Walk near the "Maltha polder" in the Biesbosch

This afternoon we had a nice walk in the famous Dutch wetlands: Biesbosch. We had a "testpanel" with us for testing the Swarovski EL 10x50, Fujinon 10x50 FMTR-SX, Leica Ultravid HD 10x50 and Pentax 10x50 ED DCF.

Nice walk on the "Beleven" near Reusel

This afternoon we had a nice walk on the Beleven. There were many birds there.

NGC3430 and NGC3395/3396 (Arp 270)

The constellation Leo Minor is one of my favorites, it is literally -covered- with very interesting galaxies. This is an astrophoto of NGC3430 and its surroundings. You also see the two interacting galaxies NGC3395/3396, also known as Arp 270. These galaxies, standing at 90 million light years, are starting to collide with each other. They can be detected using a 4" telescope! I am definitately going to try to see these objects using my 200mm telescope.
This astrophoto was shot using my 200mmF5 Newtonian reflector with an Artemis 4021 mono cooled CCD camera in its primary focus. It is a combination of 8 20min exposures.

The EL panel for the Takahashi is ready!

After weeks of experimenting with the prototype EL panel the final design became more and more clear. Herman ten Haaf from ASH turned the prototype in this final version.

There the frame is being made.

The inside contains filters in order to receive a fully illuminated field. The filters also help to decrease the brightness of the EL panel so flatfield exposures exceed 5sec. This gives better reproducable results for the flatfield calibration frames.

This is the finalized result. Next thing to do is test it on the Takahashi with my Artemis CCD and DSLR camera's.

Binocular testing

Here is a picture of the three 10x50 binoculars under test. In a week or so they will get company of a Leica also.

From left to right: Pentax 10x50 ED DCF, Fujinon 10x50 FMTR-SX and last, but definately not least: the Swarovski 10x50 EL.

Exit pupil of the Swarovski.

Exit pupil of the Fujinon.

Exit pupil of the Pentax.

And, for comparison, the exit pupil of my 10x50 Splend/Kamakura binocular.

Visit to "de Verrekijkerspecialist" in Maarssen

I am going to perform a test of modern 10x50 binoculars for astronomy use. Last Friday I got the message that the binoculars were ready for pickup, so on Saturday we went for this beautiful shop.

Here is the table where each visit starts. Jan gives basic and in-depth information on binoculars, their construction and optics. There are many examples of binoculars that have been cut in half to show their interior.

Besides new optics there is a large collection of classic binoculars. Here is a set of classic Zeiss binoculars.

Here are binoculars "war production". All luxury has been omitted to enable quick and effective production.

Large binoculars for astronomical use.

Many classical binoculars.

Classic binoculars, there is even a compass.

My personal favorite: the Zeiss Dialyt.

Quality porro prims kit together.

Chinese roof-prism besides a well-coated quality roof-prism.

Snowy backyard

Snowy backyard with observatory roof frozen stuck to the rails.....no astrophotography possible......

My current eyepiece lineup

This is my current eyepiece lineup. Remember that eyepieces are equal important as your telescope. Especially if you have a "fast" F5 (or faster) scope like me. Most of the time people buy a nice telescope, and the eyepieces are of very low quality. I always say "a 1000 euro telescope with a 25 euro eyepiece will still give you 25 euro vision!" And that is really true.
From right to left:
Televue Panoptic 35mm
Televue Plossl 32mm
Televue Nagler Type 1 7mm
University optics ortho 5mm
Televue Nagler Type 1 4.8mm
This set will serve me well for the coming years. I hope to finish the Herschel 400 list with then (100 down, 300 to go).

Astronomy4Everyone event in the UK.

In the UK a very nice event was held: Astronomy4everyone. It was a huge starparty accessible to the public. We supplied this event with live views from Jupiter and M42 from Halley observatory with our Takahashi E-300.

Here is the live view we put on the internet site livestream/astronomyforeveryone. It shows our Takahashi pointed at Jupiter.

This is a picture I took inside the small dome of Halley Observatory. It shows our Takahashi E-300 pointed at Jupiter @ F25 (focal length f=5500mm). The cam used was my SC3 modded SPC900 with ICX-424 mono CCD. The seeing was very poor because of the wind and clouds. But at least we could show something.

This is the small Toucam webcam used for show us on the event. It also captured our voices while we were working in the observatory.

Here is the imaging train for Jupiter with my SC3 SPC900 cam and 5x barlow (F25 F=5500mm)

And here is Mark Woodward of JTW astronomy that supplied the Messier deepsky live-view cam for this event. It is a very nice cam for live-viewing. It integrates 256 pictures before sending it to the screen. The views we had were like those of having a 500mm iso 300mm Takahashi!

The 7T1 Nagler got a baby sister!

I was lucky on the German astroforum and got this 4.8mm type 1 Nagler for a nice price.

NGC2419 "Intergalactic Wanderer" with Takahashi E-300 of Halley

Last months we worked hard on developing a prototype EL flatfield panel for the Takahashi. Using CCD's makes this kind of panel mandatory. Here are some pictures of the prototype:

Since we use an A3 EL panel (with shortest side 29.7cm) and the Takahashi's main mirror is 300mm, is is a few millimeters too small. We tried to compensate this by using diffusers made with transparant perspex plates.
Here's a pic of the Takahashi with my Artemis 4021 mono installed on its huge helical focuser:

The first thing I did was testing the prototype EL panel on the Takahashi: this gave good results: nice histogram with 15sec exposures, that seems well reproduceable. What was special is that I got a strange reflection of the secondary mirror/spidervane construction on it (I also saw it in the astrophoto's). See the test-flatfield 15sec exposure:

Okay, I aligned the Takahashi's CP-180 mount on Pollux using the FS2 control. After that I goto-ed to NGC2419 "The Intergalactic Wanderer".

NGC2419 (discovered on 31st December 1788 by William Herschel) is a very remote globular cluster,standing 300.000 lightyears from the center of the Milky Way.
Most globular clusters (like Omega Centauri and M31) lie within 65.000 of our galaxy center. See the drawing (source: Burnhams celestial handbooks) for an indication of the distance.

Most clusters are hovering close by, NGC2419 is way left. It is not called "The Intergalactic Wanderer" for nothing.
This object is very remote, but it is a magnitude 9 object, so it can be seen under clear dark skies using a telescope of 102mm aperture.

And here it is! The astrophoto is a combination of 5 20min exposures (no filters) shot with my Artemis 4021 mono in prime focus of the Takahashi E-300 300mmF3.8 Astrograph at Halley observatory. Check it carefully. It contains small faint galaxies of magnitude 18+!
I also included an extra enlarged version:

And a printout from the field of view (Cartes du Ciel) to show how many galaxies are on this picture:

The autoguiding was very stable. At first there were many people in the observatory, but after 2200hrs it became quiet, you see that in the datalogging, the average tracking error (rmsPE=0.34arcsecs) is well below the resolution of the camera (1.34 arcsec/pixel):

Finally, after 1 year of work, it can be concluded that the Takahashi of Halley is fully operational for CCD astrophotography work.

A fellow amateur astronomer Andre van der Hoeven analysed the exposure with Unimap. It discovered a larege amount of very faint galaxies on the astrophoto. Here is the Unimap result:

This is a fine result. What a joy to work with this beautiful astrophotography instrument!