January 17th Star Party!
After weeks of clouds and rain we finally had a clear night. Multiple telescopes were set up in the parking lot including Miles Starkenburg’s 14” (equipped with binocular eyepieces) in addition to our Takahashi 6” refractor, an 8” Dobsonian, and two Seestar (an S30 and an S50) telescopes. Additionally, the CDK on the roof was used in visual mode for the first time at a star party.
The Seestar S50 is in a class of telescopes referred to as EAA or Electronically Assisted Astronomy. It is operated by an application on an iPhone or iPad device via a local WIFI.
Peter Moseley had his S50 Seestar set up for the first time and took a picture of M42, the Orion Nebula. When Peter was 10 years old, he had taken an image of M42 at the 60” telescope on Mt. Wilson under the guidance of Alan Sandage, (the renowned astronomer credited with determining the first reasonably accurate values for the Hubble constant and the age of the universe. Glass plates with photo sensitive emulsion were used to take images at that time and this technique was used until the late ’70’s.
