by Bill Pellerin

Houston Astronomical Society

GuideStar editor

An amateur astronomer is one person, with one telescope, observing under clear, dark skies, right? It's you, your telescope, and the sky. Much of my observing is like that, but not all. You can (and you should) connect with fellow amateur astronomers because these connections can significantly enhance your observing program and your appreciation of the night sky.

Recently, I had dinner with one of my long-time astronomy friends. We were chatting about the issues he was having with his research-grade instrument and control system and about my equatorially mounted setup. We talked about how the control systems model the sky, the accuracy of pointing systems, the benefits of adding software that improves pointing, and so on.

I talked about my variable star photometry program (measuring the brightness of stars) and how some of my unguided images have tracking errors and had to be discarded from the image stacking process. Then, he mentioned the PEC (periodic error correction) capability of my mount and asked if I was using it. Uh, no, I haven't been. This is one of those 'duh' moments when you realize that you have a capability and you're not taking advantage of it. So, I'm going to work with my mount's PEC capability, learn it thoroughly, and see what it can do to improve tracking. Sometimes, you need a friend to remind you of the obvious.

Continue reading

By Bill Pellerin

Houston Astronomical Society

GuideStar Editor

Amateur astronomy is changing, again. This change is being driven by technology, the Internet, and the overwhelming amount of astronomical data now available. In the over 20 years that I've been in amateur astronomy I've seen large (often Dobsonian) telescopes come into our hands, we've seen the incorporation of computers and technology into telescope designs, and we've seen amazing advances in astrophotography.

Continue reading

By Bill Pellerin
Houston Astronomical Society
GuideStar editor

www.astronomyhouston.org

Do you find yourself setting up your telescope and then asking yourself, “What am I going to look at?” Or, have you missed a clear dark night because you can’t think of anything that you want to observe. I hope, in this article, to convince you that by focusing on one or more areas of astronomy and delving deep into those areas that your astronomy ‘career’ will take off. What’s more, if you do that, you will never run out of things to observe.

Perhaps it’s time to change how you approach your observing. If you’ve been something of an ‘astronomical tourist’ (someone who looks at objects, says, “how nice”, and moves on) and it’s time to pick your area of interest and do a deep dig into that subject. It has been my observation (pun intended) that those who are most enthusiastic about their observing program are those who really, really understand what they’re looking at and why it’s interesting. These are the same observers who have taken the time necessary to learn about the objects and who understand the object’s place in the cosmos.

Continue reading

Bill Pellerin
Houston Astronomical Society
www.astronomyhouston.org
GuideStar Editor

Good Enough

There’s a scene in the book Huckleberry Finn in which Huck and Jim are considering boarding a wrecked boat to see if there’s anything of value to be retrieved. Jim doesn’t think it’s such a good idea and says that the pair is doing “blame well and we better leave blame well alone…”.

An observing friend of mine quoted that passage to me while considering improvements he could make to his astro-imaging setup. His setup was producing very good images and any changes might make it incrementally better but instead he wanted to concentrate on executing his imaging program with the equipment he had. Everything was working ‘blame well’ good enough for his purposes.

A more contemporary writer, Paul Simon, wrote a song that says “Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance. Everybody thinks it’s true”. All of us think about how we could improve our observing equipment – larger telescope, better mount, better camera, better eyepieces, etc. Sometimes, though, we just chasing the train in the distance when leaving your equipment inventory ‘blame well alone’ is the right thing to do.

Continue reading