LOG Saturday April 30 2022
Updates
* Situation with B&H is resolved
* Water bottles collected are now up to 22 for the new observatory platform. We are looking at adding another resource to increase the supply of empty water bottles so the project can be completed sooner.
* The orders from the observatory are reestablished with B&H. This will allow the solar observatory to continue.
* Work is continuing on the solar observatory and a new solar telescope will be added to the array of telescopes. It will include a special solar filter and have ultra light weight of only 1-pound so it can be mounted on the main Nexstar 6SE and take advantage of its mount's solar and sidereal guiding and tracking. As this is a Chinese telescope, work is proceeding to translate the web sites and look for appropriate reputable companies to order from. The telescope is not yet available in the USA at the sources we reviewed.
* A new project is opened to contact astro imagers in the same city as they are dealing with many of the same issues. It will be interesting to see a new perspective of how they resolve the biggest challenges. Making first contact is difficult as everyone so far does not use or provide an email address.
* Weather reverted back to a total sheen overcast with no clouds or cloud breaks and the visibility of the Jupiter Venus Moon etc. conjunctions is now blocked from view. This will allow time to revert to a focus on ordering and product selection challenges. Of course weather can change in a 20-minute period and monitoring the environment will be helpful.
* Work is continuing on the eyepiece list to calculate focal lengths. It's expanded to include Barlow lenses and Focal Reducers. One thought is to create a list of values for each telescope combination.
* The updated observatory list is completed and published.
* A new telescope list of all telescopes purchased, designed, constructed, built and used by Otis is being prepared although the work is daunting given so many telescopes from day one to historically analyze.
* A file folder is opened up for solar R&D, including resource sites and image processing details regarding solar imaging. A large number of video sources are being reviewed on YouTube.
* Solar information was found on the potential result of solar observing in violet light. This is something we want to try at the solar observatory however see the note. Work continues to find an extreme violet filter that will function well within the limits of the ZWO ASI224MC camera's spectroscopic range.
Note: The U-Filter is not a visual filter since the human eye can not resolve images clearly in these portions of the spectrum transmitted by this filter. And particularly if attempting to see the Sun with these filters there are health issues involved. The U-Filter is not a visual filter since most telescopes and eyepieces can not pass light in the UV. According to the spectra chart
