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Ode to my Father

How sad I am now my dear old dad and mentor has
"Changed his Cosmic Adress"

It was on 22nd January 2018 that he made his ascent to his celestial home in the sky.
By now he is no doubt wondering through the heavens watching his home planet, with all the troubles it has. And shaking his head in dismay.

I like to think he was able to have a word about the weather up there.

Because. For part of the evening on, 02-02-18 the skies in East Cheshire cleared and we had 4 hours of a clear Winter sky.

Thanks, Dad 😁

This allowed me to get out and go into my control room that is "Whirlpool Observatory" And collect some ancient light. On this evening. I decided to keep it all low tech and image Messier 35 with a camera and lens on my Losmandy G11.

The camera. Canon 1000D and the lens. Tamron AF 70-300 F4-5.6 Di
I now use APT for digital imaging. I think this program is excellent and does everything I want.

How do you focus your camera lens, I hear you ask!

With APT there is a neat little tool called "Lens Control" If you use that with the "Focus Aid" window open. And you have your lens set too Auto mode. You can let the software achieve very precise focus without having to touch the camera lens body.

When you have achieved focus. APT will tell you to flick the switch back to manual and you are done.

I decided to image Messier 35 yesterday evening. This is a bright open star cluster located in Southern Gemini close to Propus (Eta Geminorum)

The cluster consists of several hundred stars, of which 120 are brighter than magnitude 13. The central region has a density of 6.21 stars per cubic parsec.

Messier 35 has the Trumpler classification III 3 r, which means it is detached from the surrounding star field with no noticeable concentration, that it contains both bright and faint stars and that it is richly populated with more than 100 stars.

The cluster has an apparent magnitude of 5.3 and lies at an approximate distance of 2,800 light years from Earth. It has the designation NGC 2168 in the New General Catalogue.

There is also a 10th Magnitude "OC" visible in the same field as M35.

NGC 2158 is located Southwest of Messier 35 and is believed to be 2 billion years old.

Here then, is Messier 35 and NGC 2158 together with NGC 2174 extreme right and just a wee view of IC 443 visible close to the star Propus.


Clear Skies.
Paul...


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