STARLOG

MOTHER'S DAY FUN

MAY 12, 2019

Observer: Tom Campbell
Location: College Station, Texas (Long: 96°17'W Lat: 30°37'N)
Telescope: Zhumell 12" f/5 Dobsonian (Zoomie)
Eyepieces: Explore Scientific 70° 25mm
Celestron Luminos 2.5x barlow
Weather: Partly cloudy, upper 70s during the day, cooling off to the 60s in the evening. Little to no wind.

Today was the first sunny day in a while, and I was anxious to check for sunspot activity. I set up Zoomie in the driveway and attached the full-aperture solar filter. I also wanted to take a few pictures, so went ahead and attached my smartphone to the eyepiece with my Celestron NexYZ adapter.

I have a hard time seeing my phone's screen in full sunlight, so it is difficult for me to tell when the image is properly focused. In an effort to alleviate this, I put a towel over my head to reduce the glare. It did help a bit, but I'm sure my neighbors thought I was going crazy.

Set up for some solar viewing. Don't forget your towel!

I was in luck today! A fairly large sunspot was visible almost at the center of the Sun. I wonder if it was causing any electromagnetic interference?

Once my eyes adjusted a bit, I noticed a much smaller sunspot near one edge of the Sun as well. This one was hardly noticeable as a tiny speck, but it was definitely there.

As I was getting ready to record some images, I thought it might be fun to do a Facebook Live session and let some of my friends view it with me. I fired up FB Live and soon I had a few online friends tune in.

The sun, showing sunspot groups AR2741 (middle) and AR2740 (mid-right). I've included Earth at the upper right for scale.

I played around a bit with zooming in on the larger sunspot and explaining to them what sunspots were. They asked me some good questions and I did my best to answer them.

In all, I had 5 of my friends online watching the stream. Once they had all left, I turned off the camera and watched the Sun for a few more minutes before packing things up. I got about as good of an image as I could see to get, and it was getting hot under that towel.

A closeup of AR2741, showing some of the turbulent nature of the hot gases on the sun.

That evening, the sky started to clear up more, so I decided to go out again and do a live stream of the Moon. It was just past first quarter phase and should look really nice.

I posted a message on Facebook notifying my friends that I'd be out again tonight to stream the Moon from 9-10pm. This gave me barely enough time to eat a bite of supper and set up my telescope again, but I didn't want to wait any later... some folks might be going to bed or have other plans.

I quickly ate and hurried outside and set up the telescope. I attached the smartphone to the eyepiece and turned on the video streaming. Before I could even get the Moon centered and focused, thin clouds began sliding in front of it like a veil.

As people began to tune in, the Moon kept dancing with the clouds, causing my auto-contrast settings to go crazy, overexposing the uncovered portion of the Moon in an effort to brighten the part hidden by clouds. On occasion, however, the clouds would give way to a clear bit of sky and the view was beautiful.

The moon, just past First Quarter phase.

I tried both full disk view and closeup views. I found both to be pleasant, but the majority of my viewers said they preferred seeing the Moon zoomed in and detailed. So I popped my barlow lens in front of the eyepiece and spent quite a bit of time looking at the area near the Straight Wall and the Apollo 15 landing site near Hadley Rille.

Closeup shot of Rupes Recta, the Straight Wall.

I ended up keeping the stream live until after 10:30pm. One of my friends was still online. We were both tired, but didn't want to stop watching, mesmerized by the beauty of the Moon slowly drifting across the viewscreen.

Finally, I broke the spell and said goodnight to my friend and cut the feed. As I put my gear away, I couldn't help but glance up at the sky once more. The clouds were gathering again in a few places, but the stars were still shining brightly, in spite of the Moon's brilliant glare. If only I didn't have to go to work in the morning.