Space Forum / Amateur Astronomy / October 2005

Hi. I have purchased a Skywatcher SK P15075EQ3-2 reflector scope(with
150mm aperture) - more details at
http://www.skywatchertelescope.com/15075PEQ3-2.html
I'd like to know...

Back in January 2005 when this was a hot topic, I took some photos
comparing the brightness of a green laser pointer and a can headlight
at 500ft (152 meters) and 1000ft (304 meters) and observed the
brightness of the beam out to approximately 1300ft (396 meters).  Just

I could not find "Planetary Nebulae Observer's Home Page". Maybe there
was some notes here, but I have not noticed.
Thanks for your any information.

Okay...I admit it...in my old age I like to view the sky in
comfort...real comfort.
So now I have decided to build a binocular chair designed around a Lazy
Boy chair.

Last weekend, my wife Jenn and I met up at Chaco Canyon (New Mexico)
with our friends Chuck and Judy Dethloff, who have been the directors
of the Oregon Star Party until this year.  It was worth making the
7-hour drive, which culminates in 20 miles of dirt road to the entrance

According to the National Retail Foundation, the most popular
Halloween costume last year was Spiderman. Next was "a princess,"
followed by witches and vampires, SpongeBob, Barbie and Harry Potter.
Sounds about right. But if you read the complete list of top costumes,

Just checking ebay, this scope is a good looking scope.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=7557714399&fromMakeTrack=true

Have you seen this <http://www.arksky.org/smf/index.php?topic=833.0>?
After visiting the above link I decided that I would open up my
observatory and have a look (in spite of the fact that it is very cold
and I have been feeling poorly recently.)

I just acquired a Celestron C8S on CG5 mount (seems cheap but adequate).
It came without a polar axis scope, and I think I want to add one,
so will throw a couple questions out in the hope of having some real
world info before I talk to Celestron about it next week.

In my foolish youth I disassembled a meade ortho for cleaning and it's
never really worked since. I'm pretty sure that the elements are swapped
around somehow. Does anybody here have any tips on how this eyepiece is
supposed to go together? It's a 9mm ortho from the 80s made up ...

I am encountering a problem with Registax that I never had before. The
optimize phase of the Align & Stack process is only optimizing the
first 20 or so of the 1,051 frames in the AVI. The graph shows almost
all of the frames as broken blue lines (I assume those are the frames

Everything we owned was ruined by Hurricane Katrina.  My eyepieces were in
an eyepiece case that I thought was waterproof -- it was not.  The case
leaked and salt water wet the foam and the eyepieces.  The eyepiece now
suffer from:

Thanks for all the great responses from my above post.
Can I just connect my webcam to my barlow?  How are these webcams configured
for viewing?

So is it just me, or does that dark splotch on the one side of Mars look
sort of like a stylized horse galloping?

Apparently there were some unusual lights in the sky Wednesday in the
San Francisco Bay Area.  I didn't see them but this article about them
appeared in this morning's San Francisco Chronicle:
<http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/10/28/MNG8EFF0FQ15.DTL>