New job at KSE Protech / Object automation

This is the last day at Ferroxcube for me! I'm going to start at KSE Protech/Object Automation (www.oa.com) tomorrow..........I thank all the people I worked with in the past 13 years! And hope we can stay in contact!

Nice viewing night

It was very warm and I could observe with only a t-shirt last evening. I saw many nice objects:
M13 Globular cluster, resolves into stars at 200x Very beautiful
M27 Planetary nebula, by using my UHC-S filter the Dumbbell structure was bright at 125x
M29 Open cluster, not very special, best at 125x
M31 Galaxy, bright center spot, best at 47x
M56 Small globular cluster, visible as a faint dot without details at 200x
M57 Planetary nebula, by using my UHC-S filter the ring structure was clearly visible at 200x
M103 Open cluster, small Ursa Major with fainter background stars at 200x
M110 Galaxy, visible as a faint dot at 125x
And the 2 new Messier objects I saw for the 1st time:
M2 Globular cluster, by viewing periphery the large cluster resolves into stars at 200x
M52 Open cluster, after viewing it long periphery, the field of view is full with small stars at 125x

F16 scale model flight

This is very close to the real thing! See the movie at: http://www.scale-jets.nl/movie01.htm
It is a Dutch guy really knows his stuff!

VFR800 pre sale checkup by Erik van Lent 2

This is my old crashed VFR750........











Here Erik van Lent, the promotor advisor (Dutch AA, ANWB checkup master) really checking the VFR meticulously for faults.....
The only thing he found was:
- broken voltage regulator
- almost worn out chain+sprockets
- worn rear brake pads
- front tyre worn
- back tyre 10years old (so must also be replaced)
There were a few small scrathes on the bodywork. For the rest it was fine!

So the deal went ok! I bought it from the dealer: Rob Hannink! Good deal. So if you're looking for a 2nd hand VFR, check out Rob Hanninks website http://zeshonderd.nl/public_html/
And if you want to have a 2nd hand motorcycle checked, go to Erik van Lents website:
http://www.erikvanlent.nl/index.htm
So thumbs up for both Erik and Rob!!! Thanks. I'm driving VFR again.

VFR800 pre sale checkup by Erik van Lent

M27 Dumbbell Nebula

The moon interfered a lot with my exposures, but I was able to shoot some pictures of M27. This is the result. It is 85x60sec at ISO800. Stacked with Deepskystacker and postprocessed in Photoshop. With the help of an astroforum member, "Orioner", I was able to get a better result with a special astronomical software filter for Photoshop.

Jupiter 24th July 2008

Seeing conditions were not very good. Very humid air and fog. I still managed to capture a reasonable jupiter. This is a combination of 2 2min .avi movies at 10fps. 900/1200 (RGB) frames and 800/1200 (L) frames with the IRpass filter. Stacked in registax and postprocessed in photoshop.

Jupiter night in Berlicum

Last night I drove to a really dark spot near Berlicum. Many other guys came to this spot. Unfortunately the seeing was not very good, and some fog came in. At the end my secondary mirror and all my eyepieces were fogged up. I managed to put Jupiter on the webcam, but still have to process the images.
Here we are waiting for Polaris to appear so we can adjust our equatorial mounts.



Here is the full lineup (only without Keats' 300mm dobson which came later). From left to right: paul66 with 200mm meade SCT on EQ6, patrickduis with 200mmF5 newton on HEQ5pro (so that's ME, I'm polar aligning the heq5pro on Polaris), with 150mmF5 newton on LXD75 (the Lidl scope), henkp with 200mm C8 on ADM and last, but definately not least:





Dutchdevil with his new toy: a 250mm Meade LX200 SCT!









Here I'm webcamming Jupiter (you also see it as a bright star on the horizon). I'm standing all the way to the left, next to Paul66. You also see Keats' 300mm Dobsonian in the lineup.

(last 3 pictures courtesy Henkp)

VFR will be checked on saturday!

This saturday an expert from the Dutch AA (ANWB) will perform a full 100% checkup on the 2nd hand VFR. The dealer already told me there is a small scratch on the gear shifting pedal (did it tip over?) and the front tire needs replacement: I know what I want: a BT014!!!
Check the website of Erik van Lent: (ANWB motor test expert) at http://www.erikvanlent.nl/index.htm

New VFR?

After some searching I found a motorcycle trader that specializes in VFR's. He wants my crashed 1994 100.000km vfr750 and wants to trade it in for a 35.000km vfr800 from 1998. Judging from the pictures it is a fair deal. But in order to be sure I'll have it checked by an expert from the Dutch AA (Anwb)....

Vista in combination with astronomy programs

Pff, that was not easy! I tried to upgrade from a XP laptop to a Vista laptop. I was already prepared for the worst. After a long 3 day struggle I got the thing going again:
The easiest were Deepskystacker (for dslr astrophotography) and Registax (for planetary astrophotography: these programs worked right away.
Then came PHDguiding (autoguiding). I had to run it in XP sp2 mode with administrator rights.
Then came QCfocus (planetary astrophotography). Had to install a porttalk.sys driver in the windows/system32 directory. And also this was running.
Then came my beloved Philips ToUcam pro webcam. Philips didn't support this nice CCD webcam anymore in Vista. But I got the thing going by 1) flashing the SPC900 binary into the pcvc740k webcam 2) installing the SPC900 Vista drivers on the laptop. Then it worked ok with QCFocus. The picture shows my pcvc740k ToUcam pro acting as a SPC900 in Vista: it works!!
Then came my planetarium program: Cartes du Ciel. It only works correctly by running it with administrator rights.
The most difficult problem was getting the telesope mount going. There is open-source software for that: EQmod, but the official v1.13 release didn't have a nice installer, so the .exe and .dll files were not registered correctly in Vista. After a long struggle and searches for help on various astro fora around the world, I finally found that I needed to register myself in the yahoo tech groups supporting the driver, and download the 1.14f beta version: this worked right away......
Now I can do all I did in XP also in Vista!!!

Earth and moon filmed from spacecraft!

Eyepiece collection after 1 year of astronomy

When I was about 10 years old I borrowed the JWG 60mm self-built refractor of my nephew for 1 year. With that telescope the astronomy virus caught me. Here's a picture a similar one that started my hobby (the left orange one). I am not 100% sure, but I think this telescope came with a 20mm and 12.5mm huygens eyepiece. The nice thing is that my nephews daughter is now also using this telescope! So the family tradition goes on.






When I finally decided to pick-up my hobby again last year, I got a 10mm and 25mm plossl eyepiece with it. After 1 year my eyepiece collection is like this:

(from left to right):
5mm Univerity optics orthoscopic (200x), very sharp for planetary work and clusters
5mm Baader Planetarium Hyperion (200x), sharp and wide view
8mm Baader Planetarium Hyperion (125x), sharp and wide view
10mm Vixen Lanthanium (LV) plossl (100x), a real workhorse, nice eyerelief
21mm Baader Planetarium Hyperion (47x), very sharp and a wide field of vision
25mm Skywatcher super plossl (40x), original eyepiece that came with my scope
32mm Televue plossl (31x), for searching objects and viewing large objects.

Jupiter, mondaymorning 14th July

Jupiter was still very low above the horizon, but the seeing/transparancy were fair. This is a combination of 2min .avi at 10fps RGB and a 2min .avi 10fps(L). Used philips pcvc740k webcam on 200mmF5 newton. Stacked 900 frames of both .avi's and combined/postprocessed them in Photoshop.

Ahh, the 5mm UO Ortho performs good!

Last night we had some clouds, but I HAD to test the 2nd hand 5mm UO ortho eyepiece........So, went out with the small 90mm refractor on EQ2 mount, and saw very nice bands around jupiter, even with the bad transparancy and many clouds. I'm very curious how it will look in the 200mm Newton telescope........Here's a picture of the whole famile of Orthos, I only have the 5mm now.

Dangerous Virus!

The One Live

Here we are playing live in Oostelbeers, last Saturday night.

Star wars mosquito defence system