Observing Log for Mike Durkin
8/30/2020 about 8:00PM-9:30PM
Locust Valley, NY
Transparency: 9/10, Seeing 3/5
Temperature: about 60-70 degrees
Equipment: Stellarvue 70mm refractor, Hutech modified DSLR and Star Analyzer 100
Testing out using the refractor instead of the DSLR lens for spectra. I used one of my afocal
adapters which had threads on the 1.25 inch side. This seemed to work reasonable well, however
using this along with the drift method, I was limited to mostly the brighter naked eye stars.
To get dimmer stars I assume that I would need to track.
I tried a couple of different types of stars for their spectra including: Antares, Arcturus,
Altair, δ Sco, Alkaid, Mizar and Kochab. On the spectral "A" type stars, I'm afraid I only got
3 of the hydrogen absorption lines, but I'd need to see in the software to be sure.
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| Spectrum of Antares? |
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| Spectrum of Arcturus |
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| Processed spectrum of Arcturus with K2iii reference spectrum |
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| Spectrum of δ Scoroius |
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| Processed spectrum of δ Scorpius with B0v reference. I also added notes for the Hydrogen Balmer lines and where one Helium line might be. The Balmer lines are also very underwhelming. Maybe a problem due to rotating and slanting? |
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| Spectrum of Altair |
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| Processed spectrum of Altair with Hydrogen Balmer lines identified. There is a line around 4625 angstroms which I believe is due to the color filter cutover and a less than perfext instrument response curve. |
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| Spectrum of Alkaid |
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| Processed and calibrated spectrum of Alkaid along with a reference example of a B3v star. |
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| Spectrum of Mizar |
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| Processed and calibrated spectrum of Mizar. This was done using the mehtod described in Ken Harrison's book, which I think may be be artificially making the graph look closer to the reference spectrum than it should be. |
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| Kochab with 2 reference spectrum, K4iii and K7v. Online references give the spectral type as K4iii, although when comparing my meaasurements with the referenece library, K7v seemed to be a slightly better match. |
8/22/2020 about 9:00PM-10:30PM
Locust Valley, NY
Transparency: 6/10, Seeing 3-4/5
Temperature: about 80-90 degrees
Equipment: Meade 16 inch Lightbridge
Not the best night, but didn't want to just sit around tonight. I thought I would try some of the Aquila objects in my astronomy magazines.
Started wth Barnard's "E" dark nebulae. I could not make out the shape, but I do think I saw the cloud since normally for that area I think I was able to see background stars of the Milky Way, bbut there was a region that did not have the faint stars. But I could not bake out a clear boundary.
I also tried M4 by Antares, but no luck there. Probably too much light pollution.
I tried the planetary nebula NGC 6804. After a little while I think I was just able to pick it up a bit with averted vision.
Then finished with Jupiter. I just caught Io as it went behind Jupiter. It looked nice in the 16 inch. Two dark band, one of the caps seems a bit larger and the space between the bands seemd a bit darker then the space between the cap/polar region and one of the belts.
8/18/2020 about 9:00PM-11:00PM
Locust Valley, NY
Transparency: 9/10, Seeing 4-5/5
Temperature: about 65-76 degrees
Equipment: Stellarvue 70mm refractor
Visual measurements of variable stars α Her, Z UMa, X Oph and Z Oph.
Also tried looking for some globular clusters in Scorpius and Ophiuchus, but could not see any
due to light pollution.
Open custers NGC 6633 and IC 4665. NGC 6633 was the nicer of the 2 and seemed ideal for a small
telescope. There we not as many stars though as I would have expected. IC 4665 was also nice
but pretty spread out.
Also saw Jupiter with the 6.7(?)mm eyeiece and a 3x barlow. I was still impressed that the view
of Jupiter looked quite reasonable with that magnitude on a scope this small.
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