Well it's been a while. The weather has not been encouraging and we have had more than our fair share of dust storms recently. Visibility was so restricted the other night that only Sirius was viewable in the night sky. Oh, and the rain and the thunderstorms have also played their part in preventing any star-gazing.

So I have been busy writing my book recording all the things I'm finding out. On the equipment front, I ordered a QHY9C camera (8.2 megapixel, 2 stage TEC cooling etc). It should arrive next week. It is much more sensitive than the Canon camera and the pictures I have seen so far by people using it are just stunning. Though I have had limited success in off-axis guiding, I also took the plunge and ordered a larger finderscope and mounting brackets. It has a helical focuser and I will be able to use it as a guidescope with the Orion StarShoot autoguider.

Mars has been pretty active in the sky lately but seeing conditions have prevented any chance of taking any pictures. Its not even good enough to take photos of the moon!

I printed out some star maps for the month of February and March and have been acquainting myself with the brighter stars (when I can see them). This has certainly helped during the alignment process, as I can now confidently choose an alternative star and know which one I should be looking at. Alignment was spot on, with little drift, M42 appearing dead center, but the images captured on the Canon EOS 500D were just so washed out by the dust in the air it wasnt worth posting them. I'd trade dust for light pollution anyday!

I have also spend the time learning Nebulosity and Maxim DL (Nebulosity is included with the new QHY9C). Oh, and I ordered an EL (electro luminesnce) panel with adjustable light output which I can put on the front of the scope to take flat frames.....

More about that later.

January 28th came and went. Apparently it was the time for best viewing of Mars, local time in Dubai at 6:45pm. So with the help of my daughter and wife, we moved the telescope onto the roof of the apartment building in time for this great event. Fully equipped with Canon EOS 500D camera, 10mm Celestron X-Cel eyepiece, Celestron 40mm Omni Eyepiece, Celestron 2x ED Barlow and Celestron power-pack.

Did we see mars? Yes, we could even make out the blurry polar caps. Blurry because the seeing conditions on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being the worst, we must have been on 10. No kidding. And for the first time, with my own eyes, I managed to see round diffraction rings (abeit they were dancing a bit with the conditions), but there were a lot of them and they looked pretty concentric to me. I think that was more of a thrill than Mars.

So it came and went, we spent a little time on the moon, but it being a full moon only the details on the extreme edges were worth looking at. It wasnt worth taking any images as the quality of "seeing" was so poor.

Looking for life on mars is gonna have to wait a little while longer... :-)

Today Jan 15, 2010 we witnessed a partial solar eclipse in Dubai, lasted several hours, It was a good chance to test out the Celestron Solar filter and Baader Continium filter (2") with the C8 and Canon EOS 500D. We (my dear wife and I) lugged it all up the roof of the apartment block and setup the equipment. I didnt bother with the hand-controller and power-pack so tracking was not possible. However we managed to take a few pictures and a video which I have posted. Used a celestron f6.3 focal reducer in order to get everything in. The shots turned out ok. Even a few sun-spots were visible!

Well the remaining adapters for the TS Optics Off-axis guider arrived so it was time to check the setup and see if it would work. Prevously, the Canon Camera was too close to the side turret and kept hitting the guide camera so there was no way it would work in that configuration.

What was needed was some additional adapters which would increase the distance between the guider and the camera. And yes, they worked just fine, allowing focus in the both the guide cam (neximage and starshoot autoguider) and imaging camera (Canon 500D) at the same time. No spacers were required for the nexImage, but for the Starshoot I needed to put a 15mm T2 spacer on the guiding side.

The crucial test was when adding the Celestron f/6.3 focal reducer. The image in the guide cam was severely distorted by the focal reducer, making it virtually impossible to guide anything. Only solution to this would be to move the focal reducer after the off-axis guider (which is only 9mm wide).

You guessed it, another adapter (T2 to SCT) will be required for that. Luckily I already have one of those - rule 1 - you can never have enough adapters.

(Note: I have tried a similar setup with the Celestron Off-Axis guider and it worked flawlessly, so I suspect it has something to do with the dimensions of the pickoff prism and its location for the TS Optics)

Will have to wait for another day before I try it out.

Seeing conditions were not too bad. The previous night there were thunderstorms and rain, which did a reasonable job of washing away some of the atmospheric dust. Usually the Unihedron sky meter gives a reading of around 15, last night it hit 17 for the first time (still equivalent to moderate/severe light pollution though).

So it was up to the roof of the apartment block and just gaze around in the 9x50 finderscope (that is one cool finderscope from Celestron). My dear wife came across a site on the Internet which gives a star map for your city - http://www.astroviewer.com which is kinda neat, if you dont have any planetarium software.

Finally decided to find out how to setup that Celestron F6.3 focal reducer. Now it seems that there are some pretty big things out there in space, and if you want to take photos of them, you need this special toy called a focal reducer. Seems I have plenty of those now.

Yes, well, it sounds simple enough, connect this bit here, etc. Thought I might read some comments on the net, only to find a lot of arguments about how far the camera must be away from the back of the reducer lens.

Say what? 85mm or 105mm? Who really cares about a few millimeters? Seems like a heck of a lot of people do. Well, I guess there is only one way to find out. Use a setup with spacers that so in Image1, there is 85mm from the focal reducer to the Camera CCD chip, and in Image 2, use spacers to get 105mm distance.

Well that was simpler than I thought. Out came two very similar pictures. Now remove the focal reducer. Change the setup to be the same distance as before 85mm and 105mm. take a picture at each.

Then compare the images in photoshop, the two taken at 85mm against each other, the two taken at 105mm against each other. A simple task of to scale the Image2 (reduce the size) to match image1.

So it turns out that at 85mm the focal reduction is 0.64 and at 105mm it is 0.62

Not much difference really? What I learnt was if you wanna take a photo of something big, use a focal reducer.

As a beginner, I seem to have been communicating with Celestron support on a regular basis. I know from many comments I have read on the net that many people have not had much luck, my experience however has been very good.

And a myriad of answers have wormed their way over time and space to enlighten me on what I was doing wrong. One might say that I am very pragmatic and logic, so after days of reading the setting the setup manual for the C8_SGT_XLT it was time to put theory into practise. Hmmm page xyz of the manual, hang-on mate, there seems to be a bit missing here, what did that say again?

Now I am not that sceptical to believe that the english text was translated from chinese, but at times I could be convinced. There was some pretty important need to know critical information left out or assumed. I was beginning to feel like the gun toting crazy dude in the film "Screamers" after he blew up all the monsters and ran out of ammo.

For example. loosen the DEC clutch, align the index marks etc - BUT no-where does it say retighten the clutch. Obvious you might say. Yeah, pigs can fly and alligators are docile creatures.

So off goes another support question (or two) to Celestron. This time I was a bit steamed. After pouring through heaps of pdf and faq files, I still didnt have any answers that made sense. So in my email what was a guy to do?

I suggested that they should have setup video's on their web site, you know, that show people how to setup their darn equipment. Thought nothing of it again till a few weeks or so later when I was checking the support site again, and stuff me, whats there now? A set of videos. Except the one I really wanted anyhow for the C8-SGT_XLT. Probably too late anyhow as I think I have the setup sussed now.

Now dont get me wrong, I am not claiming credit for this, I would like to believe its pure co-incidence, but a small part of me believes Celestron does listen......

Heres a question for you to think about - how do you know if you are gonna be wasting your time setting up all that stuff only to find out there is so much dust in the air and seeing conditions are so bad that its not even worth it.

Turns out there is an answer - order 3232 from the online shop again, the Unihedron Sky meter!

A great little tool that shows at a glance just how bad things really are (or good which seldom seems to be the case here). Now its a simple of matter of go outside, take a reading, confirm what I already knew, come back inside and watch some movie on TV......

And just for the record, I have never seen it higher than 16.....

So if I am going to the desert and viewing stuff in the sky, how will I know the longtiude and latitude for setting up the telescope? I could use the GPS in my cell-phone, thats if I can get cell-phone reception - fat chance of that happening. I guess that means another purchase from the online store - one GPS CN16 with accessory kit. Was easy to setup, except for the fact that the auxillary port unit slides in upside down on the bracket, I guess the engineer who designed that no longer works for Celestron!

No more entering the date, time and location, only adds a couple of minutes to the setup and dis-assembly times - hmmm - did I miss something here? I wonder how long it took me to do the date and time stuff before?

Doesnt it just annoy you when everytime you set the telescope up (I cant leave it permanetly mounted in the bedroom of the fifth floor apartment), you have to re-align the finderscope. Thats a right pain. To hell with this waste of time, a 9x50 finderscope is the answer, with its own quick mount/release bracket. Now thats a hell of a lot better than before, they should make that a standard feature,

Ok, so the Celestron Eyepiece filter set came with a range of filters, which I added to with some extra ones, UV, UHC, OIII etc.

Now one realises that you can of course use these 1.25" filters on the NexImage webcam, but it leaves the burning question, what about the Canon 500D that I intend to use for the main imaging camera. Note: I will guide with the Orion Starshoot autoguider or NexImage.

So that means having 2" filters. So the online shop (I must be keeping them in business during the financial crisis), lets see, um have one of those, and that one, so ended up with Thousand Oaks OIII filter (rated as the best), Baader UV/IR, Orion Hydrogen-Beta, Baader Solar Continium, Colored #80A and #21, Celestron UHC, Celestron Skylight, all in 2", as well as the required 8" Solar filter to go on the front of the telescope for looking at the sun.

Now if only the weather would co-operate. Dust-storms, talk about dust in the air, I setup during the daytime to look at my favourite billboard, and the image was dancing all over the place, leaving little hope to view anything in the sky. I counted about 21 stars visible at 9pm, 3 hours after sunset, which just demonstrates how bad the seeing conditions are here.

Which raises a good question - why on earth buy a telescope when you live in such a poor seeing area? Well, I guess I could travel to the desert, but the main intention is to ship it all back to my own country at the end of my stay here, then happily retire and keep myself busy gazing at the sky above.

I wonder how others keep their equipment clean? Everytime I bother to try and use the telescope, every bit, lens, whatever always seems to have dust on it, I seem to spend more time cleaning than I do viewing....