STS-126 Shuttle Launch Status: 70% Launch Probability

As of 10AM today, the Shuttle has a 70% launch probability (30% chance of weather delaying the launch). The launch window is only 10mins long so if it doesn't launch at 7:55PM EST/4:55PM PST then it won't be launching at least till Sunday.


Photo of STS-126 on launch pad.

Shuttle Launch Info: STS-126 (This Friday)

Space shuttle Endeavour will launch this Friday at 7:55pm EST (4:55pm PST). If you've never seen a launch or haven't seen one in a while, why don't you make an effort to watch this one as there won't be many left.

Live launch will be viewable on cable on HDNet & NASA TV, and online at the links below:

Windows Media Player Links
NASA TV 150kb stream
http://playlist.yahoo.com/makeplaylist.dll?id=1369080

NASA TV 300kb stream
http://playlist.yahoo.com/makeplaylist.dll?id=1368570

In-Browser Links:
NASA TV 300kb stream
http://www.space-multimedia.nl.eu.org/stream/nasa.php

NASA TV 500kb stream
http://www.space-sts.nl.eu.org/stream/nasa500.php

As a note, the 500kb stream may lag or not work at all depending on site traffic during the launch so keep the 300kb stream link handy!

Lastly, here are some facts about this launch:
- 155th American manned space flight
- 124th shuttle mission since STS-1
- 99th post-Challenger mission
- 11th post-Columbia mission
- 22nd flight of Endeavour
- 27th shuttle mission to the ISS

On the local side of things, it is STILL CLOUDY and RAINY here. Outlook this week still looks bad so probably won't have any telescope updates anytime soon...sob.

Weather, Alignment and Collimation

This is what the weather looks like for the next 5 days…looks like seeing will be spotty at best.



As for my telescope, it is in the middle of an upgrade (yes already!)…nothing major, just replacement screws for the mount and Polar Alignment scope which I ordered from a place called http://www.scopestuff.com/. They have a wide variety of replacement and upgrade parts for scopes so I highly recommend you take a look if you want to make your scope a little bit better (I’ve added a link to them in the Links area). I replaced the following for my LXD-75 scope:

- Azimuth Adjustment Bolts
- Latitude Adjustment Bolts
- Polar Finder Scope Adjustment Thumbscrews

Why did I replace these bolts and screws? Well the replacement bolts are made to be more convenient to turn than the stock ones and the adjustment screws on the Polar Finder Scope require a tool to adjust...where the replacement screws adjust without a tool. Makes it that much easier to use the scope.

Now that it's cloudy and rainy I've been trying to find out more about aligning the scope so that I can take longer exposures. Right now I’m struggling to get up to 30 second exposures and from what people have told me, I should be getting 1min+ exposures easily. I've managed to align the Polar Align scope (which I'm betting was one source of tracking trouble) and am also using a new piece of software to help align the scope more accurately...as soon as I get some clear sky I'll be testing all of this out.

Speaking of collimation, if you are looking for a laser collimator to make sure your mirror is aligned, look no further than the Hotech 1.25” SCA Laser Collimator. I had bought the Meade 1.25” Laser Collimator previously and due to how it is made it didn't sit flush inside of the eyepiece which renders it useless (so don’t waste your money on it!) The Hotech on the other hand uses a rubber ring that expands inside of the eyepiece so that perfect alignment can occur. I'm eager to try out my new adjusted scope but again am waiting for some clear sky...

20 Seconds of M45

I wasn't really trying to get a good shot here as I was experimenting with "drift aligning" my scope (more on this later), but this is a close-up shot of M45 (aka "Pleiades" & "Seven sisters")...more specifically this is one of the stars that make up M45 named "Merope".

The stars that make up M45 are very visible to the naked eye during the East night sky and look great in binoculars. Only with long-exposure photography do the beautiful blue nebulosity around each of the main stars start to appear. This blue nebula is called a "reflection
nebula" which means that the light from the stars are either behind or within them, illuminating the nebula for us to see.

M45 is 440 light-years away from earth which comes to 2,580,906,240,000,000 miles. It would take us 440 years to get there if we could travel the speed of light (670,616,629 mph). The fastest manned vehicle to date has gone about 24,800 mph..which at that speed would take us over 11 MILLION years to get there......

My First Nebula - M1

After still working out the kinks in the imaging process, I finally had an evening of pain-free image capture a few nights ago. I still have some bugs to work out and I will be addressing those issues next week - for now, take a look at my first nebula: M1 (aka the "Crab Nebula). Post-processing this image took a while, but turned out better than I expected for only a few 20sec exposures!

4th Observing Session: Moon Redux

Noticing a clear night last night I quickly set up the telescope with the intention to photograph the Moon again, but this time with the Meade Color DSI II camera instead of my Canon SLR to see the difference in camera quality.

What you see below is the Moon in its "Waning Gibbous" phase with about 70% of the surface visible. This mosaic was made up of only 3 exposures with slight sharpening and color correction in Photoshop.

3rd Observing Session - Moon & Capella

After a short vacation and the start of fall weather, I was able to do another photography session - this time with my DSLR camera.

The moon was out in full force during this session, which was the prime candidate of the night. Due to the size of the moon (and the wrong eyepiece I was using) I had to take multiple shots of the moon to make this mosaic (the black areas are parts of the moon that I wasn't able to take for whatever reason).

Due to the moon being so bright (and washing out all of the deep space objects) I was limited to viewing stars so I turned my scope to Capella, the 11th brightest star in the sky. Looking at Capella, it looks like one bright point of light, but is actually a close binary star about 42.5 light-years away. Intense X-ray radiation emanates from Capella, most likely due to surface magnetic activity in one of the stars.