Megrez 72 FD APO
C/2020 F3 Neowise
There’s once in a while a comet coming by and I missed some really good ones in my life… I thought I won’t let this one go by unnoticed … I took light gear with me in the car and off I went to the highest point in Folsom to overlook towards the eastern horizon. Fortunately I scouted a nice little area that is not surrounded by tall buildings around. The photos were taken with my William Optics Megrez 72 FD APO and a Canon EOS 50D camera. Various exposures from 2 to 3 seconds depending how high it was climbing during the sunrise and the sunlight began dominating… ISO settings were varying between 800 to 1600 as I was playing around. Tripod, remote shutter hand controller…
Niklas Henricson
Mercury’s Greatest Transit
I’m soon about to move in with Melissa and start our lives together in Sacramento, CA. On my last visit to the states, I left all of my DSLR cameras at her place. I realized since I don’t have any cameras left in Sweden, I had to use my Celestron NexImage webcamera, but of course it’s not compatible with Windows 10! After spending almost an entire morning trying to install Windows XP Home edition through Hyper V Manager and also trying to install all the old Windows XP drivers from the Celestron’s CD I finally succeeded to get the webcamera functioning.
My idea was to broadcast live stream and share that with others, but I found myself abandoning that idea quite soon due to connectivity issues and also due to the camera not being setup properly.
To my disappointment, I was running out of time and had to cancel my effort in trying to bring the webcam alive. The event would start at 1:15 PM local hour so instead I captured the event through the afocal-projection method by pointing my Windows cell phone (a Nokia Lumia 1020) against the ocular and to my surprise the phone captured a semi-good photo and a video of the event!
The next visible Mercury transit will occur in 2019 but will not be as spectacular as this one (so called a great transit). The next great transit will be again the 9th of Noveber in 2052. By the time I’ll be 73 years old and hopefully will be able to see it again!
(See facts about Mercury’s periodic transits). Some more facts in Swedish here
Another interesting fact about Mercury as a planet is its orbit around our sun. Not before Einstein came around with his general theory of relativity, could we explain the eccentricity of Mercury’s orbit due to the large bending of space-time fabric around the planet. Before that, Newtonian physics could explain halfway all the visible observations, which annoyed the scientists. Once again, Einstein could nail the answers to this odd behavior of the planet.
Here’s a Youtube video of the event as well, expand the video to full screen in order to see the round dot on the right side of the solar disc. Mercury is a tiny planet and covers a mere 1/158 of the sun’s diameter. Enjoy watching!
Orion’s Nebula M42
Having a cold and a 39 degrees fever I couldn’t resist from not observing tonight. Tonight’s object was Orion’s nebula (a.k.a. M42). I had to try my new SynGuider, so things went slowly at the beginning while trying to understand the menu options and also attempting to aligning my newtonian with my Megrez 72.
The reason I was using my newtonian this time was because my FluorStar is sent for service maintainance. Unfortunately I’ve got some troubles with my crayford focuser and so I needed someone to check it out.
Regardless, both the newtonian and my Synguider did an excellent job tonight autoguiding a star and allowing me to take a shot on Orion’s nebula. I used ISO1600, experimenting with different exposures. At this particular shot it was 75 seconds.
Astroniklas 