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Serious Home Observatories
peatbakke writes: "Here's an interesting article about the affordability of backyard observatories. Rich kids get all the fun at the moment, but it's getting better." Getting away from city lights may be the hardest part, though.
you could use a program like Celestia and look into the heavens from your own computer monitor.
Someone mutters and an observatory gutters
And soon it shall be morning
If you want to see the stars without using a telescope, KStars is an excellent program. It's simply an amazing piece of work.
You can do stuff like click on a star to get a real picture of it from various sources.
It's, of course, free and open source.
I've been thinking about this topic for quite a while now; there really should be some way to take all those wal-mart USB Telescopes and do something meaningful with them.
However, since I refuse to waste space on a NYT cookie, all I can say which is meaningful at all is:
"Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of those!"
Sigh.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
Some colleagues of mine has a large radio telescope dish in their back garden, with a couple of racks of electronics in the kitchen. Most of this gear, I think, came out of the skip at a company they did some work for, so I don't think you have to be very rich to do this.
When it detects some aliens a red light flashes and a siren goes off. So far they've all been false alarms.
Here
I suppose you don't have eyes either, right?
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Here is a two great sites filled with reviews and tips on astro. grear.
e views.com/
http://www.cloudynights.com/
http://www.scoper
http://www.intellipool.se/ - Intellipool Network Monitor
The obligatory whiny, idiotic complaint about having to register for the New York Times.
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You don't need $150,000 investment to enjoy the night skies. Begin with naked-eye or binoculars (10x50 allow seeing many deep-sky objects). Next step is a simple telescope - 8" Dobsonian reflector costs under $400. Even computerized "go-to" telescopes are mostly under $2000, except high-end models.
/.ers like - hacking cheap CCD webcams to get long exposure times. This allows to take really great astro pictures even within light-polluted cities. Good place to start is QCUIAG Yahoo group.
Light pollution is a big problem in cities. You may have to drive quite a bit to see the Milky Way.
Join your local amateur astronomy group (even if you don't have an instrument), these guys are generally very helpful and usually have access to some dark and safe observing sites.
A topic that many
You're not very bright are you. The light from the city that troubles the astronomers is not the lite from the actual light sources, but the light that's reflected from the atmosphere. And that light can't really be avoided (unless you climb up a really high mountain etc.). So, climb up from your well and go back to school.
Getting away from city lights may be the hardest part, though.
Light pollutions is a huge problem. I realized this myself when I started using a telescope, many nights was I standing just outside our house. Streetlights and light from our neighbours were very disturbing. So one time, I went to a nearby airfield (a very small one) and it was so dark i couldn't see my own hand. Then we looked up and saw the milky way. Not just like a faint barely visible ribbon, but it was really really bright. It was like a wide bright flood of stars across the sky, and it was basically impossible to see any constellations. Haven't seen anything quite like it before or after. Ofcourse, the lack of any artificial light source was only one good thing; the sky was probably more clear than ever. Too bad I left my telescope when I went to college...
Will work for bandwidth
Maybe I should go back to school too, so that I learn how to spell. :-P
If you're into immediate gratification, the most recent 500 observations are also available. The Yorkshire weather isn't always cooperative, so it might be a while before you get your image.
It's not the same as putting your eye to the lens, but I don't have room for a 46cm telescope, and viewing conditions are far from ideal anywhere in New Jersey!
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." --Napoleon Bonaparte
Remember that old story about how you can stand at the bottom of a well and see the stars during the day because the light from the sun is blocked out?
The sun is still shining, and the athmosphere is still spreading the light from the sun. Standing in a well wont change that...
Will work for bandwidth
I propose the idea that, like being able to stream mdeia from a shoutcast server, why not create a system of servers that allow a home users to be able to log in and stream a feed of what any number of observatories may be watching that night. Real time transmissions of focussing, change of viewing targets, etc. Show external Dish view feeds, control room feeds. Call it StarCast, StartStream, or whatever. I'd subscribe in a second.
handybundler
City lights will not be an issue at the level an amateur operates at.
Absolutely incorect. City lights affect observation at any level, including simply looking at the sky with the naked eye.
I used to live in a quite sparsely populated area where the milky way was observable easily on clear nights, and with my telescop I could see some quite faint nebulae. Since moving to central New Jersey there has been no sight of the Milky Way, and my telescope has stayed in the closet except for occasional comets and other bright object viewing.
Many older observatories are finding that they are being closed out of deep space as population around them has grown.
Getting away from city lights may be the hardest part, though.
Getting away from city lights is easy.
Leave the city. The lights won't follow you, I promise.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
One day,.. when I've repaid the ten thousand pounds of debt I owe the bank, my landlord, my brother and various other people that I;ve run up over the last year of (mostly) unemployment;... once I've upgraded this PoS to a reasonable spec machine, and moved up to proper broadband... once I've digitised all my media onto a nice fat RAID file server... in other words, once I find someone prepared to pay me for my ten years' commerical IT experience, five years of Perl and Linux, BSD, security, networking, and system admin skills... even though I've only ever /officially/ worked as a Perl programmer... in other words, when hell freezes over... I'm gonna get me a nice Meade LX200, interface it with my Linux box, get the Astronomical Software distribution, and do some quiet little research into something unsexy like variable stars, something where professional astronomers haven't yet made all progress impossible to the amateur. I've heard it said that astronomy is one of the only remaining areas of science where a dedicated amateur can still produce useful original research. In a parallel universe, where I don't get sacked for advocating Free software (and pointing out that the employer is stealing GPL'd code and selling it without including the source, license, or acknowledgment.)
But I digress.
In the back of Astronomy magazine you can see many ads for home domes like these. That, I think, would give you absolute maximum geek points...
Sigh. Life is hard.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
>> Remember that old story about how you can stand at the bottom of a well and see the stars during the day because the light from the sun is blocked out?
> The sun is still shining, and the athmosphere is still spreading the light from the sun. Standing in a well wont change that...
Well, actually, you can see some stars (such as Sirius) in the day, as long as you know exactly where to look. I have successfully tracked Venus and Jupiter too, after watching them with a telescope through the morning, but as soon as I moved the telescope off the field of view, I could no longer find them!
Whenever I go outside to observe in my suburban light polluted neighborhood, there is a pesky street light. With my neighbor's permission, I shine a laser pointer ($16 - from my local mega office supply store) at the photo diode switch located as a knob on top of the lamp. I use a tripod, cloths pin, and some tape/rubber bands to hold the pointer in place. The photodiode holes are ususally oriented toward the west.
There are people working to try to limit obnoxious outdoor lighting. They are the folks and associates of the International Dark Sky Association at http://www.darksky.org
If you are tooling around the inland waterway area of Stone Harbor, NJ, in one of the multi-million dollar beach houses, there's a large (10-20ft dia) silvered dome on one of the waterfront places.
No idea who owns it or anything, but it's definitely a nice cap to a beautiful house. Retracting door, rotating dome, etc...
When we were there, it was covered with a tarp, possibly for repairs or something, but you could still tell it was an observatory.
We already have a 30 foot dome, a 30" Dobsonian, 12" reflecting binoculars, and more.
http://www.astronomycentre.org.uk/
This includes grinding the mirror yourself, by the way. With a bit of care and patience, you can grind and polish a mirror that is accurate to within 1/10th of a wavelength of light.... that's quite a bit better than what you usually end up with when buying one from a store. I'm in the process of polishing a 16" mirror at the moment.... my first! The 16" blank, along with an 8" blank for a smaller scope and all the grinding/polishing materials cost me around $300. That doesn't include the optical tube assembly or aluminizing the mirror, but the mirror itself is usually the most expensive part anyway.
There are also those who add their own "go to" drives and such, but that seems like a bit much for me... at least with THIS scope.
My guess is that you can find an astronomy club near by with several members who can help.
More info for those interested can be found at The ATM Site (not my site).
Clear Skies,
Joe Mirando
The guy who wrote the article is named bukkake and he posts about "backyard observatories." I think this is a troll article.
Hm, that sounds like a good idea. It's hard to find a good spot to observe. Well even with some light sources around you, one can still observe the moon or comets. I like the Pleiades too. But what probably made the greatest impression on me (except observing sunspots i guess) was to watch Jupiter and Saturn through my telescope. Sure, I've seen countless of great close up images of both planets, but to see Jupiter by myself was something else. I could see different colors of the clouds and also the red spot. Saturn was quite a sight too with its rings.
Will work for bandwidth
In 1995, my wife and I rebuilt a 1977 VW bus and left the West Coast for a three month tour of the Southwest. One of the best decisions we made was to bring along an amatuer astronomy book and a pair of binoculars. We spent many nights wrapped up in mummy bags on lawn chairs alternatively finding new (to us) features, listening to the coyotes howl, and drinking freshly made cups of Peet's coffee.
We were content with our equipment until we spotted a man in Jaoshua tree with a brand new camper EuroVan and a beautiful telescope. Looking back, however, the van, book, and binoculars were the best choices for our budget, skill levels, and do it ourself attitudes.
First entomology, then virology, and finally bioinformatics systems. Bugs follow me wherever I go.
Why are so many slashdot stories linked to nytimes registration pages that ask my sex, code, position, function, range and a million other spam collector trivia?
Is slashdot getting percentages for people referred for registration or something? I don't feel like answering this interview for nytimes and I don't understand why slashdot expects me to have to do so in so many of the stories...
Is there a way to avoid the registration like the old 'partners' in the url or something similar?
Late this year, a few of my net acquaintances will be meeting in two spots (S. Africa & S. Australia) for the pending doom and end of the world... oh wait... its just a total eclipse.
.01C. I can get non-moving distances to about .1mm, I can get weight to about .1g but I can get time to a few nanoseconds so I need to devise and expierment that uses just time. I've been thinking that I can get a disk spinning, I should use a simple optical coupler (like whats in your mouse) and a good timing circut to get some very precise timings. Now if I can build a disk that is well balanced but non-uniform density, that means its angular speed should be effected by the same force thats pushing a pendulum slighty to its side. The problem is the pendulum will contine to rotate as the force is applied but my spinning device will only see the force when the force is applied to one side of the disk. The smaller the disk, the shorter this time is since the shadow of the moon is travling at a rate of about 500m/s. The phenomenon I'm looking for will happen twice for about .0002 seconds. If I miss it this time there will be another 7 chances over the next decade.
There have been some examples where pendulums swing funny durring elipses. I want to see if I can recreate this and I'm looking for help to do it on the cheap. The current expirments show that a swinging uniform sphere will have some side forces on it. My problem is measuring things in the field. I can get temps to about
The point the society is trying to make is that 50%-70% of the light from outdoor lighting is wasted (points to the sky, not the ground). This causes light pollution and doubles electricity bills. Their solution has been to design alternate lighting fixtures that fit ordinary light poles.
I know people who use this sytem in backyard observatories. The current implementation can correct for all sorts of problems in the mount, and compares favorably with the software used by professional observatories.
A well-crafted lie appears unquestionable - Dama Mahaleo
Hello all,
The amateur astronomy club that I am president of is building a robotic telescope. We just put up a new building to house the telescope. We also have a 16" like the one pictured in the article. There is nothing like tasking a telescope to go out and take pictures of the things you want to see. The problem with Hubble and other large telescopes is that amateurs can't gain access. These 16" scopes are great becasue they can see almost as well as some of the larger professional scopes with much less cost.
Our new building cost us 20K so we didn't spend any where near what that guy in the article did. You can actually build a very nice observatory for about 1000 dollars.
I would put up a url but our webserver can't handle the traffic from slashdot.
Ever tried that in the New York metro area? The lights do follow you! You can go from New York to Philadelphia without encountering a single dark spot...
I know you're a city boy, but there is a thing called "the country". I think the dude is talking about driving from the city to the country, not from a "city to a city".
Posting on /. means never having to apologize for your spelling...
GEODSS is rumored to have the ability to illuminate its targets with a laser. (A USAF site in Maui is known to have such capabilities.)
GEODSS was the first major computerized telescope system. It's an old system from the late 1970s, modernized in the 1990s. Back then, it took a huge military project to build something like this. Now, it wouldn't be that big a deal. With computer-controlled CCD telescopes widespread, this could be a good amateur project.
Most of the work is in the back-end data processing. The goal is to take all the images coming in, compare them with star maps and satellite ephemeris data, and see what new stuff turns up. Track satellites. Find space junk.
Doing this standalone could be fun, but the real payoff would be a network of amateur sites that cooperated over a peer to peer network. As soon as one finds something interesting, it should immediately communicate that to other sites so they can point at the same target if in view.
And I think that the city boy is informing you that it is impossible to find "the country" in such a megapolitan area.
The kinds of skies that I grew up with can't be found anywhere on the East coast of the US, including places like Vermont and New Hampshire. The combination of air pollution and light pollution has pretty much destroyed astronomical viewing conditions in all but the most remote places.
This problem is not confined to the most densely populated areas, either. If you go to Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado, they'll tell you about how the views from the various overlooks have degraded over the past few decades due to air pollution. Mesa Verde is in a location that's pretty "country", 9 miles from the tiny town of Cortez, and 35 miles from the only slightly larger town of Durango.
This level of pollution translates into poor astronomical viewing, and it's much worse when you're not that far out in the country.
Astronomy clubs in New York go to pathetic viewing locations in small parks along highways north of the city, where you can still barely see the Milky Way with the naked eye.
The bottom line is that the country which you so fondly fantasize about barely exists in the U.S. any more.
He started a group known as The Amateur Sky Survey, which has been working on software for analyzing the images from his cameras. After three years of scanning the celestial equator, we published a paper containing over 10 million measurements of stars in several passbands. You can read a preprint or the paper itself if you subscribe to PASP.
Based on our experience, I'd say that one of the hardest things about turning a backyard observatory into a serious scientific instrument is the bookkeeping: carefully recording all the necessary information and calibrating your results against the standard catalogs is a real pain, and doesn't have the same sex appeal as building the hardware or the software. But it's just as necessary.
Michael Richmond "This is the heart that broke my finger."
mwrsps@rit.edu http://stupendous.rit.edu
I don't know, Maine still has some amazing skies.
As the blurb points out the main problem is with city light pollution. This is actually a problem that could be greatly reduced with very little costs. For the most part it's a matter of using a different kind of light that costs about the same.
;).
Most municipalities have ZERO awareness of this issue, and all it takes is a quick post (don't bother with email) to get the ball rolling.
For more info, check out the Dark Skies homepage:
http://www.darksky.org/ida/index.html
For those of you who were wondering, yes, there is an activist group for every conceivable topic
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
This has some cool features. From the website:
"Celestia is a free real-time space simulation that lets you experience our universe in three dimensions. Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn't confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy. All travel in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across. A 'point-and-goto' interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit."
Check them out.
It's a serious problem for anyone that wants to see stars without leaving all of civilisation. Check out the difference:
The night sky from a Dark site
The night sky from a city.
FreeBSD for the impatient.
You're right - Maine is good, since it's so large and relatively unpopulated. And there are still plenty other similarly good locations. I'm not saying you can't get "amazing" skies any more, but rather that they've deteriorated relative to what they used to be like, and what they're like in some less populated parts of the world. Getting away from the cities makes an enormous difference, but doesn't usually eliminate the effect. Finding a place where there is absolutely no visible light pollution, even on the horizon, is increasingly difficult.
I don't know the homeowner, but one of my neighbors in the hills has a FULL observatory with a mechanized dome in his backyard. If you are ever behind the country club in San Jose, look up in the hills and you might see it.
Nighttime lighting in general sucks. Waste of energy, has been shown to increase (yes, that's increases) crime rates. In suburban areas, it's ridiculous. Being interested in hill top real estate, I sometimes check out properties in late evening after work. It's amazing how bright towns and houses appear; I've picked out other remote houses in forested areas that probably few folks know of simply because they have a habit of turning on their driveway post light or porch light.
It seems like common sense to hook up motion detectors that flick on the lights when they are needed or to detract someone from snooping around looking for houses or stores to steal from.
Then again, I also hate noise pollution too-- damn inadequately muffled angines and booming basses--so maybe I'm just oversensitive to what I consider obnoxious behavior.
Sebastian's Comet Hunt is a great news site detailing SOHO comet discoveries, and there's links there that shows anyone (even tyros) how to pick these comets up.
Dammit! Let him dig and dig and dig. Youses keep ruininng my submissions for Darwin Awards by informing ignorant people. Knock it off!
Table-ized A.I.
With this guy's telescope budget alone, one could have a great Dobsonian plus a phenomenally performing APO refractor plus have enough left over to throw in a pair of good astro binoculars with a nice parallelogram mount. That's a whole lotta astronomy, much of it portable.
The Meade 16" is an impressive looking piece of equipment, and it does a job. But being impressive looking doesn't equate to impressive performance. I suppose some people are seduced by fancy advertising claims and the look of a beefy fork mount and pier. But the status of a fixed observatory is outweighed by the fact that astronomy is the most fun as a movable hobby/profession. Plus there's still the problem that a SCT has technical issues that limit its use. One could still spend $150,000 for an observatory for the binoculars + APO refractor + Dobsonian, but one doesn't need to. I'd spend much less on the observatory and use the savings to go to places of optimum seeing, taking my observatory with me.
To some people everything is form over function. This guy now has a minimally useful east coast observatory that cost him nearly $200,000. What a waste. I'll bet his friends are impressed, though. So maybe it serves it's true purpose.
Here is how the process works:
- You download
.wav files that were collected on the large dish at the university of Kentucky. - You analyze the data on your PC with the signal analysis program of your choice.
- You choose your own search strategy limited only by your creativity, determination, and talent.
- Any potential interesting hits are to be posted and discussed on the project website.
The project is very educational and I recommend it to anyone who has an interest beyond using a screen saver to search for SETI. Also for those considering building a SETI station in their own backyard, the knowledge learned working with the ukentucky project will be 100% transferable.Since it takes High-Presure Sodium (the orange lamps, that start red) about 3minutes to fire properly, this will rule out motion sensors on them. I don't know how efficent these are, but they should be alot better than the 5% (incandesiant) or 15% (normal fluresant) lamps. But I'd agree, the amount of light that spils upwards from streetlights is ridiculous. I don't know why they don't design the reflector better so that the light is directed at about 120 degrees, which should stop direct spill, but there isn't much you can do about that, except paint the pavment black.
BTW for the grandparent, there is normally a fuse or circuit breaker in the lamppost with the sensor, if you have the triangular 'key' to open it, this might be a bit easier
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. --- Albert Einstein
Someone else posted this link within the past week on Slashdot:
http://nationalatlas.gov/natlas/natlasstart.asp
Once the page has loaded, go to the top right frame titled "Map Layers" and scroll down to the "People" section. Try selecting the "Nighttime Lights" option and then click the "Redraw" button over on the left underneath the main map. It gives a good rendition of where the greatest sources of light are.
Perhaps a better way of estimating possible light polution is to instead select "Population per square mile - 1995" in the "Map Layers" frame, and then redrawing the map.
It's too bad they don't have population density information for Canada at that site.
Whoever designed level 61 in Frozen Bubble is a sadistic bastard.
An excellent page, thank you.
Here's my dream...
16" - 24" schmidt-cassengran mounted on a *very* fast computer controlled mount. Set it up in some dark skies (eastern washington/oregon/california). Put a nice fast exposure CCD camera in it and connect it all to a linux box with a sattelite database.
1) point the telescope at a particular part of the sky and set the mount to counteract the earth's rotation.
2) continually scan the CCD image for moving objects (i.e. sattelites)
3) calculate trajectory and orbit and set the telescope to track it (this is where the fast mount comes in).
4) take a nice long exposure of the sattelite while filtering out the star trails. Also, look up the orbit in the sattelite database.
5) Identify the sattelite and record the sighting and image in the your personaly observation database.
The interesting thing will be when you start photographing sattelites that aren't listed in the public sattelite databases...hrm, what could that be?? a spy sattelite perhaps?
I'll have to do the physics to figure out how big a primary mirror has to be to resolve a 1 meter size sattelite...if it is too large for praticallity then use two much smaller ones and iterferometry.
I'd love to spend my weekends sifting through all of the "unknown" sattelites and examining the images I took of them...
The Czech Republic recently became the first country in the world to pass a dark-sky law. From what I've heard, it works. The idea is simple enough: shine the light on the things you're trying to light up, and quit shining so much of it into the sky. Details are here (as well as lots of other places).
:o)
For those who think this doesn't matter, wouldn't it be swell if light polution became so pervasive that we couldn't see that next mass-extinction event meteor heading our way? The headlines read: Doomsday Meteor Arrives Unannounced. Subtitle reads: At least the few survivors had a well-lit view of the damage.
Have them come over and look through your telescope. Explain why the view is limited due to the streetlights and that 300w halogen bulb so the dog can see when it's barking at night.
Works pretty good.
The ironic part is that americans can't even see the sky because of the air pollution, while US government insists in standing against the Kyoto protocol that regulates carbon emissions.
The ironic part is that americans can't even see the sky because of the air pollution
What the hell are you talking about? Spoken like a typical European who knows nothing about the US. Do you have any idea how BIG the US is? The amount of land that has any sort of air pollution problem is probably 0.1%. And as I happen to live in Los Angeles, I can assure you that the air pollution is not that bad. It's the light pollution in LA that makes it hard to see stars.
Another thing the poster to which you're responding fails to recognize is that CO2 is not a major factor in air pollution, at least the sort of air pollution that would obstruct astronomy.
Incidentally,though, the steps which one would logically take to lessen the problem of light pollution would also greatly lower electrical consumption and thus CO2 emissions and other forms of air pollution. Some examples: lower light output to the minimum needed to illuminate an area or object, use reflectors to prevent light escaping into the sky, turn off unnecessary lights after the end of the business day.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
I hope so.
Dark skies are a prerequisite to any optics based astronomy. Why are we using so much money to shine light up into the sky? If half the light is going up instead of down, then we're losing half your lighting money for nothing and lowering the standard of living.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.