Monday 28th April 2014 The week ahead from Sky and Telescope

This is the week ahead from Sky and Telescope

Sunday 27th April 2014 - Ring and Crab Nebulae from the Bradford Robotic telescope

In February 2012 I used the Bradford Robotic Telescope to take the following images.

Saturday April 26th 2014 - SHA Conference at Chetham's Library

I attended the Society for the History of Astronomy Spring Conference held in Chetham's Library in Manchester today. Note: All images from i-phone.

Dr. Michael Powell the Librarian at Chetham's had put a number of astronomical books from the library on display. This included the John Bevis "Atlas Celeste" which was discovered in the library of the Manchester Astronomical Society:

Friday April 25th 2014 Dunsinck Observatory from Robert Ball's book.

Separated from my telescopes by over 1000 miles with an empty dome and cloudy skies I looked at some of my old astronomy books in my study. Sir Robert Ball's book contained a number of images of domes and telescopes. Here are images from the book describing Dunsinck Observatory in Dublin.

Here is a description of Dunsink Observatory.

and details of the Grubb Refractor on Wikipedia

and a view of the interior

Sir Robert Ball refers to " ...the equatorial telescope , the object glass of which was presented to the Board of Trinity College, Dublin by the late Sir James South. The main part of the building is a cylindrical wall, on the top of which reposes a hemispheriacal roof. In this roof is a shutter, which can be opened so as to allow the observer in the interior to obtain a view of the heavens...... the two lenses which together form the object glass of the instrument are twelve inches in diameter, and the quality of the telescope mainly depends on the accuracy with which these lenses have been wrought. "

Thursday April 24th 2014 - Back in the UK - Black Hole in Cygnus

On 15th May 2012 I used the Harvard MicroObservatory Telescope in Arizona to image Cygnus X1  a strong X-Ray source in the Constellation of Cygnus near Eta Cygni. The Black Hole and its binary companion HD 226868 (a 9th mag supergiant ) are believed to have a rotation period of 5.6 days. Of course you cannot see the black hole only the companion. The radius of the Black Hole's event horizon is in the region of 28 km and the object lies at a distance of 8100 Light Years. There is considerable interstellar dust in this region which you can see as dark patchy regions in this image - in fact the companion star to Cygnus X1 has been reduced by 3.5 magnitudes by this dust.

Details of the image are given here:

The position of Eta Cygni is shown below

DAY 71 - Wednesday April 23rd - Last day in Spain till June.

Another hot day with blue sky. I hope its like this in the UK tomorrow..... I am going back via Murcia Airport after a drive up the AP7 Toll Motorway - usually only see half a dozen cars during the hour and a half drive.

I was reading the article by Allan Chapman in the 2004 Yearbook of Astronomy and reading about the 1639 transit so I thought I would produce an animation of the event using The SkyX Software.

This is as it would appear from Lancashire on 4th December 1639. (In fact as this occurred before the calendar change from the Julian Calendar so would actually have been the 24th November then!)

In 1761 there was another Venus Transit shown below.

Day 70 Telescopes disassembled, Chetham's Library and Andy Devey.

I have now disassembled the CGEM and 4 inch refractor and also the TAL1. I am back to the UK on Thursday then back here at the new location in June.

On Saturday I am at the meeting of the Society for the History of Astronomy in Manchester  - it is being held in Chetham's Library which is the oldest lending library in the world. If you go to the website there is an online search facility.  I put in "astronomy" as the key word and checked out the results. There are books going back to pre-1500 in the collection. Worth more research.

I came across this video describing the work of Andy Devey that I referred to on Day 65.

The accompanying text:

"A solar explorer who captured close-up snaps of the sun has had them featured on a NASA website.

Retired Andy Devey has been an amateur astronomer for about six years and said the peak of his stargazing was seeing his own photos of the sun published on the NASA space weather website.

Other sun shots he's taken have made the front cover of the British Astronomical year book for 2011.

Andy, 55, uses a host of telescopes and cameras to capture the images - and all from his back garden in Darton."

Day 69 Easter Monday The Constellation of Cancer

Visible tonight is the constellation of Cancer - not a very distinctive shape.

It does contain the star cluster M44 that I imaged recently.

  

The above image shows M44 taken with the Canon 40D and 38mm lens using the magnifier in APT.

The above image was taken on 15th March 2014 using the SBIG ST9XE and 4 inch refractor

The above image was taken with a remote telescope last year.

 The constellation also contains the cluster M67 - below

and when solved

Day 68 Easter Sunday - The Sky this week and the Sorbas Fire.

The Sky next week from Sky and Telescope

In the evening I had a call from Andy Devey who had spotted a large fire near Sorbas moving from the west towards the mountains. It was extremely windy in the direction of Cabrera which had been evacuated under similar circumstances on previous occasions. Following Andy's directions I went out - still on the phone to him -  to see if I could spot it. Going though the arch at Cabrera I looked to the south west and could see a bright red cloud reflecting the fire. Andy confirmed that he could see the same red cloud from El Pinar de Bedar where he has a good view of the entire mountain range to his South and East. From Cabrera the fire had not reached the crest of the most distant hills - I could only see the reflected glow. A neighbour came out who had also spotted it. During the night I checked a couple of times - it seemed to be diminishing as seen from Cabrera.

David Jackson has blogged about it.

(Scroll down to April 20th to see the details on David's Blog about this fire - it is constantly updated.)

On one of my checks during the night I went up the hill to try and get a view of the fire - which I could not - and switched off my torch. The stars were bright with Mars brilliant over the "Onion Dome" a large house with a Moorish dome that dominates much of Cabrera. Street lights in Cabrera are carefully designed and are only on walkways with 9W bulbs I believe. There are very few of them leaving an excellent dark sky.

Day 66 Birds and Butterflies of Sierra Cabrera

From today's walk: