Posts Made By: Maurice Clark

Hi David,

You could have a look at my website for southern sky objects. It might give you some idea of what to look for.

http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/mclark/

Cheers,

Maurice

Hi,

The scopes I dislike the most are Meade LX200 GPS. The standard LX200 are a breeze to align and use, but the GPS.... aaaarrrgggggggggg!!!!!!!

Maurice

Hi John,

Comet 2002T7 LINEAR is around mag 7 at the moment. It is visible in the evenings until around 9.00pm.

A good place to get more information is the Comet Observation Home Page:
http://encke.jpl.nasa.gov/

Regards

Maurice

2nd Place
Kara Walton of Claymont, Delaware sued the owner of a nightclub in a neighboring city when she fell from the bathroom window to the floor and knocked out two of her front teeth. This occurred whilst Ms. Walton was trying to crawl in through the window of the Ladies Room to avoid paying the $3.50 cover charge. She was awarded $12,000 and
dental expenses.

1st Place
This year's runaway winner was Mr. Merv Grazinski of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Mr. Grazinski purchased a new Winnebago motorhome. On his trip home from an OU football game, having driven onto the freeway, he set the cruise control at 70 mph and calmly left the drivers seat to go into the back and make himself a cup of coffee. Not surprisingly, the RV left the freeway, crashed and overturned. Mr. Grazinski sued Winnebago for not advising him in the owner's manual that he could not actually do this. The jury awarded him $1,750,000 plus a new Winnebago Motor Home. The company actually changed their manuals on the basis of this suit just in case there were any other complete morons buying their recreation vehicles.

An 8 x 50 "elbow" telescope loaned from the local astronomy club. The first one I owned was a 50mm refractor on a table-top tripod. Cost around $20 from memory. This was back in 1967. got some very good views of comets Tago-Sato-Kosaka and Bennett with it. Eventually was demoted to a guidescope when I purcahsed a 5" refractor.

Maurice

Where I used to live in Western Australia, if the Helix nebula was not visible to the naked eye, it was not worth observing. LM 6.8 - 7.5. A good night was when the Milky Way cast shadows.

Now here in central PA around 5.5 on a "good" night. Nedless to say, I do mostly CCD observing now!!! :-(((

Maurice

Hi Anthony,

I work for a university astronomy dept that has both types of LX200. (8" model) Personally, I much prefer the older non-GPS model. For me, the hand control is much more user-friendly and they take only a fraction of the time to set up and align.

As far as the GOTO is concerned, I have used them both from the hand paddle and controled by computer using The Sky and MegaStar. I have seen no difference in pointing accuracy. The object is almost always in the CCD field.

Regards,

Maurice

D**m.... there goes the chance to beat the "Equipment" forum!!!! :-)

Seriously though Herb, thanks for that. Theouth the postings of a couple of individuals, things were getting really sick. Hopefully they have been banned for a while and the A'Mart community can return to some form of civility.

Thanks for a great site.

Maurice

Hi Saul,

Depending on your skies, it could be visible in binoculars.

Cheers,

Maurice

Hi Brian,

I will try to answer some of your questions.

You do not calculate magnification like you do if you are using an eyepiece. For prime focus imaging, magnification as such is a meaningless word. What is important is your field of view, which depends on the size of your detector (chip, film, whatever) and the focal length of your telescope. To et your field of view with a CCD, first use the following formula;
(Sampling in arcseconds) = 206.265 / (focal length in mm) * (pixel size in microns)
This will give you the amount of sky covered by each pixel. To find the total field of view, simply multiply this value by the number of pixels per side on the chip. For example, if you have a sampling of 1 arc second per pixel and you have a chip size of 765 x 510 pixels, then your field of view would be 765 x 510 arc seconds or 12.2 x 8.5 arc minutes. This would be good for most galaxies but too small for most nebulae.

You should have a look at the "CCD University" on Apogee's website. It has a lot of useful information.

http://www.ccd.com/ccdu.html

On your Jupiter image, it looks like the exposure is too long, judging by how bright the moons appear.

Hope this helps.

Maurice