Astro Anarchy

Thursday, February 12, 2009

A POD

As seen in the image, my Observatory locates in very light polluted location.

I bought this observatory dome from Ian - Altair Astro UK.

http://www.altairastro.com/pod.htm

The POD (Persomnal Observatory Dome) is manufactured by a

Canadian company, SkyShed Obsevatories,

http://www.skyshedpod.com/

After long thinkikg I ended up to this model.

Mainly becouse there was much good feed back about the system.

the other reason was the reasonable price and easy assembly.

Becouse I'm imaging from midle of the town, the outlook of the tower is important too.

I don't want people to complain about ugly shed in the roof deck in the midle of town.

(It's clearly visible to the opposite park)

Inside the dome, there is a 12" Meade LX200GPS on the 700mm steal pier

and lots of assesories.

Even though, there is plenty of space to walk around the scope.

The model of the observatory is somewhere between traditional dome and roll off shed.

I have tested it under cloudy sky and it will give a really good protection against winds.

An other great thing is, that now I can just close the dome and leave everythin ready for the next imaging session.

In this type of observatory, there is a problem with imagingn directly to the Zenith.

I solved this problem by a simple modification.

Instead placing telescope pier off center, I made the whole dome to slide away

to clear the Zenith view.

When access to the Zenith is not needed the dome can be pulled back to maximize

the wind protection.

In this image the slideing system is visible. It's a very simple solution where slit

in the plywood works as a guide and everything can be locked down by a wing nut attached to an

anchor bolt.

In near future I will attach six wheels under the dome to make it move smoothly.

In above image is a principle, how standard furniture whells will be placed.

Main dimensions of the POD ( Inches)

3. Universe Today article

A new article by Tammy Plotner in Universe Today:

http://www.universetoday.com/2009/02/08/look-into-the-cats-eye/#more-24878

At this time I turned the Hubble Space Telescopes image of "Cat's eye" Nebula

to the spatial format.

At the article, there was a comment about error in the original image pair by B. Crumb.

He wrote:

"The axis of the bipolar flow of the planetary nebula doesn't look quite right to me. It doesn't seem to match the velocity measures made of various features within the nebulosity, nor the calculated about 32 degrees to the line of sight. With blunt criticism, Jukka Metsavainio might just like to check a few paper on the morphology of planetary nebula (G.Pascoli work of 1999 comes to mind.), to make sure the stereo images show what has already been derived.Nice pic though."

I have fixed the image pair after the previous comment, thanks B. Crumb.

The Parallel Vision version of fixed Cat's eye Nebula. Hubble Heritage image edited by me.

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

2. Universe Today article

It looks like Tammy Plotner and I will work together for some time.

Yesterday there was a new article in Universe Today by Tammy.

This time I turned one of the Hubble Heritage images,

MGC281, to a Stereo Pair format.

Distances and shapes in 3D-image are visualizations,

since we don't have enough information to buil an accurate model.

However, the 3D-model of the target is not only

a lucky guess as there is many known "anchor points" in the image,

witch can be used to estimate the actual forms

and the relative distances.

You can read the article from:

http://www.universetoday.com/2009/02/02/journey-inside-a-bok-globule/

Sunday, February 1, 2009

The heart & Soul Nebula as an Stereo Pair.

Ones again, I turned this image of "Heart & Soul" Nebula to a Stereo pair format by adding some volume. The result is more or less an educational guess about real 3D appearance of this formation. - Two versions, first for Parallel Vision , and the second for Cross Vision method.

I made this stereo pair to show the "real" nature of this target. The gas and stars are floating in three dimensional space forming three dimensional forms, rather than being a 2D painting on the canvas.

The "Soul" part of the Nebula (Left) seems to be closer to us

by some sources, some other sources states, that it has a same distance as

the "heart" (Right).

In this Stereo precentation the previous option is realized.

The original image and the imaging information can be found here:

http://astroanarchy.blogspot.com/2009/01/firs-light-for-qhy9.html

Viewing instructions, please, look for the Right hand side menu.

Saturday, January 31, 2009

APOD

[nasa-large.jpg]

Astronomy Picture of the Day

My "Sh2-240" Supernova Remnant image was selected as an "Astronomy Picture of the Day" by the NASA. You can see the NASA page here: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090131.html

This was my second APOD, previous one can be seen here:

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap081107.html