Xmas arrived early. The EdgeHD800 finally got unpacked. About six weeks after placing the order I got the phone call - where can we deliver these boxes. So I went and picked it up, saving them the trouble. And boy oh boy, talk about a brand new toy. No comparison to the CG5. Dont get me wrong, I am happy with the CG5-C8-AST. No problems there. But this is in a different ball park all together. It looks and feels like quality. It just stands there and says "I am awesome". The Miz on WWE has got nothing on this wonder.

First impressions. A wonder of engineering. Quality. Heavy. Did I say heavy? Yes, it is a lot heavier than the CG5 mount. I had a pretty delicate back operation late last year and I felt the weight straight up. Probably at the upper limit of what I can lift right now, age does no favors once you go past 50+.

A lot quieter on slews than the CG5, it doesnt sound like its straining at all. I just like the look of it. Robust and steady as a rock. When I get a little time this week I will update the HC and MC firmware to the latest. I did this recently on the CG5 without problem, so fingers crossed, been there, done that, should be ok. I got an extra counter-weight balance just in case. Not sure about guiding it yet, I got a side by saddle mounting plate from ADM so I can mount the Orion 80mm scope along with the 8" OTA. As the CGEM supports this orientation, thats not an issue and will help keep the weight closer to the center of the mount. I had noticed that the CG5 struggled a bit with the Orion mounted above the C8 OTA.

It unpacked and assembled like a breeze. Being famaliar with the CG5 helped a lot. I havent had a chance to try it yet, the humdity is well into the 70's and 80's at night now, it would just fog up instantly if taken outside, and thats not really how one should treat a brand new expensive toy.

The finderscope is 9x50, very interesting bracket (quick release - alignment not lost when removing), and so very very easy to align. Thats got to be one very smart way of doing it, so much easier than the 9x50 finder and quick release bracket I bought earlier. It has two screws and the third point is a spring loaded pivot, I had it aligned in basically seconds. The previous one was a lot more difficult.

So ive had a little play and gone through a "pretend" alignment, nothing new there. The white tube of the EdgeHD series is a real looker. Even the wife and daughters commented on how stunning this new scope looks (major hurdle overcome!). Its fitted snugly into the Celestron case and will have to wait now till the summer is over before I can unleash it on the heavens above. I think I'm in for a very long summer.....

Summer has arrived with a real vengence. Humidty has climbed rapidly and the visibility gone down accordingly. The telescope has been packed away for the time being, with little hope of any imaging in the near future. This will give me time to get more famaliar with some of the software and catch up on some reading. The picture is taken out of the apartment building, looking towards the Burj Al Arab, a well known landmark in Dubai, about 5km away, yet barely visible through the haze and dust. At least with light pollution you have some choices, with weather like this the only choice would be relocation!

Thank your lucky stars you dont have to deal with weather like this!

The weekend arrived. For those not famaliar with the middle-east, friday is a day of rest. This means for us in the UAE, our weekend is Friday and Saturday, meaning thursday and friday are optimal days for trying to do a bit of astro-gazing. I had been watching the weather all week, and the forecast was looking good, temperature 28 degrees celcius, (yes thats right) clear skys, humidity low 20's and virtually no wind.

The #2 daughter needed to go to the mall. These are no small matters, malls here are monsters with over a thousand shops and the size of a large city block. So, after duly placing everything in the car, it was into the wallet and handing over some hard earned cash for shopping actvities. That duty clearly done, it was off to the desert myself to enjoy a good nights gazing.

When I got there, it was still about an hour to go before sunset, and started unpacking, first the tripod, yes, duly pointed North, leveled and ready for the mount. Then the mount, hand control unit, set up all the powerpacks, my table and chairs - yes one must be comfortable you know.

OTA duly fitted, guidescope attached, cables all on. Now for the final act, attach the counterweights and balance this thing. Hmm, now where did I put those. Oh yes, sigh of frustration, they are not here. There is not going to be any stargazing this night. The two most important things, without which it aint gonna work. So that's it, time to disassemble everything and put it all back into its nice little/big boxes and admire the setting sun on the drive back.

However, the daughters shopping trip also suffered a few set-backs, she didnt end up with precisely what she was after, but made do.

So last night it was off again, this time making sure that the counterweights were packed also (yes, double-check). Duly setup, wait till dark, do a two-star align and calibration stars, and behold, Saturn clearly visible with its rings edge on, what a sight to behold, making up for the disappointment of the previous night.

The humidity then started to rise, fogging up the eyepiece, so we decided to call it a night at that point. It was worth it just to see Saturn. With summer settling in now, the humidity is going to dramatically increase (80+ at night) with temperatures well above 30 celcius at night. This will continue for about 3 months, so opportunites for using the telescope are going to few and far between for a while.

Happy gazing

So it was out to the desert to test the skyscout, along with a list of things to try. Wife and #2 daughter duly put the skyscout through its paces and it passed with flying colours. Meanwhile, I was busy drift aligning. What I did find out was perhaps compasses are not that good at determing true north (even when you account for magnetic declination). I thought I was aligned pretty good, Polaris was not visible, but regulus and arcturus were so I began the drift alignment, only to find I needed to move the mount a fair bit.

Once drift aligned, it was attachment time, the Orion SSAG mounted on the Orion 80mm OTA and the QYH9C on the C8 OTA. Fired up nexremote and completed the alignment procedure. At this point I decided to try something entirely different. Warning bells shouldve gone off, but I wasnt listening.

So fired up MaxPoint, MaximDL and thought I would do an auto-calibrate. Away it went for about 5 exposures and then boom, failed to resolve anymore.The images looked like a whole heap of noise and a couple of bright blobs for stars. Hmm. Ok, alter some exposure times, check gain and settings, maybe its the USB cable, maybe its settings in the ASCOM driver, on it went. Finally, started Nebulosity, preview - viola - picture perfect, nothing wrong with the camera or drivers or cables. Start Maxim, expose - [bad words deleted] - nothing but noise.

I dont know about you, but I HATE, LOATH, DESPISE and DETEST the screen stretch function in Maxim DL. In my view it should be turned off by default. If I want it, I'll ask for it, else I want the thing to display what I image, not massage it first and display it the way it wants to. Thats whats good about Nebulosity, take an image and it looks like an image. Dark background, nice bright stars. No clicking, no stuffing around. Maxim - take an image and fight with the bl--dy thing to try and get it to show you anything decent. I dont care about all the arguments, just display the image without messing the darn thing up. What a waste of time, and I am pretty sure I'm not alone here - this is the sort of thing a software coder would do - oh this is cool, lets make it a standard feature, without really thinking hey, some people just wanna point and shoot. Give it to me as an option, not as a default. And if you are stupid enough to code it as default, at least give me the ability to turn the thing off. Dont know how long I spent going through the menus and help files trying to find a way to turn the stupid thing off. To no avail. I dont want it. Period. At least not until I am darn good and ready to use it. Especially not when I am trying to use Maxpoint.

If the software coder had of been anywhere near the desert where I was, his ears wouldve been ringing. And he wouldve had to find his own way home. Needless to say, I shut down MaxPoint and came within a millisecond of permanently deleting Maxim DL.

The guys at Celestron help support did an ok job. Last night I decided once more to test the SkyScout, having been unsuccessful on previous occasions. This time, no more up on the roof of the apartment building, but a nearby desert area free from any form of magnetic interference and metal of any kind. I deliberately left behind the mobile phone and Breitling titanium watch!

Power-0n. Success. Linking to GPS. Success. Identify Sirius - Success. On and on it went. Success. Success. Power-off. repeat six times just to make sure its not a fluke. Success. Ok, maybe its time for someone else to try. Power off. Hand SkyScout to wife. briefly explain what to do. Success.

Ok, lesson learnt. I guess that means don't use it on the rooftop of buildings. Impression - pretty neat tool, wasnt quite able to seperate Castor and Pollux, but overall, did a pretty good job of identifying all the targets (wasnt that many due to a lot of dust in the atmosphere which limited seeing). And easy to use. But churns through the batteries rather quickly.

I am hoping this helps when we go to the desert later this week. From our current building I can count about 15 stars maximum on any one night. However in the desert away from the city, thousands of them, all looking the same. And When I tried to align on Polaris, about 30 in the findescope, making it pretty hard to guess which was the correct one. Even more when I tried to align. The desert has a way of making a whole heap of stars look the same brightness.

So the last two visits alignment and gotos have been way off to say the least. Am hoping that this weekend, with the aid of the skyscout, that will improve significantly. Skyscout - don't let me down.

I invested (not sure that is now the correct term) in a Skyscout, thinking it would help me learn the stars. It duly arrived yesterday, and was unpacked and fitted with new batteries quickly. I decided to update the firmware just in case. So its off to the roof (I did read the instruction manual twice) and lets see what this gizmo can do.

Ok, linking, linked to GPS, no problrm. Locate, Planets, Moon, which was nearly full and looking, this is gonna be easy. Blink, blink, follow the arrows, no, the moon is not at my feet, its 45 degrees above the horizon, not below it. Maybe I'm holding it upside down? No, that didnt work either.

Check date and time, why is it saying UTC +0? Turn off, link GPS, check date and time, says UTC +0. Ok, select menu and date and time and set it to UTC +4.

Nope that didnt work. Recheck time, still says UTC +0. Repeat 5 times. Ok I give up, Obviously a bug in user operation or a bug in software. Yet to hear back from Celestron support. Any date/time entered is not remembered, you can change it, but if you go and check it again immediately after, it still shows the previous settings, not the ones you entered.

Will have to wait and see what the response will be..

The weather has been extremely poor as of late, though I have travelled to the desert a few times, conditions have not been good and prevented anything other than visual observing. The one time we had clear skys, I setup the telescope in a carpark (this is in the desert) next to a mosque. Needless to say, it was a novel treat for all the local children who probably do not get many visitors out that way. In the end we had to pack it up early, else serious damage may have occured to our telescope from prying strangers.

The QHY9C camera arrived, and I was unable to take test pictures during the day because they all came out white (the camera is just too sensitive - even with a gain of zero and the shortest possible exposure time). I have now decided to try out a seperate guide system, and you will see in my new equipment photos posted today I am using an Orion 80mm OTA with a Starshoot autoguider. Its fitted using ADM minidovetail bar and scope rings, and it feels very solid.

I have also used cable ties to clean up the cabling system. The CGEM mount arrived last week with the EdgeHD800. It will be a few weeks before I can manage to unpack them and take them for a test drive though. Summer is fast approaching - already its in the high thirtys during the day, and within a month I guess the humidity levels will also dramatically increase (during the day 70-80%, night 80-90%) which will mean 3-4 months of non-observation time. Guess its a bit like people living in the far north having virtually 6 months of summer. I remember my wife and I once visiting Sweden, Stockholm, and I woke up at 3am, it was so light I thought it was 3pm and raced to have a shower and get dressed cause I thought I was late for an appointment!

With the weather, I was only able to upload equipment photos. I am hoping in the short window we have left that we are able to have at least one good night before the humidity arrives to take some decent shots.

Happy gazing

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!