Normally on a Saturday, I’d have a pretty picture of a nebula, or a galaxy, or a star cluster to show you. But there hasn’t been a clear sky all week, so I have nothing new to post. On the plus side, my rain barrels, that had run dry for the first time in 18 years, are now full and ready to water the plants again.

I have been looking to do a bit more than take pretty pictures though, and have been tentatively embarking on a couple of astronomical projects. The first one is my first look at variable stars. This is one area where amateur astronomers can make a real contribution to science. There are lots of reasons why some stars vary in brightness. Some are intrinsically variable because of their composition. Others are binary objects where the main star gets eclipsed. Others undergo periodic explosions, like T Cor Bor, that I’ve been observing for well over a year now.

The world’s big telescopes are too precious a resource to spend their time monitoring all the variable stars in the sky. This is where amateurs come in. The American Association of Variable Star Observers allows amateurs to collect and upload their observations of variable stars. Providing a long term database of millions of observations.

https://www.aavso.org/

Naturally, all these observations must be standardised and of the same high quality. I’m still a beginner at this. The technical lingo that surrounds the subject is all a bit baffling to me at the moment. However, I’m hoping that my smart scope will come in handy here.

Seestar S50 All-in-One Smart Telescope

This magic box, about the same size and weight as a bag of sugar, contains a high quality lens, a camera, a computerised mount, various filters, a built in computer, and a phone based app that you can operate from any internet connection. Before this I used to spend about half an hour just trying to find T Cor Bor. Now, I can go to it instantly. As well as producing nice pictures, it records the time, date, geographical location and celestial coordinates of the object being photographed. They should be ideal for variable star observation. There are even people who who set it up and tell it to take automated pictures every ten minutes of things like T Cor Bor, so that professional astronomers can be informed as soon as it goes bang.

As well as T Cor Bor, I’ve had my first glimpse of SS Cyg. My pic on the right, a couple from AAVSO on the left.

This is a cataclysmic variable, like T Cor Bor. A red dwarf star is feeding a nearby white dwarf. And they really are nearby, separated by less than half the distance between the earth and the moon. But whereas T Cor Bor goes off every 80 years, SS Cyg goes off every couple of months. They would be an absolutely spectacular sight to see close up. Although you wouldn’t want to be anywhere nearby when it ignites.

The Seestar S50 brings me on to the the other project that I’ve been exploring this week. While the S50 is an amazing box, it’s not perfect. It only has a two inch objective lens. My “big” telescope has a six inch lens, with nearly ten times the light collecting power.

https://www.firstlightoptics.com/telescopes-in-stock/sky-watcher-heritage-150p-flextube-virtuoso-gti.html

The S50 works so well because it is a tightly integrated system. But this is also a disadvantage. It’s completely enclosed, with no options to change focal length, camera or mount. If you want to try something different then you have to discard the whole box and start with a completely new setup. There are better alternatives, but just look at the price.

https://www.firstlightoptics.com/telescopes-in-stock/celestron-origin-intelligent-home-observatory.html

So I’ve been exploring the possibility of adding the same automation capabilities to my existing SkyWatcher six inch scope. I think it can be done. A lot of the software that powers these smart scopes is based on existing open source software. I’ve been looking at one of the options available on Linux, a package called KStars.

https://kstars.kde.org/

This might look like just another planetarium package, but it’s so much more. It has the built in ability to control almost anything that’s astronomy related: telescopes, cameras, filter wheels, focusers, camera rotaters, domes. It can control them locally, or remotely. The catch is, in order to be able to control every manufacturer’s equipment, it has to be very flexible. And in order to be flexible, that makes it complicated. It’s one of those bits of software where you open a dialog and there are ten tabs. Each tab has dozens of controls with obscure sounding names or initials. And I don’t know what most of them mean.

So far I’ve got it to talk to the telescope and point it where I want it to go. I’ve got it to talk to a cheap astronomical camera that I bought. Although it’s not quite taking pictures they way I’d like. If I get this working properly then I should be able to get the big scope to do what the smart scope does. The way it works is this.

The smart scope uses a mixture of GPS and a built in compass to point to roughly the right part of the sky that you want to image. It then takes a picture. It compares the picture to its database of stars and figures out where the scope is really pointing and then moves the scope in the direction needed to get closer to the target. It repeats this over and over until the target is dead center. The technique is called “plate solving”.

When everything is setup correctly, KStars should be able to do this for my big scope. And that should make my life a whole lot easier for finding targets and performing long exposures.

I should be able to get higher resolution images, using my existing gear and at almost no cost. What’s more, I won’t be tied to any particular system or manufacturer. If I want to upgrade the camera, or mount, or telescope, or if I want to add a separate guide scope or focuser, or filter wheel, I can do it one piece of equipment at a time. But it looks like it’s going to require a bit of perseverance and patience. Watch this space…