Back pain May 27, 2006
Posted by dorigo in astronomy, personal.12 comments
I have to be careful with the new scope… Bringing it out and in almost every night has caused my back to ache a bit. I know vertebrae may cause a lot of problems if they get squeezed.
The base of the scope containing the mirror is a wooden square box, 20" across. It weighs 78 pounds. And lifting it with the legs is not trivial, since the handles are 12" away from my body - so the back has to work quite a bit to lift the base up.
Today I have been thinking at ways to reduce the amount of wrestling I have to do in order to set up my scope. I already improved matters a bit a few days ago by using a plaid over which I slide it from the place where I store it to the door leading to my terrace. Next, I constructed a square flat base with rotating wheels, to move the scope around the terrace effortlessly.
I now need an idea to move the box up a step through the door leading to my terrace, and lying it on top of the moving base. The step is 7 inches tall, the moving base adds four more inches. To complicate matters, the telescope box handles barely make it across the door. And it cannot be tilted in any way, for safety of the mirror.
I believe I could design something fancy, like a ramp of some kind, such that I would then use the wheeled base to go through the door. But I wonder if there is an alternative.
Actually there is one - although I am unwilling to adopt it. The mirror itself weighs 30 lb, and it can be removed from the scope box by just lifting it off. By bringing out the base and the mirror separately, the work would be much less straining. But… The mirror is a sacred thing! The idea of touching it (from the sides!), let alone carrying it around, gives me goose-bumps.
Any suggestion ?
Things that make me happy May 27, 2006
Posted by dorigo in astronomy, internet, personal, science.add a comment
Tonight the sky was nothing much for observing Jupiter, but I gave it a try nonetheless. Not-so-thin clouds around, bad seeing (turbulence in the atmosphere), compounded by my laziness in collimating the optics and a mirror that did not want to cool down…
I set out to look at Jupiter at 10PM, and observed for an hour. I followed the transit at the central meridian of the great red spot, and saw a few more details on the disk. Since the clouds were coming and going, I had time to rush inside every five minutes or so to sketch what I was observing on a piece of paper. I also took a picture with a hand-held camera…
So here are the results of my efforts tonight. The sketch shows what I saw on the disk. Of interest are two vortices just west of the great red spot (GRS, the big eye on the top center), the interruption of the black "eyelid", the three festoons, the white spot south of the GRS on the STB (the south tropical band, the one running above the GRS in the drawing). Also interesting the white filling of the NEB (the lower, thick band from which the festoons generate).
And here is the pic - of course, not much detail in it, but one sees the GRS and some banding:
Now for what really made me happy tonight. I later checked Jupiter's appearance in recent pictures, and found one taken five days ago by a japanese amateur, a guy named Hatanaka, in a site of Jovian observers (http://www.kk-system.co.jp/Alpo/Latest/Jupiter.htm ): here is it.
This is a stack of about 400 images, and shows lots of detail. But the interesting thing is that one can see many of the features I drew on my sketch above… This makes me happy, for I see I did not make them up!
