Another Good Astronomy Christmas Gift
For most of people who love their astronomy buffs, they can’t see the appeal of some of the gadgets we buy. It’s good that we’ve found significant others who love us in spite of our desire to stand alone for hours in the dark gathering faint photons from the sky with god-knows-what-that-thing-is.
If you found this page while searching for “astronomy christmas” in an attempt to buy your starry-eyed loved one something for Christmas, then let me offer another good choice.
This Sky Quality Meter from Unihedron makes a great gift for us because this is something we probably wouldn’t buy for ourselves but would love to have. I mean, if we were going to spend $119.00 on something, it would probably be an eyepiece or an adapter of some sort. Still, we’d love to play around with this thing because we’d love a chance to get quantitative about sky conditions.
I first found about this back in July and wrote about it here.
Getting quantitative means having a number that tells how good the seeing conditions are for a given night. The units it gives are in magnitudes/arcsecond defined as follows on their website:
Magnitudes are a measurement of an objects brightness, for example a star that is 6th magnitude is brighter than a star that is 11th magnitude.
The term arcsecond comes from an arc being divided up into seconds. There are 360 degrees in an circle, and each degree is divided into 60 minutes, and each minute is divided into 60 seconds. A square arc second has an angular area of one second by one second.
The term magnitudes per square arc second means that the brightness in magnitudes is spread out over an square arcsecond of the sky. If the SQM provides a reading of 20.00, that would be like saying that a light of a 20th magnitude star brightness was spread over one square arcsecond of the sky.
On funny thing I found on their site was a list of uses. It was funny because of this one:
Set planetarium dome illumination to mimic the skies people are likely to experience elsewhere in the city.
Now there’s a big market.
Still, it’s a great gift, I say that because I know I’d love to have one, but I don’t want to shell out any money for it.
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