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The Best Hobby in the World

As a kid I had looked through a friend's 4.5" scope at Jupiter and was not exactly impressed. But, that didn't deter me from sitting in my Chicago suburban backyard during annual meteor showers hoping for glimpses of burning grains of sand.

Then several years ago, I saw Jupiter through my brother-in-law's 4.5" reflector and was floored. Seeing the main cloud bands of Jupiter that October night was a revelation and I knew I had to get into this hobby. So, my wife made the mistake of feeding the addiction by buying me a 3" refractor for my birthday. Six months later I had an 8" reflector and a year after that I bought my 14.5" Starmaster.

As is common for addicts, I found others with the same sickness at the Naperville Astronomical Association. If you live anywhere near Naperville, check out the website. Club meetings are open to the public and are held the first and third Tuesdays of each month at the Naperville Municipal Center. Additionally, the club holds public observing events throughout the year. Keep an eye on the club calendar for public events.

Stellarium

Stellarium is an opensource, free, planetarium software package that is very well done and easy to install and use. It can be found here www.stellarium.org. I use it as part of an astronomy minicourse I teach at local elementary schools. Feel free to contact me if you want to know more about my minicourse lesson plan.

Although, Stellarium is easy to use out of the box, it offers a rather powerful scripting language that is a bit more advanced. One problem I had with the scripting language was that the user guide information was a bit sketchy at times. So, I developed a script called helloworld to help explain some scripting basics. You need to open the script file itself and read the comments embedded within the script to understand which script commands do what.

I also developed a script that provides a tour of constellations. It's also helpful to open the script and read the comments as well. But, the basic idea is that the script takes you to a constellation and then pauses so you can talk about it and ask the class what constellation is on the screen. Once they've identified it (or not), you resume the script by hitting the "6" key which shows the constellation lines, name and art and then pauses. Talk about the constallation, and hit "6" again so the script will take you to the next constellation, and so on.

Global Rent-a-Scope

We had a presentation at one of my astronomy club's meetings about Global Rent-a-Scope which is a company providing access to remotely controlled telescopes in New Mexico, Israel and Australia. So, I figured I would give it a whirl. My first real attempt was the Leo Triplet shown below. The triplet consists of M65, M66 and NGC 3628

Astro Gallery

Field Trips

Astro Images

Equipment

The Sun Gun

I built my mini Sun Gun after reading this article in Scientific American. It references Bruce Hegerberg's Sun Gun site which I also studied. So, I scaled everything down to fit my 80mm f/5 and ended up with my mini Sun Gun. I wrote an article that provides a detailed parts list and instructions.The great thing about the Sun Gun approach is that multiple people can view the sun at the same time.