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My Telescopes

My Main Telescope - C14 and Paramount ME

My new Paramount MyT and 8-inch Ritchey-Chretien Telescope

MyT Hand Controller

My Meade 12 inch SCT on a CGEM (Classic) Mount

My 4 inch Meade Refractor with Sky Watcher Guidescope and ZWO camera on a CGEM (Classic) Mount

Skywatcher Star Adventurer Mount with Canon 40D

 

My Solar setup using a DSLR and Mylar Filter on my ETX90

DSLR attached to ETX90. LiveView image of 2015 partial eclipse on Canon 40D

Astronomy Blog Index
About the Site

 I try to log my observing and related activities in a regular blog - sometimes there will be a delay but I usually catch up. An index of all my blogs is on the main menu at the top of the page with daily, weekly or monthly views. My Twitter feed is below. I am also interested in photograping wildlife when I can and there is a menu option above to look at some of my images. I try to keep the news feeds from relevant astronomical sources up to date and you will need to scroll down to find these.

The Celestron 14 is mounted on a Paramount ME that I have been using for about 10 years now - you can see that it is mounted on a tripod so is a portable set up. I still manage to transport it on my own and set it all up even though I have just turned 70! It will run for hours centering galaxies in the 12 minute field even when tripod mounted.

 

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Tuesday
Jan172012

Stargazing Live

I watched Stargazing Live last night - it was deluging with rain here in Sierra Cabrera (and still is this morning) and it was a good clear night at Jodrell Bank back in the North West of England! It was interesting to see Orion clearly visible in the sky both at Jodrell Bank and at the site of the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) in the Northern Provice of South Africa - except of course that there it was upside down!

I liked the shape of the galaxy NGC 1365 that was shown from South Africa and it reminded me of the  shape of my (SN Search) galaxy NGC 2535 image of a few days ago. In fact though they are quite different  - NGC 1365 is a barred spiral galaxy and NGC 2535 is not. NGC 2535 is interacting with NGC 2536 which is also shown  but the interaction is not at all obvious from the 30s image that was taken as part of my Supernova Search programme. The interacting pair are known as ARP 82 in Halton Arp's Catalogue and is thoroughly described in a paper on the website of East Tennessee State University. This includes an animation of the interaction.

NGC 1365 is believed to possible be a similar shape to our own Milky Way Galaxy following observations from the Spitzer Telescope