This is not to say that the mount did not perform up to my expectations. In fact, given the relatively small amount of money that I paid the mount has been excellent. Good telescope mounts are hard to build well, and even harder to build cheaply.

That said, you can do better, and about six months in I decided that I would be doing this enough to consider how to do better. After my first investigations, I wrote this about the relationship between cost and quality in a mount:

In general you will find that in terms of mechanics you get what you pay for. There is a direct and linear relationship between how much money you spend and how well the mount will hold weight and smoothly track the sky with the least amount of fuss. When you spend more money you get more reliable machinery that is built to a higher standard of precision. Those gears in the motor drive will be asymptotically closer theoretical perfection. More importantly, by building in small numbers the premium manufacturers can maintain a tight hold on testing and quality control.

What this means to me is that you should start cheap, decide if you are serious, and if you are serious then go and buy your last mount ever. Mounts are like tripods in photography. If you are really serious about photography it’s well known that you will eventually spend $1500 on a carbon fiber tripod and a really good ballhead. The only question is whether you spend $3000 on inferior tripods before finally upgrading to the one you should have bought anyway.

Having started cheap and decided I was serious, the only question now was: which mount is the last one I want to buy. The choices before me were:

1. A more expensive Chinese mount. Here you have the CGEM from Celestron, and the various Synta mounts like the Orion Atlas. All of these have the same basic mechanics and manufacturing quality as the CG-5 that I had bought, but are built larger and heavier so they are more stable. I could not find a convincing case that the performance of this hardware is consistently good enough that I would not want to throw it away in a year. The Atlas and the CGEM also weigh almost 40 pounds. More on this later. iOptron in Taiwan also makes a mount in this class, but which is lighter.

2. Losmandy G-11. By all accounts this is an excellent piece of hardware. Unfortunately they’ve been in a two year death-march updating their control software, which does not fill me with confidence. The G-11 is also relatively large and heavy given the load that it can carry. Finally, there is a lot of Internet literature on do it yourself tweaks to this mount, which brings it down in my mind. But I’m not really being fair.

3. Takahashi EM-11 or EM-200. Here we are finally getting into the “just works and works forever” category. Beautiful fit and finish. Apparently great mechanics. Best polar alignment scheme in the business (more on this later). But, it requires a laptop for doing automatic pointing. And, the main documentation on the entire mount is a 10 page pamphlet poorly translated from Japanese into English. You can also only get service on this mount from a single company that is far away from me.

4. Astro-Physics Mach1. You saw this coming. Since this is the one I picked, I will now ramble on about it at length.

My pre-purchase justification for going with the Mach1 was as follows:

1. Weighs 30% less than the Chinese mounts but carries at least twice the weight.

2. Weighs about the same as the EM-200 but is more stable.

3. Extensive and competently produced documentation and support materials available on their web site.

4. Extensive and competently produced software support on the PC side if I want to go that way.

5. A few clever control features in the mount itself (more on this later).

6. Nearly 100% positive evaluation of the mount on the Internets.

7. Excellent Internet support. The owner of the company can be found doing remote diagnosis of issues on the mailing list. Impressive.

My main pre-purchase worries about the mount were:

1. Complicated to set up and polar align compared to the Tak, where you just point the polar scope and go.

2. Expensive.

3. Maybe a bit too large. The EM-11 is more my size, and would retain my “bring the mount and tripod out in one step” workflow.

4. Expensive.

Still, I had nothing to lose by putting my name on the waiting list (Astro-Physics makes two production runs of the Mach1 per year, one in the spring and one in the fall. So you put your name on a list and wait until the next run) while I deliberated further. By the time my name came up on the list six months later I had decided that $6000 on a mount is expensive, but not as expensive as spending $4000 now and then $6000 later when the first one didn’t work. Two weeks later four large boxes appeared at my house.

Here is what you can say about Astro-Physics, their excellent product photography does not do their products justice. At this point I should include a picture of the mount head, or the polar alignment adjuster knobs, or the keypad, or the wires that go from the control box to the motors or even the knobs that hold everything together. But, I lack the talent and technical ability to create an adequate picture. Every one of these items is built and finished to a degree of polish that I can only describe as good enough to make Apple jealous. I spent five minutes just turning the knobs on the Vixen style saddle. I had never seen machined knobs that were that good. Not even on my Really-Right-Stuff ballheads which until now were my standard for gratuitously expensive pieces of machined aluminum.

I spent the first night with the hardware just putting it together. There were lots of parts and knobs and whatnot. By the time I had it set up it was time to go to bed, even though the sky was clear. This is a hard situation to be in.

Happily over the next two weeks we had enough good weather in Pittsburgh for me to get the mount set up at night. Some impressions from the first setup:

1. Polar alignment was not bad. The polar scope is easy to use, and the clever “quick star drift” scheme outlined in the documentation works well. You can get set up in about 15 or 20min, which is the same time it used to take me with the CG-5′s computer. The adjustment knobs on the mount for altitude and azimuth are incredible. This is still more complicated than the Takahashi mounts with their superbly integrated polar scopes. On those you run a computer program that tells you where in the polar finder to put polaris and you just do it. You are done in five minutes.

2. The mechanics of the mount, in use, are practically perfect and absolutely predictable. With good polar alignment you can calibrate on a single star and afterwards every single GOTO goes exactly where you want. The CG-5′s alignment scheme, while clever, was never consistent. Some nights pointing would be perfect and other nights it would drift around unpredictably. You also have to memorize where six or seven bright stars are in your sky on any given night to make it work. The Mach1 only needs you to find one star.

3. When moving the mount with the keypad there is no apparent backlash in any direction. This is unlike the CG-5 where at slow speeds you’d have to wait a second or two for the gears to wind up before the mount would move.

4. The mount remembers the date and time. Hallelujah.

5. My one and only gripe so far: the clutch knobs can be hard to use because they are so close to the motor boxes. Oh, and the portable pier/tripod is not the easiest thing to fold up or adjust. That’s all I can think of.

I also got to set up with my camera. Here’s a single shot to give you an idea of how well the mount performed:

This is NGC2903 and the picture is a stack of 12 frames shot at 2 minutes exposure for each frame. The telescope was being used at 1000mm focal length. Every one of the 12 frames was perfect enough to use. The object barely moved on the screen after each exposure.

Just last month I shot this object with the old mount using my small refractor at around a 300mm focal length:

This is a stack of 1 minute frames at less than half the focal length as I used above. And the tracking is visibly worse.

“But you should be using a guider” you might say. And you’d be right. I should be using a guider to smooth out the raw tracking error in any mount. But guiders are notoriously finicky devices, and their ease of use, or lack thereof, is pretty much linearly related to the underlying performance of the mount they are guiding. So the way I see it, I’ve finally bought a mount that will be worth guiding, because the guiding will just work.

In my mind, this gets to the core value of this product. This is a product that defines the phrase “just works.” The behavior and performance of the mount is absolutely predictable. And the value of that is hard to measure.

“Value” is one of those buzz-words that makes the rounds of business meetings and marketing materials. I think in most cases it refers to something that a company would like you do believe you are buying, but in general it’s not the case. Most of the time when you spend more money you have just spent more money. It’s not often that you spend more money for something and when that something arrives you can stare at it and see the exact linear relationship between the money that you have spent and the value that you have gained. All I can say about the Astro-Physics Mach1 is that you can see every penny of it. It cost ten times more, and really is ten times better than the cheap mount that it replaced. You can’t say that about too many other products.

Sidebar Note about the Meridian

Only read this if you are a mount dork. By that I mean, stop reading now.

The Mach1 is an example of the so-called “German” equatorial mount. In this design the telescope sits on top of the declination axis and is counterweighted on the other side. Here is a poor schematic:

In this design the telescope and the counterweights are always on opposite sides of the pier. When the mount is properly aligned, the RA axis will point straight north, which means the pier will be right on top of an imaginary line that runs North/South right down the middle of the sky which we call the meridian. Another bad picture:

The issue with German mounts is that as you track closer to the meridian you can end up in one of two bad situations:

1. The weights or scope can hit the pier.

2. The weights can end up above the scope, which is bad for balance.

So avoid these things, the controller forces you to follow some rules. The main rule is that if the scope is pointing East its body should be on the West side of the mount and vice versa. This keeps things from hitting the pier and keeps the weights below the scope.

Which brings us back to the meridian. What the above rule means is that if we want to go from looking at things in the East to looking at things in the West we need to flip the scope over the mount so it’s on the opposite side:

This is a rather drastic and potentially destructive move. Things in your telescope can get out of alignment. You can catch wires on knobs. And, it can throw off your pointing. So, users of German mounts tend to try and avoid flipping at all costs. But, this is annoying since the exact time when you want to look at most objects is when they cross the meridian, because that’s when they are highest.

The Mach1 mount does a few things to make this better. First, the geometry of the mount allows it to track far past the meridian if you want it to. So you can pick up an object on the East side and follow it across its highest position in the sky without needing to flip anything around. Second, the build quality of the mount assures that when you do flip over, all you need to do to restore good pointing is to calibrate with the position of one bright star on the new side. I ended up always needing to do this with the Celestron mount anyway, even with all the fancy alignment software.

Finally, the control software in the mount allows you to shift where the mount thinks the meridian is, and thus delay or force flips when you want to. So, if you want to pick up an object that is 30min East of the meridian and track it until it is low in the West without flipping, you can tell the mount that the meridian is actually one hour further East than it really is. It will then dutifully flip the scope over as if the object is already in the West and then track it for hours without flipping. Just make sure nothing hits the tripod when you start this maneuver. If you are really a mount dork, you can read more about this here or in the AP documentation at their web site.

Astro-Physics even has a clever scheme that uses flips to make sure your polar axis is aligned (if you are aligned, a the mount will point to the same star in the same place from both sides of the meridian. So to fine tune the alignment, you flip the mount over on purpose and then adjust).

OK. I’m done.

First, this band LCD Sound System apparently came into being, published its body of work, and flamed out prematurely before I had even managed to obtain any hint whatsoever of its existence. I think this says more about me than the band, or the music scene, but I found the situation a bit disturbing.

Second, while I was watching the trailer I decided that it didn’t matter that I’d never heard of the band, because this film will inevitably be better than having seen the last show live.

At this point you are saying “that psu, he’s nuts like always.” But bear with me.

In my mind, rock and roll shows are primarily about two things. First, there is the visual and physical spectacle of the stage show itself. Second, there is the auxiliary ritual pleasure of hearing the band play songs you know over again for you, even though you have heard them dozens of times.

I say films do both of these things better.

Consider another concert film from a long time ago about another band that I had barely heard of until I had already lost the opportunity to see them live at their peak. Stop Making Sense, which documents the Talking Heads tour behind the album Speaking in Tongues has become one of the iconic films of the genre. There are two reasons why.

1. The film lays down a visual tapestry that you can only capture by being allowed to carry a camera around on stage and through the crowd. The Heads shows were renowned for a lot of lighting and on-stage effects, but the way they are captured on film and then edited together into pleasing sequences simply destroys anything you’d be able to see while stuck to a single seat in the room.

2. The film sounds better. Let’s be clear: rock and roll shows sound like shit. I have admittedly only been to maybe a dozen shows in my life, but the only one of those dozen that did not sound like shit was put on by They Might Be Giants at the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum last year. Why did it not sound like crap? They had to save the kids’ ears, so they did not turn the sound system up so high that the sound actually distorts off the walls of the room.

A year later I saw TMBG live in Downtown Pittsburgh at a show for large children (adults). This time they played full blast, and it sounded like shit. Even the words of songs I’ve heard dozens of times were so frazzled and broken apart by the distortion that I could not really hear them at all. This all served to mask undeniably great musicianship (in particular, the band made Jonathan Coulton sound like a semi-amateur geek dilettante). So it’s sad. Why do they not want to allow me to hear how well they play?

Anyway, I am sort of sad I never heard of LCD Sound System. They sound kind of interesting. But, I’m glad I’ll be able to actually hear what their music sounds like if I see this film. Because I’m pretty sure I’d have missed it seeing them live.

1. Put the mount outside. I have a spot on the patio behind my house that I use every night. This patio spot gives me a good view of most of the sky to the west and south and a reasonably good view of the north and east. The house and trees behind the house block the lower parts of the eastern sky. A large tree in the yard blocks the northwest. Otherwise things work pretty well.

2. Point the mount roughly north. If it’s already pretty dark, use the hole in the polar axis of the mount to sight Polaris, which sits right over the roof of the house.

3. Set up the Telescope. Go and get the telescope and put it on the mount. Also fetch all the accessories you’ll be using. I use my scope in two general configurations. For visual work I use a 1 1/4″ diagonal and various Televue eyepieces. For video work I use my Mallincam with a light pollution filter and focal reducer on it. In addition I’ve been using the Celestron F6.3 focal reducer on the back of the scope lately. So I attach that as well. The camera goes straight into the telescope without a diagonal. This is more convenient. I attach it with a Televue 2 inch visual back because I had the camera fall out of the crappy Celestron visual back with the tiny little useless hateful set screws. The set screws failed to hold the camera, and it just fell out of the tube an on to my concrete patio. This sucked. The Televue is a 2 inch tube that holds the camera solidly using a compression ring. Highly recommended.

So my setup goes: telescope, F6.3 reducer, 2 inch visual back, a 2 inch to 1 1/4 inch adapter tube, then the camera.

4. Balance the telescope. This takes two steps. Set the mount up so that the right ascension axis is horizontal. Now you release the clutches on the declination axis of the mount. This is the one that points north and south and runs parallel to the axis of the telescope. Then while holding the scope, put it in various positions. Let go slooooowly and make sure that the scope mostly stays in place. I try to balance the scope when it is horizontal and when it is mostly vertical. Tracking and pointing near the zenith is a lot better if you get this right.

5. Now balance on the right ascension axis. This is the one that is orthogonal to the body of the telescope. This is easier. You want to position the weights on the counterweight shaft so that when you release the RA clutch and let go of the telescope (slooooooowly) the scope does not move. This is the simplest mechanical task that there is in astronomy, as far as I can tell.

Some people tell you to purposely set the balance to be a bit heavy on the east side of the mount because it smooths out the behavior of the tracking motors. Depending on what part of the sky you are looking at this means either you want the either the scope side or the counterweight side to be heavier. I have never had any luck trying to do this because it means you need to shift the counterweights whenever the mount flips, and I hate touching the mount in any way after I am done aligning it. Maybe you’ll have better luck with this.

6. Put the scope in its “home” position. For my mount this is the one where the counterweights point straight down and the scope points straight north. Peer into the finder scope and look for Polaris. It should be at least in the field of view. When the scope is in this position I turn the video camera so that later on I know which way north and east will be oriented in the field of view. This turns out to be handy later.

7. Power. Now go get your power supply. I had been using a big 12V battery, but it started to fail recently, so I bought a couple of 12V power supplies that I can plug into an outlet on the outside of my house. This has proven to be more reliable the last few times out.

8. Now wire everything up for video. The camera gets a control cable, an s-video cable and 12V power. The control and video cables go back into the house through a sliding door. The video cable goes into the USB capture widget and the into the laptop. The control cable ends at the big Mallincam control box. The largest box ever built for holding five buttons and a knob.

Then I plug the telescope controller into a 25 foot cable and run the other end out to the mount. Finally, a second 12V power cable goes into the mount itself.

9. Initialize the Mount. Work your way through the Celestron setup menu. Enter the time and date and then tell it you want to do a “two-star” alignment. This alignment will let the hand controller learn how to point at things in your sky. What you will do is pick two stars on one side of the meridian (either the eastern part of the sky or the west) and then 3 or 4 stars on the other side. I tend to start in the west and then move to the east because I tend to be impatient to go and look at things that are still rising. The eastern sky is also somewhat darker than the south and west, since the PIttsburgh light dome is primarily to the west and south of me.

For most of the summer the first star that I’d pick was Arcturus. The scope will attempt to point at the star, but it will usually miss. If the scope were already perfectly polar aligned and set up in exactly the same place as the last time I was on the patio, it might hit perfectly. But, these things are never true. So, it will miss by a bit. Use the arrow keys on the hand controller to point the scope and get the star in your favorite sort of finder. I use a 9×50 optical finder, because I’ve never figured out those red dot things. YMMV.

10. Focus. The start should now be in the field of the camera. If it is not, then that means your finder scope and telescope are not aligned. If that’s the case, remove the camera and put an eyepiece into the telescope to fix that. Assuming it is, I then go inside and fire up the video capture software. If I have not disturbed the focus too much, the star will be in the video feed and mostly in focus. Still, it’s best to go and get your Bahtinov mask to make sure.

The Bahtinov Mask is an insanely clever device that creates a diffraction pattern on bright stars that will tell you exactly when you have them in focus. Just follow the instructions and you can’t miss. After I’m done I remove the make and put on the dew shield. I’ve gotten away with just using a shield, for now. If I were smarter I’d use those heated strips as well but it’s only been an issue twice in a year.

11. Star Align. Having focussed the telescope we’re ready to finish the star align. First grab the camera controller and turn on the cross-hairs. Making the cross-hairs is a bit of a chore that is too complex to describe here. Maybe I’ll make a separate page about that. With the cross-hairs set up, use the mount controller to center the star. It will look like this when you are done:

In this picture the horizontal lines point roughly east/west and the vertical lines indicate north/south. The actual directions might be reversed, but the important thing is that I’ve oriented the camera so that the arrow keys on the controller are predictable. This is a small touch that makes life easier later.

Anyway, when you have centered the star hit “Align” on the hand controller to tell it that you want to go to the next star. The hand controller will suggest another star in the western sky. You can use the menu keys to pick one that you can see that are not too close to the horizon. Center it in the finder then in the video camera, then hit Align.

11. Calibration Stars. Calibration stars refine the pointing model of the mount to compensate for its mechanical limitations. The hand controller will ask if you want to add “calibration” stars. Hit Enter to say yes and it will suggest a star in the east to use for further alignment. Pick a star that is well placed and hit Enter. The mount will then flip around and try and point there. As before, it will miss by a bit. Center and align the first star, and the hand controller will ask you about another calibration star. Hit enter to say yes and repeat. As you add more stars you’ll notice that the pointing will get more and more accurate. Usually the third and fourth stars will be in the field of the view of the camera. If this does not happen, you probably missed with one of the previous stars which means you should just start over.

12. If you have to start over, don’t be frustrated. This happens from time to time especially as the sky changes and you need to pick different stars for alignment because the ones you were using before have moved to the wrong side of the sky or behind a tree. Don’t panic. Just unplug the mount and do the whole routine again. Pretty soon you’ll end up with a new set of stars that you can use for a month or so and everything will run smoothly again.

13. Notes on Pointing. At this point, let’s review. We’ve set up the mount and we’ve told it to point at six points in the sky. Each time we’ve corrected pointing errors by hand, allowing the computer in the hand controller to build a pretty detailed model for how to point at things. My experience is that this pointing model works very well, especially if you avoid meridian flips. This is why I try to stay in the eastern part of the sky after doing all of this. If I cross back over to the west, the mount has to flip over, and this invites the creation of pointing errors. I’ve had it work pretty well, and I’ve also had results that were so bad that I unplugged the mount and started over. In one worst case, I had to wipe reset the firmware in the hand controller after some bug corrupted it. But, these are outliers. In general things work very well at this point and the total time I’ve spent from putting the mount on the patio to having good pointing is about 10 minutes. But, for video good pointing is only half the battle. In order for the mount to track over even short time exposures, we have to make sure the polar alignment is good. Luckily, this is not hard.

13. Polar Alignment. The Celestron hand controller has a wonderful piece of software in it that allows you to use the pointing model that you just worked so hard to build to polar align the mount. First, tell the hand controller to point the telescope at a star that is near the meridian and also near the “celestial equator”. All this means is that the star should not be too far north or too close to zenith. The hand controller will complain if you pick a bad star, so study your planetarium program to find a good one. I used Altair for most of the summer, and have recently switched to Enif in Pegasus after Altair wandered to the western sky. Remember, I try to stay on the eastern side of the meridian for all of this.

Now go into the Align menu and pick Polar Align and then Align mount. Hit Enter and the scope will point back to the star you just picked again. Repeat the center/align dance on the video screen. You’ll get another message from the hand controller about starting the All Star Polar alignment. Hit enter to start. The scope will now point to a different spot in the sky. This is where it thinks the star would be if you were polar aligned. At this point you put the controller down and you use the altitude and azimuth knobs on the mount to re-center the star in the field of view your finder scope and then the camera. When you are done, hit enter. Then find Undo Sync in the Align menu and hit enter on that too.

14. Polar Alignment Notes. There are a few things to keep in mind with this Polar Alignment scheme. First, you always want to end your alignment by moving the altitude of the mount up. You want to do this because the knob in the back that changes the altitude gets tighter when you push the mount up, which means it will stay in place better when you are done. I loosen the knob at the start end give the mount a shove downward so I know I’ll have room to move up later.

Second, it’s really handy to have a remote version of the video feed near the mount while you are playing with the knobs. I use VNC on my iPhone so I can see my laptop screen without needing to run back to the laptop. It’s also handy to use this trick when focussing.

Finally, the Undo Sync is important. The first part of the Polar Align routine “syncs” the mount to the star you picked. This messes up the pointing model to make pointing near the star accurate. But, as you move away from the star the mount points less and less well. Also, if you move the mount a large distance while finishing the alignment you may find that your pointing gets way off. In that case, unplug the mount and redo the star align. In my experience this hardly ever happens. The one time thought I needed to do it, my pointing didn’t really get any better and then it turned out that a cable snag was the reason the mount was pointing half a degree too far south all the time.

15. Final Notes. I’ve just described my setup process in about two thousand words. But you should not be discouraged by this. With practice I can do all of this setup in about 20 minutes. While this seems like a lot of up front work, remember that the guy that just goes in the house and grabs his manual alt-az on a tripod will then probably spend 5 minutes star hopping to each dim deep sky object that he wants to look at. Meanwhile, when this process works well, you can spend the next three or four or five hours with objects that are invisible in the eyepiece hitting the tiny chip in that video camera dead center every time.

Using this setup routine I’ve been able to get the Celestron CG-5 mount to do the two basic things you need an compuerized equatorial mount to do:

1. Point at things accurately.

2. Track objects in the sky for time exposures.

I use two telescopes on the mount, an 8 inch Celestron SCT and a new 85mm Televue refractor. I run the 8 inch scope at a focal length of between 1000mm (F5) and about 700mm (F3.5). On the best nights, the mount will point this scope so that every object I ask for is just about dead center on the Mallincam’s small chip. This means that we are hitting a field of view that is at most half a degree wide and about 22 arc minutes tall every time. That’s similar to the field you would get using a 100x eyepiece, which is pretty good.

The refractor has a native focal length of 600mm and I can also run it with a focal reducer and extension tube to get to about a 400mm focal length. This gives me slightly more than a degree of field of view so I can fit bigger things, like

or

or

The main complaint I have about this mount is that it does not track smoothly. I’ll sometimes get 4 frames in a row at one or more minutes that are perfectly sharp and then right after that I’ll get 4 frames in row where the object jumps 3 or 4 pixels to the east or west. I could try using a guider to clean this up, but I get the feeling that the guider will not be able to deal with these large jumps over relatively short exposures.

In the future I plan to spend a ludicrous amount of money on a mount that will track much more smoothly. But I predict that when I do so I’ll miss the relative sophistication of the Celestron software. Being able to use the video camera in the main telescope to do polar alignment can’t be beat. Hopefully the other guys will decide to try and catch up.

At this point I am morally obligated to end this post with yet another picture of M27. So here you go.

Clear skies to you all.

Messier was a comet hunter by trade, but he is much more famous for his catalog of interesting “deep sky” objects. The term “deep sky” in this context generally means non-stellar objects that are now known to be outside the confines of our solar system or, indeed, our galaxy. These objects are “deep” because they tend to be small or faint or both. The idea is that you have to look deep into the sky to detect them. This is not universally true, of course. Many of the brighter Messier objects are easily visible to the naked eye under darker skies and if you know where to look. But the term sticks.

So how did a comet hunter get into the deep sky catalog game? Well, in his scans of the heavens, Messier kept running to objects that looked liked comets in his small telescope (small, fuzzy, non-stellar). However, to his annoyance, the objects did not move with respect to the background stars. This meant that they were something besides the comets that he was interested in. In order to help out his fellow comet hunters he decided to make a catalog of these objects. Over time this list expanded to contain about 100 various nebulae, star clusters, and what we now know to be galaxies outside of our own. Later it was expanded and corrected to contain a final tally of 110 objects. You can look up the list in various places.

The Messier catalog is significant not only because it happens to contain some of the nicest objects that there are to look at in the sky, but also because everyone who becomes interested in deep sky observing eventually needs to find every object on the list. This activity serves as a benchmark of sorts; a common ritual that we can all share.

So of course one of the first things that I did when I broke out my new telescope about a year ago was to start working through the Messier objects that I thought would be practical to see from my yard. It’s good to have a project to work on. Keeps the obsession focussed. I actually did better under the light pollution than I thought I would. All of the showpiece objects were easy to find (M42, M31, M45, etc). I managed to sniff out some dimmer objects and to find hints of low contrast extended star clouds like M33. Still, there were obvious boundaries, especially for objects that sit in the sky glow to the south and west of my house. I never managed to find M74, and have only ever seen the faintest hint of something as bright as the Lagoon Nebula (M8).

When I got the video camera this all changed. Even relatively short time exposures with the CCD puts all of the Messiers well within reach of an observer of modest skill using a modest telescope. To illustrate this for myself, I set out to take “snapshots” of every Messier object as I encountered them with the camera. My goal is to just collect a recognizable rendition of the object that is representative of what you can do with short exposures (a few minutes total) with the Mallincam. I can’t draw, so I think of this as the closest that I will come to sketching what I see like a traditional observer might do. The most esoteric image processing technique that I’ll get into here is stacking multiple short exposures to reduce noise and get a bit of detail enhancement. I’m not going to go out and collect 50 hours of “data.”

Here’s a link to the first 85 images: http://www.flickr.com/photos/79904144@N00/sets/72157627091459246/

There are a few there that I would go back and redo. But for the most part I’m happy with what I have. I’m especially satisfied with the summer stuff. The fact that the camera can reach into the skyglow and get this picture of M8:

or this of the Eagle Nebula (M16):

or this of the Trifid (M20):

never fails to amaze.

The summer Messier objects also brought a few surprises. I had never seen the cluster M11 before, and seeing this in the camera motivated me to get the eyepieces out and take a look too:

I think the one weakness of the video camera is on star clusters. Stars all take on a square-ish pixelly look in video rather than the pinpoint sparkles that appear in the eyepiece. M11 is well worth seeking out and is easy to see.

The globular cluster M22 also surprised me:

I knew all about M13, of course. But the fact that there was this other huge ball of stars in the same sky never occurred to me.

As the summer progressed, it became pretty clear that filling out the last holes in my Messier image catalog would not be difficult. The winter objects that I had missed before would soon come back around and I’d get another shot. So it was time to look further afield for more things to find. Here, another legendary catalog stepped up to provide a longer term project.

In the late 18th and early 19th century the astronomer William Herschel (and his sister Caroline) not only advanced the art of telescope building to various new heights, but also discovered and cataloged an unfathomable number of deep sky objects. Herschel’s list eventually reached some 2500 objects and formed the basis for the modern “New General Catalog”, or NGC for short. In addition, there are two collections of the more notable Herschel objects called the “Herschel 400″ and the “Herschel II” lists which are a good place to start to explore this larger frontier. Over the last year or two the noted Internet Astronomy personality “Uncle Rod” has been working his way through these lists and chronicling his efforts. I figured if he can try for the whole thing, I can try for the brighter stuff from my house. So that’s what I’m doing, starting with the H400 list of the brighter stuff. If nothing else it will answer the question “just how much light pollution is too much for this camera?”

Here’s what I have so far, as far as I know: http://www.flickr.com/photos/79904144@N00/sets/72157627409712613/. Favorite surprises so far?

NGC6946:

The fact that I can see this much of the Veil (NGC6995):

And, the occasional great planetary nebula (NGC6781):

Anyway, as I said before, it’s good to have a project to work on. Keeps the obsession focussed.

I have to end this piece with a shot of M27, The Dumbbell, because it never fails to look good. So here you go.

The simplest answer is that the bike is better because my buddy Nathan was right. He’s been telling me for years that steel bikes suck and carbon fiber is the only way to fly. This is of course infuriating. Nathan is always right. But if I left it at that, we wouldn’t have much of a web page here.

In more detail, the claims about carbon fiber and other exotic materials were, among other things:

1. You can make the frame really light.

2. You can make the frame stiff, so you get more power.

3. At the same time, you can make the frame springy, so the ride is smoother.

Let’s take these one at a time. Since I don’t race bikes, I never thought about frame weight. If a frame is a bit heavier that just means that I have to be in better shape to ride it faster. And besides, the any bicycle is pretty light compared to my tubby 170lb frame. What possible difference could 5 or 6 pounds here or there make?

As for power, I don’t generate power. I’m not Lance Armstrong here. I’m just a slow 40 year old.

Finally, if you want a springy ride, run your tires softer.

So what do I like about the new blue bike? It’s hard to describe, but I’ll put it like this. Say I’m cruising over a flat road and there is a stretch in front of me of about 500 to 1000 feet that’s maybe a small rise or a little false flat. I hit the rise, and I start to feel like I need to shift down a gear to give myself a break. On my previous bikes, I would tend to tire out and go for the lower gear. The biggest single difference with the blue bike is that when I hit these things now, I can hold the gear. As an extension of this I’ve been riding the hills around my house in higher gears than I used to use. All of this makes me feel a lot faster, which makes the bike fun to ride, which makes me ride it more, which makes me go faster. I don’t even hate the compact double gears anymore. They seem as natural and perfect now as my beloved road triple ever did. There is nothing like a bicycle that tells you you are fast.

I’ve been telling myself that a lot of little things about the bike add up to this feeling of extra speed-oriented confidence. “The bike fits better”, or “the ergonomics are better in lots of subtle ways.” This, of course, denies the truth. The truth is that

1. The bike is lighter. This is especially true of the wheels, which seem to weigh only half of what my old wheels did.

2. When I step on the pedals, I get more acceleration (i.e. power). This accounts for that feeling of being able to stick with the gear you have rather than going to an easier one.

3. The bike is more comfortable to ride than the Surly. It’s also surprisingly more comfortable than my beloved steel Specialized in some ways. On a recent ride I ended up going through one of Pittsburgh’s famous 4 mile stretches of washboard pavement. A construction crew had taken off all the blacktop on the road, but had not yet replaced it. In the past, this would have been vibrational torture, especially for my hands and wrists. I recall thinking to myself “wow, I barely feel this at all.”

In other words, all those carbon fiber advocates were right the whole time. How infuriating. The only defense I have left is that the day I did the washboard ride, I think my tires were running a bit soft… maybe 90psi instead of 100. Take that carbon fiber weenies.

In the end, there is no denying that this is bike the true replacement for my beloved blue steel Specialized. It has everything that I loved about that bike and more. At this point I have only two complaints:

1. The steering is slightly slower than the old blue bike … I think this is due to a slightly different frame angle at the front of the bike.

2. The freewheel is really loud. Small children turn around and cry to their mothers “mommy, why does that man have a machine gun under his bike?”

I can live with both of these small foibles. The miracle of it is that the bike has suddenly made me as fast now as I was when I bought the other blue bike 20 years ago. Maybe I’ll go for a thousand miles next year. Haven’t done that since the early 90s. Isn’t technology wonderful?

Extra Note for the beginning of Football Season

FOOTBALL! FOOTBALL! FOOTBALL! FOOTBALL! FOOTBALL!

Thank you.

Now, to some people, this is a feature. There is always that class of hobbyist whose idea of sheer hell is that their interest would somehow blossom into something generates a genuine mass market interest. Even back in the 80s there were already people who thought that computers had been dumbed down too much when people started putting them into boxes for you instead of making you build a wire wrap board. These people must be really pissed off now.

Astronomy serves as a case study in what happens when the mass interest never hits. Let us be realistic. This is a hobby that is primarily enjoyed by a few tens of thousands of users almost all of whom are male and aged between around 41 and 67. As a result, the market has the following odd characteristics:

1. The market is small. There will never be a product here that has the psychological impact of something like the iPhone. Or the Apple II for that matter.

2. The market is conservative. These people really hate change. I’ve mentioned this before, but I can’t think of a single consumer device besides a commercial telescope mount that still uses RS-232 for anything. The only other uses I’ve seen are for esoteric industrial control applications. This is also a market that isn’t quite sure that eyepiece designs from the 19th century still don’t have some technical advantages. I could go on and on.

Because the market is small, there are very few players in the market that can scale their operations to modern levels. The largest companies by far are the ones based in China. Orion Telescope and Celestron are the two most well known names here. They both source all of their products from the same large optical company in China. But, as you move up the food chain cost and quality, you move into smaller and smaller companies. The most well respected maker of refractor telescopes and telescope mounts is Astro-Physics. They make at most few dozen instances of each of their products a year. If you are lucky you can get a mount almost immediately (like now) but usually you’ll wait around a year. If you are unlucky and want a telescope be ready to wait 10 years.

Here is another example: there is a guy who used to work for Astro-Physics who now makes what I hear are bitchin’ tripods for the mounts. But the only way you can hear about him is in a forum post, or a classified ad. You can only order one of his tripods via email, and you will have no idea when the thing will actually be delivered.

You see this over and over again. More than half the time you go to any large dealer of astronomical products and look up something you want to buy, the words “pre-order” or “out of stock” or “back ordered” will be right next to the “buy” button. It’s almost easier to just look at the astronomy equivalent of ebay and wait for used stuff to show up. It will often happen faster than the new stuff. This is an infuriating state of affairs. People (by people I mean me) are now programmed to expect to just go to Amazon and buy anything with one click. The astronomy world destroys this expectation completely.

The issue of scale also comes up in the software business. Several of the most used pieces of astronomy software are primarily developed by one person. Not a small team led by one person: one person writing all the code (off the top of my head I can think of Skytools, PHD guiding, Nebulosity, the Astro-Physics mount software, and Equinox). While all of these tools are certainly functional, they will not win any design awards, and they are limited in the rate at which they evolve (c.f. the market is conservative). It’s just now occurring to folks that wireless control of equipment might be neat. Or that user interfaces might want to evolve past the Visual Basic Forms sort of look and feel.

Of course, there is an upside to all of this smallness. If you are lucky you will find small groups of people making just what you want and doing a really good job with customer service. Every single one of these small companies that I have mentioned (except the tripod guy) runs a mailing list on Yahoo where questions are answered by the people who run the company. Not some customer support staffer in India. The actual guy who runs everything. This is pretty neat. It’s too bad that they can’t hook up with that Amazon commerce engine though.

It’s good that you can find good support because you are going to need it. The combination of the small size and conservative nature of the audience means that there are not a boatload of companies breaking down doors to make telescopes and other astronomical equipment easy to use. I don’t think the industry has ever really gotten past assuming everyone buying telescopes has a little DIY streak in them and enjoys constructing custom wiring harnesses by hand, or hacking marine battery packs, or any number of other little construction projects. Let’s just say that product packaging is not necessarily a great concern. For example, you can buy a $10,000 Dobsonian telescope and then find out that you have to wire up the cooling fans to a power supply on your own because it’s too much trouble for the company to do that in its “factory”. In fact, you can go to manufacturer A’s web site and read about how one of their best features is that they don’t make you wire up the fan by hand, like manufacturer B does. It would be comical if it were not so sad.

Although I have learned to adjust to the strange ways of this industry, I still find myself wishing that it would move from the darkness of an obscure DIY niche into the light of a true mass-market retail industry. I’d like for things to be in stock, and I’d like to not have to worry about knowing whether I am using the right god damned power connectors between my battery and my telescope.

Side note: the power connectors on all this equiment are universally awful. It’s pathetic that you can buy an equatorial mount that costs as much as a used car and someone will still tell you that it order to get a clean power connection you might want to “spread the pins” of the power connector just to be sure. I mean come ON people.

I dream of a day when people will realize that spending hours calibrating a CCD camera just isn’t fun, and they should figure out how to automate the process. Or the day when I’ll be able to 1-click purchase a filter with confidence instead of having to call around to fifteen small-time dealers before I find one. But, I think I’ll just have to make the best of the here and now, because I don’t see that day coming. If anything, the industry is shrinking and what we have now may be the best it will ever be. After all, there can’t be that many people waiting in line to make those tens of dollars.

I was confused that I hated it because it should have been perfect. My favorite bike of all time is the steel road bike I bought just after moving back to PIttsburgh. Here is how I bought that bike:

1. I walked into Pittsburgh Pro Bikes. For a while they were one of the only serious bike shops in the area, and over time I came to not really like them for various reasons, but at this point I didn’t know better.

2. I said “I want to buy a straight up road bike, but with lower gears. I think I’m a 52? Maybe? Or a 54?”

3. The man showed me a Specialized Allez Sport. A straight up road bike with a triple crank in front. The triple crank provided a nice small front chain ring and the gears I needed to get over the Pittsburgh hills.

4. A 52 turned out to be too small. The 54 was just right. I took the bike on to Murray Avenue and rode up and down the hill. The bike felt perfect. I was not conscious of it at the time, but it had the right reach, the right handle bar height, the right length, and the ride handling.

5. I rolled back down to the shop and hit the brakes. I hit them hard because I was used to the ancient side pulls on my old road bike. The brakes bit down and I almost flipped the bike over forward. Now those are great brakes.

I bought the bike that day. The whole process took maybe an hour.

I spent a few months thinking about the bike I should buy to replace it. I thought that the characteristics of the Specialized that I liked were the nice steel frame, the relatively inexpensive mid-end Shimano drive-train, and the overall size and fit. The Surly appeared to me to match most of these characteristics and also provided the ability to use fatter tires and fenders and such. Perfect, right? Wrong.

At first I thought I just had to adjust to the gearing. The new fashion in gearing is the so-called “compact double crank” wherein you take advantage of the fact that you can fit ten fucking speeds in the back of the bike to get low gears by using a smaller small chainring in front. Instead of the standard 53/39 combination of years past, the new road bikes now come with a 50/34. With a wide range of speeds in the back (11-28, or 11-32) you get a reasonable low gear and a high gear that only a guy with legs larger than his chest can use.

I am used to riding a “road triple”, meaning I have a smaller range of gears in the back (13-26) and three chainrings in front (52-42-30). The triple crank in front has always caused consternations in the road bike crowd. You will hear them whine that it is heavy, shifts poorly, is heavy, and also makes your penis smaller. All of these things are true, but none of them matter.

The Surly came with a compact double, though with only nine speeds. I stuck a 12-27 on the thing to get the lower gears I wanted and rode off into my Pittsburgh hills. I found the experience to be miserable. None of my gears were in the right place. I could never work out exactly when to make the too-large jump from the 34 to the 50. I rode slower than I have ever ridden on my standard loops. I put it up to getting older, and figured it would get better this year.

It did not get better. If anything I got even slower. Soon, I dreaded going out on the bike at all. And this made me even slower.

Something else that did not get better on the bike was the shitty shifting and the crappy brakes. I had the shop try to adjust the shifting a few times, but it would always hang up on one of the middle cogs and annoy me as a tried to downshift to slog up the next hill. This made the feeling of slowness even worse. This in turn made me even more reluctant to ride the bike. The Allez never shifted badly. Even after I crashed it once at 30 miles an hour I never had any trouble. One has to conclude that the 1993 just-worse-than-Shimano-105 parts are just that much better than the 2010 just-worse-than-Shimano-105 parts. My advice to new bike buyers: do not buy a bike with parts cheaper than 105.

My second piece of advice to new bike buyers: do not settle for anything but the Shimano dual-pivot side pull brakes. Remember those brakes that almost flipped by bike over? Those were the Shimano brakes. The Surly uses these Tektro brakes which on the surface look like a similar design. The problem is that they are crap. You have to use an inordinate amount of pressure on the levers to make the bike stop. On the steep hill down from my house this means that I’m holding on for dear life and squeezing all the blood out of my hands. I hate it. So heed my advice. Be very careful when reading the parts specifications for that production road bike you are about to buy. You want Shimano brakes.

Another unexpected annoyance was the fat tires. These tires stick to everything. I’d get to the end of a ride with a million tiny little pebbles embedded in the rubber. I figured this would get better over time too, and it did. Sort of. I soon lost interest in the fat tires. And, since I never ride in the rain, I never actually fitted the fenders that would fit into the frame and under the shitty brakes.

The final problems I have with the Surly are my fault. I set up the fit slightly wrong, with the reach slightly long and the bars slightly too high. I did this with my Bike Friday as well. You’d think I’d learn. In any case, the result was a relatively slow heavy bike with fat tires and a clunky drive train.

The more I hated the bike, the more I thought about why I hated the bike. I went over my bike buying experience again and again trying to work out where I had gone wrong. Aside from not actually trying the Surly frame before buying it, I could not see where I had really failed.

Then I had an epiphany.

I had bought the wrong bike because I had misread the sort of bike that I thought I wanted to buy. I had always assumed that what I liked about the Specialized was that it was more practical version of the straight-up racing bike, and that if I got an even more practical bike I’d be even happier. This was incorrect. What I liked about the Specialized Allez was that it was a straight-up racing bike with more practical gearing. I liked the bike because it was light and felt fast. The fact that they had the courtesy to make the fit and gearing more comfortable was just a happy coincidence of marketing. All these years I have thought that what I wanted was a steel all-around bike, since I don’t race and don’t really ride that fast anyway. The truth is that what I want is a fast bike which I can then take out and ride too slowly. But at least I’ll feel fast on it.

My mission was now clear. What I was after was the 2011 version of the Specialized Allez Sport. If you ask the current market “Hey, I want a straight up road bike with lower gears and a slightly more comfortable fit, what should I buy?” the market will answer “You should buy a production carbon-fiber road bike designed with one of the ‘comfort’ geometries.” Most companies that make road bikes do this now: Trek, Specialized, Jamis and even the more hard core racing brands like Cervelo.

Here is Trek’s version of this bike: the Madone 4.5. It even comes with a triple crank! I trekked on down to the Trek store and had the single worst bicycle buying experience that I have ever had in my entire life. It started out OK. They seemed very interested in getting me something with the right fit. This involved standing in front of a computer and taking various cryptic measurements. When I finally got out on the bike my seat was an inch too low and the bike was so out of adjustment that the chain dropped three cogs riding up the ramp from the Whole Foods back to the Trek Store. I will never set foot in a Trek store again.

I then went back to Pro Bikes. I wasn’t sure I’d actually buy from them, but I figured I should at least try the current Specialized bikes since I had struck gold with Specialized before. I stood in the store for about 45 minutes watching them deal with the crowd of people they had at the end of the day. I don’t begrudge them not helping me out. It was a busy end of day crowd. I do begrudge them not even asking if I needed anything.

Luckily, I won’t have to deal with my inner grudges, because I found what I needed down the street at BikeTek. I had talked to these guys last year when I decided to buy the Surly and the store owner had been a bit off-putting with his constant cheerleading for carbon frames. Luckily, the current staff of the store is great. They let me ride about five different bikes at various price levels and spent the time to make sure they were in good adjustment. In the end the bike that felt the most like the Specialized of yore was this one:

I decided to get this one because it had Ultegra on it. This was to overcompensate for my horrible experience with the Tiagra on the Surly. Felt also makes a 105 version of this bike which would have been just fine, but at this point in my life I figured why take chances. Also: I like the blue.

So: quick frame with comfortable fit: check. Real Shimano brakes: check. Bike can shift into all gears without choking on itself: check. The BikeTek guys even put the bike on a stand for me to double check the seat height and the reach and such. I had them put on a slightly longer stem. The fit is just right. I’m going to resist the urge to tinker with it and ruin it (the bars could probably be a bit lower…but no no no).

I took the bike out this morning for its first ride longer than three blocks long in Squirrel Hill. I went eight miles through North park and then back up the hill to my house. Here is what was in my head the whole time: man, I think the bike computer must be adjusted wrong, it’s reading my speed as too fast. I then rode up my hill on a cog one gear higher than I’ve been able to use in the last year and a half.

I don’t entirely understand why this happened. The new bike is not that much lighter than the old one. Just a few pounds here and there. I’m going to speculate that it’s the wheels.

Anyway. The Surly will go on Craig’s list. Or maybe it will just sit in my office looking pretty, but not getting ridden that much. Hopefully the next time I buy a bike I’ll remember what sort of bike I actually want. And I’ll remember about the brakes.

Footnote about the brakes

I screw up this brakes thing over and over again. The last bike I bought before the Surly was a Bike Friday folding bike. It also had longer reach side-pull and then later V-brakes, both of which I hated. This was because I bought the touring version of the bike (more practical!) instead of the road bike version (sound familiar?). I do not learn quickly.

The defining aspect of the Mallincam which makes it different than other astronomical cameras is that its output is an analog video signal. A more traditional CCD or digital camera captures light into the wells of its sensor and then when the exposure is done, the voltages are read out of the sensors wells one at a time and converted into discrete digital values. These are then sent over a wire to a storage card (digital camera) or your computer (CCD). To actually see a picture you have to do some post-processing on the file to convert it into an image format that you can display and then parse with your eyeballs.

The Mallincam is different. There are two outputs on the back of the camera: one for S-video and one for composite video. You hook a regular analog video cable to these ports and then to a monitor and you can look at images directly from the camera. It’s as if you hooked up a camcorder from the 1990s to the back of your telescope. This is a great convenience if you want to just look at the pictures and not bother with any computer-based post-processing. Viewing with an old CRT security monitor gives you images that are as good or in some ways better than you can manage in a computer. The CRT has a luminosity to it that images confined to LCD screens lack. Believe it or not you can still find some CRTs for sale… but there are also people who use small and very expensive professional LCD video monitors.

Me, I use a computer. I actually ran a CRT screen side by side for a couple of nights as well, but didn’t see too much advantage in it. Anyway, I always have my laptop nearby since it’s running my planetarium and observation logging software. So naturally I’d want to use it to capture pictures. This leads to the question of how to capture video frames in the machine. On my Macintosh laptop, I tried two different schemes:

1. Firewire capture device, some Mac software for image adjustment. I bought a relatively expensive Canopus capture device. S-video goes in one side and Firewire goes into the Mac. Very high quality. Sadly, I was never happy with the capture and processing end. There is a tool called Camtwist with a lot of nice features, and even some filters specific to the Mallincam. Unfortunately it the basic tools it has for adjusting contrast, gamma, color and brightness are hard to use and much too fussy. The astronomy filters are pretty cool, especially if you are limited to shorter exposures. But the lack of a good set of basic controls killed this tool for me. The other worry with this tool is that it’s essentially written by two guys who have stopped working on it, so new versions of MacOS are sure to break it.

2. USB capture device under Windows. Again, the device has an S-video (or composite) input and then hooks up to your computer with a USB cable. For very little money you can pick up a “Dazzle” video capture box on Amazon. The quality is not as good as the Canopus, and you need special drivers that may or may not work on your Windows system. I had to buy and install Parallels to make this work. The drivers did not work in VMWare. In a strange bit of turnabout, once you get the device working there is a basic capture program that is much better than the Mac stuff in the “just works” department. I refer to AmCap.

AmCap doesn’t look like much on the outside. It has your basic shitty Windows XP layout and various modal dialog boxes. But, it does a couple of critical things right, which I will now explain. All of the Mac video capture progams assume that your goal is to capture a huge stream into a movie and then import it into Final Cut or iMovie or something. What this ends up meaning is that it’s hard to find software that has the video feed in one window and the adjustments in another window and lets you make adjustments to the video while seeing the feed change in real time. This is exactly what AmCap does.

When you fire it up, the main window has the output from the video feed. You can then open an adjustments dialog and drag it off to the side and push the brightness, contrast, saturation and other knobs around to fix up the picture. The sliders have an effective range of adjustments and a good “scale” in that they don’t change too fast which was my complaint about the Camtwist adjustments.

I should put a screen shot here to show you what I mean, but I don’t have my camera running to do so, so you’ll have to wait for later.

In practice the main adjustments you end up making are brightness and contrast. In a relatively light polluted environment like my back yard, you are always fighting the brightness of the skyglow and trying to beat it down without losing detail in the object that you are looking at. So the scheme is to drive the brightness down as much as you can and push the contrast back up to get some detail back. All the while you want to keep and eye on the noise. In the best cases, you can get good object detail and a nice dark background with acceptable noise, like this:

In the worst cases, I’ll have the brightness slider bottomed out and still have a huge glowing ball of noise in the frame, like in this shot:

I was looking at this object low in a very hazy sky, thus all the awful noise. This is about the best you can do with just AmCap. You could, and people do, use additional devices to adjust the signal before it hits the capture device. The Mallincam has spawned a large amount of interest among telescope geeks in archaic analog video processing devices to try and fight the dual problems of background brightness and noise. The most popular of these are based on old time base correctors that you used to use to copy old VHS tapes. These are hard to find since the main use for them was pirating VHS video tapes that no one cares about anymore. But if you snoop around you can still find them. Rock Mallin used to sell a modified one that he called the “DVE”, but he ran out. You can even find versions of these devices that allow you more sophisticated adjustments in color, brightness and contrast. I have not as yet experimented with anything like this, mostly because of the cost and also because I don’t want to add yet another box to my chain of complexity. But, if I ever run longer exposures that I do now, I’ll look into it more carefully.

AmCap also lets you capture single frames out of the video feed into a bitmap image file that you can then look at later. I’ve gotten into the habit of making a folder for each object that I look at on a given night and capturing 5 or 10 good frames into the folder. “Good” here is defined mostly by the quality of the tracking during the exposure. The mount is not always perfect, alas.

For a while I’d go over my screen shots at the end of the night and pick one that I liked for each object and throw them up on flickr. Here is a favorite object out of the southern summer sky, the Eagle Nebua:

It’s a bit noisy and washed out because it is relatively low in the southern sky. This puts it right in the worst sky glow that I have in my yard. On a bad night you can’t even see many stars with binoculars in that part of the sky, and it’s supposed to be filled with the rich star clouds of the Milky Way.

Anyway, a week or so ago I discovered that if I had five or ten good frames that were fairly well aligned, I could use some code in the Nebulosity application to “stack” the frames together and smooth out the noise and detail. What you do is tell Nebulosity how to align the pictures, and then just tell it to chew on the frames. The result, after a 5 minutes of Curves adjustment in Photoshop, looks like this:

This is really fantastic in my opinion. It’s about ten minutes of work above and beyond staring at the original video and capturing a few good exposures. But the stacking makes a big difference in the final quality of the picture. If you are interested, the tutorial I used to figure out Nebulosity’s stacking feature is here. Skip the parts about pre-processing and go right to the explanation of how to align images and do Standard Deviation stacking. It’s actually possible to do some dark frame subtraction with the Mallincam as well, but if you start down that road pretty soon you’ll find yourself running 8 hours of LRGB data collection when you should sleeping. I’m not sure I want to go there yet.

If you are observing at this point that all of this seems a bit similar to CCD imaging, I don’t think you are off base. There are similarities, but there are also differences. I think the Mallincam still does more pre-processing of the image than even one shot color CCD cameras do. The result is that you can can both observe the object in “real time” and then later post-process the images in a limited way to make them prettier. I like doing both.

That said, it’s not hard to imagine someone building a more streamlined CCD capture application that did some of the work that the Mallincam’s video hardware does. It should not be beyond the realm of possibility to quickly capture data from a short CCD exposure and process it into a color image in real time without all of the baggage of a long winded traditional CCD calibration and image processing workflow. Imagine an iPad app that can talk to one of the new eyepiece-sized CCD guider cameras, capture an image and show it to you instantly while you stand next to the telescope… maybe even over wifi. You could then save the individual files to your computer later to do stacking and other processing. All things being equal I’d buy that app.

To close, here are two more shots from my recent nights out. First, M8, the Lagoon nebula:

This is five stacked frames. Next, M17, the Swan. This is also around five stacked frames.

The best part of summer is coming. Hopefully the skies will be clear enough to see what’s up there.

My first stop for the night was M64. I had found that the only image I had of M64 was a bit of a blurry mess because the focus of my telescope had gone off as a I captured it. So I took another shot at it, and it came out better:

This is about a 1 minute exposure. I also used the opportunity afforded by a well behaved mount to take 5 separate frames at 1 minute, and also a “dark” frame with the telescope covered up. I then used a cool program called Nebulosity to combine all these images and use the dark frame to clean up warm pixel noise and generally smooth things out. The result is this:

Noticeably nicer, without a whole lot more work.

After M64, I hopped over to the nearby NGC 5005 to add a new object to my “observed” list. The main reason people buy telescopes is to collect objects into an “observed” list. Anyway, this proved to be a nicer object than some of the smaller “M” galaxies in the area, with a pretty compact spiral:

From there, I then jumped into the Coma Berenices cluster and got the surprise of the night. I centerd my frame on the galaxy known as (I thought) NGC 4889. But, as you can see from the picture, the object is really small. I wasn’t really sure what I was looking at. To make things more confusing, Skytools did not think that there was any object named NGC 4889. It only knew about NGC 4884. Well, it turns out that one of many bugs in the NGC catalog is that these two objects are the same. There is only 4884. This mystery solved I stared at the field of view for a while, and noted a ton of little “stars” that looked suspiciously fuzzy. What could those be?

Since we live in the future there is an oracle in the sky that can tell us what these things are now, and all you have to do is send it a simple picture. I refer, of course, to the Astronmetry blind plate solver. I have mentioned this engine before, but at the time I did not give it enough extended credit. This system is as close to magic as we can get in the modern world. Best of all, it combines all three major dork passions into one glorious nexus of geekdom: it’s a computer that processes photographs and tells you what astronomical objects you telescope is pointing at.

Here is the picture I sent it:

The astrometry bot extracts everything out of the frame that looks like a star, and then compares the star patterns with a huge index that has been built from one of the more comprehensive catalogs of all stars down to some ridiculously faint magnitude. If it can find a strong enough match in this index, then with no information other than a noisy image, the system can tell you:

1. The exact celestial coordinates of the center of the picture.

2. The size of the field of view.

3. The name of every interesting object in the field.

4. Which way points north.

And so on. This used to take hours of painstaking work comparing your picture against a paper atlas. Now you send a picture to a web site and wait about 45 seconds, and you get back something like this:

The only thing more magical would be if it ran natively on an iPad (ha ha).

What the astrometry bot told me was that I had wandered in to a huge cluster of galactic bodies. The frame contains seventeen island universes each made up of hundreds of millions of stars. Truly a fantastic sight.

I rounded out the night with a reminder of what is to come over the next couple of months. I sent the telescope over to one of my favorite objects, the Trifid Nebula (M20). Images of this object through a six inch scope were what convinced me to take the plunge at the Mallincam in the first place, and the camera did not let me down. Here is a set of five frames, 45 seconds of exposure in each:

It should not be possible that this looks this good. Especially since the area of the sky this sits in is in the worst of the light pollution in my yard (to the south and west).

I’m looking forward to shifting from galaxy hunting to looking at the great nebulas of the summer. As another teaser, here is the Dumbbell (M27).

I think I’ll go to bed early tonight.

There are three parts to the puzzle:

1. Mount setup, especially polar alignment.

2. Picking the right effective focal length.

3. Setting up the computer for image capture.

Mount and Alignment

The first two go hand in hand. So we will cover them in an interleaved fashion. It is axiomatic that the performance of the mount determines the focal length you can use. Since I am cheap, I bought an inexpensive Celestron mount (the CG-5) with relatively crude mechanics. This means that it has rather large tracking errors which would be magnified greatly by a long focal length. In addition, I am lazy so I have not set up an autoguider to correct those tracking errors. This means:

1. I should use the shortest focal length that I can get away with.

2. I should set up the mount as well as possible (within the constraints of not having a permanent position) to minimize tracking errors created by misalignment and such.

My telescope has an aperture of 200mm and a native focal length of around 2000mm (F10). After playing with many combinations, I decided that for my telescope while the image scale at F5 (1000mm) was pleasing, especially with smaller objects, the mount just could not track well enough. So, I finally settled on a setup that gives me F3.5 (around 700mm).

The following images of the galaxy M51 illustrate the difference in image scale and tracking quality:

First, at F3:

Second, at F3.5 to F4:

Finally, at F5 or a bit more:

The shot at F3 has way too much vignetting to really be usable. At F3.5 things are a lot better. The tracking is a tiny bit worse, but still tolerable. You can see a lot of detail in the object. Finally, at F5 the object is a nicer size, but we are right on the edge of what the mount can manage without guiding. The stars are a bit fat and the detail in the object can get blurred.

The second half of the mount performance equation is how well we set the mount up in the first place. Recall that the general scheme goes like this:

1. Set up the mount on the patio. Point the leg of the tripod under the polar axis roughly north.

2. Put the scope on the mount and balance.

3. When it is dark enough, turn the telescope sideways so you can look through the hole in the polar axis. Adjust the mount until you can see Polaris in the hole.

4. Plug the mount in and do a pointing alignment. The mount will point at 2 stars in one side of the sky and up to 4 on the other side.

5. Try to end step four on a star near the meridian and fairly high in the sky. Use this star to run the polar alignment software in the mount.

While this seems simple enough in principle, the mechanics of the mount and the temperamental nature of the software make every night a new adventure. Here are my tips for making your setup a less stressful experience. Note that these tips are by no means a complete method for foolproof setup. I still find that every other time I go out something weird happens and I throw my hands up in frustration. I find that it’s better to go out expecting the to do the alignment twice, because you will anyway.

So, things to watch out for when setting up a Celestron CG-5:

1. If you are doing the 2+4 star alignment and the mount does not seem to be getting any better at pointing, you probably aligned on the wrong star a couple of steps back. Unplug the mount and try again. Don’t try to fix it, just start over. The UI on the handbox is not really set up to effectively replace alignment information. I have tried to do this a few times when I realized that everything had gone wrong, and it just makes it worse.

2. The accuracy of the initial pointing will vary widely based on how the mount is feeling or whether you got lucky on your initial rough polar alignment. Don’t be surprised if the first couple of stars don’t even make it into a wide field finder scope. My finder is 5 degrees across and yesterday I spent the whole night missing. But, this does not really effect the final accuracy of the pointing system. After all my frustrations, I got the best pointing I have ever had last night. Good tracking too.

3. Don’t start aligning the mount too early. Without other stars as references, you are likely to guess badly and then you need to go back to step 1.

4. If you have a sequence of stars that works, milk it for as long as possible. Whenever you change the stars you use for alignment you are just asking for the mount to change up on you and go nuts. This happened to me when I decided to toss Dubhe into my list one night. Two problems: the mount did not seem to point at Dubhe, and I don’t really know where Dubhe is. Needless to say I started over again.

5. Try and arrange for the +4 part of the 2+4 to be on the side of the meridian where you want to be working for most of the night so you avoid doing a meridian flip. Also, I have had weird problems with the mount pointing off into la-la land if I do a meridian flip just before or right after finishing the polar alignment. So beware. Generally I try to end up in the West, because the sky to the West is not blocked by my house.

6. Plan ahead with the alignment stars to avoid areas of your sky blocked by trees, or houses. This is why aligning in the Eastern half of the sky doesn’t work for me.

7. When adjusting the latitude of the polar axis with the awful hand screw, always miss too low on purpose so that you hit alignment while tightening the screw. This way it won’t loosen later.

8. Occasionally, usually when everything has gone perfectly and you are polar aligned in 10 minutes, your first GOTO will send the scope pointing into the ground. At this point you should power down and go inside and have a beer. Since you are setting up a video camera, you don’t need to worry about wrecking your dark adaption. This is the best thing by far about using this camera, by the way.

Finally, I like to align with a high power eyepiece and switch to the camera after. This calibrates the pointing system with a smaller field of view, which in my experience means you get better pointing.

If all of this seems like a lot of work, it is. Last night I spent about 90 minutes doing trying to make sure that I could repeatably get a good polar alignment in a systematic fashion. I can’t really say I succeeded, because I was still confused about a few things. Also, I only got to spend an hour actually looking at anything. But The M51 capture above made it worth it.

The Rest

Now that the scope is set up, here is the rest of the checklist.

1. Connect the control and video cables to the camera.

2. Plug the video camera into the USB capture box. I use a cheap Dazzle DVC100. I have also played with a Firewire box and it is better, but the post processing tools, strangely, are better on Windows. So I’m using USB for now.

3. Fire up Parallels on the Mac. I use this because VMWare would not talk to my video capture widget. After the capture device connects, run AMCap to capture video. This is a .NET example program that does video capture. I use it because the brightness and contrast controls are much better than anything I’ve found on in MacOS for adjusting the video in real time. There are a few video processing applications for MacOS, but the native brightness/contrast/color controls are all awful. Clearly someone needs to fill this void.

4. Put the focussing mask on the telescope and go outside with the iPhone and focus the scope using the iPhone to watch the video feed via VNC. This is the future baby.

5. Take the mask off and go back inside with the hand controller for the mount. Now you can sit inside and point the telescope at what you want to see. Adjust the video with AmCap. Do screen captures to record your conquests.

I use Skytools to make lists of things to see. Skytools is very useful, but I find the UI clunky. I would like someone to take his databases and make a leaner planning program for the iPad. You could make tens of dollars doing this.

Lately, I’ve been working in the Virgo Cluster of galaxies because it’s almost summer and this is my last chance until next year. A month ago I was happy to get this out of focus and not so detailed shot of M87 and some companions. I was just amazed that there was anything there at all:

Last weekend, I managed to do this:

This has the nice feature that it’s actually in focus. The tracking is also a lot better. Good enough to capture this small detail in M87: the famous jet. Here is a slightly closer look:

Here are a few other favorites from this area and close by:

M94:

M101:

NGC 4631:

and M88:

Finally, a Surprise

One thing I’ve been doing to make myself feel better is to revisit objects I looked at last month and try to do better this month. Along these lines, I’ve taken a bunch of pictures of that old favorite, the Whirlpool Galaxy M51. Here is my first one from two months ago:

Here is the one I took yesterday:

I’m fairly happy with the progress.

Having taken so many pictures of the same object, I came across the following cosmic surprise. Here is a shot of the galaxy taken on May 30:

And then again two days later:

If you study the two pictures you will note that there is a “new” star in the second one that is not in the first. To the left of the core there is a straight line of three stars. The middle one is the new one. If you don’t feel like finding it, go to the Flickr image and it’s already marked there.

It turns out that this is a supernova that had been discovered by some amateurs in France just the day before. A single star 35 million light years away explodes with such violence that a little video camera in my sky-glow-filled suburban back yard can pick it up as a new point of light in a 45 second exposure. I never would have imagined that this would be possible 25 years ago.

I guess I’ll have to get a guider.