My last post neglected to mention Donna’s performance with the Viewpoint Concert Band. They had their January concert – the second of the season. The February concert will happen next Saturday afternoon. Donna is no longer the “new girl” on clarinet. There are a couple of musicians behind her now in the clarinet section. She’s also a board member for the band.

Donna’s raised garden bed is producing some fine veggies for us. Some of the broccoli bolted, but we’ll be able to harvest plenty. We have lots of fresh, yummy tomatoes. She’s thinking about her next round of plants now. The worm bins are thriving and I’m ready to start harvesting worm castings.

My astrophotography efforts are really improving at a rapid rate. Donna figures I spend about 50 hours per week studying – that might be an over-estimation, but there’s much to learn. I’ve made a few more trips up to the Weaver’s Needle Viewpoint to set up in darker skies. Light pollution puts a real damper on astrophotography efforts. It’s not impossible to capture good images from the city, but it’s a lot harder.

I took advantage of the darker skies at the Weaver’s Needle Viewpoint. It’s less than half an hour away from home, but it’s much darker. There is a scale for rating light pollution called the Bortle scale. It’s numbered from one to nine. Nine would be looking up from the center of a large metropolis with tons of artificial light. A Bortle one area would be absolute wilderness with no artificial light. Our home at Viewpoint is a Bortle seven area, while Weaver’s Needle Viewpoint is a Bortle five. I captured the Andromeda Galaxy again and made a big improvement over my first backyard attempt.

Andromeda is is the nearest galaxy to our Milky Way and is about 2.5 million light years away. It’s size is a mind-boggling 220,000 light years in diameter and it’s made up of an estimated trillion stars. The larger, brighter stars in the photo are from our galaxy and are much closer than Andromeda, whose stars appear as dust.

Donna accompanied me on my next trip to the viewpoint. She enjoyed a short hike toward the Needle while I was setting up, before it got dark. After dark the temperature dropped and she was too cold to stay outdoors, even with a blanket. She retreated to the Jeep and read her Kindle. Meanwhile, another astronomer showed up – his name is Marty. We compared notes and went about our business. I targeted the Pleiades star cluster (Seven Sisters or M45).

The first time I tried to capture Pleiades, I was pretty much clueless and approached it like I was imaging a planet. It was a failure.

I’ve learned much and upgraded my equipment – both hardware and software. Deep sky objects cannot be captured with the same techniques used for planets. DSO requires accurate guiding to stay precisely on target during long exposures. My guiding software showed more error than I liked on the declination axis. I researched and learned how to tighten up the backlash in the geartrain and I made it better. I think the factory errs on the side of looseness to prevent any chance of binding.

Last Wednesday, I took another try at Pleiades and made a huge improvement.

You might find the term nebulosity unfamiliar. It’s derived from nebula (nebulae is plural). It’s an astronomy term for areas of space that emit or reflect light. They can be made up of gases, dust particles, ice crystals or any combination of these. They are precursers to star formation. Pleiades is about 440 light years away from earth.

In my last post, I mentioned the telescope mount is the most important piece of equipment – it’s more critical than even the telescope used. A poorly made or overloaded mount is a disaster that only leads to frustration and heartache. I learned this the hard way with my first gear purchase. Then I upgraded to a SkyWatcher HEQ5 German Equatorial Mount (GEM). I’ve been capturing deep sky images with my William Optics Z73 telescope and ZWO ASI533 cooled camera. This rig weighs about 10 pounds.

The HEQ5 mount is rated by Skywatcher at 30 pounds capacity. Most experienced astronomers say that is a stretch – okay for visual use, but for DSO images you shouldn’t exceed 20 pounds, 15 pounds is better. My AstroTech At115EDT with camera gear and guidescope push that limit.

So, I dove into the deep end again. I ordered a Losmandy GM811 GEM. It has a 50-pound capacity. Losmandy products are made in Burbank, California and are not mass produced like the Asian-sourced mounts that are most popular (due to price/value considerations). Scott Losmandy is the owner of the company and he, along with another technician or two build each mount by hand. I read that his company consists of five or six employees. They machine their own parts and assemble everything. It will take five or six weeks for my mount to be built – he always has a backlog of orders.

Scott is an avid astronomer and a retrograde lover of all things mechanical. He has a collection of old mechanical devices and he admires the ingenuity and quality of things built in the “old days”. He applies this thinking into the mounts he builds – no plastic, no castings – everything is machined from aluminum, brass or steel alloys. He does employ modern software for automated functions of the mount. His electronics and software are developed by a couple of guys in Germany.

Marty, the astronomer I met at Weaver’s Needle Viewpoint will buy my Skywatcher HEQ5 when my Losmandy mount arrives. Everyone will be happy!

Donna and I booked an AirBNB for two nights in May. It’s outside of Tucson and they have an observatory! They are good with me bringing my astrophotography gear to set up on their property. I’m looking forward to it.

Donna came up with a super idea for summer getaways when the valley heats up. She signed us up with Trusted Housesitters. It’s a website that lists housesitting opportunities. They charge an annual membership fee of $129 to background check and vet people for housesitting. They list houses for members looking for a housesitter and Donna peruses the listings to see what might be a fit for us. The people listing the house can look at our background from the bio we posted and decide if we would meet their needs.

Most of the time something like walking, feeding and caring for pets is involved. We don’t derive any income from it, but we have a free home to stay in and we can pick and choose where and when we want to do it. We just agreed to house sit in Prescott, Arizona in late June. Prescott will be much cooler than here in the valley. Additionally, this house is on a 12-acre property about 20 miles from town in a dark sky area. I will be bringing astronomy gear along!

Like most folks, we’ll be parked in front of the TV later today for the Super Bowl. I’m not real excited about it, but I hope it’s a competitive game. The weather has been nice – highs around 70. We should see upper 70s today, but another cold spell is forecast for next week, with warmer temps returning by next weekend.