Courtesy of Spaceweather.com, here’s a comparison between the size of earth and the size of some current (small) sunspots.

The annual Leonid Meteor Shower is set to begin tonight and extend for several nights. It figures that it’s supposed to be cloudy all week so I’ll miss them just like I missed the eclipse last month. A few years ago Ana and I went a few miles outside of Champaign around 3am to watch and it was a spectacular show. I recommend if you have the chance, check them out.

Tonight I made a very quick test run of using a webcam with my telescope. Lots of people have been very successful in creating awesome photographs with their webcams, but I was pretty skeptical. I’ve been waiting to make a way of connecting the webcam to the telescope until I knew for sure it was actually going to be worth the trouble. After taking a quick shot at the moon, I must say that I’m very impressed and quite excited with what I may be able to do with deep space objects such as nebulas and the like. You can see the very shakey (since I was holding it up to the telescope by hand) video here, it’s a 3MB+ and in Windows Media format – I don’t have any software to go from avi->mpg here.

Right now the game is tied 7-7 in the 7th, after being down 7-2!

I was able to get a few good shots of the moon earlier: waxing gibbous and the bay known as Sinus Iridum.

The Binocular Mount I purchased for my tripod arrived today. I was pleased to find that it’s the correct size; it’ll be a great help when I’m outside looking at the stars (hopefully tomorrow night).

Not much is going on this weekend, so it should be pretty relaxing.

Today was completely cloudless, so I rushed home after work to setup the telescope and try out the new solar filter and camera mount. The solar filter lets in roughly 1/10,000th of the light – pretty cool. This is one of the pictures taken, albeit a bit out of focus since I was hastily taking picture before the sun went down and it was pretty windy outside. Next time I’ll take more time and hopefully come out with some clearer pictures.

Tonight I was barely able to get my third necessary picture of the moon. Check out the Waxing Crescent. This was difficult to get because without the moon filter it was very bright and with the filter it was too dim. The wind was also pretty strong tonight so a lot of the pictures I took had a slight blur to them. Hopefully the one linked to above will fit in with the others nicely.

Last night I got a picture of the Waning Gibbous phase of the moon. What’s funny is I went to bed thinking I was going to miss the shot because the moon had already set for the day. I woke up at 3:48am and noticed bright moonlight shining through our window and realized I had misread the Virtual Moon Atlas software I use. So I got up and spent about an hour outside then went back to bed. I now have 2/8 of the pictures I need for my project.

I did get to go outside tonight with the telescope, and it was fairly clear. I ended up taking 30+ pictures, and only one of them looks like it’ll be a keeper. At first glance, alot of the ones I took look good but with closer inspection the edges are blurred.

One moon picture down, 7 to go.

I’m starting a project aimed at getting 7-8 pictures of the moon, with the telescope like these, at its various stages. It will probably take me a while to get done because of the timing and weather but I think the end result will be pretty cool. Once I have them taken, I plan on utilizing Ana’s newfound mat cutting abilities and arrange them in a nice frame.

Tonight just happens to be a full moon, so I hope it stays clear so I can mark that one off the list.