Friday, October 4, 2019

Pew! Pew!

Space Laser!

I have one of these mounted on the business end of my telescope.  It is a rifle laser sight.  It shines an intensely bright thin green line towards whatever is in the crosshairs of the sighter scope, also visible in this image.

Careful alignment was necessary.

It's useful because I can determine where the scope is pointing or slewing without doing the contortions to peer through the sighter scope.

It works really well.  Even at cold winter temperatures.  Cold is usually a problem for green laser pointers, but I made sure this had good cold weather specs.

Pew! Pew!
While out with the telescope last night, I noticed something that I had not previously seen.

I was aligning the scope's tracking to a star in a section of the sky where there were dim objects that I planned to image.  The imager was attached to the laptop and SharpCap was running. I pushed the momentary switch to the laser and saw this frame.

Pew! Pew!
The laser beam was visible in the very narrow field of view of the imager.

So, I'm now wondering how I will explain the interstellar war I started by firing a laser at some indiscriminate target in the sky.😎

And then there was the sign on the wall that I once saw when working in a laser lab.  "Caution.  Do not look at laser with remaining good eye!"

 




4 comments:

  1. Space cats must be going wild!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Today I learned about the space cat meme generator and how to an image cannot be embedded in a blogger comment.

    So, here is a link instead.

    Space Cat

    ReplyDelete
  3. Replies
    1. This is a really pretty 532nm green. It's forbidden to use at astronomy club dark sites in case its beam shines through the field of view of someone using an imager.

      Delete

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