Found the Dumbbell Nebula

Just come in from a moonless and surprisingly clear sky. Found the Dumbbell Nebula (M27), which was bigger that I was expecting. Couldn't see any detail, just a hazy blob with a slightly darker band round its middle. Could see stars through it, or in front of it. Also found a little cluster nearby. Not sure what it was. Pleased my star-hopping is getting better, but I need another finder to complement the straight scope.

Jupiter was looking very neatly flanked by a pair of moons either side of it. The atmosphere was quite stable, so I could use highest magnification (about 300x currently) and really get a good look at the banding.

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Created a pathetic image of jupiter too

Jupiter is that tiny striped blob! So this is my first real attempt at using RegiStax to combine more than one frame in an image. Given the raw material, it's done a reasonable job. It was pretty hazy and the moon was almost full too. Jupiter's moons are too dim to be seen in theis shot (apparently Io was in transit during the exposure.)

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First webcam image through telescope: the moon in bad skies.

Last night I reconfigured (cobbled) a webcam to hook up to the 10" dobsonian. All I had to do was remove the lens and then find some way of fixing it in place of the eyepeice. Turns out a sligtly modified 35mm film case works well. Amazingly, the focal plane lay well within the normal range of the focusser, so things were pretty straight-forward and stable. The only issue is that the CCD in the webcam is tiny, so the images are very zoomed.

Features on the surface stay in the field of view for about 45 seconds. The earth rotates at 360 degs/24 hours => 1/4 degee per minute. This makes the FOV is about 0.2 degrees, pretty narrow. With the barlow, I can only make that narrower.

Being a rubbish old webcam, literally from a skip, it is only 640 x 480. Am now playing with the awesome-looking RegiStax to see if multiple images will get better quality.

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Last night's tally

Had surprisingly good skies last night and Jupiter was very clear, managed to see four moons and very clear colour banding. Also found the ring nebula and M13 again, as well as M92. The new 8mm eyepeice was really good. Clear and a good field of view, seeing individual stars in the globular clusters was easy. It also woked really well in the 2x barlow to give 300x magnification, whcih was very useful for jupiter. I definintly need to improve my star-hopping though, spent too long trying to find stuff, and not enough time looking :)

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Canon Camera Window Problem

My installation of the Canon camera tools got severly messed up when I installed a new version of the software (Camera Window and ZoomBrowser) on top of an old version. I think the problem arose because I installed both versions from different user accounts. (I have a multi-user Windows XP setup, which some software wasn’t written to cope with.)

Anyway - the symptoms are that after you plug in the camera, Windows recognizes it, but the download window doesn’t show up. For one user, it works, for the other it doesn’t. The weird thing is that I could watch the process list and see the app (CameraWindow.exe) start, but then quit without showing any error message.

After much mucking about, I tracked it down to the permissions on the registry keys. One user had permission to modify the keys, the other didn’t, so the application quietly failed. I couldn’t even re-install the app, as I didn’t have permissions to write to the HKLM\Software\Canon key.

To fix it, I uninstalled as much as I could, switched users to find who had permission to alter the registry key, deleted it, then reinstalled the software. I actually reinstalled (the same version) for all users this time, but probably could have just modified the permissions on the registry keys for all users to have access.

Mapping Bath

Last weekend, a gang of OpenStreetMappers descended upon Bath in the UK. I went along, to lend a hand, armed with my trusty Geko and a bike. I had already made an attempt at mapping the town ccentre, but not much outside the old city walls was done.

My first day’s results can be seen here, the second day’s work here, and all the raw data from the weekend from all the people involved is shown here. For only two day’s surveying, I think the amount of coverage is pretty impressive. That’s only the raw data though. Now lines need to be drawn on top, using vectors, then those vectors combined to make streets and the attibutes, tags, added, such as names, size and restrictions.

Ingalls Lake Trail

The trail up to Ingalls lake takes you over dry hills, through sparse clumps of larches to a beautiful and open alpine lake.

This hike provided a perfect compliment to the previous one in the Olympics. Whilst the Olympic national park is a temperate rainforest, Ingalls lake lies on the east side of the Cascades, in a rain shadow. The ground was dusty and the trees stunted and sparse.

The drive from Seattle was long but through interesting scenery and the novelty of farmland. At 10:30 am we hit the trail and after a couple of miles we were out of the forest and getting views of the red and grey rock-strewn hills around us. The plants here were very different from those in the Olympics, and there were barely any huckleberries.

Just before we reached the highest point of the walk, Rainier emerged from behind the nearest mountain to the south. It was a perfectly clear day and we could see the glacier-topped giant very clearly. To the west, far more distant, but still clearly visible, was its brother, Mount Hood.

From the high point in a saddle the trail contours roughly around the basin below. It was easily visible and we could see where lake Ingalls was probably hiding. The view across the glacial valley to Mount Stuart was impressive, but the views closer to us were equally good; [scored orange-red rocks][scratched rock] dotted with yellowing larches. There is a campground here, a superb isolated location, but it would certainly be cold. There was frost in the shade even though it was early afternoon.

On the way around the basin we encountered a couple of marmots, which didn’t seem bothered by our clumping boots and got too close to get completely in shot

The last leg of the walk turned into more of a scramble up over to the edge of the lake. It was a stunning view: Ingalls peak to the left of us, orange, streaked with grey and to the right, reflected in the blue waters of the lake, were the crumbling peaks of Mount Stuart.

We lunched here in the silence and sun, ducked below the cold wind. The view looked familiar, on checking the guide book, I found out why: it was on the cover.

The return journey, back out the same way we came in, passed quickly. We saw the marmots again - passed the autumn larches and went back over the saddle for more views of Rainier. We arrived back at the car at about 4:30pm and headed back to the city in search of food.