Star gazers

The annual Perseid meteor shower begins this week, slowly at first, with just a few meteors per hour, then building to a peak dozens of times more intense on Tuesday, August 12th. The source of the shower is Comet Swift-Tuttle, which has littered the August portion of Earth's orbit with space dust.

 

Thanks for that Walnut :thumb:

 

"Have to set me alarm clock to see them - whats the best time?"

You'll need a clear-skies upgrade for your alarm clock :D

Garden recliner, orientated towards that area of the sky, lie on your back and enjoy.

Possibly camera with tripod on "Bulb" (open shutter, or long exposure)

Astronomy was one of my annual hobbies (For new years resolution I try to start a new interest, or project, each year). Bought a large telescope (12" Dob) one year and learnt my way around the sky. Don't do much now, other than when the kids' friends stay over and an annual Autumn outing to their school. But I do enjoy watching the space station flying over, or a Iridium flare

If you are not familiar with it Heavens Above is worth a look. Select your location and it will tell you Time and Sky-location of anything interesting passing overhead. You need to be looking out to-the-second for an Iridium flare, turning up 5 minutes late won't do! and if you are in town choose things with a magnitude of -5 to -8 (bigger minus number = brighter) on a moon-less night - you need clear skies too!

 

Telescope is no good for a meteor shower because it only views a narrow angle of the sky.

Low powered (i.e. wide angle view) binoculars might be useful to have on hand, but naked eye probably best.

Dobson was an astronomer and "Dobsonian" has become the generic name for the telescope he invented.

Telescopes have traditionally involved the lenses & mirrors (optics) bit, and a "mount" / tripod. They are often about the same money - so 50:50 between the two. Dobson came up with the idea of making a really cheap mount, so that more of the budget could be spent on the optics.

The wider the aperture, the more light is collected, and 12" is the breakpoint limit between cheap (Chinese in my case) optics and having to flash out serious money. I decided I should start with the maximum sensible affordable kit, rather than some utterly cheap, but probably useless, department-store-scope.

The Dobsonian mount is a few bits of ply wood that allow the telescope to tilt, and rotate - but you have to do it by hand; whereas a pucker tripod mount has complex gearing that can "track" an object on the arc that it follows through the sky - and to which a motor can be attached. With a Dob you have to nudge it every minute or so as the object starts to move out of view (due to earth's rotation). It also uses a Newtonian style reflecting telescope for the optics. This is basically a tube, with a concave mirror at the bottom, which focuses the light at the top of the tube. At the top is a tiny mirror, at 45 degrees, which squirts the light out of the side - where there is a connector for an eyepice - which you look through. So no expensive polished glass lenses such as are found in a refracting telescope

Entry level 8" Dob = £300
12" Dob = £700 :thumb:
16" Dob = £1,300 :(

More Pro, non-Dob, telescopes:
8" = £1,000 :(:(
12" = £4,000 :(:(:(
16" = £10,000 :(:(:(

Object visibility is ranked using a logarithmic Magnitude scale, and thus what-you-can-see is dependant on the square of the diameter. So a 12" is one magnitude more than an 8", but twice the money. A 16" is is one magnitude more again than a 12", but also twice the money :( (A Jodrell Bank diameter 'scope is several orders-more-doubling of the price!)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dobsonian_telescope

 

JWK a good pair of binoculars is as good as anything for spotting meteors try to get away from street lights any clear night from now until they peak tuesday morning will be good for viewing.
Kirsten have you still got the 12" ? I have only got a 114mm celestron but I get to see the planets and moons like you say it gets expensive when you move up the scale.

 

Thank you for this useful post Walnut m8:thumb:

 

Things you learn on a gardening forum I thought a Dobsonian referred to the telescope, not the mount.:o Dumb Terrier.

 

Ill have a look tonight.... hopefully the clouds may clear a bit.

 

"have you still got the 12""

Yup, but I need to be brave and get the mirror out and clean all the crud off it (its amazing how well it works when I see how dirty the mirror is!)

I figured that there are only a few planets, but lots of Deep Sky Objects, so I went for aperture-fever!

That first year I stayed up until ridiculously late / early :thumb: hours in the morning seeking out as many of the Messier objects as I could, but I then decided that things that were only just visible were fun to say-I-had-seen but weren't that much fun to observe.

So now I'm a bit of a space-tourist. I have a number of objects that are bold enough that I can enjoy watching, and marvel at, and they mark the seasons as they come round each year - a bit like the garden really.

I marvel at the fact that light from the Andromeda galaxy has taken 2,000,000 years to get here. And that it's width fills my wide-angle eye piece, as does the Seven Sisters which is only 150 light years away [from memory]. I can;t really comprehend how big the Andromeda galaxy is by comparison, but I do mumble to myself "That's one big Mama!"

My eldest has a friend staying over, but its cloudy tonight, but I think it would have been cool to look at Mars, Venus, Mercury and Saturn all in the same view finder shot, and Jupiter also in the night sky (albeit all so low down that its pretty crap viewing). The folks in the Southern Hemisphere should be having a nice showcase for the next few nights in their Winter sky.

Seeing Saturn's rings and Jupiter's spot and moons through a half-decent amateur telescope is on my recommended things-to-do-before-you-die list, together with a total eclipse of the sun; and a decent wildlife safari in Africa.

 

I have dark sky right in my garden (my only neighbours on the back are grazing cows, and we are really quite out of the village) and we have a tower nearby to look at such things. My parents arevisiting next weekIhope Ican pry them away from the marvels of german summer longenought to look up at the sky for half a second, lol.
Thanks for the warning, I always miss these things!

 

cheers walnut shall be havin a good luck:thumb:

 

Yep. When I can see the "Seven Sisters" at 10.p.m. I know that autumns here, whatever the weather is like

 

"When I can see the "Seven Sisters" at 10.p.m"

Beginning of November I reckon

Heavens-Above Sky Chart for Portsmouth

In the form [at the bottom] change month to 11 and hour to 22 and size to 700, or bigger and press Submit.

Seven Sisters is unlabelled but it is the blob of stars between Taurus and Triangulum

(You might want to set your location more specifically at Heaves Above)

Edit: Note that East and West are reversed - hold the map above your head and they will be the right way round!