Lunar Phase for Courtesy of the U. S. Naval Observatory

Current View of the Sun

Welcome to our Astronomy page! We are rather new to astronomy but have been studying the sun for decades. My interest in the sun through Amateur Radio (Ham Radio) lent to my interest into astronomy. We do not live in a very dark area as we are just a couple of miles northwest of Ellisville, MS and there are a group of baseball fields about 1/2 mile east of us over the hill behind our house. We have a farm in rural Franklin County, Mississippi where it is very dark. We are surrounded by paper company timber land and National Forest. We are starting on the Messier Objects and will work through those first. We are members of the Rainwater Astronomical Association at French Camp, MS. It is about a 3 1/2 hour drive from our house there so we plan our trips there around events. This site will be under constant construction as I will add photographs and other items of interest as time goes by.

My Telescopes

We just bought a new Celestron CGEM-1100 Computerized Telescope. It is an 11" Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope on a CGEM Computerized Equatorial Mount. We am relatively new to Astronomy but we have been studying hard over the past year learning the sky and studying telescopes. We were planning on buying an 8" Dob but decided to go ahead and invest in a good telescope. Our goals are to continue to learn the sky and the proper way to use the scope and to eventually get into Astrophotography, but not in a major way. Our home location is not very dark as there is a baseball park just over the hill behind us and lots of street lights. Over at our farm it is very dark, though. We do not have neighbors for miles and the closest street light is 13 miles away. We are surrounded by paper company timber land and National Forest.

We have purchased a Lunt LS35THa Hydrogen-Alpha Solar Telescope as our entry level into solar astronomy. It has a 35mm Unobstructed Front Mounted Etalon with a Band Pass of <0.75 Angstroms. This is at least 25% better than the Coronado PST with its <1 Angstoms of Band Pass, even though the Aperature is 5mm less. The Focal Length is 207mm and the Blocking Filter is 4mm with a Full Disk Image up to 400mm Focal. We originally got interested in Astronomy because of my years studying the sun for Amateur Radio (Ham Radio). Sunspots have a great effect on High Frequency (HF) Radio Propagation. The high radiation from the sunspots ionize the Ionosphere and this causes better HF propagation because the radio waves bounce back to earth off of the highly ionized layers in the atmosphere. The number of sunspots on the Sun has a considerable effect on the levels of radiation emitted and thus impacting the ionosphere. This has a marked effect on radio communications of all forms. So sunspots are of great interest to anyone using HF radio communications, since it affects radio propagation so much.

Index

Astronomy Links

Index

Astronomy News

Index

Astronomy Calendars and Star Charts

Index

Meteor Showers

Index

Astronomy Webcasts

Index

Astronomy Weblogs and Bulletin Boards

Index

Astronomy Clubs

Index