Sunday, October 20, 2013
Here and There with Uncle Rod: Unplugged Astronomy and Doc Clay at the EAAA
PSAS Fall Sky Watch
First up was
the Fall PSAS Public Star Party. As I have mentioned before, our club has an
agreement with the local public schools stretching back well over 20 years. We
get to use their beautiful Environmental
Studies Center classroom building as our monthly meeting place in exchange
for doing two star gazes for the school kids a year. Truth be known, Unk and his
buddies would do public star gazes anyway, since most of us are committed to
outreach, but this is a nice arrangement.
Unk was both
excited and confounded in the days leading up to the Thursday night event. I
always enjoy showing off the sky to the kids, their parents, and people from
the ESC’s neighborhood, but I’ve been struggling with the question of which telescope
to use for that for years. What works best with the younguns, but doesn't break
my back and fray my nerves in the process?
My favorite
star party scope for the last several years has been my Criterion RV-6 Dynascope, donated to the cause by a kind
gentleman some time back. I still like to use it with my college students. In most
ways it is perfect; it breaks down into two fairly manageable pieces (though
its pedestal legs are a pain), needs only an inverter and a jump-start battery
for tracking, and delivers superb images, especially of the Moon and planets. The
downside? Its long 6-inch f/8 Newtonian tube puts the eyepiece too far off the
ground for the littlest folk.
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| Boomer... |
That ISAN
happened to coincide with Unk putting his manual fork mount SCT, an Ultima 8,
back together in mutated form. I thought the
U8 would be perfect: tracking, but no
computers (or their alignments) and big batteries to worry about. That’s what
Unk thought; he’d forgotten how heavy
the Ultima’s fork, wedge, and tripod are. After manhandling the scope’s
components across the parking lot of the Eastern Shore Centre, I swore “never
again,” even though my pseudo-Ultima worked superbly otherwise.
There things
stood on the Wednesday before the “Sky Watch,” as our public school compadres
like to call our public star parties. I thought briefly about the 4.5-inch StarBlast,
which is a good little scope for young and old, but decided I really needed
8-inches of aperture to deal with the badly light-polluted sky of the ESC. OK,
what then? Well, if a C8 was perfect, I’d use
a C8, just dispense with heavy and/or complex mounts.
That was
good thinking, but how would I wed the two ideas—an easy to use C8 and an easy
to use mount? The solution was my Synta AZ-4 mount, a manual single arm fork that is identical to
Orion’s Versago mount (and completely different from the one they call an
“AZ-4”). I’d bought this alt-azimuth rig for use with my C90, but found it was
capable of considerably more payload than that, up to and including a C8. I’d mounted
a Celestron on the AZ-4 when I was reviewing Hotech’s amazing advanced CT collimator.
When you are
first learning to use the SCT-centric CT, it’s easier to work with an alt-azimuth
mount, and since the AZ-4 has a Vixen style saddle, it was simple to get a C8 on
it. In the course of using the collimator, I discovered the AZ-4 was surprisingly
steady with an 8-inch SCT. Maybe even steady enough to allow real observing. I lugged C8 and AZ-4 out into the front yard a
couple of times for looks at Saturn and Jupiter, and was pleased with the
result. The mount wasn’t overkill, but it worked.
The night
before the Fall Sky Watch, I mounted the SP C8 on the AZ-4, fiddled around to
find proper balance with a 2-inch diagonal, and made sure I could adjust the
altitude and azimuth tension knobs on the mount so motion was easy but not too easy. The AZ-4 wouldn’t track the
stars, but given the smoothness of the mount’s motions, I figgered that with
the right eyepieces that would not be a problem.
And that is
Big Question Two when you are preparing to face the lollipop brigade: eyepieces.
Do you sacrifice your Naglers and Ethoses on the altar of candy-sticky kid fingers
and mascara-caked teen eyes, or do you use oculars that are not your best? I’ve
waffled on this for years and have concluded, “It depends.” I’d be using an SCT
at f/10, which would be awful forgiving of inexpensive oculars. Still, I
wanted wide fields. If you are using a non-driven mount, as I would be, it helps
to have as much apparent field of view as possible. But “wide field” does not have to mean “TeleVue.”
Thursday
afternoon, I’d settled on a couple of 2-inch eyepieces that were not only inexpensive
and practically indestructible, but which I’d used successfully at public
events in the past: a “Bird’s Eye” 30mm
82-degree job I got from Herb York years ago, and a 25mm Rini with a 70-degree apparent
field. In addition to being inexpensive and robust, I didn’t think either
eyepiece would cause balance problems with my semi-dobsonian-mounted SCT. Even
the big Bird’s Eye is considerably lighter than an Ethos, and the Rini is a
featherweight. I also snagged a box of 1.25-inch eyepieces and threw that in
the 4Runner along with a single-step step stool for the little ones.
What else
would I need? In case I wanted to show the kids some deep sky objects, I’d need
a star atlas. These days, my iPhone and SkySafari
fulfill that role when I don’t have a laptop in the field. I’d also want a red
flashlight, so I borrowed Miss Dorothy’s red/green LED flash. It’s handy to
have a non-red light on hand at public events; it’s not like dark adaptation is
a big concern, anyhow.
I lit out for the site at 5:30 in the p.m., and when I got there I was thrilled to see the mostly clear sky we’d had all day wasn’t just holding, but was improving. The weatherman had been issuing partly cloudy forecasts for the evening, but he got it all wrong once again, I am happy to say.
I lit out for the site at 5:30 in the p.m., and when I got there I was thrilled to see the mostly clear sky we’d had all day wasn’t just holding, but was improving. The weatherman had been issuing partly cloudy forecasts for the evening, but he got it all wrong once again, I am happy to say.
Time to set
up. Getting the C8, Boomer (that’s what she
told me her name was), ready to go took all of five minutes: Adjust AZ-4 tripod so it would be at a height
reasonable for the wee-est of the wee customers. Secure C8 in dovetail. Screw
diagonal onto rear port. Insert eyepiece in diagonal. Mount dew-shield on OTA.
And I was done. No batteries, hand controls, or computers to fuss with. This
was unplugged astronomy and I was
liking it already.
The only
thing I wasn’t feeling good about was the stuff I’d forgotten. I’d brought
along a box of 1.25-inch eyepieces in case I wanted to up the magnification
from the 80x of the Rini, but I forgot to pack a 1.25-inch adapter for the
2-inch diagonal. Doh! And, yes, SkySafari
running on the iPhone makes a perfect sky atlas and reference (“How far away is
M13, huh, mister? How far?”). But only if you remember to bring your iPhone
with you. Mine, I suddenly realized, was sitting at home hooked to its charger.
Oh, well, it wouldn’t be an Unk Rod observing run if something wasn’t left behind.
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| "Look at all them CRATERS!" |
And so it
began, long lines of excited kids and parents at my telescope and the scopes of
my four fellow PSAS compadres who’d been able to make it out. Our guests were well
behaved and asked intelligent questions. Even the tiny mites. If you go digging
at any astronomy club, you’ll come up with public outreach horror stories, like
the time we caught a couple of little boys spitting
down the tube of an unattended Newtonian. But those incidents are rare. On this
night everybody—both the kids and PSAS members—just had a good time.
What did I
show ‘em? It took a while to get past the Moon—the sprouts simply cannot get
enough of her—but when the line finally began to dwindle, I slewed over to M13,
where I stayed for quite some time. With just a little guidance, most of my
guests were not just able to see the big glob as a fuzzy spot, but were able to
see (barely) that it was a ball of teeny-tiny stars. After that it was another
globular, M15, which was smaller but easier for everybody to see. Finally, just
before shutdown time at 8:30, I went to M31, which proved surprisingly
popular—especially when kids and adults were told Andromeda is on a collision
course for the Milky Way.
With
headlights flashing on as our guests began to head for the gate, it was time to
pull the big switch. And that was one of the best things about this unplugged
evening. It took 5-minutes to set up, and it took the same amount of time to
tear down, which was even sweeter at the end of the evening. Boomer has made it
so painless for me to do public outreach that she may have encouraged me to do
more, and that is a good thing, muchachos.
Doc Clay Live
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| Doc Clay Onstage... |
For me, Clay
has been a long-time inspiration and, most assuredly, one of my mentors in this
business. So, I always look forward to his and Patsy’s yearly visits to the
Gulf Coast as both an opportunity to spend a little time with them and to listen
to one of Clay’s outstanding presentations. What is Doc Live like? One recent presentation was entitled, “Doc Clay’s DeLorean Time Machine.”
You get the picture, fun. But also
packed with plenty of information for the amateur astronomers, students, and
members of the public who pack the hall at Pensacola
State College every year to hear Doc.
Unfortunately,
there was a complication this year. That was spelled K-a-r-e-n. The tropical storm
was predicted to hit the coast on Sunday evening, and it seemed likely
conditions would be bad on Saturday night, the evening of Doc’s presentation. PSC’s
Administration, understandably nervous about staying open during a big storm,
ordered the college closed for the weekend.
Then, Karen turned
into the proverbial tempest in a teapot. In fact, Miss Dorothy and I motored
over to Pensacola despite the fact Doc wouldn’t be able to speak, and spent a couple
of hours hanging out with EAAA. The gang that assembled at the Golden Corral restaurant
near PSC included legendary Gulf Coast amateur astronomer and astronomy
educator, Dr. Wayne Wooten, EAAA
President Jon Ellard, and several members of the excellent club and their
student auxiliary. The weather was a little breezy, but hardly threatening.
Hell, we didn't even run into rain on the way over—or back.
In the
course of enjoying our buffet supper, we did a little strategizing. It wasn’t
long before Wayne announced he would see if he could reschedule Clay’s
presentation for the following Saturday night. Amazingly,
Wayne was able to pull it all together in just a week. Doc was fine with doing
his talk the next Saturday, but getting a place for him to speak and letting
the public know about it wasn’t easy. The EAAA’s usual venue would be in use
for a Phi Beta Kappa initiation, but another auditorium, a nice one on the
north side of the campus, was available. Another problem was getting the dadgum
Pensacola newspaper to get the updated location correct in their announcements.
Then it was over
to the campus for Doc’s “A Comet is
Coming.” Despite obvious confusion over the change of venue, Clay’s paen to
the hairy stars played to a near full house. In addition to talking about
comets in general, Doc also gave his (guarded) predictions for Comet ISON,
which as you may know is scheduled to put on some kind of a show from late November and on into January.
Will ISON be
the vaunted Christmas comet everybody hoped for and was cheated out of in 1973?
Or will it be just like the notorious Kahoutek,
a decent but not outstanding comet for amateur astronomers, but a dog, a flop, a
lemon, a bomb for the public?
Unfortunately,
I believe ISON will be a lot more like Comet Kahoutek than Comet Hale-Bopp.
From the first, all the signs have pointed that-a-way. Like Kahoutek, ISON, a virgin comet straight out of the Oort
Cloud, brightened rapidly at first but then that slowed down. Way down. Fresh
comets tend to put on a nice show when they are way out, but that’s because a
layer of volatiles boils off at the first touch of the Sun. The ice below is
locked in a deep, deep freeze, and even a close encounter with Sol often isn't
enough to thaw it out enough to make a virgin into a showpiece.
Finally, if
one thing will keep ISON from being a Great Comet, it’s its position. A “Great
Comet” is generally acknowledged to be (there is no hard and fast definition) a
comet so grand it captures the public’s attention. Unfortunately, ISON will be
in the pre-dawn sky when it is at its best, and nowhere near as many people
will see it as saw Hale-Bopp no matter how good it is. The public wouldn’t turn
out in numbers even for Ikeya-Seki and West, two dawn comets that were far
better than (I believe) ISON ever will be.
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| The EAAA's Dr. Wayne Wooten... |
Doc believes
ISON might not just be good, but spectacular.
I will admit it is looking better in images, but it is still disappointingly
dim. Clay, however, had a new bit of information to share with us Saturday
evening: ISON’s nucleus, which has
apparently not been rotating, has begun to do so. That is perhaps evidence of
increased activity on its surface and may also mean the comet is being rotisserie grilled and may thaw out
better than Unk has feared.
To say the
least, Clay knows more about comets than I do and has paid more attention to
them over the years than I have. I hope he is right, and on the morning after
his talk I kept finding more and more reasons to believe he is. Clay, of course,
acknowledges this one could still be a flopperoo; he knows comets are like
cats: just when you think they are going
to do one thing, they up and do the opposite, seemingly just to aggravate you.
Whether ISON
turns out to be another Hale-Bopp, or gives us on planet Earth a big cosmic
pie-in-the-face (metaphorically), Dorothy and I had a great time listening to
Clay tell the story of ISON and her sisters. Wish y’all could have been there,
muchachos; if you are down on the Gulf Coast this time next year, make tracks
for the EAAA and Doc Clay Live. You
will be glad you did.
Next Time: Space Race Redux...
