Uncle Rod's Astro Blog

The CGEM performed superbly. I was working with a small field of view, but any object I requested, from one horizon to the other, was always in the camera’s narrow field—which was smaller than it was when the scope was in its fork configuration.

Since I didn’t have to use a diagonal with the scope on the CGEM (had to with the fork or the camera would bump into the drive-base), I didn't have enough spacing between the Xtreme and my Meade f/3.3 reducer to provide as much focal reduction as normal. With the Mallincam inserted into a visual back screwed directly onto the reducer, I got maybe f/4 – f/5. Field looked to be maybe 10’ x 20’. I’ve got some spacer rings and an SCT prime focus adapter I can use to get a wider field next time.

There was actually some benefit to the smaller field, though; I was getting big, detailed pictures of objects. The famous edge-on galaxy in Andromeda, NGC 891, just slammed onto my monitor, showing mucho detail in its equatorial dust lane. In fact, every object I looked at Thursday was superb. There was a reason for that that had nothing to do with the scope:  a crazy-good sky.

Shortly after NGC 891 was in the can, I stuck my head out from under the tent canopy and looked up. “Well, darn…looks like haze moving in.” Venus in the west was set against a hazy background that spiked upwards towards the zenith. Then it hit me:  “That ain’t haze (you dummy), that’s the Zodiacal Light!” When conditions are right, the CAV skies can still amaze.

Unfortunately this crazy-good transparency was accompanied by crazy-bad temperatures that began dropping sharply at mid evening. They had hovered on in the upper 30s for some time, but as nine p.m. approached, the low thirties arrived and I guessed the mercury would not stop falling anytime soon.

I placed the heater in the tent to warm up my accommodations, since I believed it wouldn't be long before Big Switch Time. I was tired, I was cold, and I was not my usual ebullient self. I did a few more goodies including the Horsehead Nebula, M78 (which was as good as I’ve ever seen it on video), M81, M82, and several more before bowing to the inevitable.

Or starting to bow. I was here to get quasars, and I would get at least one on this night. Which one? “Old Faithful,” the Twin Quasar, QSO 0957+561, in Ursa Major was decently high so I went there. One of the best things about this magnitude 17.0 object (so SkyTools says; I believe it may be as much as a magnitude brighter) is it’s easy to track down. It’s close to a bright galaxy, NGC 3079, and a dimmer galaxy that’s still easy in the Mallincam, MCG 9-17-0 (magnitude 15.4). Best of all it is adjacent to a distinctive pattern of field stars.

When the CGEM stopped, I immediately picked out those stars in a 30-second exposure. I thought I might be seeing the QSO too, but the interests of being sure I upped the exposure to 1-minute. Yep. There it was. A little pinprick of light. Not much different from what it had looked like in the eyepiece of my 12-inch Dobsonian, Old Betsy, when Dorothy and I were at the 1999 Texas Star Party. Or…maybe it was different.

As its name suggests, the Twin Quasar consists of two QSOs positioned next to each-other, a brighter one and a slightly dimmer one separated by 6-arc seconds. Except there aren't really two quasars there; the two are the same QSO. A massive foreground galaxy, YGKOW G1, is creating a gravitational lensing effect, causing an additional image of a single object to be formed. Peering closely at the monitor, I was thunderstruck to realize I was resolving the Twin. Its "ghost" image was surprisingly easy, actually.

The Twin’s stats are amazing (and kinda scary). The light from the core of this ancient galaxy, which is nearly 8-billion light-years from us, set out before the birth of the Solar System. Most amazingly, I was seeing it with my modest telescope and my modest camera in a relatively modest sky. That was almost enough to impel me to push on no matter how cold I was. But not quite. I threw that accursed Big Switch, covered Bertha, and headed for the Coleman.

Surprisingly, the tent felt almost too warm at first. I got my heavy coat off, set up the PC on the camp table, inserted the DVD of Aliens, poured out a little warming red wine (spilling quite a bit on the tent floor in the process), and was warm and cozy for some time. Comfortable enough, but I was cursing my current health kick and wished for a great big bottle of the Rebel Yell--which would have done a lot more to warm my old bones!  Eventually, the outside temperature dropped enough that the little catalytic heater couldn’t keep up, and I decided my sleeping bag was a good idea, but it was never tremendously cold in the tent.

Being warm enough in the night wasn’t the problem. The problem came just after dawn when I needed to use the facilities. Nature’s call impelled me to brave temps my phone claimed had dropped to freaking 19, which must be close to a record for this part of Florida. I got to the clubhouse only to find the toilets were frozen up. There’s a heater to prevent that from happening, but we were all so fixated on the fantastic sky that we forgot to turn it on.

I ruminated on what to do. There was a pretty obvious and simple way to get rid of the inevitable results of the red wine from the night before. But what then? After a long previous day on the road and setting up, and a night in a cold tent, I felt in bad need of a hot shower. There were, of course, showers on the field, the famous "meteor showers," but seeing as how these were open to the sky, that didn't have much appeal. Frankly, I didn't believe it would be warm enough even in the afternoon to encourage me to take one. Solution? Jumped into the 4Runner and made tracks to the Quality Inn.

There, it eventuated that a room for Friday would not be a problem, but one for Saturday would be. There was a big funeral being held in town and both the Quality Inn and Days Inn were booked up. I figured the same would even be the case for the modest Manatee Springs Inn, the town’s single remaining hostelry. I told the clerk I’d take the room for one night. Sounded as if my decision about staying/going on Saturday had been made for me. I doubted I'd want to move back to the tent after enjoying the hot shower, breakfast, and cable TV of the motel.

Late Friday afternoon, refreshed thanks to a long shower and some o' that cable TV, I motored back to the field for what it appeared would be the last night of my dark run. If it were to be that, I needed to get as much done as I could. After viewing that one quasar Thursday, I’d got a good feeling about the project and thought a magazine article might come out of it. Maybe even more than that. So, I needed to see as many QSOs as I could on this evening. I could no doubt get quasars from the club dark site back home with the uber-sensitive Mallincam Xtreme if I wanted to continue on with 'em, but they’d still be easier in Chiefland.

Before I could get going on this last night of my Chiefland run, however, I had to deal with a bad video cable. I’d had several incidents Thursday where the video glitched. Wiggling the cable always brought it back. Friday night when I turned on the camera, no matter how much I wiggled I couldn’t restore the picture. Luckily, I had a spare cable, which cured the problem. The fault was really mine; I knew I had a bad Xtreme cable and a good one, but it had been long enough since I’d used the camera I’d forgot which was which. If I’d been smart, I would have trashed the bad cable just as soon as I received a new one from Jack Huerkamp, but you know how your silly old Uncle is about throwing anything away.

Video problem banished, the CGEM and C11 again performed admirably. You hear a lot of grumbling about the mount—there’s no denying it had a somewhat bumpy introduction—but I am here to tell you that if your requirements are similar to mine you will love it. For visual/video with an 11-inch or smaller SCT it is unbeatable for the price. Is it an A-P Mach 1? Of course not. But I don’t need such a thing, you might not either, and you may be surprised to hear that, despite what’s sometimes said about the mount on Astro-BBSes like Cloudy Nights, the CGEM is capable of doing deep sky imaging. Long exposure, guided, prime focus deep sky imaging.

Will I use the CGEM all the time? No. It’s heavy, and the combo of the VX mount and Edge 800 SCT (or one of my APO refractors) has proven to be a powerful one for me. It’s just so easy to get into the yard or the observing field, and the gears and motors of the VX are a step up from those of earlier mounts like the CG5 and, yes, the CGEM, in my opinion. Still, there are times when I want the horsepower Big Bertha can bring to bear. The CGEM is allowing me to continue to use her, and I didn't pay a lot for that privilege.

When I was hunting Herschels, it came down to deciding which deep sky object on the screen (there were often multiple ones) was the target. That could be trying at times, but usually there weren't enough faint fuzzies to make it a pain. Not so with quasars. They are star-like points.  The targets on my list that would be something more than that were some Seyfert galaxies, which might—might—present disks. Most, however, were "stars." What I had to do to identify my targets was match star patterns on the screen with those on a chart or photo.

At first, I was concerned about being able to do that in the field, in the cold, when I was tired. In truth, it wasn't as much of a problem as I'd feared. SkyTools’ excellent charts (POSS plates didn’t seem to be as much help), which were easily sized to the same field dimensions, approximately, as that of the camera, made it as easy as such a thing can be.

One other help? You often hear quasars referred to as “blue point-sources,” but even so, I was amazed to see some actually showed an obvious blue tinge with the Mallincam, which made picking them out substantially easier. Somewhat like when I was doing small Herschel elliptical galaxies and learned to look for their golden hue. Color helps.

So, was it fun? You bet. Surprisingly so. Part of it was the sense of accomplishment. When the run was done, I’d corralled twenty of the suckers (including the Twin Quasar Thursday night). Even more satisfying was thinking how deep I’d gone. The dimmest objects Friday were at my self-imposed magnitude 16 limit. As a sprout, reading what little I could understand in the S&T articles about these weird new objects, would I ever have dreamed I’d easily image down 16th magnitude and push out toward the edge of the visible Universe with my personal telescope? Not hardly, friends, not hardly.

Nineteen objects doesn't sound like a lot of objects for all of Friday night, does it? I considered just trusting the CGEM to make things go faster. Trusting that the object of my desire was somewhere in the field of the camera when the mount stopped and reviewing the images at home to identify my quasars. The CGEM never, ever missed an object, but I still demurred. I wanted to be sure, and I wanted to say I had seen my objects out on the field. Not seeing them until I got back home just seemed a step too far removed from amateur astronomy to me.

What mainly kept my object count down, however, wasn’t the time it took to identify the quasars. After a while, I got pretty good at that. It was the sky. The night was (a little) warmer than Thursday, but it was also not as clear. I was seeing real haze, not the Zodiacal Light. The wind was gusting, too.

Bertha and the CGEM handled the wind remarkably well, no doubt thanks to the TPI spreader on the tripod, but eventually the stars in my exposures began to elongate as strong winds caught the big sail of the C11 dew shield. Not long after that, the sky background on my images (and on one of my fellow observer's DSLR images) began to turn brown, a sure sign of haze. Formerly easy 15th and 16th magnitude QSOs suddenly became harder. It was well before midnight, but there was no denying it was time to call it.

Back at the motel, I spent considerable time with the cable TV (Ghost Adventures) and the remainder of that warming red wine.  I was feeling good, though it did take some time to banish the chill from my bones. The night's results had been better, even, than Thursday night. Not only had my run bagged plenty of QSOs, I had a warm room, a warm bed, a hot shower, and the prospect of a hot meal in the morning.

Saturday a.m. after breakfast (scrambled eggs, biscuit—ONE biscuit—and gravy) I checked out and headed to the CAV to pack. Which took a while given I had to strike the tent and get it back in its bag. I took my time, since I the fellow who was buying my gear wasn't supposed to arrive until noon. That was OK. The additional hours at the CAV after Miss Van Pelt was loaded let me spend some time with my friends and have a leisurely lunch consisting of junk from WallyWorld, natch.

My buyer's "noon" actually turned out to be "well after two." Why some folks just can't do what they promise they are gonna do is something that always baffles me, though it no longer surprises me.  I was plenty put out while I was cooling my heels waiting for him, you bet, and had just about decided "to hell with it." However, when he arrived shortly thereafter and I collected the dineros for the NS11 components, my mood improved considerably. I was feeling good about getting the fork mount sold and there was no reason to feel bad about hitting the road. It was increasingly obvious if I stayed on Saturday night there wouldn't be Quasars. There might not be Messier objects.

A look at the sky, which was now crisscrossed by multiple jet contrails thanks to spiking humidity, hinted Saturday night's conditions would more than likely be considerably worse than those Friday evening, which wasn't close to perfect. A storm front was moving into Florida from the east. I hit the highway, drove straight through with one stop for gas and nothing else, and made it back to the New Manse at 7 p.m. after passing through torrential rain along the Florida Panhandle.

Best Chiefland run ever, Muchachos? Nope. The weather, the cold weather, if nothing else prevented that. The upside was that I did get plenty accomplished. I also became reacquainted with how much I love our avocation. I started out not really in the mood to observe, but once I was out on the field with the scope humming, I had a real good time. What more can you ask than that?

Not too much more to say about this one. Yes, I was in a funk at the time, a derned blue funk. But, as I observed above, it would have been less funky if I'd had Miss Dorothy with me.  Also, it was pretty obvious I was ready for a break from Chiefland and that was a large part of the problem. Not only had I been down CAV way an awful lot the previous five years or so, changes insured it wasn't quite the same as it once was. I didn't know it at the time, but this was to be my next to last CAV odyssey.

And let's see...the red wine and health food bidness? I've continued to watch my diet and keep reasonably fit. That stood me in good stead following the accident I suffered in '19. In fact, my surgeon told me, "Rod, you're in pretty good shape for your age; if you hadn't been, you probably wouldn't be here." I have, however, decided, "good shape" does not preclude "Rebel Yell." I do, yeah, watch the diet, still, though...don't wanna wind up like one of those old dudes with the big, white Santa Claus beard riding an electric scooter up and down the Walmart aisles!

Otherwise? That dadgummed tent I'd talked myself into? I should have listened to the little voice that said, "Uh-uh, Unk. Remember how much you hated that blasted tent that May down at CAV? And how you swore you'd never tent-camp again?" You'll laugh, but the tent hasn't come out of its box again in the seven years since this trip. I still feel a little sheepish about that, but it was cheap enough it wasn't much more than what I'd have paid for an additional night (in comfort) at the dadburned Quality Inn. And sometimes a good lesson is worth a few bucks, too...

Next Time:  Star Trek and Me II...