Did soem cleanup prep for burnign man today, got our gerar out, finsihed up the swamp cooler and cleaned up the mess I’d made in the shop and garage in building it.
I also got my telescope (8″ schmidt-cassegrainian) to get ready for the eclipse tomorrow. I have a solar filter made just for this kind of thing. .. We’re only going to get soemthign like 56% occlusion tomorrow, but it should be cool anyway
I had to expereiment with my telelscope to sue it in the day liek this.. Normally I align it to two stars that I know and it does the rest .. it can find objects in the sky, and tracks things ot keep them still despite earths’ rotation.. well.. thats fine at night when I can see the stars..
It was wierdly hard ot get the telescope aimed on the sun.. simply because you can see the sun in the sky, doesn’t make it easy to line up.. especially since you cant use the finder scope.. because that means looking into the sun..
WHat I did was is aim the scope north and level , set the date, time and lat/long where I was standing.. then pretended to go through an auto align even though I coud see the guide stars… they’d be close enough. THen I asked the scope to go to the sun.. after several warnings, it did… still.. I wasn’t exactly on the sun.. i had to do soem fine adjustments with the manual settings. I found soem advice on the web that had the great idea of adjusting for the smallest shado wf the telescope.. which means it’s aligned.. BINGO.. from then on , the scope tracked wonderfully ..
here are some simple images just taken by holding gabe’s camera to the lens.. notice the sunspots.
here they are up close..
if you’re in the neighbrhood tomorrow, drop by and take a peek during the eclipse !
later int eh afternoon we headed to tim and jen’s for an almost end of summer feast.. lots of kids heading out of town soon, so it was a chance to all be together..
it was another view of the sun for the day ..
and the newlyweds
ok.. gotta sleep now.. more tomorrow froma partial sun !
nite all. nite sam
-me