World Space Week at FC College

WOW.. what a sun gazing session it was! We had set three telescopes there​, two with Solar filter on and one halpha solar telescope with a binoviewer at the eyepiece end.

For three hours, students and faculty members kept on coming to our telescopes and most of them saw the solar surface first time in their lives. I heard many many 'WOWs" during that time period. It was a hot day and i with many others were trying their best to fight off the heat with all our astro will.​

We were asked all sorts of question about how the sun generates such massive energy and what does individual feature on the solar surface mean, which they all were watching ​through these telescopes. 

I am very grateful for the media folks from Express Tv Channel, to have come there and recorded all the event and stayed there till the end.​ I am also very thankful to "Benade Physics Society" of FC College and specially their president Amina Saleem.

As always, the members of Lahore Astronomical Society always find time to arrange such events​. Special Thanks to Maroof Mian, Ali Khan and Muhammad Ali.

Lahore Astronomical Society's October Meeting

I am very grateful to all those who came this evening in our monthly meeting. It was also great to see so many students from Space Science Department.

Ali Khan, our head of ATM (Amateur Telescope Making) gave a thorough introduction of mirror making and then how to make a telescope. The grinding methods and polishing was beautifully explained by showing each step with the mirrors in hands. He also described some key terminologies and the advantages and disadvantages of various configurations of the mirror designs. Many attendees asked important questions of the procedure of grinding techniques and Ali, as he always does, came up with easy to understand words/examples that kept us hooked during his whole lecture. He was thanked with a big round of applause.

World Space Week will be very busy for us.. So many vanues were under discussion. FC college will probably be our first venue with solar observations both with white light solar filters and with Halpha dedicated solar telescopes.


And last but not least, we are definitely going to Thandiani, Abbottabad and the number of participants are growing so fast.. Perfect!

These are the pictures taken by our dear member Mudassir​, who is always great with his camera.

More sun in '3D'

​Someone in Lunt mailing list showed me 'solar action'.. I was in search of a method to easily color the mono images from halpha telescope. This tool is really a blessing, though i only like to color tool, others seems worthless to me.

Following is the first attempt with 'solar action'​.

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3D effects in processing

There are unlimited ways to process an astronomical image. Every imager has his/her own taste for the 'pretty picture'.

Some halpha imagers process by inverting the B/W image.. and then add colors to the image. It makes the filaments on the surface look like 3 dimensional.
I did just that with the following image and to me, it seems the 3D effect does appear with this processing technique.. what do you all think about it?

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Sunday Solar Mosaic

Six AVIs, with 5,000 frames in each file, 800 best selected among them, using AVIStack, Registax and photoshop, here is our Mighty Sun, with the surface temperature of about 5,800 degrees celcius, with the core temperature of 15,000,000 celcius.

With this temperature it is fusing 600 million tons of hydrogen every second! 4 million tons of matter is converted into pure energy, every second and in only 10% of its volume and it will continue to do that, for the next 7,000,000,000 years! Sun is busy.

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More halpha images today

All images were shot with DMK21 camera and with Lunt60 dedicated Halpha telescope with Televue 2.5X barlow attached.​

Again each file was of 5,000 images, 800 best were selected aligned and stacked in AVIStack and sharpened in Registax. Final touches were done with Photoshop CS5.​

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Halpha Solar mosaic

​Okay so today was my off day from work.. what better way to use your holiday than to spend all day with your dearest one.. (okay okay.. after my wife :)

Sky was all clear and seeing was also very stable. So i attached my barlow lens which magnify the image 2.4 times than the original image. Before the televue, barlow lenses were thought to degrade the view so astronomy community always tended to avoid these lenses. Things have long changed now. Telvue 2.5 X barlow does not even tell you its there.

I shot several AVIs files, each with 5,000 images and processed 800 out of them and made a mosaic.​

Here is the color version​​ and original size of the mosaic.

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A broken heart

Our sun is quite these days with very few sunspots at the visible surface. There is no  good solar prominence​s as well.

Few days ago, i imaged a small sunspot​, which is quite huge by our terrestrial standards. This spot has moved to the eastern limb now and a new region has appeared from the west (see arrowhead below). On the full disk it is barely definable but in  my image our Sun has just shown us its broken heart!

Click here for high resolution image​

Click here for high resolution image​

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At least three sunspots have merged to create this group​. Coming forecast seems to be clear for my location so i will try to see how this region evolve in the near future. Sun is a highly dynamic system and it is always going through visual changes. I also saw this region with Halpha telescope but i think i would wait for some time to image it in halpha light.

Granulation and sunspot

The sky was covered with patches of clouds everywhere, yet i tried to have first shots from the new Astrozap solar filter.​ The new filter was much better designed to fit on the front of the telescope, with three screws attached, the fit was in just a few seconds.

First i used my 25 mm eyepice at the back of the scope and the visual views were not bad but so very detailed since the earth clouds were moving across the surface of the sun. But the two sunspots and three tiny ones were clearly visible.

Then i attached DMK21 camera​ and shot an AVI of about 20,000 images. Quickly processed it with AVIStack and Registax and here is the final image, my first from the new filter!

​I am happy to see the individual granules on the surface of the sun which i could not have seen with the Lunt60 Halpha solar scope previously. Solar granule is a small bubble in the image below and typically is around a thousand kilometer wide.. that's about the distance from Lahore to Karachi! The bright part is where the hot material is coming up on the surface and the dark boundary is where it is falling down again. These granules are the convection zones on the sun's surface.

The big sunspot in the middle is quite small when you see it on the solar disk here. I very roughly figured the size of this whole sunspot to be about 40 granules, so that would make it to be around 40,000 km wide. Thats like three times the size of our planet Earth. Sun is huge!

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The whole disk of the sun. ​Image from Spaceweather

Astrozap white light Solar Filter

In the past, I have been using Thousand Oaks Solar filter which does not work so good when it comes to high resolution viewing of the Sun.

Thousand Oaks filter is made of glass and is an off axis filter. C14 telescope is too big to have a full aperture front solar filter because although solar filters drop the sunlight and solar heat way down, still in a big aperture telescope like C14, the amount of heat would generate too much temperature instability which will degenerate the solar views. That is the reason, probably no one makes a full aperture front plate solar filter as big as C14 can use.

Unlike Thousand Oaks, Astrozap uses solar film in their filters. Solar film filters have an advantage over glass filters when it comes to high resolution viewing and imaging of solar surface granulation. Though glass is much more durable than a film. It's hard to take care of solar film filters. But film can easily be replaced with a new one; these are not so expensive.

So the new upgrade is of the New Astrozap Film Filter for my C14 telescope! The off axis filter makes C14 essentially a 6 inch refractor scope. With the central obstruction of the secondary mirror gone from the view, this scope can provide very high resolution of the sun's surface.

In the image, you can see Astrozap white light Solar Filter attached on the front Schmidt plate of C14.

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Telrad view finder

I always wanted to have this!

Finder scopes are essential for long focal lengths telescopes since they provide much bigger field of view than the telescopes these are attached with. Telescopes are almost impossible to align without the help of finder scopes.

A finderscope is itself a small refractor telescope that show a few degrees of the sky. Almost all of the finderscopes come with crosshairs that accurately points the telescope to a particular object (bright stars in most cases).

With my C14, 9*50 finderscope comes as standard. Recently I forgot to cover the finderscope while imaging/viewing the sun. Something got messed up in there and I was having very blurred views. I ordered a new finderscope from Celestron which came with 8*50 specification. Works fine for me.

But then no finderscope is Telrad! Telrad is very smartly designed finderscope. It projects three red illuminated rings of 1/2, 2 and 4 degrees field of view on the sky through its glass plate. With finderscopes, one has to put the eye on the eyepiece, as any telescope is visually used, but not with Telrad. The beauty of this thing is that it can be used to view way back anywhere, from a reasonable distance, now that is very nice.

C14 is a huge OTA (optical tube assembly) which on an equatorial mount as big as Losmandy Titan proves very hard to align with a finderscope. Finally today i recieved my Telrad in the mail and I am sure Telrad will make aligning the scope so easy for me.

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Crepuscular Rays at sunset

A few days back, i saw this amazing phenomenon.. sun was setting and the light/shadow rays were extended all the way from west to the east. Never in my life, have i witnessed the crepuscular rays being  extending from horizon to horizon.

Immediately pulled out the camera and made a movie of that part of the sky. I also grabbed a few pictures to complete a panoramic view. The white dot in the picture is the moon in the sky.

Panorama of the crepuscular rays

Panorama of the crepuscular rays

Sunrise with Monsoon clouds

One of the beautiful moments we amateur astronomers get is to see the sunrise after long night of observation session.

Beautiful blue and yellow colors were spread over the sky when I was going downstairs from my observatory in the morning hours.

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Interview at Samaa TV

This interview was recorded at my observatory, on 18th May 2012 by Samaa ​TV, in their program Hr Pakistani Main Chupa Hy Aik Hero, "There is a hero in every Pakistani", yes its a very flowery title :)

I am thankful for Samaa team and the producer Rao Shahid.

Epsilon Lyrae, Multiple Star System

​I tried to attempt this, not so easy target, to split these very close (2.4 arcsecond) binary stars, which demands good seeing and good optical settings.

I decided to use Infrared filter, Astronomik 807 Pro, for this target since bigger wavelength is much less distorted by the atmosphere than the shorter visual radiation. Also kept the exposure as short as possible that my camera can provide me, that is 0.11 seconds.

Took 500 images and then used MaximDL to calibrate and process them and then combine them in AVI video format. Youtube upload did a really poor job with the quality of this video so i used Vimeo, which kept the resolution good enough to see the "double double" system easily.

I think i should try to image Epsilon Lyrae with my planetary camera as well. DBK21 mono can go at 60 frames per second so i can get many more images in a much less time limit, hence 'freezing' the good atmospheric seeing.

Try to see it in full screen so you can better appreciate the close binaries. Web has a lot of info about it so i am saving myself some time here :)