| 1 min
| 85 words
Huh. I installed the front truss addon, I’m observing now and finally noticed the direction of the wobble. After a transient big vibration period of 3s or so it settles down… and stars look like two points right next to each other instead of a big glob of light. Progress! I looked at a low-altitude object… And the direction of the two stars was up and down. I think I’ve finally defeated side to side wobble only to find my true opponent was altitude wobble
| 2 min
| 345 words
Telescope mount v3 is pretty good, but it still wobbles slightly. If I touch or move the telescope, it wobbles a bit before settling down in 2-3 seconds. Before it settles down, Saturn turns into two images of Saturn next to each other.
I can use that picture and do the math to see how much it's wobbling:https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/planets/distance says Saturn is 18.96" right now. That's a second of arc, 1/60 of a minute of arc, which is 1/60 of a degree.
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| 1 min
| 159 words
I drove a few hours to visit friends and a bortle 4 sky. wow there were so many stars. You could barely make out an arc slightly lighter in the sky than the rest of it! The Milky Way! Through a telescope, there were much more stars than before and they just kept going and going if you moved the telescope. Saw the plediades too wow many bright stars near each other
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| 31 words
Jupiter, four Galilean moons, and a blue star!
It could be improved if I was better collimated, but I’m happy I got all 4 of them with the high power eyepiece!
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| 128 words
Today I learned that astronomers measure star brightnesses in the modern AB system, using (logarithmic) units of Janskys, where one Jansky is 10−26 W⋅m−2⋅Hz−1. Why is there the extremely cursed Hz−1? Hz is already s−1. Why is it like that. Astronomers, why is it like that. s−1−1 is just seconds
If you cancel all the units, you get… 1 Jy = 10−26 kg m2 s−3m−2 s−1−1 = 10-26 kg s−2. …so we measure starlight in the same units as surface tension.
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| 68 words
turns out it’s…
click to reveal the first one?? 3D printers fill the inside of objects with really lightweight infill, and it's so light compared to 100% filled walls that it takes both less time and ends up being less weight than the fancy truss on the right. Which sucks because I spent such a long time designing that fancy truss only to be outdone by a brick.
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| 99 words
I heard there was a meteor shower tomorrow! So naturally I went out today to see it. First I treated it like any other target and tried to find a good gap in the trees to see Perseus, but then I read online that meteors appear in the full sky, not just at the radiant.
So I lay down on the sidewalk, and 30 minutes later… zoop!
The meteor was super underwhelming compared to the time I spent waiting.
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| 31 words
Everything was very blurry today and I kept wondering why focusing didn’t seem to fix it before realizing it was cloudy.
My custom Pico Bluetooth picture taking button worked great though!
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I take photos using my phone. My telescope shakes when I press the capture button. I have a raspberry pi pico W, which recently added bluetooth. I wonder if I can connect the pico to my phone as a bluetooth device so I could press a button on the pico and remotely take a snapshot
| 2 min
| 238 words
I got the Andromeda galaxy!!!
Aiming the telescope was a nightmare. “I’ll use a star app to aim!” I thought. I tried downloading Stellarium, it complained about a Google Play error. I downloaded SkEye, and it had some weird gyro issues because it expected the phone to be pointing in the same direction as the telescope, but I use my phone camera to take pics so it was mounted sideways looking at the telescope’s eyepiece.
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