Petri Kehusmaa Astroblog

Not being able to image any deep sky objectes due heavy clouds, I decided to customize my old light box to fit my new RC scope. Here is master flat frame taken with RC10C and STL-11000M.

Finally, after loooong wait my new scope arrived. It’s a 10″ Ritchey-Chretien manufactured by Deep Sky Instruments with serial number 5.

The box arrived in pretty good condition considering its long voyage from Atlanta, Georgia (USA) to Hyvinkää Finland. It was taped and banded.

Opening the box revealed the scope which was suspended by custom formed styrofoam. On top is a printed invoice from DSI. Seeing the scope in perfect condition was a big relieve.

Rear plate is anodized with three fans and I/O port for controller. There are also two handles to ease up carrying the scope. Excellent machining! Stainless steel parts used throughout.

The difference between 8″ Meade SCT and 10″ RC10C is huge!

After few tries I was able to lift the scope on top of my AP900GTO. What a beautiful combination! Luckily my counterweights were just enough to balance the system.

The focuser is robust and it’s moving the 5″ secondary easily and smoothly. Primary mirror looks clean!

Last year my astroblog had more than 32 000 visits which is new record! I thank you all and will continue to update my blog with new discoveries and images. I’m also going to upgrade my current telescope with a new one pretty soon. I hope that I can write more about it within couple of weeks from now.

I wish you all clear skies!

Petri Kehusmaa

Our local team in Finland discovered a new supernova in PGC 14286. The intial discovery was made by Mikko Päivinen (Rajamäki, Finland) on 26.12.2008 and I confirmed the discovery next evening by taking several unfiltered exposures of the target. After some checking and rechecking Arto Oksanen from Jyväskylän Sirius reported our discovery to IAU as a possible supernova. After some long hours of waiting, I received an email from Arto that IAU (CBET 1635) had confirmed our discovery and gave it a designation SN2008im. Bravo and thank you Mikko and Arto!

A broken display adapter was a reason for my troubles with the computer. After changing the adapter, everything (or almost) started to work. I continued having troubles with Cloud Sensor Graphics software though but after removing and reinstalling it (to another directory), solved my problems.

I seriously need to consider a backup plan because it takes a lot of time to rebuild everything!

I wish you

A Merry Christmas And A Happy New Year!

Another setback for SRO. After installing latest XP updates and reboot, my computer screen went totally black. No BIOS or boot information, nothing. It kept running though and were even able to update the weather graphics. My diagnose is that the video card is broken. The only problem is that it’s very hard to buy old technology today and in worst case I have to buy a new computer.

I took the PC offline, so there is no weather station data/graphics available until the issue is solved. Observatory webcam is also offline.

Last night I continued testing automated session with CCDAutopilot. Target was asteroid 133 Cyrene. This is data for more than 4 hours. Individual exposure 2 minutes and 103 data points.

I decided to have this asteroid for my target when testing CCDAutopilot. This session was fully automated for almost 4 hours (I was a sleep when session ended). Everything went well and here is the result. There is a sum image where asteroid movement is visible and lightcurve to see variations of reflected sunlight from asteroid’s surface.

With only six days in between observations, this dwarf nova faded away for my equipment. On 22nd of September I was able to catch it with my 8″ SCT but six days later it was gone. Light curve below.

This supernova was found by Koichi Itagaki from Japan. It’s very bright and clearly visible in my 7 minutes exposure. Taken with 8″ SCT and STL11K.