Bits and Pieces

Posted Mon, August 24, 2009 - 10:26 PM
astronomy, photography

I haven't posted for a while because I've was too busy relaxing at the cabin, then the North Shore. Still a few notable things, though.

Monday through Wednesday at Savanna Lake we had beautiful clear skies. Tom had brought the 8-inch Newtonian and I used it to spot a bunch of objects I'd never identified before (due to lack of a sufficient 'scope) - M57 (the Ring Nebula), M101, M27 (the Dumbbell Nebula), M15, M2, Uranus, Neptune, M11, and even the Helix Nebula low on the horizon - faint, but unmistakable. We were also able to see the dusty speckling of the brightest individual stars in M13 - an exciting addition to the usual "fuzz spot" sighting. The field-glass objects like M8, M31, M33, and the Perseus Double Cluster were spectacular. One of the things that really made things easier was Tom's green pen laser - after a short consultation of the start charts and a look through the 10x80s to fix the starfield in memory, I was able to lay the laser against the barrel of the 'scope and position it to within a fraction of a degree of even very faint objects, in most cases within the FOV of the 25mm (48x) eyepiece.

One thought that struck me during one of those nights is that a sky map is, you know, a map. And my memory for maps seemed to apply, whether it's on the earth or beyond.

It rained all day Wednesday and Thursday, though. On Friday, we packed up and headed for Grand Marais. It had cleared up again, and on Friday night I went out to Artist's Point after midnight with the tripod and camera. I gathered a bunch of time exposures at ISO 800, but none were enough to turn into photos, even when stacked. The signal-to-noise ratio was just too low. Individual bright stars weren't a problem, but I wanted to get the Milky Way as it descended into the horizon over Lake Superior, and there wasn't enough distinction between the Sagittarius star cloud (M24) and sensor noise. One interesting point is that I managed to capture orange light from not one, but two towns on the other side of the lake that was utterly invisible to the human eye. Unfortunately, it only confounded the image further. I'm guessing the layer of humidity lying over the lake probably contributed to the scattering that caused these horizon effects.

So after a nice relaxing time, I'm leaving again at the end of the week for Laramie Daze. I'll be posting about the courses, both here and on Attackpoint, and without a portable scanner I'll have to make do with photos of the course maps. That should do. Then, on to Colorado!