Uncle Rod's Astro Blog

 

What’s ol' Unk goin’ on about now? I was thinking the other day—yes, I do that occasionally—about a nice observing project to do (mostly) from my backyard, and figgered it might be a good idea if it were something y’all have at least asked for for a change.

What is that something? Why, the good old Messiers, of course. While they are not always the best of the best in the way of deep sky objects, they are almost always among the best. I never tire of them—never. But didn’t I go through the list just a little while ago? That’s what I thought, muchachos, but when I checked, I found it has been eight years—actually, a little more—since I last strolled through the M list here. I also recalled that when I finished I was a little sad to be done. Apparently y’all were too, since I’ve had periodic requests for more Ms over the intervening years.

So, what’s the plan, Stan? My primary goals are, first, to image every one o’ them Messiers with a smartscope. I want to find out how today’s inexpensive robotic scopes do on the whole-big-thing, the 110 objects we (well, most of us) consider part of the M list today. This time we’ll do them by constellation or groups of constellations, not by their numbers. When will the installments appear? Whenever Unk feels like it.

Secondly, I want see what I think of them visually after 60 years’ of observing these beauties. Most of all, I want to try, best I can, to approach each one as if I were observing it for the first time. No preconceived ideas nor notions. No, “I know there’s a dust lane there, so maybe I did see it this evening.” Whether I’m in the backyard or at a dark site, how does M-umptysquat look to me right now. How good is it, really? Sometimes I’ll draw an object, most of the time I won’t.

What’s on tap as a visual scope? I’d like to say, “Zelda-Zelda-Zelda.” That’s my 10-inch GSO Dobsonian, who is in my opinion of the optimum aperture required for a good look at Messiers from a suburban backyard. I hope to use her frequently but know sometimes the flesh will be weak and smaller scopes will be used for The Messier Project (Gotta have a name, don’t it?). And, of course, for some objects smaller scopes will be appropriate any time.

What else? You don’t need much in the way of observing planning software for “just” the Messiers, but one still helps you decide which constellations/objects are available on any given night. I could use Deep Sky Planner or SkyTools 3, and I probably will use those two super-programs at home. But I hope to do a little star-partying again soon and will want to have a laptop with me.

I prob’ly ain’t gonna lug my humongous and current-hungry Alienware laptop onto an observing field…so…what?  As y’all know, I am a Mac user much of the time now. So, I thought it would be a Good Thing to install a deep sky planning program on my MacBook Air. The one I chose is an old favorite, AstroPlanner.

Paul Rodman’s (very) long-running observing planner is as capable as the others, and I’ve always liked it. So why haven’t I talked about it in a long time? I’d got used to using SkyTools and Deep Sky Planner and stuck with those programs. Neither of them runs on Apple computers, though. Since my power-sipping MacBook is the laptop I’ll take to star parties, I thought AstroPlanner might be just the thing. Assuming it was still around, which I hoped it was.

Well, of course it is, as I soon found out. The only change I could see is that Paul now classifies his astro-ware as shareware, which I believe is a change from the olden days. At any rate, I was gratified to see it works on Apple Silicon Macs. I downloaded a copy and soon had it cranking on my M2 Macintosh. Even better, after a small amount of fiddling around I discovered that, yep, I still knew how to work AstroPlanner! That alone should tell you what a winner it is, since it’s been at least 10 years, and probably more, since I last sat in front of the program.

Planetarium software? Likely, that will be SkySafari running on my iPhone and on the Macintosh. I still use Stellarium; it’s still a fine program and free to use. Ditto Cartes du Ciel. But… I’ve always got SkySafafi on the phone in my pocket, it’s beautiful, and performs very well indeed on the Mac, and…there just ain’t much reason not to use it.

Since one of my goals will be to make portraits of the Messier objects with the smartscopes, I thought I should really take advantage of the new SeeStar equatorial mode. I’d tried it out, and it worked fine, but I knew I could make it work better. Mostly by doing better polar alignments. What I have been doing is just tipping over the pan-head of my Manfrotto tripod. That works, but it is difficult to fine-tune tilt for latitude adjustment. I decided to get a genu-wine equatorial wedge.

The question then became, “Which one?” Several are available that will work with the ZWOs including from ZWO itself, SkyWatcher, iOptron, and several Chinese brands I’d never heard of. After using my share of SkyWatcher (Synta) gear over the years, I figgered theirs was a safe bet and ordered one off’n the Amazon. 

When the wedge arrived, I was rather impressed. It looks nice dressed in SkyWatcher’s current white/green-anodized color scheme. I also noted that a mystery was solved. It does include a 3/8-inch to Vixen dovetail attachment to mount the SeeStar (or other scope) to the wedge. The pictures on Amazon do not show one.

A down-check? The bolt that secures the dovetail to the wedge is a knob-headed one, and the base of the SeeStar will interfere and prevent you from using it. I could see that from the pictures, so before the wedge arrived, I’d hied myself to the Home Depot and got a hex-head M8 bolt to replace it (a bag of two was just a buck or three).

Anyhoo, got out my SkyWatcher Star Adventurer tripod and attached the wedge to the 3/8^th bolt on the tripod, bolted the dovetail to my Suzie-girl, mounted her on the wedge, and was ready to rock after adjusting the tilt of the wedge to roughly 31° using my phone’s gyrocompass utility. Oh, one further down-check, though I guess it don’t amount to much: The wedge’s latitude scale is screwy. Or maybe it ain’t a latitude scale at all...

Before moving the wedge to tilt the scope at the angle of Polaris, I looked at the scale and realized it would read “0°” when pointing straight up, and “90°” when pointed to the horizon. That’s the opposite of how it would be if it were meant to indicate latitude.

Pasted on upside down? Somebody at the Synta factory got confused? Not meant to indicate latitude at all (why not on a wedge fer Chrissakes?)? No big deal, though. If you want to use it to help with rough setup, just remember to subtract your latitude from 90 and set it to that. I adjusted the wedge to 59°, which would be 90 minus my latitude, 31.

When it was time for polar alignment, the SkyWatcher widget showed its value. I’d set the wedge midway between the two push-pull azimuth adjustment bolts (like on an AVX or EQ-6 mount, just smaller) and nudged the tripod to point north using my phone’s compass. After it got dark, it was easy to move the wedge to just the right azimuth for the NCP. Likewise, the smooth latitude adjustment knob made it laughably easy to move in altitude. I achieved the best polar alignment I have ever had with the S50. We was ready to bring home some Ms!

Where will we go for this first night of The Messier Project? Let’s begin with The Great Bird of the Galaxy, Cygnus the Swan. He’s on the meridian in early evening and will soon be sinking into the west as another year dies. Tucked under Big Bird’s wings are the small star figures Vulpecula, The Little Fox, and Sagitta, The Arrow. Also close at hand is the small but distinctive group Lyra, The Lyre. The four bring with them six Messiers, three Real Good Ones, M27, M71, and M57, two in the “OK” camp, M29 and M39, and one in the “also ran” category, M56.

So, it was on a somewhat hazy but clear evening I set out once again on the Messier Road….

NB: My observations were done over the course of several evenings, mostly to dodge clouds. I set aside one visual-only night, but it was plagued by haze—same as the other evenings, but worse—and rising humidity.

Messier 27 (Vulpecula)

Why did I hit M27 first? Simple: it was placed so as to give me an hour or so of imaging time before it was on the Local Meridian, which is not a good place to try imaging an object whether your telescope is mounted in altazimuth or equatorial fashion.

There wasn’t any drama involved in getting Suzie on target. As above, the new wedge made it easy to dial-in alignment. One thing I did do? Two polar alignment iterations. When you click “get alignment error,” the SeeStar does that based on the plate-solved image. But as you adjust in altitude and azimuth, the figures you see are determined by the scope’s level sensors. So, best to mash “get error” a second time when you’ve got it close, let the SeeStar take another image, and dial it in one more time.

And then, I plunked myself down on the couch with the felines and did a little reading and reminiscing about this legendary planetary nebula. The basics?  It was discovered by Charles Messier on the 12th of July 1764. Today, you’d think it would be difficult to mistake for a comet, but remember, Messier was using a very small scope. Also, while he may have begun with “objects that can be mistaken for comets,” almost from the beginning he was putting anything he saw that was weird/interesting in his list, comet-like or not.

Today, the Dumbbell is thought to lie about 1360 light years from this little rock. It’s a planetary nebula, the corpse of a dead solar-mass-range star that has blown off its outer layers. What remains is a beautiful corpse, the green-glowing Dumbbell (it’s always looked more like an apple core to me). There’s also M27’s magnitude 13.8 central star, the cooling core of its progenitor, which is visible in medium-sized scopes. The nebula itself is magnitude 7.4 and 8.0’ across, and obviously not a challenge for small scopes or even binoculars.

What did the man I still consider my Messier guru, John Mallas, think of the ol’ Dumbbell? Obviously, in 60 years more has been learned about this planetary, but the stats John gives are not far off the mark, with the major change being we now know it’s a little farther away than the 1250 light years it was estimated to be in his time. His visual impression of it (in the book he did with Evered Kreimer, The Messier Album) is for the ages:

A superb planetary for low to medium magnifications with small apertures; even the 10-power finder (of Mallas’ 4-inch Unitron) reveals details. Glowing quite greenish, M27 is one of the few planetaries to show vivid color in a small telescope. At low power when the air is not too steady, the Dumbbell may seem three dimensional.

The only thing that puzzles me, then and now about M27’s entry in the book is John Mallas’ drawing of it. It is nothing more than a rectangular smudge that looks nothing like the Dumbbell I’ve seen in any scope or binoculars.

What I saw with my own 4-inch (an Edmund Scientific Palomar Junior reflector; I could only dream about Unitrons) one long-ago evening was pretty much as Mr. Mallas described. Well, almost. I never noted even a hint of green color. But that’s something that requires just the right conditions. Otherwise, it was very nice indeed, showing its Dumbbell shape readily. Yes, it was smaller and far less detailed than the astrophotos in my books, but by the time I hit Vulpecula, Little Rod had learned that would sadly be par for the course.

That was then, how about now? What was M27 like in Zelda 60 years down the amateur astronomy road? On this less than stellar (ahem) visual night, the Apple Core was the best of the night’s catch. On this evening, I preferred its look at 78x in my old Happy Hand Grenade 16mm 100° eyepiece to that in shorter focal length oculars. Surprisingly, it was a little better, I thought, without either a UHC or OIII filter. That was probably due to conditions—usually the UHC is my goto for the Dumbbell.

So, Zelda did well, with her 10-inches bringing out mucho nebulosity. Only "problem"? She has enough light-gathering power to make the Dumbbell shape fade away. I was mostly seeing a football-like oval of nebulosity. Under these conditions, I could not make out the brighter bar of nebulosity that extends diagonally across the object. Nor could I see the slightest hint of green. The nebula was uniformly gray.

Suze acquitted herself nicely. I was a little worried about the high altitude of her target, but she only dropped one frame over the course of 45 minutes. I could no doubt further enhance the red “edging” of the apple core with post-processing with Siril, etc., but you know what? I kinda like what came out of Suzie (albeit with AI denoise applied) just as it is.

M39

As a kid, I thought this open cluster was the height of “ho-hum.” Has my opinion changed over the years? Let’s see... Anyhow, it was discovered a long time before Charles Messier began his sky adventures, having been recorded by Aristotle in 325 BC. Chuck paid it a visit on 24 October 1764 and added it to his list. What it is is a bright, large, loose open cluster shining with a combined magnitude of 4.6 and covering a whopping 31.0’ of sky. Pretty obviously, there’s no way Messier mistook it for a comet.

If there’s something to be said against this lovely group, the Arrowhead Cluster (Wikipedia refers to it as the Pyramid Cluster, but I’ve never heard anybody actually call it that), it is that it’s just so large, 31.0’ across. Back in the supposedly glorious Day, most of us were using telescopes, large or small, with relatively long focal lengths, and eyepieces with narrow—often very narrow—fields. Put a 31’ cluster in a 30’ field, and you’ll see what John Mallas saw.  After praising the cluster’s appearance in binoculars, he goes on to say, “M39 is less impressive in the limited field of the 4-inch.” And so it was in my Palomar Junior.

On this night in Zelda, M39 was and was not a disappointment. 1250mm is a bit much for looking at this big galactic cluster, of course. But it wasn’t bad even so. What was in my ocular was three bright stars arranged in a near-equilateral triangle shape filled with 30-40 dimmer suns. However, the cluster just barely fit in the 16mm’s big field. I said, “Waaaalll we’ll fix that!” and snatched my good, old 35mm Panoptic out of the eyepiece case. No dice, y’all, no dice. The Pan’s lower magnification made the field way too bright on what was turning into a rather icky night.

Suzie’s image? OK. The Arrowhead could have stood considerably more field than what Suze delivers, but the S50 is what I had in the backyard, the night was growing old, and lazy Unk, wisely perhaps, stuck with what was set up and working.

M29

As a young observer, I was every bit as dismissive of M29 as I was of M39. Why? I’m not completely sure. The cluster’s stats certainly don’t tell the tale. M29, which first appeared in the field of Messier’s small scope on a summer Paris evening in 1764, shines at magnitude 6.6, and is a mere 10.0’ across. You’d think that would be just about perfect for a 4-inch f/11 Newtonian. No sir buddy, I didn’t like it. As for Mallas, he found it to be attractive in his finder scope but not so much in the main instrument.

In Zelda M29 was, I fear, not lookin’ so hot, either. The cluster itself was nice, showing off its little dipper shape very well. There are eight prominent members with a few dimmer stars scattered among them. However, even in the 13mm Ethos, which I’d switched the ‘Grenade out for in hopes of darkening the field a bit, the scads of dim stars that make the cluster’s field so lovely were mostly missing. On the other hand, not having the distraction of all them stars, sure made Messier 29 pop out.

As for the Seestar? I have nothing to complain about with the image that appeared on my iPhone. I could have given it more than 15 minutes and brought out more field stars, I reckon, but I’m not sure that would have been good thing. As is, the little dipper-shaped group stands out better than it usually does in astrophotos.

M57

If M27 is a famous planetary nebula, M57, The Ring Nebula, is the famous planetary nebula. I know that as a beginning observer of the night sky, pictures of the Ring were one of the things that fired my imagination along with images of beautiful spiral galaxies. Best of all, for once, an object I admired in books wasn’t hard with my small scope.

M57 was discovered not by Messier, but by another French astronomer, Antoine Darquier, in 1779. It is 1.3’ across, and thanks to that relatively small size remains bright at magnitude of 9.7. I liked it in my Pal Junior. I liked it a lot, even though it was smaller than I thought it would be in my ½ inch focal length Ramsden eyepiece. Still, I judged this one “cool.” Mallas? He oddly calls it a “challenge” for the visual observer. Well, maybe it is if you’re after details including the notoriously difficult central star, but otherwise this is a showpiece for smaller instruments.

Like M27, the Ring was surprisingly good visually under the poor conditions. In fact, its small—but not too small in the 13mm Ethos—disk looked amazing in soup that was getting thicker and thicker. In a 10-inch class instrument, it’s easy to see the ring is elongated, that the center is not dark, and that there are brightness variations across the ring. Howzabout the central star? I have seen it in a 10-inch on a night perfect for that pursuit, but there wasn’t a prayer on this sticky Tuesday’s eve’.

I let Suzie have a brief go at the Ring, but it is just too small an object for her short focal length. The planetary is much better in another Chaos Manor South roboscope, Evie, the Unistellar Equinox, a 4-inch reflector. She did a nice job, but underexposure by me (I’m still learning the scope) meant the central star didn’t stand out like I wanted it too. Here, in a shot from last season, it’s maybe overexposed, but I dang sure did bring out the central star.

Messier 56 (Lyra)

The next stop on my sightseeing tour was the subdued globular cluster M56 over in Lyra. It was already across the meridian and would be a good Suzie target. This is another object actually discovered by good, old Chuck. On 19 January 1779, he found a smudge in the field of his scope. You can bet his small refractor didn’t come close to resolving it, and he put it down as a possible comet. However, coming back some nights later, it hadn’t moved and M56 went into his Big List. This was just the sort of thing he’d had in mind when he started the catalog.   

I’d be a-lyin’ if I were to tell y’all I was excited by the prospect of visiting Lyra’s oft-overlooked globular cluster. Why? It’s surprisingly difficult from the suburbs. When I was a kid running down the Messiers for the first time, I figgered logging M56 would be like shootin’ those proverbial fish in a barrel. It was a glob, and it was magnitude 8 and 8.0’ across. How hard could it be? Oh, brother was li’l Rod in for a surprise! It wasn’t there. I looked and looked with my Pal. Night after night—nada. Finally, I spotted the dimmest of glows in the field on a superior evening. Why so dim?

The problem is M56 is quite loose. It is a X (10) on the famous Shapley-Sawyer scale. For comparison, the devilish little NGC 5053 is a XII. That means M56 is almost as bad. Our old pal M2, in contrast, is a II. M13 is a V. So, what you have is a cloud—almost like an open cluster—of dim and distant globular stars. That makes M56 tough. I’ve found that for a nice visual look, a 10 – 12-inch under country skies is desirable.

Referring to The Messier Album, I’m surprised about what John says: “An impressive object. In a 4-inch refractor, M56 is a bright, nearly circular glow in which a few individual stars are seen.” I’m not sure exactly where he did the observing for the book, but for M56 to show stars in a freaking 4-inch, it must have been awful dark. What was it like in a 10-inch under hazy suburban skies?

On some nights, M56 has surprised me, but I wasn’t sure this would be one of those nights. As I keep sayin’, HAZY, which is typical for our early autumns. Some days the humidity is a little lower now, sometimes it is a little higher. But “lower” will still be 50 something percent, and tonight was tending toward "higher" with a vengeance. Anyhow, tracked the little glob down with Astro-Hopper, inserted my Happy Hand Grenade 100-degree 16mm eyepiece and put my eye to the ocular. What was in that huge spaceship porthole FOV?

Geez Louise, the answer is “not much.” I re-aligned Astro-Hopper on a nearby star, Albireo, because I wasn’t sure we were on the proper field. After considerable eye-straining and ocular switching, I finally noticed a dull glow in the field, and that was it. Higher magnification didn’t help, nor did lower. And no wonder, I’d had to use Zelda’s 50mm finder to locate Albireo so I could align on it. The normally prominent star was almost invisible with my eyes and Rigel Quick Finder. Frankly, it appeared the heavens were now well on their way to “considerably worse” in advance of a storm font predicted to arrive the following day.

Image wise, Suzie had no trouble with this sprite despite being limited to a half-hour. Her shot is not unlike the one Kreimer captured with his immense Cave Newtonian and cold camera for the Album all those decades ago. That is, a bright(ish) core, a fairly good spray of stars around the core, and, overall, an OK-looking globular star cluster.

Messier 71

After the awe-inspiring (ahem) M56, I was ready for a treat. Over we went to little Sagitta, the arrow clasped in one of the Great Bird of the Galaxy’s talons. Given M71’s Shapley-Sawyer Class, again X, this should be another punishing one, but it is not. In fact, it is easy for almost any telescope on any decent evening. Mallas is right on the money when he says, “A beautiful sight even in Mallas’ 10 x 40 finder.”

M71 is another Messier object not actually discovered by Messier but only cataloged by him (he did observe it). The discovery bragging rights go to Swiss astronomer Philippe de Cheseaux. Anyhow, it is a magnitude 8.4, 7.2’ across clump of Suns. Yep, clump. The stars appear brighter than those of M56 (it is about 13,000 light years out compared to 33,000 for M56), but it looks decidedly less globular-like. In fact, what it looks like is M11, the Wild Duck (galactic) cluster.

This galactic/open appearance caused a lot of debate for years. Was it a globular cluster or was it actually an open cluster? Surprisingly, the talk went on for a long while, until the 1940s, when somebody finally decided it might be a good idea to look at the cluster’s color-magnitude diagram. When you do, it’s, “Say, this thing is a globular cluster!” I’m embarrassed to say that some amateur astronomy books continued to question its status for decades thereafter.

With M71, I was ready for that much-desired Something Nice in the 10-inch’s eyepiece. Was I disappointed? Yes I was. The sky was now even worse than it had been during me and Zelda’s visit to M56. Oh, I could see a small clump of stars that was (I assumed) Messier 71, but the normally amazing field of the cluster was on the barren side this evening.

Little Suze did another right good job with M71 despite the fact lazy old Unk only gave her 15 minutes on the cluster. Her portrait does a fine job of showing off the glob’s “arrowhead”/M11 look. Anyhoo, the first bunch of Ms in the bag, I was ready to call it a night despite the fact Suzie-girl’s battery still had plenty of juice left. Yes, I know you can use a cell phone charging battery to power the little scope for a long while, but she has always outlasted me. Out to the scope, removed her dewshield, shut her down, waltzed her inside, and called it a night, and what a night it was—the Messiers are just fun.

I had finished the evening’s list, and by this time, near midnight, I was sweating and everything—eyeglasses, finder, oculars, even Zelda’s secondary—was fogging up. Her tube was wet with dew, and I had that yucky damp feeling that always impels me to pull that metaphorical BIG SWITCH. I covered Z, lugged the eyepiece case (which seems much heavier than it used despite me not having added a new eyepiece in about eight years) and headed to the den for Yell and YouTube with the felines before it was sign-off time.

The Bottom Line:  6 down 104 to go…

Where is M13?

I mentioned this program years ago. It was a good one; having been useful to me as an astronomy educator. What’s it do? Among other things, it can show you where deep sky objects are in relation to the Sun. Imagine my surprise to find it is still around and better than ever, now going by the moniker Our Galaxy. It has many more features than before, and I find it very nice to be able to get some perspective on where those Messiers are in the galaxy (or outside it).

 

Muchachos, down here on the borders of the Great Possum Swamp it sure has been that proverbial long, hot summer. I’ve been able to do some astronomy here and there, but not much, campers, not much. I hope conditions will begin to change as August takes its place in the rearview mirror, but I am not counting on that. In September and October, we here in the ‘Swamp really begin watching the stormy Gulf of Mexico…

SOOO…. No big observing plans or projects till the thunderboomers at least reduce their intensity and frequency. What, then? I got out last month and captured my yearly M13 with the SeeStar S50, Suzie. One reason for using the Smartscope was I wanted to try out her new equatorial mode. Worked fine. I had no problem doing a polar alignment, and The Suze tracked amazingly well, dropping nary a frame over the course of a half-hour. Yep, worked fine, and I thought I was done experimenting with Suzie for now.

Not so. First off, I hadn’t tried longer exposures, longer subframe exposures, that is. EQ mode makes exposing for longer than 10 seconds more practical, and the SeeStars can now go up to a minute. How would that work? I also wanted to test the scope’s new 4K feature. I thought ZWO would rest on their laurels for a while after nailing down EQ mode, but they didn’t. Just weeks ago, they added the option to have the app upscale your pix to 4K resolution. What was that all about?

In typical Unk fashion, howsomeever, that is putting the dadgum cart ahead of the nag. Traditionally, I’ve offered an account of my birthday doings here, though your routine-loving correspondent’s b-day has been much the same year after year. In homage to my days as a space-crazy kid when I’d spend my summers with my head out in the stars, one feature of Unk’s big day is space modeling. I didn’t do much this year, but as you can see, I did continue (slowly) with the launch umbilical tower (LUT) for my completed Airfix Saturn V model. ‘Twas fun, and maybe I’ll pay more attention to my little sub-hobby e’en as summer wanes away.

Natcherly, on Unk’s birthday evening (last month) he and Miss Dorothy made our way to my favorite Mexican (well, Tex-Mex) restaurant, El Giro’s. There, Unk ordered his usual, the Number 13: Chili rellenos, tamale, burrito. Yes, of course there were many, many cold 807s in the mix in celebration of your old Uncle’s 72^nd trip around Sol.

Oh, how Unk loves the number 13!

What’s that? You’re surprised I wasn’t shy about givin’ my age? I’ll tell you what, my young friends, when I hit 70, I decided there was no reason for me to be coy about my age any longer. That emperor has been running around buck nekkid for a while now. I’m old. I look at least older and sometimes act that way. Luckily, only sometimes.

Anyhoo, there’s no denying it. My 60s were fun and rather wild in subdued fashion. Hell, back then I thought nothing of yukking it up in El Giro’s or Heroes till, damn, 10 o’clock at night with me mates! But those days are gone. As they say, “Fun is Fun but Done is Done.” I am feeling fine most of the time, though.

Yep, I am I feeling good, friends, and we are even making plans to attend our area’s long-running and—yes—legendary star party, the Deep South Star Gaze. I am pleased to say it will be back at the Feliciana Retreat Center this November, which furnishes nice, small motel-type rooms with air conditioning and showers, just right for an (ulp!) senior like Uncle Rod. My attendance had dwindled away to practically nothing during the years the star party was at a different and more spartan facility, but I hope to be back now and keep on being back for as long as I can be.  

“Blah-blah-blah. What else happened on your birthday, Unk?” Skeeter, that was about it. I missed out on my other traditional birthday activity this year, activating a park for Parks on the Air. I was all set to head for Gulf Shores State Park. Batteries were charged and my little G90 transceiver was all checked out. But it was just too blamed hot. Even with them Gulf breezes, even under shade trees. Ah well, just like serious observing, serious POTAing will wait for cooler WX. 

I set Suze up in the backyard on the Manfrotto tripod and waited for darkness late on a sultry Tuesday afternoon. The weather station display in the radio shack said, “Feels Like 102.7,” and the sky was festooned with clouds. I was doubtful, but the weather services, including the usually dependable Astrospheric, agreed it was gonna clear by dark. Even if it did, Astrospheric also predicted sky transparency would be just this side of skim milk.

It turned out Astrospheric was right on the money. When astronomical twilight came, it was clear. Well sort of; the haze was as predicted awful heavy, worsening my suburban light pollution. There were also drifting high altitude clouds. I shrugged, “Well, we’re set up, might as well give her a go, I reckon.” I got my girl polar aligned.

That done, I retired to the couch in the cool den with the felines and sent Suzie to the Great Globular, instructing her to take 20 second exposures of M13 till I told her to stop. While she was doing her thing, the cats and I amused ourselves by watching YouTube videos. Tommy, Chaos Manor South’s resident black cat, favors programs about the war in the Pacific, especially Midway, and—even moreso— “The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.” That is just what we watched until Tommy fell asleep and began snoring heavily as 9pm came in.

I did have to keep an eye on Suzie early on. I’d set her up for, yeah, 20-second subframes, but we weren’t having much success. Less than 50% of ‘em were keepers. After 20 minutes or so, we had maybe 7 minutes worth. The reason was, I thought, twofold: poor conditions and a less than good polar alignment. When I’d done the alignment, I’d been sweating in the high humidity, and was already weary (Unk ain’t quite recovered from the Huntsville Hamfest). I just got the numbers in the green and called it “good enough.”

I know I need to do better and have a SkyWatcher EQ wedge on the way. The Manfrotto is a very good tripod, and very steady indeed, but there is no way to adjust the scope’s tilt with any precision. I was a little disappointed, but there weren’t nothing for it… I backed off to 10-second subframes, let Suze run for just under an hour, and called it a night. A look at the clock showed we were coming up on ten freaking thirty, quite the late one for Unk in these latter days.

The next morning, I imported my M13s into the PC out in the Batcave (my radio shack/workshop of the telescopes) and had a look at them on a large monitor. How were they? OK. Not bad, anyway. Well, nothing to write home about, friends. The high humidity and scattered light pollution made for blotchy, off-color backgrounds. I had to do something I rarely worry about with SeeStar images: I ran the pix through Graxpert to make them look at least presentable.

Hows about the 4K business? Wasn’t much to say about it.  On the live screen before beginning my exposures, I’d touched the three-dot menu and turned on 4K. Or thought I had. By the light of day, it appeared my finished images were the same resolution as always. I wasn’t sure what I had done wrong, and the instructions from ZWO are on the vague side, “Turn on 4K before framing.” I assumed (you know what they say about that word) they meant “before beginning a capture sequence.” I thought that was what I’d done but wasn’t sure. I had noted that the switch turned red when I turned it on.

Oh, well. It looked like the next evening’s skies would again be passable if not great. In fact, it ‘peared Wednesday might be a smidge clearer in advance of—yep—another storm front. So, Unk resolved to give the 4K stuff another try. I set The Suze up in the back forty again, and when it was dark enough (not till around 8:45, damn this DST) again polar aligned her.

Night 2, 10-second subframes...

This time I took considerably more pains with the procedure. I used my phone’s angle indicator app to get the tilt right at 31 degrees before beginning, and set the azimuth dead on 000 magnetic north (not much magnetic deviation in these parts) with the phone’s compass. When I began the polar alignment, the numbers were in the green from the get-go, but I refined them best I could.

I was more concerned about the 4K feature than getting 20-second sub-frames, so I set the scope for 10-second subs, letting them run for half an hour. That done, I tried 20-second ones again. This time Suze only rejected a single frame over the course of half an hour. Whether that was due to my better polar alignment, better conditions, or a combination of the two, I do not know.

Next mornin’, I again dumped the pictures to the PC and wound up scratching my head. Yes, they were twice the normal 1080x1920 resolution, just as they should have been after upscaling. But when I brought up the previous night’s photos, so were they, 2160x3840. What the—? I can only presume I got on the wrong directory when I was checking the shots the previous morning. I didn’t pay much attention to the dates on the images and, well, one M13 with the same scope is pretty much like any other. At any rate, the 4K feature does work and does seem to make the images look smoother and just better. It ain’t like night and day, but I do see a difference. Yes, I know, “TANSTAAFL” applies. Upscaling introduces noise, but I couldn’t see that it was any worse in my upscaled frames.  

And that was that. 4K works, and longer subframe exposures are practical now when called for. Were they in my case? Not really. In suburban light pollution, 10-second subs will often be more practical if you ain’t up to doing a lot of processing, which your ignernt old Uncle don’t know how to do anyway. In the wintertime or from a darker site, I suspect it will be a far different story.  

On the Chaos Manor South horizon? The SkyWatcher EQ wedge will be here on Saturday, and I will report on my results with it in the next article rat-cheer. What will that be about other than the wedge? I’d like to say it will concern my big (sort of), new (sort of) observing project. As above, though, I ain’t convinced September will bring better skies to Possum Swamp. We shall see, muchachos, we shall see…

 

“Well, I made it and made it before July ran out. Just barely, but I did!”

“Hell, sounds like Unk’s been hittin’ the dang Yell again.”

Not at all, Skeeter. Well, maybe I have had a drop or two of the Rebel Yell, but I ain’t any more addled this morning than any other morning.  What did I make? My yearly portrait of the Great Globular in Hercules. It’s one of my little yearly rituals, like my Christmas Eve look at M42. 

I really wanted to get Herc done this month—before you know it, the constellation will be plunging into the west. Unfortunately, this July's weather has not been conducive to any sort of astronomy. Rain. Heat. Bugs and lots of ‘em. In other words, a typical summer in Possum Swamp, muchachos.

What I did was keep an eye on the Weather Channel and Astrospheric. That paid off last Sunday evening. The day had been mostly cloudy. Hell, at sundown, it looked like we were in for another round of thunderstorms. The forecasters stuck to their guns, though: “Mostly clear.” By dark, the clouds had rolled off, and I was left with a clear but hazy July sky. Hokay, time to get a telescope into the backyard.

Which telescope? Do you even have to ask? There was simply no way I’d deal with a conventional scope under these conditions, which included a temperature that would still be near 90 when astronomical twilight came in. If you guessed, “Miss Suzie the SeeStar S50 smartscope,” you’re right on the money. This was the perfect time to let the scope sit out in the steamy backyard and do her thing while I sat on the couch with the cats watching TV and drinking cold 807s.

That and only that would, however, be a repeat of exactly how I captured Herc last year, and normally wouldn’t be much of a subject for an entire blog entry. There would be something different this time, however. A very big something…

The SeeStar is a great little scope hampered by one big limitation: alt-azimuth tracking. That creates problems like field rotation, and depending on the object’s elevation can result in The Suze rejecting a large number of sub-exposures. As y’all know, I’m not after perfection. However, alt-azimuth tracking results in pictures that can be just a little ugly sometimes, uglier than I want even my simple cosmic snapshots to be.

Not long after the SeeStar was released, its fans began clamoring for an equatorial mode. Some creative souls even managed to run the scope in equatorial fashion using workarounds to fool the software into tracking in EQ (and even being able to do gotos in limited areas of the sky). ZWO, the SeeStar’s maker, watched and listened, and a few months back released an update for the SeeStar app and firmware that, yes, included EQ mode.

I was quick to download the new stuff, but a couple of things got in the way of me trying it. One being wrapping up the semester at the university, and the other being my involvement in putting on our big yearly amateur radio event, The Mobile Hamfest. I really wanted to give EQ mode a try, though, and M13 night seemed to me to be a good time to do it.

The hardest part? For your impatient old Uncle, it is indeed the waiting. It was nearly 9pm before I could begin the process of turning Suze into an equatorially mounted scope. When that time finally came, I began with step one, which is tilting the scope over so she points at the pole, roughly. Some SeeStar owners have invested in little equatorial wedges. ZWO sells one and so does SkyWatcher, and they are nice enough. As you know, though, your Old Uncle is loath to spend a dime if’n he doesn’t have to. I have a fairly heavy duty Manfrotto tripod. It’s never failed me for any photographic task in the 20+ years I’ve had it. Why couldn’t I just put Suze on the normal head and tilt that so as to point Missy at Polaris?

It turned out I could. As you can see in the picture, down here at 30 degrees north latitude, the little scope is really tilted over and hanging out in space. I was a little leery, but the Manfrotto seemed steady indeed and Suze didn’t plunge to the ground or anything. The only catch to keep in mind when you are setting up: be sure to mount the SeeStar so that the power button is pointed up when the telescope is initially pointed in the direction of Polaris. Done, I could proceed to the second (and last) step, polar alignment.

To get going, you connect to the Seestar with your phone, go to “Advanced Feature,” mash “Mount Mode,” and then touch “switch” to go from alt-AZ to EQ. Next, you’ll see a graphic of the scope and two numbers, the current latitude and the SeeStar’s current angle. Don’t mash anything on the screen, just adjust the tilt of the scope till the two numbers match. Which I did. While it would no doubt have been easier with a wedge, it wasn’t difficult with the Manfrotto’s pan-head, either.

When the tilt is good, touch, “Get Polar Align Deviation.” That will cause the scope to point near the celestial equator. When it stops, you will be presented with two more numbers, up/down and left/right, that indicate the direction and how far you need to move the telescope to polar align. When polar alignment is within one degree of the pole, you’ll bit a big, green checkmark on the screen. I strove to get both deviation numbers as small as I could, but I didn’t agonize over it. Even with “just” a camera tripod head, adjustment was not difficult. If all this sounds slightly confusing, the in-app help on polar alignment is well done and explains everything. 

And then? That was it. I could get inside out of the heat, change my clothes, settle down on the couch, and send Suzie to M13 using the built-in star atlas. I didn’t notice much difference from alt-az, with the SeeStar doing her usual calibrations and autofocus routine. I did note that when the first live image came in, M13 was dead center—but the S50 is usually good with her gotos. Now to set subframe exposure time. With EQ mode comes the ability to shoot sub-exposures up to 1-minute in length. First time out, though, I decided to stick with 10-seconds and see what was what.

Cool and comfortable again, I let the girl do her thing on Herc. What did I notice when I’d glance at the iPhone over the course of the evening? Suzie was not dropping many sub-frames. In fact, I’m not sure she rejected even one during the half-hour sequence of M13. This with Hercules at the zenith and crossing the Local Meridian—not a great place to shoot due to balance changes causing tracking problems.

When the girl had accumulated that half hour of subs, I did a quick AI denoise on the result, saved that and the un-denoised version and moved on to the next target, Hercules’ M92, natch. That done with purty much identical results, few/no dropped subs, we finished the evening with my old “The Friendly Stars” pals, the globular clusters M10 and M12. By then, it was past 11pm, way past your tired old Uncle’s usual bedtime.

What did I think of my results by the light of day? I was impressed. The stars are not quite perfect, but more than good enough for me, and I believe they would have been better if I hadn’t been shooting near the zenith the whole night.  I was very impressed by how much smoother the pictures looked, and, of course there was no field rotation “noise,” which will begin to be apparent at about the half-hour exposure mark in alt-azimuth mode. The smoothness of the result made those two little sprites, the galaxies NGC 6207 and IC 4617 easy to see.

So, honestly, I don’t see many reasons not to shoot in EQ mode with a SeeStar. Oh, I suppose if I’m in a real hurry, I’ll go alt-az—it took me about ten minutes to get the little gal polar aligned. I do expect that I’ll get quicker about that now that I am familiar with ZWO’s polar alignment procedure. So, to sum up: EQ MODE IS A WIN FOR SEESTAR USERS. BIGTIME.  

 

I’ll fess up right from the get- go, muchachos... No, I didn’t get a telescope into the backyard this month. I am old and lazy and, frankly, there weren’t many even partially clear nights in June. This week? This week brings ARRL Field Day and y’all know Unk is gonna be up to his ears in that. I have been ruminating about amateur astronomy, though. A day rarely goes by that I don’t. My ruminations at the moment? Which telescopes are best for boomers? What’s a practical scope as we watch our 60s recede in the rearview mirror?

If you’re a young sprout, you can punch out rat-cheer. But you might want to hang around. You’ll be faced with this question almost before you know it. And having a nice, portable scope is something not to be sneezed at at any age.

Before we get to useful telescopes for the over-the-hill gang, though, there’s a question you might venture: “Should I get rid of the scope herd I have?” That mostly depends on the nature of the herd you have and your circumstances. A 30-inch Dobbie you haven’t used since the 2019 Almost Heaven Star Party? Let it go. I know you love it, and it holds some wonderful memories, but doesn’t it deserve to be used?

You might say, “But Unk I’ve got a nice observatory for the Dobbie (or the C14). It is no trouble for me to use it, and I still like to. Sometimes.” Maybe so, coach, maybe so. But can I clue you in to something on the not-so-pleasant side? You ain’t gonna be here forever and neither am I.  Final exam time isn’t quite here, but spring semester midterm has come and gone. You don’t want to leave a lot of STUFF for your spouse, or partner, or children, or relatives to deal with when you exit stage left. At the very least make firm arrangements as to what happens to your gear when you’re gone, and make sure your family knows what the arrangements are. 

Hokay, that outa the way, let’s talk telescopes…

Newtonians

Us kids' dream scope in 1966...

And by “Newtonians,” I’m talking about German equatorial (GEM) mounted reflectors, and particularly those of focal radios of at least f/6. Yeah, I know Dobs are Newts, but they deserve their own category here. Bottom line? Most of us who still own the 60s-style scopes of our youth haven’t used them in years and probably should get rid of them. Those of 8-inches and above aperture, certainly, and those of 6-inches and under, probably.

Moi? I was lucky enough to have one of the more legendary telescopes of that distant age, a Criterion RV-6 Dynascope 6-inch, fall into my hands some years ago. It was a very fine telescope. The DYN-O-MATIC drive still worked like a charm, and the optics were every bit as good as I remembered them being.

I used the RV-6 some. Hell, I even did a little public outreach with it. But, Jeez Louise! That pedestal! It was even worse than the one on my Palomar Junior when it came to getting it into the backyard. I mean clumsy and downright dangerous. In my salad days as a star-struck kid, I damaged myself (and Mama’s prized mahogany coffee table) more than once trying to get the Pal out of the house. Despite its damned pedestal, the RV-6 was a lovely telescope and worked oh-so-well—it was a downright marvel on the planets. How long had I drooled over the Criterion ads in Sky & Scope? Give that up now? No way!

One summer I was visiting my friend and former Editor, Kelly Beatty, and his wonderful wife in Boston when I spied a real monster in Kelly’s garage. An Edmund Scientific 8-inch GEM reflector. How I dreamed about owning one as a young teen. And Kelly scored one back in the day! Man on man! Just looking at that huge mount and OTA, though... I didn’t ask if he still used it; I hoped so, but it would be way beyond me now.

Which got me to thinking (always a dangerous thing)… I decided the RV-6 needed to go to a new home. I knew I wasn’t going to use her. Frequently—or maybe ever again. And a Good Telescope doesn’t deserve that fate. But just to make sure, I set her up in the back forty. Beyond the pain of moving that fricking-fracking pedestal outdoors (with the GEM head on it, since it’s not easy to detach), I soon recalled what a pain a GEM-Newt can be to use. The eyepiece always seems to wind up in a lousy position for viewing. Sure, if your scope, like the Criterion, has tube rings, you can rotate the OTA to put the eyepiece in a better position. But that invariably causes you to lose that hard-won faint fuzzy.

So, my RV-6 went to a younger person who used her, and, I hope, continues to use her. How about a more modern 6-inch or larger GEM Newt on a more modern mount, though? The same things apply: GEM Newts are large and not fun to move and not fun to use. Let them go… 

CATs

SCTs and Maks are supposedly the perfect compact telescopes. But are they really? For those of us who’ve crested the hill, if not yet gone over it? Maybe. If…you set 8-inches as the aperture limit and eschew fork mounts. Oh, a fork 8-inch isn’t terrible, but I find a GEM the size of a Celestron Advanced VX or maybe a Losmandy GM8 makes for a telescope I’ll use more often.  I loved and used forks for years, and an 8-inch fork-scope is still useable for me but, one that became less desirable years ago.

If you’ve got an C8 or Meade on a goto fork that can be used in alt-AZ mode, you may be good for a while. But putting even an 8-inch on a wedge? I can still do it but don’t want to. Why? Forks are OK, not great, for imaging—or visual use. Once you move to the northern (or southern) polar area or close to it, that old bugaboo of poor eyepiece placement rears its ugly head again.

Oh, Bertha, how I still miss you!

A larger SCT? Fuhgeddaboutit. I sure did love my NexStar 11 GPS, Big Bertha, but hefting that big gal onto a tripod? It was becoming difficult over a dozen years ago. Oh, I still hauled her down to Chiefland and occasionally into the backyard, but it was becoming a task I dreaded. One afternoon I nearly did serious damage to myself and the scope while trying to get her down the front steps of the old Chaos Manor South. As I recounted last month, I deforked the girl and put her on a Celestron CGEM in hopes of using her a while longer. It worked, but only for a short while. Bigger CATs like 14-16-20-inches? No way in the world. Those are for younguns with permanent observatories.

How about MCTs, Maks? Since most are in apertures of 7-inches or smaller, they are a definite possibility. The good ones can produce exquisite images of the deep sky as well as the Solar System. Do be aware, though, that one on a goto fork mount, even a 5-inch like my own Charity Hope Valentine, an ETX-125, is not much less of a hassle than a fork 8-inch SCT.

In my opinion (and you know what they say about opinions), a practical choice for a Boomer who wants a CAT they will use is a C5 or C6 if’n you want an SCT. A Mak? A Celestron C90, old or new, ain’t bad and neither are the 4 – 5-inch class MCTs from China.

How you gonna mount that CAT?  Maybe on an undriven alt-AZ mount like the SkyWatcher AZ-4, or a “custom” alt-AZ, or some kinda big video tripod? Not for me. The high magnification nature of CATs larger than the C90 makes them much better on a tracking mount. There are quite a few smaller goto alt-AZ mounts available from Celestron, SkyWatcher, Ioptron, and others. A C90 or C5 on a goto mount might be a sweet little setup and just the thing to get you into the backyard if you are one of us Reluctant Astronomers.  

Don’t like that consarned goto; you still want to STARPHOP? There are some smaller manual GEMs still around, and since you ain’t likely wanting to make 6-hour exposures with your C5, one could make for a nice, portable package. The Celestron Omni CG-4 is a good candidate. I would get the optional RA drive, though, since tracking with a manual slow-motion control is a recipe for THE SHAKES with lighter GEMs

Dobsonian Mounted Newtonians

Is a Dobsonian telescope the perfect Boomer rig? In some ways, yes—as long as you keep that gull-dern aperture down. If you’re content to stay at 8-inches or smaller and are in reasonable health and physical shape, a Dobsonian just might be IT. Even if you think you need to keep it down to 6-inches, 150mm will show you plenty of wonders. Remember, when we were kids a 6-inch was a large and powerful telescope we dreamed about.

Which brand to get? I don’t know that it matters much. I haven’t heard of any real punk smaller Dobs in a long time. It is true one of their prime purveyors, Orion Telescope & Binocular Center, is gone with the wind and that is a shame, but remember, they didn’t make the scopes, they only sold them. SkyWatcher has plenty of models and plenty of dealers offer them. So does GSO (their scopes are sold by Apertura and several other concerns).

But you might say, “Unk, I gotta have more than 8-inches.” Be careful. While there are truss tube scopes available in less-than-monster sizes, in 10-12-15-inches, you may find having to disassemble/assemble the telescope for set up deters you from using it frequently. You might also discover the mirror box alone is a lot heavier than you thought it would be.

How about SkyWatcher’s FlexTube Dobs with collapsible OTAs? Being smaller when collapsed helps some, but they ain’t much lighter than a solid tube scope. Yes, there are dodges like wheels and wheelbarrow handles that make getting larger Dobsonians, Flextube or truss tube, where you want ‘em easier… but… come on. You know if you can’t just plunk the scope down and be observing in five minutes, you ain’t gonna use it.

Stick with 8-inches. Hey, don’t look at me with those puppy dog “Why don’t you do as you say, Unk?” eyes. Yeah, I know I’ve still got my 10-inch GSO solid-tube Dobbie, Zelda.  But I probably shouldn’t. Last time I got her out, I nearly had a little accident with her. She’s not quite too much, yet, but she is becoming too much. I think I shall reserve her for use at the yearly Deep South Star Gaze (which, I’m excited to relate, may be held at its former home, the Feliciana Retreat Center, again) in the future. 

Refractors

Unk's Pretty Little Patriot...

Yes, a Dobbie can be a good telescope for a Boomer. But not one without some problems. Chief among them being their need to acclimatize to outdoor temperatures before they deliver their best images. Which takes a half hour at least. You gotta ask yourself, pilgrim, “Does that really fit in with the way little old me observes now?” What if there were a telescope that didn’t require any cooldown, and didn’t require much of anything in the way of maintenance?

That’s, of course, a refractor, campers. But which refractor? How big? APO or achromat? Let us address size first. 6-inches? Probably not. The 6ers most of us will want to or be able to afford are import achromats, and while they may be well made, they will almost always be on the heavy side. How do I know? My own 6-inch achromat, Big Ethel, stymied me the last time I tried to get her on a mount. I just couldn’t get the telescope in the saddle and wound up cutting myself on the dovetail bracket before, yep, giving up. Now, I have some ideas as how to get the big girl onto her mount safely and hope to do so soon, but I counsel against a refractor of this size unless you are in much better shape than your broken down Uncle.

The next click down, a 5-inch, can be very manageable. Weight and bulk don’t scale linearly with aperture, and many 5-inch refractors are much easier to handle despite “only” being an inch smaller. My own 5-inch SkyWatcher f/7 APO is light and easy to set up and does well on an AVX mount. But what do you lose compared to, say, a C8 by going 5-inch APO refractor? Not much. In fact, in side-by-side tests (at a dark site) my 5-inch compares very favorably to a C8. If you want to observe the deep sky from suburbia with a refractor, a 5-inch class telescope is my recommendation.

A 5-inch still seems too large and maybe too expensive? Can you go even smaller? Sure. A 4-inch can show tons of deep sky wonders from suburban skies. I did a large amount of the observing for The Urban Astronomer’s Guide with a 4-inch Palomar Junior Newtonian from the city. The 4-inch refractor doesn’t have to be an APO, either. I’ve seen a lot of cool stuff from the backyard with Miss Dorothy’s fast Explore Scientific 4-inch achromat.

Even smaller than that, say 80mm? A dedicated and practiced observer can see mucho cool stuff with a Short Tube 80. However, going smaller in aperture than 100mm is where outstanding optical quality becomes important. My 80mm William Optic fluorite APO can beat the Palomar Junior, being able, for example, to resolve, or at least begin to resolve, several Messier globular clusters my Pal has trouble with. There's no denying an APO can present a superior image in any aperture. However, you may find an achromat might suit you just fine. And on most objects, there isn't much difference. Many of the folks who looked through 6-inch Big Ethel at star parties commented on what a nice APO she was. Neither Ethel nor I corrected them. 

Smaller still? Well, I sure did like the 66mm SD scopes popular some years ago, but at less than 80mm, we begin to enter grab ‘n go territory. Telescopes where ease of use and setup are their most important characteristics.  The tradeoff? 60 or 70mm is small for the deep sky and small for the planets and even a little small for Luna. My own grab ‘n go of choice? An f/5 Celestron 4-inch Newt, Tanya. Yes, she takes a little while to acclimatize, but when I’m using her I’m not after high magnification or high resolution and can be observing with her in minutes.

The New Breed

Them dern smartscopes take better pictures than Unk can!

That new breed is, as you might have guessed, smartscopes. The little robotic telescopes that allow you to take amazingly good images of the deep sky while you watch TV in the den. I won’t belabor the subject, since I’ve certainly said a lot about it the past couple of annums. I’ll simply say smartscopes have become not just my primary, but my only astrophotography tools. I just don’t have the gumption to spend hours at a laptop in the bug-infested environs of a dark site.

Smartscope minuses? You just don’t lose the visual experience; you lose the joy of being out under a starry sky. Also, they are not well-suited for imaging the Moon and planets. That carping aside, smartscopes have allowed me to continue taking pictures of the night sky frequently, and not just shooting my yearly snapshots of M13. I am all for the little widgets and believe they are the biggest thing to hit our avocation since goto.

And I sure have gone on this morning, ain’t I? Before I say “vaya con dios” (the legend on the Prude Ranch sign you see as you are leaving), here’s my Boomer scope lineup:

Special occasions/events, Zelda, the 10-inch GSO Dob or Mrs. Peel, a Celestron Edge 800 SCT (often on the AVX mount, but sometimes on a Losmandy GM-811).

“Serious observing” (whatever that is), 5-inch SkyWatcher APO, usually on the AVX mount.

Grab ‘n go, 80mm Skywatcher f/11 achromat on an altazimuth AZ-4 mount. OR…maybe more frequently lately, Tanya, the 4-inch Newtonian on her little alt-AZ fork.

Even more informal grab ‘n go, the C90 on the AZ-4 or my well-loved and oft-used Burgess 15x70 binoculars.

Picture takin? Smartscopes, Smartscopes, Smartscopes. Game over. End of story. Zip up your fly. 

Up next? I haven’t forgotten my vow to set up the 6-inch refractor and the GM-811, but I ain’t gonna do it on one of these “partly cloudy, scattered thunderstorms, poor transparency” nights! I do hope to have a look at the Moon (at least) through Ethel before July is in the rearview mirror.

 

                                                                                           

What’s been going on here at good old Chaos Manor South out on the borders of the Great Possum Swamp? Well, muchachos, it’s been wet. I mean thunderstorm after thunderstorm. Sure did put a damper on my latest (ham radio) contest, the CQ WPX CW. The antennas spent more time disconnected than connected. As for any astronomical endeavors? Hell, there was no chance of observing anything but clouds…and the month began to run out…

Specifically, I didn’t get to do something I’d really been looking forward to, getting my Losmandy GM811G and my six inch refractor, Big Ethel out into the backyard for a tour of spring deep sky wonders, which will soon be on the wane. Well, if I can’t use the GM811, at least I can talk about it. For such a nice and capable GEM, I don’t hear much discussion of it, and maybe I can help rectify that. If nothing else, this one fulfills my vow of not missing a month posting a new article to the AstroBlog, even if said article is a short one.

“But wut in pea-turkey is a GM-811, Unk? Wut is one, huh?” That’s easy enough. I think most working amateur astronomers know about the Losmandy (Hollywood General Machining) G-11. It’s a medium GEM that has been around for decades, including being sold with a Celestron nametag on it once in a while. It’s a reliable general-use mount that is a known quantity.

The G11 is a well-respected and reasonably priced mount, but some, like your decrepit, old Uncle would have trouble handling the hefty G11, not to mention big sister, the Losmandy Titan. There’s the smaller GM-8, but that doesn’t help those of us who need more payload capacity than is offered by the littlest Losmandy. Scott Losmandy and his colleagues had an idea… What if their mounts could be mixed and matched? As in, produce a mount that uses the RA assembly of the G11, but the declination assembly of the GM-8. And one with the RA of a Titan and the dec of a G11. The mix and match mounts provide extra payload thanks to the bigger RA assemblies, but keep the weight down.

So how did Unk wind up with one? Round about a dozen years back, he was tooling along happily with his Atlas EQ-6 and Celestron Advanced VX GEMs, and his beloved fork mount NexStar 11 GPS, Big Bertha. Getting a little older was what happened, mostly. I suddenly found I could no longer safely lift the NexStar 11 onto her tripod. Oh, I still did it, but I felt nervous about it. At that time, I really wanted to continue using a C11—or thought I did—and it ‘peared to me the way out was to defork the OTA and put it on a GEM.

Unk being Unk, he didn’t want to spend much/any money on a new mount and wondered if the Orion Atlas would suffice.  After a few weeks of thinking, asking, and reading, I reluctantly ruled that a “no.” The small counterweight bar and Vixen saddle argued against it. A 9.25 is really the upper limit for an EQ-6, though some have exceeded that. Also, I never got friendly with the SynScan HC. It just never seemed as accurate goto-wise as my Celestron NexStar hand paddles. Sure, the use of the EQMOD software corrected the SynScan faux pas, but I was never real comfortable with that, either. What I wanted, I decided, was a GEM mount that would handle a C11, one equipped with the familiar and accurate NexStar HC.

There was no mystery as to which mount that should be. It had been obvious for a long while that I should not have bought the EQ-6. What I shoulda done was wait a few months for the Celestron NexStar CGEM, which I knew would soon be released. But I got new GEM fever and bought the Atlas. I regretted that decision for years. So, I sold the Atlas—which was a good mount, really, just not the mount for me—and bought, yep, a CGEM, which to avoid offending my penny-pinching personality, I financed in part by the sale of the Atlas and the NexStar 11 GPS fork mount and case.

CGEM and C11:  That's a lot of telescope, paw-paw.

So, Unk, the CGEM, and his (pretty carbon fiber tube) C11 lived happily ever after? For a little while, yeah. The CGEM was indeed just what I’d wanted all along. A GEM with a NexStar HC, a dual Losmandy-Vixen saddle, and all that vaunted NexStar goto accuracy. It was nothing for it to put objects dead center in the field with the C11 at f/10. That honeymoon went on for a while, with a couple of outstanding star party expeditions with the CGEM, but by 2017 the blush was decidedly off the rose.

The problem? Damned, old Father Time (and a spate of rather serious back problems). That rascal had made the CGEM and the C11 both heavier and heavier. Honestly, I was back to where I had been with Bertha on her fork mount. To be honest, I knew the 11 and CGEM were too much from the day the big Celestron mount came to Chaos Manor South. I practiced the art of denial for a couple of years before giving-in to the obvious. Both mount and scope were way too much for me, the situation would not improve, and both had to go.

So, I made a hard choice: To sell the C11, which was the SCT I had honestly loved more than any other I’ve used over the last half century. Luckily, I was able to send her to a good home where I knew she’d be very well taken care of and used. Likewise, the CGEM went to a new owner. The good part was I really hadn’t had enough time with the mount to get attached to it. I’d think about setting it up, even with a C8 instead of a C11, and usually find reasons I just had to use the Celestron Advanced VX mount instead. So, there I was. C11-less, with my workhorse mount being the AVX.

So, what would I do? What would I do? Or…why do anything? I had a nice Edge C8 and a nice AVX. Both worked fine. But the lack of a larger mount began to eat away at me. While this was toward the end of my time as a semi-serious astrophotographer, I didn’t realize that at the time. I wanted more payload and better guiding for the very manageable 5-inch APO Veronica Lodge, who’d replaced the C11. Mostly, though, I think I just wanted to have one really nice mount. Something nicer than the Chinese GEMs that had been my bread and butter for years.

But what?  I immediately ruled out Astro-Physics or an exotic European mount. I was never an “8 hours of exposure” kinda guy, and it was clear even my relaxed take on imaging with a DSLR was slowing down. So, if I wasn’t going for the high-priced spread, and I was done with the Chinese mounts, then what? Actually, I did consider an iOptron CEM60, but for various reasons, not just that it was of Chinese manufacture, I decided against it. That left Losmandy, and their new mount that had caught my eye, the GM811G.

Next up? Unk did some digging. What I found out about the 811 was encouraging. As above, it consisted of the big G11 RA axis, and the GM-8 declination assembly. All metal construction. Mucho stainless steel. Worm gears on both axes, not just on the RA axis as I’d been accustomed to with my Chinese mounts. Annnd…most of all, maybe, a payload for imaging of 50 pounds despite the GEM head only weighing 27 pounds. Would I ever again put anything approaching a load like that on a mount either for imaging or visual? Unlikely, but overkill is good.

Only one thing deterred me: I’d have to learn a new goto computer system, the Gemini 2 by Rene Gorlich. Luckily, Rene, who’s had Gemini going for 25 years now, had and has an excellent webpage that makes it easy to get an idea of what Gemini is and how to use it. It even includes an HC simulator that I found incredibly valuable. By the time I got the mount, I was able to use the goto system with only a few hiccups.

As for the system itself? It’s not too much different from those we’ve been accustomed to. There’s a hand control, which is connected to a computer that bolts onto the tripod. Different alignment options are available, including the ability to build models with multiple stars on both sides of the Meridian, something my beloved NexStar systems lacked.

The Gemini HC is quite something. On one side of the hand control are normal tactile pushbuttons for slewing the mount, the other side is, yeah, quite something. It’s a full color touchscreen. Objects? Gemini falls behind Celestron and Meade with 40,000, and that gave me pause. However, realistically, how many more would I really need? You can enter RA and dec values and go anywhere you want. Or send the mount to any object in the sky with a PC.

And how about a PC? The Gemini computer is incredibly flexible if you want to use a laptop in the field with the mount. You can connect via good, old serial, something I’d really gotten tired of on the Celestron mounts. Or you can use a USB cable. Or—get this—you can control the mount over Ethernet. That would turn out to be my usual choice. No fooling with com ports, no worrying about a too-long USB cable.  

So… I decided I was gonna do it, buy me a Losmandy. I wondered, however, whether I should order directly from the company or use a dealer. I decided to call Losmandy and find out. I spoke to the famous Miss Tanya and asked if I ordered direct, how long the wait would be (I’d gathered from dealer websites that it could be weeks). She told me to hang on and she’d ask Scott. She was back on in a minute, “Scott says if you order now, it will ship this afternoon.” You can bet I whipped out my credit card. In addition to the GM811G Gemini, I ordered an AC power supply and the lightweight field tripod (no way I wanted to carry around the big G11 tripod). I did not order the polar alignment scope. I’ve always hated those things and by this time had progressed to using Sharpcap for polar alignment.

I was in an agony of anticipation, natch, but in just a few days some big boxes labeled “Hollywood General Machining” were on the Chaos Manor doorstep. You can read all the unboxin’ stuff here (and even watch a little video), but it went very smoothly indeed. Then I encountered a problem. The mount tended to experience “motor stalls” when slewing in dec to a position near the horizon. A quick call to Tanya told me what to do:  Many mounts need an initial gear adjustment depending on the nature of your payload—like my 6-inch refractor. The procedure has a webpage at the Losmandy site, took only a few minutes, and I never got a stall again with any telescope I’ve used on the 811.

From the evening of the day the Losmandy arrived, it’s performed splendidly in the field—I looked on the fact the sky didn’t cloud-over the minute I received the new GEM as a good omen. As long as I didn’t try to carry the mount head with its BIG counterweight bar in place, setting the Losmandy up was no problem for my poor back. The lightweight field tripod? It was very steady even with my 6-inch refractor onboard, and I sure was glad I’d eschewed that G11 tripod.

Gemini 2 touchscreen HC.

“But how about imaging, Unk?” The mount did well with both my SCT and my APO refractors. In particular, I was thrilled with how easy picture taking was with the 811 at one Deep South Star Gaze. I can’t give you a figure on guiding errors—it’s been a long time since I’ve taken pictures with the mount—but I’m pretty sure it guided at 1 arc second or better (and I never did get around to training its PPEC).

It's been a long time, yeah, since I imaged with the mount. In fact, I haven’t even used it for visual in a while, about five years as a matter of fact (ulp). But why? The near-fatal accident I suffered in early 2019 put an end to my observing for almost a year. When I was (more or less) back setting up scopes in the backyard? The aftereffects, particularly with my right arm, which still doesn’t have much strength, discouraged me from using any but the smallest and lightest instruments. Five years ago, just to say I could, I got the mount assembled but almost dropped the 6-inch refractor in the process of getting it into the mount’s saddle, which further discouraged me.

Now? Well, campers, I’m five years older, but I feel good. I have a better idea now of what I can lift safely and how to lift it. I have every intention of cruising the deep sky with Big Ethel and the Losmandy. As soon as the sky clears. Whenever that is…