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Guy's Math & Astro Blog

Guy's Math & Astro Blog

Monthly Archives: September 2017

A Recent Image of M-13, the Great Hercules Globular Cluster

09 Saturday Sep 2017

Posted by gfbrandenburg in Uncategorized

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Last weekend I practiced doing some astro-imaging during a beautiful night that featured a nearly full moon night, up at Hopewell Observatory. I was particularly concerned with getting decent ‘flat’, ‘dark’ and ‘bias’ subframes, which are shots where you take images of what appears to be nothing at all. However, using those apparently ‘nothing’ subframes, you can subtract out noise and unwanted internal signals, in order to get decent images. I was using a Celestron 14-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope on an ancient Ealing mount whose drive has some problems; as a result my ‘light’ sub-frames could only be 2 minutes long. I am also using a second-hand Canon EOS Xsi 450D DSLR camera that has had the infrared-rejection filter removed.

I did the stacking and registering and removal of noise using a program called Deep Sky Stacker, with no further processing. One day I will learn how to adjust colors with something like Pixinsight to make it look more beautiful I was fairly pleased with the results, which you can see here:

m13 as png file from hopewell labor day 2017

Trying to Test a 50-year-old Cassegran Telescope

07 Thursday Sep 2017

Posted by gfbrandenburg in astronomy, flat, Hopewell Observatorry, Math, science, Telescope Making

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Tags

artificial star, celestron, classical cassegrain, couder, double pass autocollimation test, ealing, FigureXP, focus, foucault, hyperbolic, optical tube assembly, parabolic, primary, refurbishing, ritchey-chretien, Ronchi, schmidt-cassegrain, secondary, spherical, Telescope

We at the Hopewell Observatory have had a classical 12″ Cassegrain optical tube and optics that were manufactured about 50 years ago.; They were originally mounted on an Ealing mount for the University of Maryland, but UMd at some point discarded it, and the whole setup eventually made its way to us (long before my time with the observatory).

 

The optics were seen by my predecessors as being very disappointing. At one point, a cardboard mask was made to reduce the optics to about a 10″ diameter, but that apparently didn’t help much. The OTA was replaced with an orange-tube Celestron 14″ Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope on the same extremely-beefy Ealing mount, and it all works reasonably well.

 

Recently, I was asked to check out the optics on this original classical Cassegrain telescope, which is supposed to have a parabolic primary and a hyperbolic secondary. I did Ronchi testing, Couder-Foucault zonal testing, and double-pass autocollimation testing, and I found that the primary is way over-corrected, veering into hyperbolic territory. In fact, Figure XP claims that the conic section of best fit has a Schwartzschild constant of about -1.1, but if it is supposed to be parabolic, then it has a wavefront error of about 5/9, which is not good at all.

Here are the results of the testing, if you care to look. The first graph was produced by a program called FigureXP from my six sets of readings:

figure xp on the 12 inch cass

my graph of 12 inch cass readings

I have not yet tested the secondary or been successful at running a test of the whole telescope with an artificial star. For the indoor star test, it appears that it only comes to a focus maybe a meter or two behind the primary! Unfortunately, the Chevy Chase Community Center where we have our workshop closes up tight by 10 pm on weekdays and the staff starts reminding us of that at about 9:15 pm. Setting up the entire indoor star-testing rig, which involves both red and green lasers bouncing off known optical flat mirrors seven times across a 60-foot-long room in order to get sufficient separation for a valid star test, and moving two very heavy tables into said room, and then putting it all away when we are done, because all sorts of other activities take place in that room. So we ran out of time on Tuesday the 5th.

A couple of people (including Michael Chesnes and Dave Groski) have suggested that this might not be a ‘classical Cassegrain’ – which is a telescope that has a concave, parabolic primary mirror and a convex, hyperbolic secondary. Instead, it might be intended to be a Ritchey-Chretien, which has both mirrors hyperbolic. We have not tried removing the secondary yet, and testing it involves finding a known spherical mirror and cutting a hole in its center, and aligning both mirrors so that the hyperboloid and the sphere have the exact same center. (You may recall that hyperboloids have two focal points, much like ellipses do.)

Here is a diagram and explanation of that test, by Vladimir Sacek at http://www.telescope-optics.net/hindle_sphere_test.htm

hindle sphere test

FIGURE 56: The Hindle sphere test setup: light source is at the far focus (FF) of the convex surface of the radius of curvature RC and eccentricity ε, and Hindle sphere center of curvature coincides with its near focus (NF). Far focus is at a distance A=RC/(1-ε) from convex surface, and the radius of curvature (RS) of the Hindle sphere is a sum of the mirror separation and near focus (NF) distance (absolute values), with the latter given by B=RC/(1+ε). Thus, the mirrorseparation equals RS-B. The only requirement for the sphere radius of curvature RS is to be sufficiently smaller than the sum of near and far focus distance to make the final focus accessible. Needed minimum sphere diameter is larger than the effective test surface diameter by a factor of RS/B. Clearly, Hindle test is limited to surfaces with usable far focus, which eliminates sphere (ε=0, near and far focus coinciding), prolate ellipsoids (1>ε>0, near and far foci on the same, concave side of the surface), paraboloid (ε=1, far focus at infinity) and hyperboloids close enough to a paraboloid to result in an impractically distant far focus.

We discovered that the telescope had a very interesting DC motor – cum – potentiometer assembly to help in moving the secondary mirror in and out, for focusing and such. We know that it’s a 12-volt DC motor, but have not yet had luck tracking down any specifications on that motor from the company that is the legatee of the original manufacturer.

Here are some images of that part:

IMG_8207
IMG_8210
IMG_8224

Magic in the Night Air

04 Monday Sep 2017

Posted by gfbrandenburg in Uncategorized

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My cell phone can’t do it justice with pictures, but I’m in an enchanted land right now.

There is something magical about being outside on a very pleasant summer night at 2 AM, away from any city lights, at our observatory on Bull Run Mountain. I’m well-napped and caffeinated, standing on a platform, surrounded by silver light, trees, our observatory, grass, and deep shadows. Because of this nearly-full moon, I didn’t need any flashlight to make my way between buildings, and now I’m listening to the cicadas, tree frogs and katydids, and also doing astronomy — or at least trying (with some success) to do various experiments with our equipment! And we have a cell phone signal strong enough for me to post this!

(ICYWTK, I’m imaging the very famous M13 — the great globular cluster in Hercules — as well as the also-famous Double Cluster, trying various settings on the mount and camera, more for my edification than to do any original research… I also tried using the Full Moon filtered through my T-shirt to produce “flat frames”. ICYDK, you have to subtract the signal in the flat frame from the signal in your “light frames” — the images you take of the star or galaxy or whatever — in order to get rid of noise and other distortions… It’s all complex mathematical algorithms today to produce those pretty astro photographs we live to enjoy…)

Being outside under the moon and stars on a nice summer night is something few of us get to do anymore. But it’s MAGIC. Try it some day.

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