Jeff Struve

Skyward for February 2022 David Levy Go Webb! We all got a special and thoroughly delightful present early on Christmas morning. Although I did not set my alarm, Wendee did get up around 5 am. I turned on our television set, and what I saw 15 minutes later was the most thrilling space view since 1969, when Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the Moon. It was the spectacular, flawless launch of the James Webb Space telescope, The start of a mission so perfect and smooth that if Webb could speak, it would have told us that it did not feel any motion whatsoever as it soared away. Even the countdown was unique; it was in French: “Dix, neuf, huit…” I did notice a possible hiccup. About ten minutes later, the metal covers designed to protect the telescope during launch fell away while the vehicle was still in powered flight. But a second later, I understood that this was not a hiccup; it was supposed to fall away. The telescope was already out of Earth’s atmosphere, and with no air to bother it, the protective cover was no longer needed. As lovely as this experience was for me, the launch was […]

Well, with a little bit of luck… short of doing some documentation, training and the open house… and the weather holding… I’ll be at the Wilton School Systems Observatory from 2PM until 10PMish doing the final touches on Thursday. The plan is to get there before dark and make sure everything is working and in place… then see if I can get the some sort of picture taken with the camera. This is to ensure that the camera is working and will come to focus so that I can perform the next step…Modeling. Modeling is used for 2 things… the first is to allow a precise Polar Alignment to be made to the physical mount. The modeling finds a number of stars and stores them and then the application determines how far off the mount is from perfectly aiming at the Celestial Equator… you then use the adjustment bolts on the mount and pier to tweak it as directed by the application… then you repeat this process. An accurate Polar Alignment is needed to ensure that an object stays perfectly in center of the the field of view for extended periods of time… when you take a picture, and the […]

Hi all! Before heading into the STEM room I went into the observatory to check to make sure that things were safe in the observatory to remote in from the STEM room. While U was in there I did go ahead and do 1 Windows update followed by a restart. I also put the filter wheel back in the cabinet as I was able to determine what all of the filters were except for the one in slot 8… In the STEM room I performed all of the various tasks and made mental notes of miscellaneous issues that occurred… We’ll probably want to consider getting the large monitor behind the instructors desk hooked up to the computer for screen sharing… and maybe consider a wired mouse for that PC… oh, and a shortcut for Tight VNC Viewer if possible… and the classroom pc still goes to sleep while in use… all nit-picky stuff, but may prove to make things look slicker when we do the public open… by the way, how’s that going? Any public notices yet? So for mentally noted issues, I ran into an issue with the mount starting… I’d never seen that before, but maybe, since I […]

Hi all! Lots if miscellaneous stuff today! I climbed a ladder to get to the weather station on the roof of the observatory and took close up pics of that Boltwood system… even tho it rained, the App shows dry which is fine as it is really windy so Dry is accurate… BUT… much of the time the wind speed is showing around 5mph when its more like 25+mph… I emailed Defraction Limited on this… More Windows updates – one showed paused for some reason, and I’m not sure that one updated. It says no more updates after a restart, so I guess we are good.   I updated MountWizard4 to v 2.1.6, recreated the roof driver dropping error and sent the logs to Michael at MW4. I’m taking the filter wheel home to try to figure out what filter is in which slot. The TightVNC Viewer icon doesnt stay on the desktop of the STEM room instructors PC… can that be made to happen? Also, if you are in full screen mode, what is the best way to close the viewer so you can log off of the STEM room computer? I checked the FoV of the ZWO 290MC, and […]

Skyward for January 2022 By David Levy Imagination and the Astronomical League. “A Dragon Lives forever, but not so girls and boys.” Three quarters of a century ago, during the Second World War, the famous Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley, along with Charles Federer, founding editor of Sky and Telescope Magazine, launched an association of astronomy clubs across the United States. It is called the Astronomical League, and it thrives to this day with more than 100 astronomy clubs. Unlike the national Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, the League is designed to be a more loosely structured organization. According to Carroll Iorg, its current president, one of its most critical and central goals is to inspire the next generation to enjoy the night sky. If that goal should fail. The possibility exists that there may be no Astronomy for future generations. As part of this vital goal, the Junior Astronomical League, a new subset of the Astronomical League, is now meeting every second Sunday over zoom. But there is something more. My next book will be devoted to those young stargazers. It actually began as a typewritten saga I wrote in 1958 when I was ten years old, and of all […]

Skyward December 2021 By David H. Levy Daffy Duck Agreed, this seems like an awfully daffy title for an astronomy article. But there is method to the madness, and there is a story. During the late summer of 2019 there was a star party in southeast Arizona that featured a dark sky and five perfect back-to-back nights as I spent hour after hour hunting for comets, I came across the sprawling North America Nebula in the northern sky constellation of Cygnus the swan. But this time something different appeared. It was a strange structure, the outline of a dark nebula bordered by a slightly brighter cloud. The whole feature was rather subtle, so that sometimes it was there, and then it faded so that sometimes it wasn’t. I spent some time trying to determine a name for it. It looked like the head of a duck. I couldn’t call it the wild duck nebula, as there is a cluster with that name and Donald Duck is a bit confusing. So how about calling it the Daffy Duck nebula? Thus, the structure is named after Daffy Duck. It is No. 403 in my catalog of interesting things found during my more […]

Today I brought one of the astronomy club members out to the observatory in order for him to double check my train of thought on procedures and also to help me troubleshoot the electronic focuser. The electronic focuser seems to be working fine and the trouble seems to be some type of binding in the mechanics… it seems that part of the problem may be that the focuser knob was not set onto the shaft properly, and although fixing that would be simple, we couldn’t find the right size allen wrench. We noticed that the electronic focuser worked fine when it wasn’t engaged the mechanical focuser. We then tried turning the course focus knob and found it was pretty tight… this could be from the scope not being used for long periods of time and the lubricant hardening. We manual ran the focuser all the way in and out a number of times and that seemed to help alot. We also noticed that there was some sort of ‘catch’ every few turns of the knob… this is how we found that the course focus knob was a bit loose and this was due to the set screw holding it onto […]