Venus

Afocal, Coulter 8" F/4.5, TMB/BO Planetary 6mm eyepiece, with my son's Sony P100 camera.

Solar projection

I made a little cardboard solar projection box for my 8" Coulter, and a mask to cover all but 2.9" of aperture.  I read a hint to put two holes in to get the resolution advantages of the aperture--I may try that one day.  Or I might open up more of the aperture and use IR-rejection film, though that may be risky for the eyepiece.

It's easy to point the scope at the sun--you just move the scope until the shadow of the tube is as small as possible.  For safety, I make sure all the observers are on the side of the telescope away from the eyepiece.

With a 27mm Kellner eyepiece, after I got things into focus, the box did show sunspots.  (Note that the big yellowish smudge on the right is glue on the inside of the box, rather than a solar feature.  I will have to stick in a clean piece of card paper there.)  The image was actually a little too bright to view comfortable.  The photo of the projected image worked, though, once I set the camera to minimum aperture and exposure time.  I need to make some registration marks on the projection screen, so that I can take two photos in the future, one with exposure for the bright disc and the other with exposure for the registration marks, and use the registration marks to undo the skewing you see in the photo.

The sunspot positions match those here.

The aperture mask was quite warm, but the eyepiece didn't seem to get hot.

Solar observing safety precautions: Do not look through the eyepiece.  Do not look at the sun naked-eye, either.  Stop down the aperture to prevent the eyepiece from shattering from the heat (which is a waste of an eyepiece, and might cause harm from flying shards), and push telescope away from the sun every couple of minutes to cool off.  Don't use an expensive eyepiece.  Never use the cheap solar filters that screw into the eyepiece.  They can shatter while you're viewing and the sunlight is then likely to blind you (and I had one as a kid that faded with time--it got less and less dark! fortunately, I never used it in the telescope).

Aurora

Alas, I can't report whether aurora was visible as far south as here since I was sick and not observing last night. Here are some gorgeous photos from Norway, though.

Micrometeorite candidates

The kids and I took apart a defective hard drive yesterday, and I used one of the magnets (in a plastic bag, which I then inverted) to fish for micrometeorites in the soil near a downspout.  I found a few plausible candidates, as well as a bunch of surprisingly pretty microscopic ferrous dust.

Here is a particularly pretty area.  The pointer is pointing to a round micrometeorite candidate.  It's stuck to some probably earth-origin stuff--the hard drive magnet magnetized all the samples, so they stick together.  There is also a pretty piece of glass or crystal closer to the top edge.

I ended up preparing a slide with four candidates (one a bit dubious) mounted under a glass coverslip.  It's hard to grab pieces as they are very tiny--though big enough to see naked eye as a tiny dot--and stuck magnetically to other things.  In particular, I lost the round one in the first photo, as it just shot away when I tried to grab it with a toothpick (which looked like a big blunt log under the microscope).  Here's one that didn't get away.  It's about 60% of the size of the ball in the first picture.  You can't tell in the photo, but if you shine the light on this, it's very metallic--a nice silvery object.

I ended up perfecting a method for extracting them.  First, I use the toothpick to sweep the area around it clean, looking in the microscope most of the time.  It's confusing, since the miscroscope reverses the view, but eventually the brain gets used to it.  Then I wet the toothpick with acetone.  The micrometeorite candidate sticks to the toothpick.  I then transfer it to a clean piece of glass.  Because the acetone evaporates so quickly, it's easy to just wipe the toothpick on the glass and the micrometeorite drops off.  I lost two promising samples--especially that nice big round one in the first photo--before I got the above two.

From what I've read, rounded things that look like they were partly melted are good candidates.  Here is a less rounded item that ended up on the slide of the four that I saved.  I don't know how it got there, as I only intentionally transferred three to it, if memory saves.  Maybe it accidentally got carried there.  It looks too rough-edged to be a micrometeorite.  However, I've also read that they can avoid atmospheric melting by being small, so maybe rough-edged things count as candidates, too.  It, too, has a nice shine to it, though the photo doesn't show it.

If you try to view this with bright-field microscopy, of course you just get black silhouettes.  What I did is I taped a bright LED flashlight to the microscope, pointing at the sample, and then I took timed exposures, holding the camera to the eyepiece (sometimes with some sort of adapter to keep the camera in place).  For the second two photos, I found a way of adding more light.  I took the microscope outdoors, and then reflected sunlight onto the slide with a mirror (actually, a hard drive platter--they make lovely mirrors).

The photos were taken with point and shoot cameras hand-held to microscope eyepieces, with some loose-fitting adapters to make it easier. The first photo was with a Sony P100 through the 10X Huygens eyepiece that the microscope came with. The second and third photos were with a Canon G7 through a Rini 30mm telescope eyepiece, using my home-made telescope-to-microscope eyepiece adapter.

Update: I wish I knew how to better identify micrometeorites. The very round one may not be one--see this article.

Clavius

I was playing with my 5mm ortho eyepiece on my 13" last night, looking at the moon and Jupiter, but the seeing wasn't good enough.  But I did take a picture of Clavius with my Canon G7 through my Hyperion 13mm.  Not as sharp as I'd like.