Supernova in M82 from Earlier in the week, now designated SN 2014J. Quite a bright supernova. It’s bright because it’s practically next door – 12 million light years. This is a Type Ia supernvoa caused by a white dwarf in a binary system gaining enough mass to trigger new nuclear fusion and cause the supernova explosion. Read more
On Christmas Eve the Catalina sky survey spotted an object that had not been seen before. Shortly after McDonald observatory in Texas confirmed the object and further observations were needed to help nail down it’s orbit.
We had clear skies on Christmas night so I checked the Minor Planet Center NEO page to see if there were any possible targets and sure enough the object, provisionally called UY31A3B, was within the range of my equipment. Read more
More of a note-to-self than a blog post… How to go about confirming NEO’s listed on the NEOCP. Read more
I’ve recently tried taking some long exposure images just to see how the observatory handles the light pollution. To make life easier I’m using an Astronomik CLS-CCD filter with the DSLR. The one I currently have is for a t-ring, though since these images have worked out well I think I’ll get the clip in version to experiment with regular lenses. Read more
Astrometrica is a great piece of software to analyse images to search for and record the positions of objects. However getting it to work with a DSLR image can be a bit tricky. Here’s how I do it: Read more
Before I built the observatory I used to only use the laptop when I was going to try imaging. Now the laptop is almost always used unless I really am only doing visual astronomy and don’t want to bother with planetarium software, in which case the laptop and camera are a distraction to trying to glimpse the universe through Dublin’s light pollution. Here’s how I have things set up. This may not be ideal for you.
Some friends after seeing a strangely cut bit of cardboard in the observatory suggested I write a blog post about it. Those of you who do astrophotography won’t need an introduction to the Bahtinov Mask, but this post might be of interest to the rest.
Getting focus right in astrophotography isn’t easy. Autofocus doesn’t work like it does for normal lenses. And judging it manually is error pone, you can estimate when a star looks like a point, but there is a large margin of error in that estimate, a bright star may look like a sharp point but the fainter stars may still will be blurry. This is especially true in poor seeing where star image blobs can look the same over a large focus range. Read more
This morning I got this one line email from the International Astronomical Union Minor Planet Center: Your site is now code Z72. So Cademuir observatory is now officially recognised by the MPC! In order to obtain an observatory code it’s necessary to observe some minor planets (in the 1000-400,000 range) of varying magnitudes, at least a couple of times a night over at least a couple of nights and record their positions to an accuracy Read more
I’ve already posted this on facebook, so apologies to friends who’ve already seen it! Jupiter taken 12th January 2013, 22:17 : Read more
The latest improvement in the observatory is lighting. I needed something that was low power, needed to be red, needed to be white, preferably dimmable, preferably remote control. There didn’t seem to be anything in the local shops, but I found an LED solution on ebay costing a whole $18.90. At that price I’d have to give it a go! Read more