Steve Elliott and Cynthia Cauley – married, and both working at Sun – popped round for an inpromptu star-party. Steve brought his f/12 Meade 12.5cm ETX Mak-Cass whilst I supplied the Swedish mosquito repellant (thanks Martin! – it also works on British bugs) plus a 25cm/10″ LX200 SCT with JMI NGF-S motorised focuser, and a Intes-Micro MN56 Mak-Newt on a homebrew Dobsonian mount – with Cynthia bringing a wonderful ham, feta and dill frittata, some macaroons, a bottle of ros&eacute, charm, wit, and balm to marshal a couple of grown men who had suddenly reverted to childhood, playing-with and sharing their toys.

My neighbour and her friend – having been out on a hen-night, wearing tiaras in their hair – played the role of the giggling, mildly tanked but honestly interested girlies who usually stumble across these events. From experience I prefer female drunken bystanders to the men, the latter generally asking stupider questions for proportional quantities of alcohol consumed.

About halfway through the evening, Steve produced a webcam mated to a 1.25″ eyepiece holder, a laptop to drive it, and wired it to his ETX.

Me: “Er, would it be possible to jack that thing into the big scope?”

Steve: “Sure…”

…and the results are not bad, especially given the crappy thermal conditions:

They are also a lot bigger and more detailed than my previous efforts.

Jupiter rotates every 9.8 hours – that’s it’s day length, like 24 hours here on Earth – so if you sit back from your monitor, click on one image and use your browser to ping-pong back and forth between it and the next one, you should just about be able to tell that the planet has rotated about 1/40th the way around, between the two exposures – which are separated in time by about 15 minutes.

Computers and wireless networks are finally powerful enough to do the sort of stuff that I wanted to do 10 years ago but never bothered due to the hassle of dragging cables all over the house – but with a wireless laptop, some hacking of my motofocuser, and a little software, I could do the astrophotography from the nice warm kitchen. That said, Steve told me of a conversation he’d had with Terry Pratchett – another famous observer – who’d said that CCD/webcam astrophotography was “like sex while wearing a condom”. It’s another version of the go to a gig versus buy a CD live-music argument.

As a born star-hopper I sympathise with what Pratchett means but I also remember when I was studying in 1986, CCD astronomy was sexy cutting edge science – I had a friend who did some of the early research on the topic – and I remember the alternative process of film hypersensitisation – of baking your film at 50C in a “bomb chamber” flooded with hydrogen gas.

Let me run that past you again: baking your film at 50C in a “bomb chamber” flooded with hydrogen gas.

Sound like an invitation to an explosion? It has happened.

So I’ll take the amateur CCD process please, with all the geekery that entails, and when I want to get out there and “do it for real”, I’ll sling the Dob into the car and go find a campsite.

Hmmm… Adriana‘s just IM’ed me:

interesting… Doc Searls is also star watching: http://doc.weblogs.com/2006/06/18#eyesInTheSky

Blogging astronomers. We are legion. Mad swine, and all.