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…

Over the last couple of years I’ve been struggling to do a little astrophotography on the cheap. I’ve used an entry level Newtonian with a second hand mirrorless camera, neither of which were designed for the purpose. However, the limitations of the equipment were beginning to show. Attempts to photograph the Virgo galaxy cluster and the Horsehead nebula proved fruitless. The scope and camera had to be controlled independently, so I had to sit beside them outside and monitor everything they do, manually taking individual pictures with no real idea how they would turn out.

So I bought myself one of these, a Seestar S50, one of the new generation of “smart” telescopes.

https://www.365astronomy.com/zwo-seestar-s50-all-in-one-smart-apo-refractor-telescope

It’s a bit more money than I’m used to spending on this hobby, but if my first night out with it is anything to judge by then I think it’ll be worth it. And in comparison to some, it’s relatively cheap.

https://www.365astronomy.com/celestron-origin-intelligent-home-observatory-6-rasa-smart-telescope

It’s about two feet tall, including the tripod, and weighs roughly the same as a bag of sugar. So you can pick it up with one hand and take it anywhere. It contains a highly quality lens system, a low noise camera sensor, a dew heater to prevent it misting up, a dual narrow-band light pollution filter, a solar filter, an auto-focuser, tracking software and image stacking software. Everything is controlled from a single phone app that, fortunately for me, is almost idiot proof.

I used to spend a considerable part of each night just trying to get things in focus. Sometimes I’d have to repeat each session multiple times just to be sure of getting the focus spot on. The Seestar app has an auto-focus button. I just press that and, as if by magic, within a few seconds everything is in perfect focus.

It seems to have quickly become a tradition that the first thing everybody does with the Seestar S50 is photograph either Andromeda or the Orion Nebula, and I’m no exception. so let’s get them out of the way.

These are pretty much how they came out of the box. I’ve brightened them a bit, probably too much in the case of Andromeda, but otherwise haven’t done any post processing on them. The Seestar also let’s you save the individual image files so that you can do your own selection and stacking rather than rely on its algorithms. I haven’t got around to that yet. The one night I’ve spent with it gave me more data than I previously got in a month. It’ll take me weeks to work my way through it all.

Just to prove that it really could take the pictures that I couldn’t take before. Here’s part of the Virgo cluster of galaxies and the famous horsehead nebula. Again, I’ve cropped and brightened the images very quickly, with no real attention to detail.

The big white blob at the top of the horsehead picture is the star Alnitak, the left hand star in Orion’s belt.

One of the downsides of the Seestar is also illustrated in the horsehead picture. If you look carefully at the right hand side of that image, you’ll see vertical streaks running at an increasing angle down the right hand side. This is because of the type of mount that it uses. It can go up and down and left to right. This allows it to track the positions of objects in the sky. However, if you think about it, objects don’t just appear to move across the sky, they also appear to rotate. The Seestar can’t fully compensate for this, with the result that longer exposures cause the effect you see. There’s a well known way around this, but as this was my first night out I wasn’t going to try anything elaborate.

A couple of more galaxies, Bode’s galaxies and the Triangulum galaxy.

There are a couple of lines across the bottom of the left hand image of Bode’s galaxies. This isn’t a telescope artefact this time, but a plane flying across one of the frames. When I do my own stacking I’ll get rid of this frame.

And now a couple of old favourites, the Double Cluster in Perseus and T Corona Borealis – our unexploded star. The Double Cluster picture is way better than anything I’ve previously taken with my old setup. Despite being one of the largest and brightest objects in the sky, my old telescope often had difficulty finding the Double Cluster. The Seestar uses a technique called “plate solving”. Essentially it compares what it sees with its internal database of stars, figures out where it’s pointing, and moves to the desired location. All with no user intervention whatever.

T Cor Bor has disappeared from the evening sky in the west, but if you wait until about 4 am it rises above the eastern horizon again.

And finally, that sun-with-a-bird picture. This time I’ve included another sun-with-a-bird picture from the next day. When you’re imaging the sun, especially when you take movies over a couple of minutes, it’s actually surprisingly common to see a plane or a flock of birds transit the sun’s disk. Notice how the sunspots move with the sun’s rotation from one day to the next.

My other scope has about ten times the light gathering power of the Seestar, so it isn’t redundant. And it’s got one thing that the Seestar doesn’t have, an eyepiece, so you can actually look at the sky with your eyes rather than a phone. But for sheer convenience and it’s ability to record images, the new box is quite unbelievable. I might even try driving a few miles out of town to escape some of the light pollution in my back yard.

But I’ve saved the best bit for last. As it’s controlled by a single, dedicated, phone app, and you can operate it over wi-fi, I can sit in the comfort of my living room in shorts and t-shirt, glass of wine in hand, and tell the telescope exactly what I want it to do. Then I just sit back and watch as the images appear on my screen. No more shivering for hours outside in the cold. In fact, the telescope barely needs me at all.