February 2016 - Utah-Astronomy - mailman.xmission.com

Next Liver & Onions Subcommittee Meeting
by Chuck Hards 13 Feb '16

13 Feb '16

Just a reminder that the next Liver & Onions Subcommittee luncheon will be Saturday, February 27th, at the Left Fork Grill. Starts at noon. I'll post reminders as we get closer. Hope to see you all there!

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Gravitational Wave Discovery
by Dale Hooper 11 Feb '16

11 Feb '16

In case some of you haven't heard the big news: http://astronomy.com/bonus/gravity?spMailingID=24700511&spUserID=MTE2MjkxMD…

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Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 061102 (2016) - Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger
by Dave Gary 11 Feb '16

11 Feb '16

One for the history books. Another confirmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity and an observation of a merging black hole binary system with subsequent ringdown to the resulting single black hole. If you hit the PDF button you can download the submitted article. Very interesting. > http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102 <http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102> Dave

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Pit n Pole
by Joel Stucki 11 Feb '16

11 Feb '16

Anyone know what conditions are like out at pit n pole right now? Thinking today or tomorrow night might be good for observing there, but how much snow is on the ground? Is it drivable without 4 wheel drive? Any suggestions of other dark sky sites near UT valley?

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AstroTortilla
by Dave Gary 07 Feb '16

07 Feb '16

Do any of you guys that image out in the wild use AstroTortilla? It’s freeware and it is the greatest piece of software for a goto scope and imaging setup that one can have in their arsenal. I tried it out last night and was amazed at the results. I never once had to leave the comfort of my chair (and the small heater under the table to warm my feet) to look through the finder scope and get the target centered on the camera chip. I didn’t even do a one-star alignment once the mount was polar-aligned, so I could really test the accuracy of the program. I have my setup ready-to-go in the garage so I know the camera is already focused. I used my hand controller for the mount and made a slew to Betelgeuse. Of course, since the mount was not aligned it missed the target (Betelgeuse) by quite a bit. I was not in the field of view of the camera chip, that's for sure. I opened AstroTortilla and let it do its magic. It did a plate solve of the area my scope was pointing to at that moment. Within seconds AstroTortilla told my mount where it actually should be (based on the input from the hand controller, i.e., Betelgeuse) and moved the scope to center Betelgeuse. It took about 15 seconds. I synced on Betelgeuse and it was off to races. One note, make sure to download the Tycho2 index files when the installer shows you that option. I didn’t do that the first time I used the installer and my plates wouldn’t solve. I went back to the AstroTortilla installer, picked only the Tycho2 index files when the installer presented them, then downloaded them. From then on the plates solved and everything was good. I tried several targets and the program centered every one in a matter of seconds, automatically. I mean dead center in Nebulosity’s window. You can use a variety of imaging programs with AstroTortilla (I use Nebulosity 3) or you can save a frame-and-focus image (I saved one as a .JPG to see how that worked) and solve off of that. One caveat, you have to link to your mount with ASCOM drivers. Either a direct cabled link, which I think most people use to connect their scope to their computer, or WiFi. I use WiFi and the iOptron ASCOM driver for my mount. Nearly every mount has ASCOM drivers available for it. Here is a link for ASCOM drivers. http://ascom-standards.org Here is a link to get the AstroTortilla program. http://sourceforge.net/p/astrotortilla/home/Home/ Below is a link to a great tutorial for the program. This guy covers everything and has a link to an excellent field-of-view calculator (to calculate your camera chip’s field-of-view). It was when I actually ran the field-of-view calculator that I realized I needed the other index files. Sometimes, when I try to save a step or some disk space, it doesn’t work out. If you image and don’t want to get up and look in the finder scope to center your target (while tripping over cables or tripod legs) then get this program. http://www.lightvortexastronomy.com/tutorial-setting-up-and-using-astrotort… Dave

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If Deseret Industries Had A Food Court
by baxman2＠q.com 05 Feb '16

05 Feb '16

The Deseret Industries at Welfare Square, for a number of years, actually did have a cafe in the store. Unfortunately, it was later shut down to make more room for products processing.

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Off-Topic: If Deseret Industries had a food court
by Chuck Hards 05 Feb '16

05 Feb '16

Probably only the locals will get this, but my wife and I were talking about the terrific food court at IKEA, and somehow we began to speculate about a possible food court at D.I. We both like to go there once in a while, both to drop-off donations, and I look for old telescopes and binoculars, she looks at clothes, to stretch her clothing dollars. We think they would probably serve "funeral potatoes", green-bean cassarole, and green Jello with carrots. Wash it down with kool-ade. This is the kind of conversation you get at home when you marry a Mormon, folks. ;-)

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RASC Calendars reduced
by Thomas Sevcik 04 Feb '16

04 Feb '16

Greetings fellow SLAS members, If you were interested in obtaining a 2016 Royal Astronomical Society of Canada's calendar, now is the time! We've reduced the price from $24.95 to $12.48 ($13.33 with tax) as of today. We have only five left on hand, so it's first-come-first serve! And we've gotten a bunch of new Orion 2" eyepieces! Come down and check out the remodeled planetarium while you're at it! Tom Sevcik

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C/2013 US10 Catalina
by Dave Gary 04 Feb '16

04 Feb '16

Comet C/2013 US10 Catalina as photographed from the Driveway Observatory last night. A small galaxy in the bottom right-hand corner is visible. I think it's NGC 2146. This galaxy is about 90 million light years distant (~28 million parsecs), while the comet is at a distance of 142.9 million kilometers or 7.94 light minutes. This photo was taken last night at about 22:30 from St. George. > https://www.flickr.com/photos/78046474@N06/24697298852/ <https://www.flickr.com/photos/78046474@N06/24697298852/> Dave

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Liver & Onions Subcommittee Luncheon
by Chuck Hards 31 Jan '16

31 Jan '16

I know Kay needs a few weeks notice, so how about Saturday January 30th? Kay, if you could make the 23rd, that's an option.

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