is about as small, but crisp as it was looking with my eyeball through the telescope too! Depending where Saturn is in relationship to earth the rings can be edge-on and almost invisible or more titled so we can see them better. Also, Saturn and all the other planets change in apparent size depending on time of year and how close/far they are from planet Earth.

Later, I took around 10 seconds of jittery, crappy hand-held video and then registered (lined up) and stacked (piled on top of each other) the resulting video frames using RegiStax. RegiStax is a FREE awesome astrophotography program. It took me about 4 hours to download and install it (mostly just the downloading took a crazy amount of time). What’s cool is that when I went back to look at the raw video it was so shaky that Saturn was only in the viewfinder for about 3 seconds. So, 3 seconds of blurry Saturn stacked up and throwing away 7 seconds of darkness.

Directly above this is a video taken through one of my telescopes. The telescope is locked in position. The sideways movement of Saturn is due to the spinning of the Earth. The up-and-down bumps are from the slight wind moving the whole apparatus.

After taking the 10 seconds of video, I imported it and then played around in RegiStax. Once I got my preferred settings in RegiStax I set it to process, that took about 40 minutes. The result was it transformed crumby, shaky low-res video from a 1990s Fuji Finepix 4700 digital camera into this blast of awesomeness:

Notice how you can see at the bottom right where the sphere of the planet actually casts a shadow on the lower part of the ring as it passes behind the planet! You can also barely make out differences in the rings (darker colors).

RegiStax is a FREE (but long) download available here: http://www.astronomie.be/registax/ You’ll want to install it on a desktop because it is HUGE and powerful program. Think PhotoShop for 3-dimensions.

Harsher processing (different settings) with RegiStax of the same 316 frames of video stacked on top of each other:

Because I was sick of holding my old camera (a 1990s Fuji FinePix 4700 'Silver Brick' that I had since college) up to the eyepiece I made a cheesy but free afocal astrophotography bracket out of scraps:

Here is this crazy apparatus mounted on my old tiny telescope. The red ring between the camera and eyepiece is a reel from some white Teflon plumber's tape. It was the perfect size for my old telescope and it's lousy little .9" eyepieces (see below about eyepiece sizes).

It's important to note the different physical sizes of telescope eyepieces and how that obviously makes mounting a camera a real pain! If you want to change magnification you have to change the eyepiece.

The little eyepiece in my hand to the left is what you're probably used to in toy store telescopes and microscopes. It's a .9" Japanese size eyepiece. Tiny, not so great usually. Next to it is some 1.25" format eyepieces. Now we're talking! Better telescopes can accept 2" eyepieces and 1.25" eyepieces with an adapter. Professional quality eyepieces are 1.25" and 2". 

Here is my HUGE Zhumell Z8 telescope with a 2" format eyepiece mounted in it (to the right and higher than the Pepsi can). It has a frosted white plastic dust cover on it and yes it IS almost as big as the Pepsi can!! It's actually heavier than an unopened can of soda (in Michigan we call soda "pop").

You didn't believe me when I told you my telescope eyepieces are as big as a pop can did ya?

If you have a Dobsonian-mounted telescope (on a spinning lazy susan style mount) a great user upgrade modification is what I did to my Zhumell Z8 shown here. Mount in on a milkcrate and cut holes on either side of the mount. These mods accomplish a few things: with the addition of a rubber bumper on the bottom of the tube (so it doesn't bang into the mounting as hard) I can now push the telescope tube upright, then bear hug the whole telescope and grab it by the two new huge holes. I push my chest into the tube which mashes it tightly against the mount (and rubber bumper) Yes, I carry my entire telescope out the door in one piece instead of multiple trips! No more carrying the base, then the tube and trying to assemble them in the darkness. The huge pieces I cut out where also pretty heavy, meaning I have less weight to deal with all around, which is nice. The milkcrate just makes it higher so I don't have to lean down and get a backache or migraine while using the scope. 

The other piece of advice that really, really helps when using this type of reflector telescope has to do with colimation (lining up the primary and secondary mirrors with eachother, and then lining up the eyepiece--all using a laser). Whenever you make adjustments to the secondary mirror mount screws or the thumbscrews of the primary mirror (but not the locking screws) always try to tighten them to get to where you want things aligned. At first I would loosen one side and tighten another. Once I shifted to always tightening, after a few nights of use and colimation things were so tight that they telescope didn't need to be colimated at all! Things just tended to stay put...and that's after the bear hug and walking down stairs and out a door and down stairs of a stone paver patio!  

So, do you have an old Tasco telescope? It's a great telescope with two deadly flaws (that you can fix). For a few dollars you can order a new eyepiece mechanism that will allow you to put 1.25" eyepieces in your telescope! I did this and was blown away by the quality increase when using my good eyepieces in what I thought was a bad telescope. Tasco telescopes are optically fine, they're eyepieces are totally crumby though. 

The second deadly flaw is their criminally negligent telescope mounts (tripods). They're just awful and probably were the main reason that 99% of their telescopes end up "used only a few times, asking $10 for it".  Find a way to stabilize the mount and you'll love the telescope. This may entail wood and metal working, or haunting charity resale shops (Salvation Army, Disabled American Vets) for a deal on a better mount. For $5 I found a fancy equatorial telescope mount, twenty pounds of counterweights and best part was--it came with my old telescope tube! Yep, the grey telescope I took many cool photos with was only $5 for the scope, great mount with weights and a pile of mediocre eyepieces and other stuff! 

I highly recommend the DAV Thrift Store at 8050 N Middlebelt Rd, Westland, MI 48185! The workers are also SUPER NICE!!! They work for charity to help disabled veterans. Probably my favorite place on Earth besides Costco and my own house.

I also like my binoculars big, and mounted on tripods. Above are a pair of great Konus binos I scored cheap off of Amazon brand new.


In later posts I’ll detail my: spectrometers (a few homemade and a store-bought one); infrared experiments and my favorite hobby of all: staring at the sun! Until then just know this: no matter how cheap a telescope or microscope or binoculars you have you can usually stick your camera (even a cellphone camera) up to the eyepiece and take cool pictures afocally. 



For the desktop or laptop Stellarium is a great astronomy tool: stars, planets, space junk and satellites visible from Earth are all easy to find using this software. They charge for the mobile app but desktop version is free and way more powerful. I have it on my phone but always seem to use the free app SkEye, which lets me scroll around and even attach my phone to my telescope and it tells me which way to swing the scope to view my target object. There is an align function that's easy: point telescope at a known object, scroll on screen and tap the object. Do that a couple times and your phone and telescope act as one! 


Remember, telescopes are just light buckets: the bigger the bucket the more light you grab. The eyepieces do the focusing and magnifying (zooming in). In my big 8" telescope looking at the moon is actually a little too bright and painful. I have to squint. Good thing we don't have super-sensitive cat's eyes.

The moon is so bright that most astronomers don't bother to use their telescopes when it's visible because, much like the sun, it drowns out the stars in the sky. Even the ancients were both awed and annoyed by the moon:

The stars about the lovely moon fade back and vanish very soon, when round and full her silver face swims into sight and lights all space.

Sappho

Meow!