Welcome to my deep-sky page!
Hello, and welcome. This page belongs to dark_adapted, and it is about visual deep-sky and variable-star observing from a back paddock at 960 metres in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. There is a message board for the eleven or so of us who keep turning up, a logbook of what I have actually seen, and an about page describing the equipment I use and the rules of the board.
The paddock sky, roughly — Norma low in the north, the flicker star circled in amber. Not a real chart, just the shape of the argument below.
If you have wandered in from a search engine looking for Hubble pictures: there aren't any, and there were never going to be any. What is here is a written record. People sat out in the cold until three in the morning, wrote down what they actually saw through the eyepiece, and argued about it in prose. That turns out to be the interesting part.
What is new
- New 14 March. Twelve loggings added to the logbook, including four nights on the flickering star in Norma at unusually good strength.
- New 11 March. The flicker thread has passed forty replies and is no closer to an answer. seeing_hermit has done the variability arithmetic; old_dob remains unconvinced by everybody.
- 28 February. The Dob versus refractor argument has restarted for the third year running. I have stopped trying to close it and simply let it run now.
- 19 February. Board rules rewritten after an unpleasant week. Please read the netiquette section before you post.
If you are new to this
Visual deep-sky observing is looking at faint things through a telescope with your own eye rather than a camera. What makes it worth a whole page is that the eye is a strange instrument: it takes twenty minutes or more to fully dark-adapt, it sees faint light better slightly off to one side than dead-on, and no two people's eyes agree on how faint is faint. So a telescope in a paddock in Australia can show a galaxy that is invisible from a backyard in Sydney twenty minutes down the highway, and the two observers arguing about why is most of the interesting writing this hobby produces.
"Faint" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and it is the reason this hobby generates so much writing. Two people looking at the same object on the same night see different things, and neither of them is lying. So we developed a way of writing down exactly how dark and steady the sky was — seeing and transparency — and a convention for reporting it, and then we argued about the convention. That argument is most of the message board.
The thing I would most like solved
There is a star in Norma. Most nights it sits at around fifth magnitude, faint but plainly there to the naked eye. Every so often it swings up to fourth magnitude or drops below sixth, on no schedule I have ever been able to pin down, and it has been doing this every year since I started logging it. Nobody on this board can agree on what kind of variable it is. We have a very long thread about it, and if you know anything at all, I would like to hear from you.
Four years of the flicker, at a glance — each bar a naked-eye estimate, taller means brighter, the two gaps are nights logged as unid with no number attached. Illustrative, not the full record — see the logbook for the actual nights.
A page for the eyepiece sketch gallery is under construction. It has been under construction since November.
You are visitor number 004172 since 12 August 1996.
