Space Forum / Amateur Astronomy / July 2009

When the Galileoscope was first announced on Phil Plait's site, I
ordered two of them in a single order.  Much later, I ordered another
one, plus one to be donated.
Here it is the end of July and I have received one scope.  I assume

Hi - I've polar aligned the telescope.  I have the coordinates of the
object from a computerized star chart.  How do I aim the telescope?
The declination seems pretty straight forward, but I don;t understand
right ascension.  If I move the telescope's RA indicator to the one

Dear friends,
Lats night I sat down to finish some business with Sh2-101 in Cygnus
and which is perhaps more commonly known as the Tulip Nebula.
I imaged this gem two years ago but never circulated the result due to

Dear group ... and oriel,
In spite of a noticeable wind as well as average seeing, I sat down
last night to pursue the dark nebula B133 in Aquilla. I wish I had
taken a few more luminance subs but at least I now have a baseline

Has anyone else noticed the oddball pricing being advertized for used
astronomy books?  Actually, I think it's all used books, but I bumped
into it when looking for an astronomy book.
For example, go to Amazon, and look under "Astronomical Almanac 2009."

My proposed reaction mass-less (gravity) space drive
 Lets call it a gravity drive. No, lets call it the Webb drive. Here
is how it works. You have two large masses in orbit - say a ton each -
and a mechanism to push and pull them 10 kms apart. If there is the

Photos here:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/07/24/hubble.jupiter.scar/index.html
(CNN) -- In an unusual step, NASA scientists interrupted testing of
the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope to aim the orbiter's camera at

Over the last many years I've found that black accessories, watch bands,
cables, bags, ... you name it have a strong preference towards black.
This "trend" is describable in the phrase too easy to lose or
misidentify. I've been using a labeler, and sometimes electrical tape to

This morning BBC was reporting on the reaction to the
eclipse across Asia. A pregnant Indian woman refused
to venture outside to watch one of the most spectacular
shared natural human experiences because her astrologer

I've seen an image of the insides of a Meade SCT, but don't recall how
it was done. I suspect it was a medical device. Possibly this can be
done with one of the machines at an airport. Any ideas on how to do
this? It might be useful to find internal problems.

By the way, I took the Ranger/SM40 out for a spin "on"
the Sun Tuesday morning, and was pleasantly surprised
to find a rather sizable (~1 Jovian diameter) prominence
on the following limb, in the northern hemisphere.  A bit

Maybe the polar bear is doing ok this year.
http://www.weatheroffice.gc.ca/data/analysis/350_100.gif

I thought I read an amateur caught the impact on video? Is it on the
web? Google hasn't coughed up anything yet.

I thought this might be of interest to the resident geeks:
http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/07/apollo-11-missions-40th-anniversary-one.html