The Inaugural Post and the King of Planets

I first got into astronomy 2 years ago when I discovered that my future inlaws had a small telescope set away in storage. The telescope was a Celestron Powerseeker which was about as basic as a telescope could get. However, it got the job done and provided good views. That Christmas I received my current scope, a Celestron 6 inch f/8 Starhopper Dobsonian. The Starhopper has been a great scope and provides great views of everything from plants to deep sky objects. Because I have to manually track Starhopper, I have become fairly adept at locating objects without computer aid. In addition to just observing, I also employ a webcam to take photos of objects in the night sky. Unfortunately the web cam is limited to planets, the moon, and some double stars.

I wanted to start this page for three reasons: First, I take so many pictures with my webcam that there is no way I could ever print them off for display. Posting these online seemed like a economical alternative. Second, my first observing log was lost when my lap top up and died on me earlier this year. Not trusting my computer’s long term viability, I figured an online log would be fairly safe. Lastly, I wanted to show what kinds of objects can be seen in the night sky despite being in an urban area. I’m located in the Butler Tarkington neighborhood in Indianapolis, Indiana which is about 6 or 7 miles north of downtown. The light dome from downtown dominates the southern sky and there is significant light in the other directions. Despite the light pollution I still find plenty to observe.

To start out this first post, below is a photo of Jupiter taken on August 17, 2008.

This photo is a combination of 3 14 second avi's taken AT 10 frames per second with Amcap and stacked in Registax 4. A little processing was done in Registax. If I have time I might go back and try to tweek this in Photoshop. Because my scope is not computerized, I use a drift method of capture. I set up the scope so when Jupiter drifts into view I immediately start to capture a video. I then repeat this process several times to get enough videos to stack together to form a halfway decent final image. Note the Great Red Spot transiting across Jupiter’s disc.