Space Forum / Amateur Astronomy / July 2008

I have been looking for a portable GoTo mount for visual observing for
a while .  Ideally it will be a mount with some serious capacity.
One of the options seems to be the Vixen SkyPod.  Vixen is a well-
known brand.  I have, however, found some issues with SkyPod.  It

The new issue of my little newsletter is up, it's still free, and
while a little thin this time, I think it will make for some nice
summer evenin' readin; especially if your skies are as cloudy as
mine... ;-)

I had doubts as soon as I heard it, too. It burned with a green
colour, which is the colour of burning copper, or perhaps some other
refined mineral. I'm fairly sure meteors don't usually burn with a
green colour. It was probably space junk.

I don't own a Newtonian, but I'm curious whether the image is mirror,
interted (upside-down) or something else. Googling for these attributes
produces vague descriptions that suggest the image cannot be made erect.
That seems odd. If that's the case, I would think there's some ...

Without setting the alarm I woke up at 3:22am local time (12 July 2008
9:22 U.T.).  This was just in time to attempt a sighting of Comet C/
2007 W1 (Boattini) from my rural Montana U.S. location (latitude
between 45 and 46 degrees North).

Tonight at July 14, 2008 at 2:19am MDT, observers in the Intermountain
USA region near 110 west long with have an opportunity to observe or
make a time-lapse image of an unusual eclipse reappear event of the
Jovian satellite Io.  Io will appear emerge from the shadow of Jupiter

I'm using registrax to align moon images taken with a cheap 500 mm
mirror lens on a DSLR, handheld. There is so much variation between
frames that most don't get aligned automatically or end up way out of
registration. Manual alignment is not precise enough.

An attractive New General Catalogue group in Pisces
Galaxies that are listed in the New General Catalogue are not even
distributed across the sky. Some groups get a disproportionate amount
of attention and imaging time while other, equally attractive, groups

Quantitative Drift Alignment is a method of drift alignment that uses
measurements of stellar drift rate to compute where the polar axis is
with respect to the celestial pole, and tells how to adjust the axis.
At first, this method may seem to be complicated by measurements and

......Is it possible tidal forces from the moon give us Magma?  Magma
is
considered to be a mystery right now......
Jon Riley

Baade’s Window
Baade's Window is a small clearing in the dust clouds of Sagittarius,
near the globular cluster NGC 6522, through which it is possible to
see stars within 1,800 light-years of the galactic centre..

In the 365 million years of human history on Earth, mankind has
successfully landed on other planets for many times, only to have
found that other planets were not suitable for human habitation.
Then,

With all the hype about global unity as billions watched in July 1969, did
it and
the other landings really unify and affect a "speedy" end to the Vietnam
mistake

Brian Tung wrote -

Alll that has happened is I did not find a single person who actually
likes structural astronomy and the new way to explain the seasons
using a component of orbital motion,the restoration of heliocentric
reasoning as it was orginally and magnificently laid out,the means by