Astro, Rails, and Fish

Three fun topics, one easy post!

I had today off from work. So I went the neighbor to a lake about an hour north of the twin cities to do some ice fishing.  The lake is about a mile and a half east of the BNSF Hinckley subdivision. So after a half hour or so of fishing, I heard the wonderfull sound of a train horn off in the distance.  We kept fishing til after dark.  After we finished and were packing up, I looked up and saw Orion rising in the east, and the milky way overhead coursing from Auriga and Perseus down to Cygnus on the wester horizion.  All in all, a pretty successfull trip, and three cool things in one post!

Did I mention I like trains?

Big?  Check
Fast? Check
Loud? Double Check

Here the UP Challenger 3985 pounds the rails through Platteville Colorado, with almost a mile of tools cars, burbling GE's, and circus train in tow.  How someone cannot be impressed by this is beyond me.

POTD 12/11/11

This one could also be called "Hey there big guy!"  CP 8828 leads a short northbound train on a cool Thanksgiving day.  We are just a couple of miles north of Hasting MN, where the line crosses under Highway 61 in the background.  This was one of my first shots with a vibration reducing lens, and the results seemed pretty promising.  The shot was 1/160th at f5.6 ISO 200.  Normally those setting for me result in a nice chunk of blur.

CP 8828 Thanksgiving Day 2010

Gobble Gobble

What are you looking at..

As alluded to in an earlier post,  most telescopes will not show things in the right side up, left is left right is right prospective that we are used to.  So how do you get used to how your scope shows the universe?  Well, let it show you of course!

If you are new to using your type of scope, take it out for test run to get used to how it shows you things.  I had my Orion ST80 refractor scope out the other day to realign the finder.  While doing that, I took a bit of time to review how things looked in the eyepiece.  

The best way to do this is to find something that is

1. Easy to keep track of
2. Distinctive in shape and that you know how is should like with normal vision.

For my test, I used the stop sign at the end of the block.  It was easy to track, and I have a pretty good idea of what it should look like.  

With the refractor, if you just use the eyepiece, the object in the eyepiece will be upside down.  Most refractors, mine included, use a diagonal between the scope and the focuser.  This is to make the viewing angle more comfortable.  It also partially corrects the image.  Up is once again up, but left and right are reversed.  So when I looked at the stop sign, the S was now on the right end of the word, and mirror reversed.    

Another good object for getting oriented on the view from your scope is the moon.  The best times are between new moon and 1st quarter in the evening, and between 3rd quarter and new moon if you view in the morning.  The reason is that at these times, the moon has a distinctive shape so you can make an easy comparison between the naked eye view and the view through your scope.

Practice this until you become used to how things are oriented in your scope.  This will make it easier to find objects when you start to star hop.

Late Summer Astro

Summertime is starting to loosen it's grip on the night sky.  

The warmest season is also ironically the least friendly to backyard astronomy, at least at this far north.  The long days that bring us warm temperatures and lush greenery try their darndest to hold the night at bay.  But the seasons are just that seasons, and now summer is getting ready to yield the stage to autumn.  

We are now losing about three minutes of daylight per day.  In the St Paul / Minneapolis area, we had about two and a half hours of evening twilight in the first day of summer.  That is now down to under two hours.  Couple that with an 8:15 sunset, and we can now get out and observe before having to call it a day.

The last week has also had a near full moon.  This made for a good time to get the scopes ready for the longer nights ahead.   The big project for both was getting their zero power finders up and running.  These finders project a light on a clear screen that is used to get the scope pointed in the right general area so you can then use the optical finder of the larger scope or the scope itself to starhop to your target.  Apparently I had left the batteries of both of these on over the summer, so I had to do a little digging around the house to find new ones.  The finders will both need to be aligned again before use.  

The other project I've been working on has been to reacquaint myself with how objects appear in the eyepiece.  In binoculars and cameras, objects appear like they do to the naked eye.  Astronomical telescopes do not contain the extra prisms and lenses to pull this off.  Furthermore, the reflector turns everything in the eyepiece upside down, where as the refractor just makes a mirror image of them.  This'll make a good topic for another post.

Until then, hope you have clear skies.

     

End o June

June has been more railfanning than astro around here.  A couple of trips out have found me trackside in Winona and Mankato.  Winona wins the prize as the better train watching town.  More action and better views.  The more action part led to a shot of Indiana Railroad SD9043's far from their home rails.

Visitors from the Hoosier state in Winona

June has not been a kind month for backyard astronomy.  Here at the northern latitudes, the skies don't get completely dark until after 10:30... When the alarm clock rings at 5:30 a.m. astronomy takes a back seat to sleep.  But now every day, darkness comes a little sooner and the scopes will come out of their summer slumber.

April Showers

Greetings from a soggy Saturday morning!  Not much to write about here lately.  April has been a very slow month for rail pictures and astronomy both here in the great brown north.

The weather people are telling us that this has been a normal April.  However, it seems to have been cloudy nearly every day.  We've had about two clear days, and as many clear nights.  

I've had the scope out twice here this month for a couple of short runs.  The first time was early April, and I had the reflector out.  I know I hadn't used it in a while, as I seemed to have forgotten how things move in the eyepiece.  That was a very frustrating trip out.  The good news from that one was that the rebuilt focuser is as smooth as silk now, with the demon glue grease gone.  Then on thursday night, we got some surprise clearing, and I took it out to look at saturn.   My wife even came out for that one!  She also confirmed that I need to do some work on the mount, the exact quote is "why is this so wiggly?"

With it being close to new moon now, I want to get it out some more and look for galaxies.  Alas the cloudy weather, and the fact that complete darkness does not come until after 10:00 is putting a damper on this project.  And as we get closer to summer, that later situation does not improve any.  The warm weather does allow for work outside on some projects that are to smelly to do inside, like cleaning out the equatorial head of the scope and maybe some wood working projects. 

Stay tuned...

Dawn Patrol 3/28/11

Yesterday's trip to Culver's resulted in an early wake up call this morning.  Unable to fall back to sleep, I hopped on the computer and found that I was up before the Astronomical Twilight.  Which in English, means that all the illumination in the sky is from the stars and planets!  No sunlight just yet.

With a little time before having to get ready for work, this was the perfect opportunity for Dawn Patrol.  I bundled up, grabbed the binoculars and headed out into the cold.  Although it is now offically spring, with a clear sky and snow on the ground, temps are still pretty chilly here in the great white north.  The temp from a local weather station that reports on Wunderground.com was a balmy 16 degrees.

There's a couple of pro's and a con to dawn patrol.  The con is that you are in a race against the rising sun.  Dawdle to long, and sunlight will quickly lower the curtains on the starry sky.  On the plus side, you get a sneak peak of the evening sky several months from know.  Also, the sky tends to be a little darker in the morning, as some outdoor lights are turned off after business close for the evening.

With this, I had a nice view of what would normally be a late July evening sky.  The summer triangle was nicely positioned in the east, with Scorpio holding court in the southern sky.  It was kind of odd to see that famous summer constellation with snow under foot.  Rounding out the show was a waning crescent moon low in the southeast sky.

All in all, a nice change of pace for a Monday morning.

Cold Weather Testing

It doesn't feel that long since the last post on here, but looking back it was not even last month, but last year!  Albeit on the 30th of last year.  A hectic work schedule is not conducive to blogging about leisure time activities.

January was pretty much a wash out as far as railfanning.  My job moved, so now the commute takes me under the CN's former Wisconsin Central line into the Twin Cities, specifically under the east end of the small yard they own in New Brighton.  I have seen trains parked there a few times early in the morning.  As the sun rises earlier, there'll be opportunities to explore this on the way to work.  The other sightings I have had have been auditory vs visual.  The new office is about a mile and a half east of the Minnesota Commercial line that works it's way from Minneapolis up to New Brighton and points north.  I have heard a few train horns, but not enough to determine any kind of pattern.

With the long winter nights, there's been a little more opportunity for backyard astronomy.  Or in my case, front yard as the back yard is still covered in copious amounts of snow.  On the clear mornings, with my earlier start time, Venus has been the standout object in the morning sky.  However, it has been gradually sinking as it prepares for the transition to an evening object later this summer and fall. 

I've been able to give my scopes a little TLC in January to.  On my reflector, I was able to clean the grease out of the focuser mechanism. The stuff seemed to be slippery, yet very sticky.  If some got on your hand, it had a sticky consistency to it even at room temperature.  Take this stuff outside in a northern winter, and it became nearly rock hard.  After getting some advice from the friendly folks at the cloudynights forum, I cracked it open and attacked the grease with a combination of Goof Off, dish soap, and veg oil.  After cleaning, I relubed it with white lithium grease.  

Tonight I had a chance to see if this made a difference in the cold weather.  Tonights temps were around -1, plenty cold enough to torture test the old grease.  I brought the scope out to cool off, and came back about 1/2 an hour later.  I worked the focuser and found that it moved just like it did indoors.  The true comparison was when I went to move the scope to line up the Pleiades.  Turns out the mount must be full of the same grease/glue.  The mount felt like the focuser did before I cleaned it out.  This may be the next project for March, when we usually get a good chunk of cloudy nights.  In the end, I was ready to head back in because the cold was bugging me much more than it was the scope, and the morning alarm is not to far off here.