Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Here’s the report from Halloween night. Lucinda went out with Cathy and some of the other kids from our neighborhood, while I stayed home and handed out candy. I set up my telescope in the front yard and let the kids look a Jupiter and also Comet Holmes. The comet was a special treat, since I’m usually kind of hard up for something interesting to look at if Jupiter or Saturn isn’t up.

Overall it was a good evening. Lucinda came home with 7.5 pounds (3.4 kg) of candy, which we all considered to be a good haul.

There is a large web in the back of my garage, with a nice big black widow on it. This is easily the largest one of these spiders I’ve seen around here. I guess it’s well fed on all the other creepy-crawly things that live in our garage.

I snapped a few more pictures of Comet Holmes last night. It’s a bit dimmer now. The first picture is a 10-second exposure on ISO 400. I finally figured out how to set the camera for long shutter times. Compare the second picture today with the second picture yesterday. Both are 1-second exposures on ISO 800. They look pretty similar, but for some reason, it looked a lot dimmer to the eye.

Just for the record, the telescope was a Celestron C-8 with a 32mm eyepiece, giving about 60x. The photos were all cropped and then scaled down by a factor of 1.9, so they are all showing the same size field. The camera is a Canon A560, and most importantly, it was attached to the telescope with Scotch® brand packing tape.