Uncle Rod's Astro Blog

The Herschel Project Night 28

2012-01-29T07:34:00.002-06:00

It was a busy week, muchachos. Before I could get the H-Project back on the road at the Chiefland Astronomy Village, I had to get myself from Portland, Oregon, where I gave a presentation for that’s city’s justly famous Rose City Astronomers, and back to good, old Chaos Manor South.

The RCA is a truly excellent club, as I am sure you have heard, and silly little ol’ me was flattered to be called upon to address that august body. The problem was making it home to get ready for CAV. Combine the vagaries of the U.S. air transport system, what is left of it, with the weather, and making it back on Tuesday evening was a near thing. That cursed American Airlines did eventually deliver me to Possum Swamp, but man was I tired by the time they did.

The original plan had been to pack all the copious gear I’d marshaled in Chaos Manor South’s front parlor in the truck when I got home Tuesday. When I finally walked in at 10 p.m., though, it was FUHGEDDABOUTIT. I strode right past that huge pile of astro-stuff and straight to the liquor cabinet. I’d had well over nine hours in the air and five or six in airports, and, as you can imagine, it was soon night-night time for the Rodster. I’d just have to get up early to pack. Real early. With the sun going down at the CAV before 6 p.m., Miss Dorothy and I would want to be on the road no later than about 8 a.m. to give ourselves plenty of time to get settled in the Day’s Inn and set up on the Billy Dodd Observing Field.

Y’all will be right proud of me: when the dadgum alarm clock started beeping at 0430 in the fracking a.m., I did not turn it off, roll over, and go back to sleep for a couple of hours. Only for half an hour. I wearily requested Miss D. , who was up and bustling about preparing for her fourth CAV adventure, wake me at 5 a.m. At 5, I was up, not even requiring Miss Dorothy’s urging. I was awake and ready to get going no matter how weary I was.

A couple of good things on this early Wednesday morning? It wasn’t actually raining yet—though rain was predicted—and I found my 4Runner, Miss Lucille Van Pelt, much easier to pack than the Camry had been. Her considerably larger cargo space meant I didn’t have to be as careful and deliberate in my packing. I was able to expedite loading without getting downright messy.

What did I pack? The usual stuff for a video-centric Herschel run: NexStar 11 GPS, netbook computer, DVD recorder, DVD player (to serve as the display), observing table, tailgating canopy, yadda-yadda-yadda. A couple of changes this time, though. I did bring the Stellacam II, but only as a backup. It has been replaced by my wonderful new Mallincam Xtreme. And since Miss Van Pelt offered all that space, I couldn’t resist filling it up with yet more astro-stuff. I didn’t expect serious problems with Big Bertha, our NS11, but she is a decade old now. I loaded up the C8, Celeste, and her CG5 mount “just in case.”

A bummer? I love Big Bertha, but there is no doubt the C11 is getting harder for me to manage year by year. I know she ain’t gaining weight, so I can only assume poor Unk is getting weaker. I wish it weren’t so—I’ve loved the comfortable convenience of her fork—but I am now thinking that in a few years relief will be spelled L-o-s-m-a-n-d-y G-11. Getting Bertha’s (thankfully wheeled) case down the front steps, I managed to bang my knee. When the worst of the pain subsided, I was pleased to see I hadn’t really dislocated my kneecap, which was what it had felt like had happened.

The trip Down Chiefland Way was no shorter than it ever has been, a good six hours on I-10 and U.S. 19, but with Miss Dorothy at my side it seemed shorter than it did back in the days of my solo CAV expeditions. A substantially larger vehicle and the excellent Sirius XM Satellite Radio didn’t hurt, either.

After a few hours on I-10, we took the Highway 19 exit just past Tallahassee, stopped at a gas station there, and refueled Miss Van Pelt and ourselves, Unk choosing, as always, a Sasquatch Big Stick (ANGRY flavor, natch). I was pleased to see our usual stop has held on through tough economic times, if in reduced circumstances, going from Shell to Citgo and closing down the Wendy’s burger joint formerly attached to the gas station.

Then it was 100-miles of U.S. 19, the Florida-Georgia Parkway, gateway to the celestial bliss of the Chiefland Astronomy Village. As we motored along, I couldn’t help sneaking a look or two at the sky. Did not look good. Clouds, plenty of ‘em, and the occasional rain shower if not downpour. Often, as you get near to Chiefland, the skies will clear as if by magic, but I didn’t expect that this time. The weather forecasters had been unanimous that Wednesday night would be Mostly Cloudy.

Whatever the night might bring, D. and I stuck to THE PLAN: check into the motel, head to the site for set-up, hit Wally-World for whatever additional supplies might be needed, grab a late lunch/early supper, and head back to the CAV. Well, we tried to stick to The Plan, anyhow. It was well after three by the time we got in our room, and the sky was going from bad to worse. Mist had become rain, and the field at CAV would be disgustingly wet by now.

What to do? Four o’clock had come and gone, five was coming on, and still the rain fell. It was obvious there was simply no way we’d be setting up our gear. At first we thought we’d at least run out to the CAV and see who was there and what was going on, like we did the first night of our last expedition, the initial evening of which had also been cloudy. But there wasn’t much reason to do that. If anybody were on the field, they’d be buttoned up in a tent or RV or trailer and out of the mess.

What to do, then? Might as well hit Wally-World, I reckoned. That’s about all the entertainment there is down CAV way on a rainy Wednesday night when you are deprived of the sky. The Chiefland Wal-Mart, despite its way out in the country status, is one of the better stocked stores in the chain, and its patrons look much like people anywhere, nothing like the CREATURES displayed on peopleofwalmart.com. (Trust me: DO NOT go to that site!)

There was also the question of grub. We could have cruised over to Bar-B-Q Bill’s; I understand their supper menu is derned near as good as lunch, and that their steaks are killer. But I was undeniably weary, the Macdonald’s inside the Wal-Mart (yes) was just steps away, and I figured that in my present state a Big Mac would do the trick. Big Macs downed, we picked up Jack Links Flaming Buffalo Nuggets and bottled water for the field, and some Colorado Kool-Aid for after-run libations and headed back to the room.

And how is the motel Unk has stayed at for the last cotton-picking ten years? About the same. They’ve even done a little repairing and remodeling. No, the breakfast ain’t what it was when it was a Holiday Inn Express, but there was big news afoot when we checked in: there would now be WAFFLES, make ‘em yourself waffles, in the lobby. Whoo-hoo! That was the morrow, though. How would we spend a rainy evening?

There actually wasn’t much of an evening to spend. Not for Unk. Opened a Coors or three, turned on the netbook for a quick cruise through the Cloudy Nights bulletin boards, and that was it. I’d had exactly five hours sleep in the last 24, and before Adam Richman could gobble his first mega-sandwich on Man vs. Food, it was dreamland for Uncle Rod. If the sky had been clear, you can bet your bippy I’d have been out on the field, but I don’t know how much I’d have got done—or how long I would have stayed awake.

Morning came and with it blue skies and a huge waffle slathered in Log Cabin Syrup and butter. Then it was out to the good, old field, where several of Unk’s buddies, including Carl, Mike, John, and Bobbie were hanging out. The sky was clear, the temperatures balmy, and gear setup, if not exactly pleasant when you’ve got as much to set up as Unk and Miss Dorothy, was quick and easy. Tailgating canopy up and Bertha on her tripod, we wandered the field for a while and then headed back to town for lunch and naps in that order.

I reckon I need to vary my Chiefland menu one of these days, but I never can seem to get past Bill’s and their insane lunch special. For around ten dollars you get barbeque beef (or pork), excellent beans, butter-saturated Texas toast, enormous fries, a drink, and the salad bar. Bill’s salad bar is particularly noteworthy. The stuff is fresh and it is old fashioned—no purple vegetables. Unk drenched everything except his monstrous salad in Bill’s notorious hot and spicy barbeque sauce, and just kept eating and eating.

Back at the motel, I started Michael Hoskin’s book about Will and Lina Herschel, Discoverers of the Universe. Barely. I just made it to the end of the first chapter when my derned eyes began to close and I knew nothing more for a couple of hours. This is the way you star party, campers: good food and a good bed in a clean and warm/cool motel room.

When I awakened it was time to get going. I still needed to set up the computer, camera, DVD recorder, and DVD player and get everything cabled together. To give myself plenty of time, I headed out to the CAV at 4:15. OK, OK, I’ll be honest: when we are in Chiefland I feel drawn to the Astronomy Village like a freaking swallow to Capistrano, and it’s hard to sit around in the motel room waiting for sunset.

Soon enough, Sol was hitting the hay, and it was time for Unk to get to work. I’d like to tell y’all that everything went smoothly, but if that ever happened, it really wouldn’t be an Uncle Rod night, and you wouldn’t believe it anyway. Setup did go smoothly at first. Fired up the netbook, lit off the camera, started its software, and brought up the cross-box (crosshairs with a box in the center) overlay on the video screen to help me center the consarned alignment stars. Started NexRemote and selected the proper software build for the NS11. “Hit OK,” Bertha intoned via NR’s Microsoft Mary voice. When I did, disaster struck.

Instead of going to the normal NexRemote hand controller display, a little window popped up that said “INTERNAL ERROR!” That did not sound good, not good at all. Redid the settings. Same-same. Quit NR and started it again. “INTERNAL ERROR!” Now what was I gonna do? I did have the hardware HC with me, but did this indicate an electronic gremlin in the scope itself? Shoot! Sure was glad I’d brought Celeste along.

I sat at the computer for a few minutes wondering what the problem could be. Then it hit me: “Rod, you DUMMY! You forgot to turn on the telescope!” I flipped Bertha’s o-n/o-f-f switch to o-n, and gave NexRemote another try: “INTERNAL ERROR!” I was pretty sure I’d confused the poor netbook badly by this time and needed to reboot, so I didn’t panic. I restarted Windows 7 and gave NR one last try. Selected settings and pressed “OK,” just like Bertha told me to, and she immediately asked if I wanted to do a GPS align. Whew!

After this foolishness, the rest of Bertha’s alignment went smoothly; having crosshairs on the video screen was a big help. What exposure did I use on the Xtreme during go-to alignment? Sense-up at “128x,” about 2-seconds, worked great for both star centering and focusing. I was concerned the two stars Bertha chose, Capella and Aldebaran, were a little close together, but her go-tos were right on all night, with everything I requested somewhere on the Mallincam’s small chip, so go figure. I swung over to the little open cluster NGC 2158, focused up, and got to work. Well, I got to work after I’d stared at the tiny and distant open cluster for a while. In a 15-second exposure it was wonderfully resolved, and the star COLORS looked oh-so-pretty. Yay Xtreme!

How did the new Mallincam affect my normal routine? Not much at all. I’d check the Herschel Project list on SkyTools 3 for the next target and punch its number into NexRemote. When Bertha’s slew finished, I’d adjust the exposure if I felt that necessary and record 30-seconds of video to DVD. The exposure part was the only difference from what I’ve been doing with the Stellacam II since The Project began.

With the old camera, I’d have to go out to the scope to change settings on its (wired) hand control. Which meant I’d have to leave my warm and cozy observing position, which meant lazy ol’ me usually just set the Stellacam for a reasonable exposure and left it alone for the whole run.

With the Mallincam control software, I could sit at the netbook and change exposure (integration time), gamma, gain, and a lot of other stuff for the best possible images. Not having to go to the telescope encouraged me to do a lot of experimenting with those things. I started out real shaky with the settings, but as the hours passed, it became easier and easier to get what I wanted (though I am hardly a Mallincam expert yet); using the Xtreme’s software was like playing guitar. I was learning the licks and getting in the groove.

Actually, there was one other major change. The Mallincam is somewhat longer than the Stellacam, so I could not use it with my Meade f/3.3 reducer. Plugged straight into a visual back screwed onto the reducer, the camera would contact Bertha’s drive base well before zenith. I couldn’t use the camera in a diagonal, either; it would not come to focus with the Meade 3.3 in that configuration.

What did Unk do? All I could do. I mounted my Celestron f/6.3 reducer/corrector onto the scope’s rear port, screwed a William Optics 2-inch dielectric SCT diagonal to that, and installed a Baader .5x focal reducer on the camera’s nosepiece. I inserted the camera/reducer into the diagonal via a 1.25-inch adapter, crossed my fingers, and gave it a try. This jury rig worked OK, acceptably at least, delivering somewhat more reduction than the Meade, but I reckon I probably need to put one of Rock’s MFR reducers on my wish list.

As I mentioned to y’all in my initial report on the Xtreme, midway through my first run with it NexRemote stopped responding, throwing up the dreaded No Response errors. I was using a no-name USB- serial adapter for the Mallincam serial connection, and I thought it might be conflicting somehow with the Keyspan adapter I was using for NexRemote. I replaced the no-name with another Keyspan and crossed my fingers. Looked like Unk for once hit the solution on the first try. I had no computer problems the whole time we were at CAV, with NexRemote and the Mallincam playing together happily.

All that’s just the mechanics, though. What did I look at? Another H-project milestone was passed on this evening, friends. When I finished the Herschel II list, I decided to tackle the Herschel I, the Herschel 400, since I’d had so much fun leading you-all through the HII. Thursday evening, that came to an end, with me knocking off the last two H400s I needed, a couple of galaxies down Lynx way. Was I sad like I was when I finished the Herschel II? Not really. I’ve been through the H400 several times, so this didn’t feel like the major turning point finishing the HII was.

As always, the details below are from NASA’s N.E.D., and the galaxy types are given according to the de Vaucouleurs system. Try to ignore the banding in these simple screen grabs. They are not the fault of the camera, but Unk’s fault as per usual, and are due to iffy AC power setup and me not yet really knowing how to adjust camera gain, gamma and everything else.

NGC 2683 (H.I.200) is spectacular with only 15 seconds of exposure, displaying much detail including a bright stellar core, a strongly elongated inner region showing some dark lane detail, and a wispy outer envelope. NGC 2683 is a nearly edge-on SA(rs)b spiral that’s bright at magnitude 10.64 and large at 9.3’x2.2’.

NGC 2782 (H.I.167) is a little low, but I can still make out some odd looking details with a 15-second exposure. It looks disturbed. There’s a bright nucleus, some off center disk, and traces of very faint streamers on the live video. This intermediate inclination SAB(rs)a galaxy is apparently intereacting with another island universe. It is very apparent at magnitude 12.3 and a size of 3.5’x2.6’.

After Lynx, what? Then, muchchos, it was BIG ENCHILADA TIME, time to continue my pursuit of The Whole Big Thing, the Herschel 2500, the complete list, of which 866 remained to be logged. When I got started Thursday, I was worried I wouldn’t have many objects to chase till the spring galaxies rose late-late/early-early. That turned out not to be the case. Y’all got any idear how many fuzzies are in Draco? There is a passel, and by the time I’d worked my way through them the Great Bear had climbed out of his cave and over the eastern horizon. As y’all do know, I’m sure, his dipper bowl is just brimming with galaxies.

So it went: eyeball the nextun in ST3, punch it into NexRemote, record it on video, write the DSO’s number in my notebook, record my brief impressions of it on my (MP3) audio recorder, and repeat as needed. Which was a lot of repeating this evening. I was rested and raring to go; I was on what D. calls A DEEP SKY TEAR. I passed 100 new objects, strolled over to the clubhouse, pulled a Monster out of the fridge, guzzled it, and kept on trucking. Before I knew it it was after two and on the way to three and I’d logged 150 new ones.

I could have gone longer, but it was cold. With my tailgating canopy in full cold weather mode with the sides (blue tarps) up and my little Black Cat catalytic heater cranking, I don’t normally get too cold. Sitting at the computer out of the (very heavy) dew I am comfortable enough on a mid-thirties night like Thursday, even if my old bones ain’t exactly toasty warm. But I screwed up. I forgot to bring along a cigarette lighter to light the Black Cat. I’d borrowed Carl Wright’s lighter at sundown to get the heater going initially, but shortly after two a.m. the first Coleman gas bottle was exhausted.

At dark, the field had been surprisingly full for a January dark of the Moon. At least 10 scopes were up and operating. Now, save for me and one other person, that storied field was deserted; the cold and, especially, the damp induced reasonable folks to call it a night around midnight on this long evening.

I can get spooked on a lonely observing field, but this time, even where I was, in the heart of SKUNK APE country, I didn’t. I was fired up. I wanted more galaxies. But I was also cold and there was nobody to borrow a lighter from so I could restart the heater with a fresh propane bottle. Big Switch time I ruefully and reluctantly admitted.

After throwing that dang switch, securing the scope and gear, and motoring back to the Day’s Inn, the clock said it was well past three and getting on to four. Do y’all know what is on cable TV at that time of the a.m.? Yep, you guessed it, Ancient Aliens, the silliest, most outrageous, and most entertaining (when it’s the wee hours and you’ve had a shot or three of the Rebel Yell) show on the air.

As much as I got done Thursday, that was just the beginning of me and Dorothy’s latest Chiefland adventure. Friday was almost as good, and I even saw some stuff Saturday night, which was, according to the gull-derned Weather Channel, supposed to be completely clouded out. For variety’s sake, though, let’s leave Chiefland, Florida behind and travel way out west to Portland, Oregon next Sunday. Have no fear; I will finish up with the H-Project Nights 29 and 30 the following week. For now, muchachos, I am going to back to my day job in the shipyard so I can get some cotton picking rest.

Next Time: Everything’s Coming Up Roses...

A Chiefland Intermezzo

2012-01-21T21:00:00.000-06:00

In other words, the good, old Herschel Project is back on the move. How did it go? That's a story for next Sunday, muchachos. As always when Unk is on the road, you are being cheated out of your blog for this Sunday. I will say the new Mallincam Xtreme worked exceedingly well, bringing back tons of new aitches. And it was simple enough to work that Unk had no trouble doing so despite being weary after having just flown in from snowy Portland, Oregon. But that, too, is a story for next time. This time? How about a few pix to tide you-all over?

Now, in Living Color…

2012-01-15T03:34:00.001-06:00

I love my Stellacam II, muchachos. When I got it nearly seven years ago it was state of the art: a black and white deep sky video camera capable of integrating frames for not just the normal 1/30th -second but for—gosh—up to ten seconds. Its CCD chip is phenomenally sensitive. With the gain cranked up it has romped through The Herschel Project. Small 15th magnitude and even dimmer galaxies fall before it like dry leaves before the wild hurricane fly. And yet…and yet…

Over the last four years or so I heard less and less about the Stellacam folks (Adirondack Video Astronomy) and more and more about this dude up in Canada, Rock Mallin, who it seemed was pushing the envelope on deep sky video. Adirondack had come out with a Stellacam III that could expose for as long as you wanted and had cooling. B-U-T. Unless you bought a wireless shutter controller, you had to stop and start exposures manually, and the (optional) Peltier cooler had a distinctly cobbled on look—it was developed and installed by a third party.

Mr. Mallin? He seemed to be going from strength to strength, introducing cameras that allowed far longer exposures than my Stellacam II, and, eventually, a vidcam that could expose for as long as you could ever want (100 minutes). His cameras came standard with Peltier coolers that were built-in and optimized for their purpose. The hugest difference? Color. Adirondack was supposedly working on a color camera, but didn’t introduce it before they went belly up a couple of years ago. I haven’t heard anything about a color rig from the outfit that is continuing the Stellacam, Cosmologic Systems, either.

Bottom line was that Rock Mallin had well-engineered, practical color cameras available now and they sure made my Stellacam look old. I will admit I was skeptical about going color for deep sky video at first, but that changed the night I saw my buddy Lyle Mars’ Mallincam VSS in action at the 2010 Almost Heaven Star Party.

Lyle had a beautiful setup on the field, a C14 on a CGE, but that wasn’t what got my attention. What did that was the images the Mallincam was delivering to his monitor. Lyle punched M51 into NexRemote, the big scope went there, and Lyle started a 28-second integration. What slammed onto the screen when it was done near-about blew my mind. There was M51 with uber-detailed spiral arms and dust lanes, but what made it so wonderful was the color, a warm yellow center and bluish spiral arms. I’ve sometimes opined that black and white images reveal more details, but that was not my opinion on this night. There was a wealth of detail visible in this color image.

Nevertheless, being the penny pinching sort I am, I pressed on with the Stellacam. I was deep into The Herschel Project, and had my imaging system DOWN. With so many Herschels still to go, I hated to change horses in mid-stream and learn a new and potentially rather complex camera. As 2010 became 2011, however, I began thinking more and more often about the images from Lyle’s Mallincam and those I’d seen down in Chiefland with my buddies Mike Harvey and Carl Wright’s cameras. With the H-Project well under control this past November, I decided it was time to make that horse-change. I’d get a Mallincam, learn to use it, and be ready for the coming of the galaxies of spring.

The question then became, “Which Mallincam?” Unlike pore old Adirondack, Rock never seems to stop innovating and adding new products, and his Hyper and VSS series cameras have been succeeded by a new one called the “Xtreme.” The older cameras are still available, however, and I considered them—the Hyper especially. The main thing in its favor is fairly simple operation. Most functions are controlled with onscreen menus superimposed on the video display, and are accessed with buttons on the camera or with an optional wired remote. Shutter control for long exposures of up to 56-seconds is via a pair of toggle switches on the camera body.

The Xtreme is a whole ‘nother ballgame. Starting with its exposure capabilities. As mentioned up top, the Xtreme will expose for up to 100-minutes. Not that I thought I’d ever have occasion to go that long, but the camera’s extra long exposure “CCD mode” would be there if’n I ever wanted to use it. Like the Hyper and the VSS, the Xtreme includes Rock’s “mild” Peltier cooling, the same menu buttons on its rear, and the ability to use the wired remote. The Xtreme kicks it up a notch, however.

The Xtreme’s biggest innovation other than exposure time is that it is normally controlled by a PC. The Hyper and VSS cameras are also PC controllable for most functions, but long exposures still have to be set by on-camera controls. Everything on the Xtreme can be manipulated with an included (Windows) software application.

That sounded good to me. I am at my most efficient, as I discovered while working The Herschel Project last winter, if I stay under an EZ-Up tailgating canopy snug and dry (from dew) at the computer. One of the things I did not like about my Stellacam set up was that I had to get up and go out to the scope to change camera settings, any camera settings, via a wired remote tethered to the camera with a short cable. With the Xtreme, I’d be able to sit at the computer and video display, meaning this decrepit old hillbilly might have a prayer of making it to 3 a.m.

Rock and U.S. Mallincam distributor (and old buddy) Jack Huerkamp, make several Xtreme packages available; I chose the most basic one, which includes the camera and a (long) serial control cable. There are other packages offered with both wired and wireless remotes that don’t require a computer for camera operation. I expect these will be of most interest to folks who do public outreach or who, for whatever reason, don’t want to take a computer into the field.

The Xtreme is custom built by the man himself in Ottawa, Canada, so when you are ready to take the plunge you go on a waiting list and wait your turn. Luckily, Jack took my resolution to “go Xtreme” seriously when I talked to him this past summer, and decided he’d better go ahead and put silly old Unk on the waiting list then and there. Thus it was that in just a little over a month there was a largish box in the front hall of Chaos Manor South when I returned from the salt mines one afternoon.

Ahhh…opening new astro-stuff! What on god’s green Earth is sweeter than that? Tearing into the box from Mr. Jack revealed, first off, a Mallincam ballcap. Being a southern boy, I can always use a new ballcap, particularly a spiffy looking one. Below that? A…well…case. It was obvious that the cherry red box was not really a case, but a smallish picnic cooler. My first thought was, “Well, I can run down to Academy and get a pistol case like I planned.” But…turned out the cooler was actually better than the plastic case I had in mind. Padded. Numerous compartments. Carry strap. It ain’t exactly a case; it is if anything better than a real case.

Now for the goodies. The Mallincam was packed very well in a little box with Styrofoam inserts. At first blush, it reminded me a little of my time-worn PC23C planetary camera. Till I picked it up. This sucker is DENSE. Heavy. On the rear are the pushbutton controls to access camera functions, a power connector, a serial RS-232 connector, a composite video out socket, a Super VHS video out socket, and a pilot light. What was really cool? Turning the camera over revealed it had been signed by Mr. Rock. He signs each and every one of his cams, which oughta tell you something about his pride in and commitment to his product.

What else comes with an Xtreme? If you order the basic package like Unk did, you get a combined power and video cable. I like that idea. There are two separate cables in one jacket, and anything that cuts down on cable clutter is a Good Thing. There’s a serial RS-232 computer control cable. And there is a 1.25-inch nosepiece for the camera, so you can slip it into a standard focuser or visual back. Finally, you get an AC power supply, a wall wart with a cord sufficiently long to allow you to plug it directly into the camera if you don’t want to hook it to the far end of the video/power cable.

You’ll dig a CD outa the box, too. In addition to the camera control program, it holds a wealth of information about the Xtreme. The instructions on the disk are easily enough to get even the most Luddite among us, like your old Unk, up to speed with the camera and its software.

You will probably also have ordered an option or three. Rock dang sure has a lot of cool stuff you can get to go with your cam. All cheap old me bought was a 12vdc cigarette lighter cord for the camera, which I’d need since we are bereft of power at our dark site. One popular option is a digitizer that converts the analog video coming out of the Mallincam to digital images your computer can use. With that you can broadcast your video on Rock’s Night Skies Network web site (more on that some Sunday). Since I don’t have an Internet connection out in the wilds of Tanner Williams, and can’t observe from home, I skipped that for now.

Then came the moment of truth, the indoor test. I unwound a little of the generously long video/power cable, hooked the video to my normal rig, a DVD player/DVD recorder, plugged the other end into the camera, rigged up the power, connected the RS-232 cable to the camera and to a USB – Serial adapter on my netbook and let her rip.

Meaning I ran the software on the netbook, connected to the proper com port, selected the “advanced” tab on the Mallincam control program, and ticked the “color bars” box. A set of video-test color bars popped onto my screen. Which meant “success.” No fiddling or fussing; the Xtreme worked from the get-go.

I reckon before we take the Xtreme into the field, I ought to explain its control and exposure system, which confuses some newbie boys and girls. Let’s start with the control system. You can change camera settings by mashing the buttons on the Xtreme’s backside. That causes menus to appear on the video display. The wired remote does the same job, and allows you to stay at the monitor. Neither the buttons nor the wired remote will allow you to set-up long exposures, however. There are only two ways to do that: with a computer or with Rock’s optional wireless controller, which ONLY controls exposure.

And how about exposure? Mallincam novices find that especially confusing. It’s really not once you glom onto the fact that there are three exposure modes. Unless you want to take pictures of the Moon and planets, you can forget the short (“ALC”) exposure system. The second mode is “Sense Up.” This is accessed by a pull down at the top of the software’s Advanced tab’s screen and offers exposures of from 1/15th-second (“2x”) to 2.2-seconds (128x). If you are a deep sky hound like Unk, all you have to do is set the Sense Up to 128x and leave it there for the remainder of the observing run. 2.2 seconds is just about right for focusing and centering alignment stars.

“But Unk…2.1 seconds ain’t much. How you gonna pull in all them deep sky wonders with that?” You ain’t. That’s why the camera offers a third mode, “hyper.” With Sense Up at 128x, you can choose “Preset” exposures of 7, 14, 28 and 56 seconds. Not enough? Or the wrong durations? Select “Custom,” and specify anything you want up to 100-minutes.

To recap, set Sense Up to 128x, choose a preset exposure or specify one yourself, and click the Start button. The camera will begin taking exposures for the duration you chose, displaying each one on your video monitor when it is done. That is all there is to setting exposure.

Which is not to say the software doesn’t provide copious options. But that doesn’t have to be daunting, either. A hint? While you are waiting for your camera to arrive, download the software. You can play with it even though you don’t have a camera connected. When you light it off, you will find you might not even have to worry about the Advanced menu. There are ready-made settings for deep sky, planets, Moon, and Solar. Actually, though, the Advanced menu ain’t that hard. In addition to enabling Sense Up 128x and setting the exposure, all I’ve changed thus far is AGC (gain) and Gamma (more/less contrast more or less).

Course, you can’t tell nuttin’ about a piece of imaging gear until you get it out under the stars, and in that regard, Unk was lucky. When the dark of the Moon rolled around, the forecast was “clear.” One caveat before we hit the PSAS observing field: Unk has been doing video astronomy for a lot of years; if your Mallincam is your first deep sky video camera, do yourself a favor and set up out back the first couple of times. Everything’s easier in your friendly backyard.

What did Unk have to set up at the PSAS’ Tanner Williams, Alabama dark site? My C8, Celeste, and her CG5 mount. Observing table. Computer. Computer Shelter. DVD recorder and a portable DVD player (the display). Lawn tractor battery to power the DVD recorder via a small inverter. Two jumpstart batteries: one for the mount, one for the dew heaters. You get the picture. A ton of…err… “stuff.” But like I done told y’all, I’m used to it after six years with the Stellacam II.

Set up went OK. Mounted the Xtreme on the C8’s rear cell in concert with a Meade f/3.3 focal reducer. That is very important. You want to get the focal length down if you’ve got a long focal length, “slow” telescope. Vidcam chips are incredibly sensitive, but they are also relatively small. In the interest of well-framed, bright images you want a focal length of about 500 – 1000mm.

Just before I fired up the netbook and PC and began scope alignment, I took a critical look at the sky. Dangit! Were those clouds? No, but almost as bad. A woods fire had broken out not far from the site, and the blue sky was rapidly being squeezed out by clouds of billowing white smoke. The local volunteer fire department must have got things under control quickly, though, since the smoke dispersed about sundown. The odor of wood smoke hung on the field for a couple of hours, but that was OK.

Anyhoo, got everything turned on and sent Celeste to her first alignment star. When the slew stopped, the star, Vega, was visible on screen as a ping-pong ball sized blob. A few presses of my JMI Motofocus’ buttons and Vega was a small, blue point, and numerous dimmer field stars popped into view. When I was done with alignment and polar alignment, came the moment of truth, the first light object. I chose M15. Why? The globular star cluster was well placed in the west and out of the Possum Swamp light dome. And there is nothing better than a glob for touching up focus.

Keyed M15 into NexRemote’s virtual HC, Celeste made her normal weasels-with-tuberculosis sound, and, when she stopped, the Horse’s Nose Cluster was centered and looking sweet. I tweaked focus a bit and took a good look. Color looked appropriate, yellowish/orangish. Decent resolution, if not as many stars as I was used to with the Stellacam. Oh, well, got to expect a little loss in sensitivity when you go color, right? Wrong. I had forgotten the exposure was still set to 128x, 2.1 seconds. Selecting a Hyper exposure of 7 seconds revealed easily as many stars as I normally see with the Stellacam, and going higher than that began to overexpose the glob’s core. YEEHAW!

What now? Well, M27, the Dumbell Nebula, was still high enough to be a good candidate, and would allow the Mallincam to show off its color capability. Before going there, though, I ran an eye over the scope and mount to make sure everything looked OK.

This would not be an Uncle Rod run if there were no surprises, I reckon. I noticed the light was out on the DewBuster dew heater controller. Not a good thing on what was shaping up to be a dew-heavy evening. I fiddled with the ‘Buster and its connections and got exactly nowhere. Oh, well. I had an old Kendrick controller as a backup. Plugged it in, turned it on, and its light illuminated—but only briefly. Rut-roh. All I had left in my dew fighting arsenal was a little 12vdc window defroster - cum hairdryer. That would have to do.

Onward to the Dumbbell. It was everything I hoped, with a 28-second exposure showing, as you can see in the simple single-frame screen grab here, plenty of delicious greens and reds in addition to very good detail. When I was finally able to tear myself away from M27, I went to the nearby Crescent Nebula, NGC 6888, which was not only well-defined, but showed a surprising amount of red given its dim nature.

I still wanted to be reassured about the camera’s sensitivity, though, and there is no better way to do that than with a galaxy. The target was NGC 7331 in Pegasus, near Stephan’s Quintet. We down here call this the “Deer Lick Group.” 7331 is the salt-lick, you see, and the three-four little NGC galaxies nearby are deer. In a 28-second exposure, the Xtreme didn’t just pick up the lick and the four deer, but a couple of other teeny galaxies besides. Even cooler, the big galaxy’s dark lane and, on the live video, its sweeping spiral arms were easily visible. I had no further doubts about the Xtreme’s ability to take on the dim galaxies of The Herschel project.

How was the Mallincam control software in the field? I loved it. Being able to easily change gain, gamma, and other stuff encouraged me to experiment more than I normally do with the Stellacam, which I generally “set and forget.” Anything I didn’t like? The software’s “safety timer” took some getting used to. When you change certain things, like gain, you have to wait three minutes before continuing (a “light” on the Advanced menu indicates the safety timer has been activated). That was a pain, but its purpose is to ensure the camera doesn’t get jammed up with commands from the software and crash, so I reckon it is a good thing.

To cut to the chase, I was one happy little camper. But, again, this being an Unk Rod night, there were bound to be more alarums and excursions. Toward the midpoint of the run NexRemote’s virtual hand controller began displaying the dreaded “No Response 16” and “No Response 17” errors. These errors indicate the HC has lost communications with the mount, and can be the result of cable problems, power problems, or internal mount problems. I wondered whether the fact that I was running two USB serial adapters, one for NexRemote and one for the Xtreme, might be causing the No Responses. I hoped that was it; I dang sure didn’t want the problem to be my beloved CG5, which has worked flawlessly for going on seven years.

One sure way to find out: I disconnected NexRemote from the mount, dug the hardware hand control from a case, plugged it in, and did an alignment. No errors did I see. The mount worked a treat for the remainder of the evening. Wheew! I’d have to check the USB – serial adapter and the NexRemote cable and connectors on the morrow.

Before I could get going again, I had to deal with one other minor glitch. The video recorder end of the Xtreme’s video cable turned out to be flaky. Jostle it, and the picture would break up. I thought it might be the BNC to RCA adapter on the end, but fooling with that didn’t seem to help. I positioned the cable so the signal was good and fixed it in place with my favorite tool, a piece of duct tape, natch.

It was smooth sailing for a while after that. Following the Deer Lick, I went to nearby Stephan’s Quintet, that group of five small and dim galaxies, four of which are interacting. Stephan’s was always a problem for the Stellacam with its 10-second-max exposure, but not for the Xtreme at 28-seconds. Not only were all five fuzzies visible, there were hints of detail.

After that it was one showpiece DSO after another: M2, M72, the Saturn Nebula (which was blue and showing off its ansae/ring), M15 again, and as many more as I could think of. One real cool thing? Did you know there are dim little LEDA galaxies scattered among the stars of everybody’s favorite open cluster, NGC 457, the E.T. Cluster? I didn’t, but there are, and the Xtreme picked ‘em up with ease.

Last object of the night was that Horse of Horror, The Nasty Nag, B33, The Horsehead Nebula. I should probably have left this filly alone, since she was still corralled in the Possum Swamp light dome to the east, but I couldn’t resist. Which was a good thing. Not only could I see B33 more easily and in more detail than I ever could with the Stellacam, the very faint nebula that forms the background of the Horsehead, IC434, was glowing a subdued but obvious pink/red.

I hadn’t intended Horsey to be the last object of the night; it was barely 11 p.m. Unfortunately, the dew had got heavier and heavier, and trying to keep it at bay with my pitiful little window defroster gun was a losing battle. I packed it in, packed it up, and headed back Chaos Manor South, where, once the unloading was done, I sat in my blessedly warm den sipping inside-warming Rebel Yell and watching the images I’d captured on DVD on our big screen TV.

What amazed me was how well the videos held up on the large screen. I can often not bear to watch my Stellacam videos on the big TV, but this was a different story. Not only were they colorful, the longer exposures, I reckon, resulted in smoother, less noisy images. The camera’s built-in “mild” Peltier cooler probably had something to do with that, too. I was just as pleased as pleased could be with my new Xtreme. I’d troubleshoot my various problems by morning light.

First patient the next day was the DewBuster. Can’t get much done down here without a dew heater for the corrector. Turned out, as I should have realized Saturday night, the problem was not the controller, but a shorted heater strip. I should have taken the old Kendrick strip, which I knew to be bad, out of the box so I wouldn’t accidentally put it on the telescope instead of the new Dew-Not corrector heater. Luckily, all that was wrong with the DewBuster controller was a blown fuse in its 12vdc cable. Replaced it and all was well.

The fix for the flaky video cable was also trivially easy. Emailed Jack Huerkamp and he got a new one on its way to me tout suite. If only every astro-vendor provided the level of service and support Jack does.

My final problem, the NexRemote errors, wasn’t so easy to diagnose. Not at first. I cleaned all the cables and connectors and examined all the pins with a magnifying glass, but nothing was obviously wrong. OK. How about the Keyspan USB – serial adapter I use for NR? Plugged it into the netbook and took a look at Hardware Manager, which immediately registered an error for the device. A little fiddling with the adapter’s cable did not help. I finally got some canned air and blew out the USB connectors on both the Keyspan and its cable, and suddenly it came back to life. Go figger. Just to be on the safe side, I ordered a replacement from B&H Photo.

Bottom line-a-roony-o? I’ve been doing deep sky video for a long time, muchachos. My Stellacam has continued to amaze me, knocking off one faint Herschel galaxy after another. I didn’t think it could get any better. But it has. Thanks to Rock Mallin, deep sky video has come a long, long way and I’m now reaping the benefits of his hard work. Oh, I’ll hang on to the Stellacam as a backup, but I gotta admit the Stellacam is an Atlas F compared to this Saturn V of a Mallincam Xtreme. Nuff said.

Next time: The Herschels Down Chiefland Way...

Good Old George

2012-01-08T07:40:00.001-06:00

We take each-other for granted, muchachos; that is the human way. So it was with me and my friend George Byron. As I mentioned in the Christmas Eve blog, Miss Dorothy and I were devastated to learn that George, whom I’d known for over twenty years, was gone. It was a shock and led to your old Unk pondering the nature of friendship and mortality over the Christmas holiday. Mostly, though, I thought about what fun we had with old Georgie.

George was a friend, yeah, but that peculiar sort of friend we tend to make in amateur astronomy. I saw him month in and month out on the observing field and at club meetings, but I’d never been to his house, not once in all the years I’d known him, and I had no more than the vaguest idea where he lived. It’s not that way with all my amateur friends, but that was the way it was with George. He was a feature of life, somebody I saw all the time, and with whom friendship had not grown beyond that. Which didn’t seem to make much difference. I was always glad to see him and I think he was always glad to see me.

I’m not completely sure when I first met George, but it was probably at a public star party at the end of the 80s. I’d just moved back to Possum Swamp and was getting acquainted with the personalities on the local club scene. Anyhoo, here was this little, old (looked it, anyhow) guy hunched over a ten-inch Meade Schmidt Cassegrain. I admired his telescope, but more than that I admired the twinkle in his eye as he showed all the Moms and Pops and Buds and Sisses celestial wonders.

What was he like in those days? He was only seven years older than Unk, which would have put him in his mid 40s. But he looked to be in his fifties—if not his sixties. The result, I reckon, of the various and sundry infirmities he suffered and must have suffered for a long time. It didn’t seem to affect his outlook, though. George was a glass-half-full kinda guy with a sunny disposition.

What spelled “George” more than anything else was his dry sense of humor and his tendency to malapropisms and misspeaking. If any of the rest of us had said ‘em, I’d call some of George’s verbal missteps “putting your foot in your mouth.” With him it was never like that; his faux pas were always hilarious, and I always wondered if he’d planned them, even though I knew he really hadn’t. A particularly funny example: one public outreach night George had his big LX5 SCT on the field and was trying to attract “customers.” He turned to one well-turned-out southern matron, looked her straight in the eye, and insisted, “IT’S A TEN-INCH!” Wish y’all could have been there to see her expression.

By the time me and Miss D. got hitched, George was a fact of the astronomical side of life. He for sure approved of my bride; especially when he learned Miss Dorothy was a math professor. While George had never been within a country mile of a college math class, having spent his working life as a blue-collar AT&T phone man, he was fascinated by mathematics and had a real talent for it. I can’t remember too many times when we ran into him that he didn’t have some kind of math problem or puzzle he wanted D’s opinion on: “Say you were able to drill a hole straight through the earth…” I’m sure his mathematical obsession was occasionally trying for Dorothy, but she put up with it both because she is such a nice person and because George was such a sweetheart of a guy.

You can bet D. and I were alarmed to hear, when we returned from our honeymoon in September of 1994, that George had suffered a serious heart attack while we’d been gone. We were maybe reassured, or maybe more alarmed, when we found him in Fletcher’s the following Sunday. Fletcher’s was a barbeque joint/breakfast buffet out on Highway 90, one of Georgie’s faves, and there he was, hale and hearty as he ever looked, plate miles high with bacon and sausage. That was, as we came to say—frequently—“just George.”

In the mid 1990s, our club, the Possum Swamp Astronomical Society, was, as it is now, enjoying one of its periodic booms: lots of members, lots of activities. One of the things we liked to do in them days was get a bunch of folks together and convoy up to a star party, like the Mid South Star Gaze way up north of Jackson, Mississippi. Miss Dorothy and I had a great time on these expeditions, and George did too, though he must have sometimes felt like a third wheel on these slightly couples-oriented trips. Perennial singleton George bore up with the good cheer that was his hallmark. I never heard of a girlfriend or even an ex-wife, and sometimes felt a little sorry for him, but he never seemed anything but happy with his lot.

In those days, George was a huge star party goer: Texas Star Party, Winter Star Party, eclipses in Mexico, he’d been everywhere, man. The star party I most associate with him and the one he loved best was our own little Deep South Regional Star Gaze. He would drive over to the DSRSG at McComb, Mississippi’s Percy Quin State Park with a truck full of gear and plant himself firmly on the observing field. I can see him as if it were yesterday, grumbling good naturedly about the ASTRO WIMPS who’d walked off the DSRSG field at a mere 1 a.m.

Sadly, by the middle of the last decade it was clear his star partying days were over. His health problems, which affected not just his heart, but his digestive system, his eyes, his back, his neck, and who-knew-what-else made it downright unwise for him to venture to remote locations, and he’d finally reconciled himself to that. Despite being barely sixty, he seemed old. Last time I was at a big star party with him was the 2002 Peach State Star Gaze way up yonder in Copperhill, Tennessee. We were in cabins with Spartan bunk beds and, in unaccustomed bad luck, George had got a top one. I offered to swap with him, but in typical George fashion, he’d have none of it. Also typically, I wound up hefting him into that cotton pickin’ bunk every dawn.

I just hated it when George had to give up even his beloved Deep South. He hung in there with us through 2005, but that was it. I hope the end of his star partying days was made a little easier by the fact that by ‘05 we’d had to relocate from Percy Quin State Park, which he loved, to a small and overly rustic camp down the road.

A few years after that, we moved to a much better venue, the Feliciana Retreat Center, which featured accommodations even better than those of Percy Quin, including fully equipped motel rooms. I hoped we’d be able to lure him back for one last bow, but that never happened. He was missed, with DSRSGers who barely knew him still enquiring year after year about “Good, Old George.”

For a while there, it looked like he might be finished observing altogether, even from home. Well before the end of his star partying, he’d had to sell off his Meade 10-inch LX5. Not only could he not lift it onto its wedge anymore, even if we helped him get it mounted, or mounted it for him, his back and neck problems prevented him from contorting himself sufficiently to aim an equatorially mounted SCT at much of anything. The LX5 was sold, and George took to using his puny Astroscan.

That was at night. For the daytime, he had a pair of very nice Coronado hydrogen alpha scopes. In the quest for something he could find easily, I suppose, he’d turned to Solar work and developed a real interest in Mr. Sun. George used his PST and a larger Coronado to show a generation or two of Possum Swamp School children (and us) what is really going on all the time on the Sun. We were especially envious when he won a second PST at one of the last DSRSGs he attended.

But at night George had been sidelined. He had got to the point where he had a hard time aiming even the Astroscan. He still wanted to show the kids something at our public outreach star parties, though, and would struggle mightily to get the Moon in view and would beg us to check to see if he had the Pleiades centered in the little Edmund. I wondered if the time might not be coming when he’d drop out of amateur astronomy altogether.

George quit astronomy? No way! He decided he’d just work smarter. At the turn of the century, computerized go-to scopes were still a mystery, a scary mystery, for many of us. Not for George. He had a plan. He bought himself Celestron’s first NexStar, the go-to NexStar 5, equipped it with a Telrad with a 90-degree viewing adapter to help him get it aligned, and was able to keep on trucking. I believe he saw more the first couple of nights with his NS 5 than he’d seen with any of his telescopes over the previous ten years. Soon, he was moving up to a NexStar 8, zapping it to its targets with SkyTools 3, and teaching those of us who tended to look down on his observing skills a thing or two about the deep sky.

It was during this period that I probably spent more time with George than ever I did before or since. He was out to make up for those lost years spent fruitlessly hunting M42 with that dadgummed Astroscan. We didn’t have a good dark site at the time, but we did have a light-polluted suburban spot. The skies weren’t very good at all, and it was often just him and me, but that was OK. We saw a lot of cool stuff. Not that this was a completely different George. His contemplation of a galaxy would often be punctuated by a running commentary on the “curiosities” that intrigued him, like Olbers’ Paradox. “I still don’t get it, Rod! How COME the whole sky ain’t white with stars! HOW COME WE AIN’T BURNING UP?”

I would most assuredly be remiss if I didn’t mention everything George did for us, his fellow club members. The average astronomy club is one of the few civic organizations where the membership competes to see who can avoid serving as an officer. In the absence of anybody else to do it, he picked up the reins of our club and led us through thick and thin, serving as President for over a decade. Unfortunately for him, he did an outstanding job. Every December he’d bring up the idea of holding an election for President, and we’d reelect him by acclamation before he could say “no.”

Otherwise, George soldiered on. I think he’d finally realized his body was indeed failing him, and occasionally seemed frightened by that. A time or two out at the dark site we thought we’d have to run him to the emergency room, but it never quite went that far. I probably should have worried about him more than I did, but outside those couple of scares he seemed mostly unchanged from twenty years ago. He didn’t look young and healthy, but he didn’t much look different. Usually, he was the first person at the dark site, greeting one and all with his patented “Howdy-howdy!” and was the last one of us to pack up (reluctantly).

We continued as we always had till one night when it was just him and me on the field. I mentioned more or less in passing that I planned to step down as his Vice President, a job I’d held about as long as George had been President. I further said that the club was now in good health with several young (at least younger) members who were enthusiastic and well suited to take over from us, the old guard. In other words, it was time for us to hand the club off to the next generation. He seemed a little taken aback at first, but nodded in agreement, and opined that we ought to hold real elections in December, which was just a few months away.

While I felt rather strongly about the need for the club to move on from us old-timers, the last thing I wanted to do was upset my friend. I just wanted him to think about it. I said nothing further on the subject after that night, and was utterly gobsmacked when, after the opening formalities at the December meeting, George announced that it was time to elect new officers. In just a few minutes, it was PSAS: The Next Generation, with a new President, Vice President, and Secretary taking over. George seemed OK, if maybe a little stunned.

I am glad one of the last things I said to him embarrassed him badly. I stood up and thanked him for his years of service, announced he would always be our President Emeritus, and requested a round of applause, which was long and tumultuous. I wonder now if, sub-consciously anyway, he was putting his affairs in order that night.

Life being what it is, I didn’t much think about George for the next several days. Not till I arrived at the dark site Saturday evening and found myself alone. No “Howdy-howdy, Rod! How’s Miss Dorothy? Did she ever get a chance to look at my math problem?” After a couple of my compadres arrived, we discussed George briefly. We were not overly disturbed. It being the Christmas season, we thought it possible he had gone to New York to visit relatives, though it would be strange for him not to mention that to us. I figgered he just wasn’t up to braving the cold, and, since he wasn’t President anymore, no longer felt obligated to be at every single dark site run.

I wasn’t a bit worried about my old friend, not much anyhow, which made it that much more of a shock when Miss D. called me at work Monday afternoon to tell me she’d arrived home to find a message on our machine from Judy, our club Treasurer and a very old friend of George. Judy, Miss Dorothy said in a shaky voice, had called to let us know George had died that past Saturday.

I called Judy for details just as soon as I could; deep down I guess I was hoping it was all a mistake. What she knew was that George had been in the habit of phoning one of his NY relatives every Saturday. Like clockwork. When said relative hadn’t received her customary ring, she got ahold of his stepmother, who lives down here. Her repeated attempts to contact George failed and the police were called. They found my friend dead in his favorite chair.

Dorothy was concerned that George, all alone, might have been in pain and scared at the end. Thankfully, from what we could glean, it must have been very quick, probably a massive heart attack, and he might even have gone in his sleep.

Which didn’t make it any easier for us, the living, to bear. We’d scheduled a Christmas Eve observing run, but even if the clouds had not piled on, I wouldn’t have been there. December 24th was way too soon. I couldn’t stand the thought of seeing George’s accustomed spot empty. And I simply dreaded the absence of that old reliable “Howdy-howdy! Guess it’s too cold for them ASTROWIMPS!”

George was a good friend and a good observer. He was also uncommonly nice. I’m only able to vaguely recall one time when he came even close to losing his temper in all the years I knew him. In addition to his natural niceness, George also possessed an innate appreciation for truth and fairness and wasn’t shy about speaking up for the right. You can’t ask for much more in a friend or anybody else than that, now can you, muchachos?

Next time: Going to XTREMEs...

Happy 2012 from Chaos Manor South!

2012-01-01T07:43:00.001-06:00

Another year has come and gone, muchachos. How did it shape up? It was a good one. The best part was that the wonderful Miss Dorothy successfully completed her difficult and long treatment for breast cancer. Unk? I got to keep my day job as Test Engineer for the Navy. I had to transition from the AEGIS Destroyers to the new LPD landing ships, but I kept my job, which is a pretty welcome thing in this day and age.

The astronomy part of life, my NIGHT job? I continued my long-time teaching gig at the University of South Alabama, stuffing the heads of yet another generation of younguns with astronomical knowledge. And I continued to do astronomy writing, professional astronomy writing, appearing in Sky and Telescope and Sky and Telescope’s Skywatch this year.

“What about AMATEUR astronomy, Unk? What did you do under the stars and down to the club, huh?” The Herschel Project rolled on, and was as big a part of my observing life in 2011 as it had been in 2010, but by the end of the year it was beginning to wind down a little as I finished the Herschel II, almost finished another run through the Herschel 400, knocked off more and more Herschel 2500 “Big Enchilada” objects, and suddenly found there were nights without many aitches available. Yeah, the Herschels were a big part of 2011, but that wasn’t all I did…

Sunday, January 16, 2011: Having Fun Together

Why is the Great American Astronomy Club still alive in this day of 24-hour ‘round the clock “club” meetings on Cloudy Nights and Astromart? Because when it’s done right, a non-virtual astronomy club is just so much danged fun.

Rod’s club, the storied Possum Swamp Astronomical Society (PSAS), has persevered through thick and thin, and is still going strong in this high-tech age. A major reason for that is that in addition to public outreach and group observing and interesting meetings, we get together and have some non-astronomy fun once in a while. Like at our annual holiday dinner, which was held at the excellent Ed’s Seafood Shed out on the Causeway in January of 2011.

Not that amateur astronomy wasn’t discussed. After “several” whiskeys, Unk regaled the PSAS with his take on THE BEST STAR PARTIES EVER-EVER. The kindness and friendliness of the membership was demonstrated by the fact that they actually listened to the (semi) foolishness Unk spouted.

Sunday, January 30, 2011: A-OK?

Unk Rod has striven mightily to keep the even vaguely political out of this blog, and has had a pretty good record of doing that. Most of the time. There have been a couple of exceptions, one of which has had to do with the current state of NASA and the U.S. space program and, specifically, the manned space program, which for all intents and purposes has been shut down by the current Administration.

I worked some good, old 60s nostalgia into this article, but mostly it was serious business. My ideas for getting the American Space Age going again? I didn’t have any. The pitiful best I could come up with was the suggestion you write a letter to the goobers in Washington expressing your displeasure. Sigh.

I want Americans in space in American spacecraft. Is there no hope? I know that “write your Congressman” is one of the most hopeless phrases in American English, but I don’t know what else to tell you to do. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to let them know that there are still a few starry-eyed boomers out there.

Sunday, February 13, 2011: The Herschel Project Night 20

And so it was that, after a layoff of a couple months, the dear, old H-Project was back on the rails. Unk was feeling a bit lazy and had a little trouble convincing himself to drag the C8 and Stellacam and all the support gear out to the Tanner – Williams dark site on a hazy, freezing winter evening, but he did. Though not with the intent of finishing the Herschel II. That would have meant staying out in the 32F temps till four a.m. Nossir buddy!

What got done on this chilly night, then? Given the fun I had leading y’all through the Herschel II list on this here blog, I decided to do the same with the Herschel I, the Herschel 400. Yes, I should probably have attacked the Big Enchilada, the Herschel 2500, with a vengeance, but it was cold and damp (very heavy dew), and I was still adjusting to my new duties on my new job. I consoled myself with the fact that all the Herschel Is are members of the 2500, so it wouldn’t be like I was ignoring The Whole Big Thing, and I would get to see some spectacular objects in the bargain.

And I did. Celeste, my C8, and her CG5 did not miss a beat, putting everything I requested smack in the small field of the Stellacam II. Object of the night? Probably the lovely edge-on spiral in Andromeda, NGC 891. The SC II easily revealed not just the galaxy’s equatorial dust lane, but the fact that the lane’s edges are irregular, “curdled,” all along its length.

Inspired by the beautiful 891 and similarly wonderful H 400s like M110, NGC 2158, and NGC 457, and a look at the supernova in NGC 2655, I kept going without a thought to the cold. Till it was nearing midnight and Unk began to feel seriously miserable in the heavy dew. Big Switch time. Final tally? Fifty Herschel 400 sprites.

Sunday, April 10, 2011: The Herschel Project Night 21

After a pause due to weather and work, the Herschel Project got going again in April, and Miss Dorothy and I were excited about it. We were especially excited because we would continue it down in Chiefland. And not just that: for the first time in quite a few years, there’d be a genuine Chiefland Spring Picnic on the Chiefland Observers’ Billy Dodd Field. Yes, the “new” Chiefland group, which puts on the Nova Sedus Star Party, has a spring picnic on the expansive and well equipped observing field just to the west of our old digs, but I am a creature of habit. I want the “old” Spring Picnic with all my old friends.

What was particularly notable about this Herschel Expedition? One very welcome thing was that Miss Dorothy was in fine form for her second CAV trip; she was, in fact, almost her old self again. Not only did we enjoy an excellent edition of the legendary Picnic, with more Wal-Mart fried chicken than even Unk could eat, we took a day trip to our beloved “Duma Key,” Cedar Key, where we spent several enjoyable hours browsing the shops and trying the lunch menu at The Pickled Pelican.

The most memorable thing about this trip, howsomeever? A milestone was passed. On Thursday night I observed the three galaxies in Hydra and one in Virgo that constituted the last of the Herschel II list. Yep, I was done with the HII, the original project in “Herschel Project.” Finishing was a little bittersweet; it had been a fun slog through the second 400, and I’d had a great time reporting on my progress here. Finishing the HII did not mean the end of The Herschel Project, of course. Shortly after beginning it, I’d resolved to tackle all (near) 2500 aitches, and when Miss D. and I reluctantly packed up and headed home over half of ‘em still remained to be observed.

Sunday, May 15, 2011: Welcome to the Stellarium

What did Unk do when the Moon was big or the clouds numerous? One of the things I did was play with astronomy software. I’m an old hand at that, I reckon; me and astro-softs go all the way back to the Commodore 64 and Sky Travel. Not as old as that, but almost, is Skyglobe, a wonderful, fast DOS (what came before Windows, sprouts) planetarium that Unk continued to use for quick looks at the virtual sky till his XP laptop bit the dust a little while back. This installment of the blog was about the program that replaced Skyglobe for me, finally, Stellarium.

Not only is Stellarium almost as fast to pop onto my screen as Skyglobe was, it is incomparably more beautiful, and, naturally, as befits 21st century astro-ware, has lots more objects. Shortly after installing Stellarium, I found myself admiring its display in a darkened room, just as I’d done with Skyglobe on that long ago night when I ran it for the first time on my old IBM 486.

Sunday, June 05, 2011: Unk’s Messier Album 1

It wasn’t all Herschels, Herschels, Herschels last year. I started a new and much more informal observing project. One centered around one of my favorite Sky and Telescope columns (later assembled into a book) of yore, John Mallas’ and Evered Kreimer’s “A Messier Album.” This wonderful feature took us through the whole Messier list, with Mallas providing drawings and commentary and Kreimer furnishing groundbreaking astrophotos.

What I proposed to do was go through the objects in the same order M&K did, observing them with a similar instrument, my ETX 125 (Mallas used a 4-inch Unitron achromatic refractor), and see how what I saw compared to what John M. saw. To that end, I tackled M49, M61, M68, M13, and M92 on the first evening out—at my club’s dark site—knocking off two Mallas/Kreimer columns in the first go.

My results? On the galaxies, John and I saw about the same things. Globular star clusters were a different story, with me consistently resolving more stars than he did. One thing the first “Album” run did for me was give me a better appreciation of Mallas’ drawings. They are a little funky in daylight, but under a dim red light they look amazingly like what is in the eyepiece of a small telescope.

I had a lot of fun doing those first two columns. Writing and drawing them. I resolved to sketch every Messier Mallas drew (everything but open clusters). What might improve my Messier Album series even more? Getting back to it. I did a second installment some weeks after the first, but haven’t continued since. I hope that will change in 2012.

Sunday, July 10, 2011: The Herschel Project Nights 24 and 25

Despite the Messier side trips, my 2011 observing was mostly all about the Herschels. In the interest of bagging more, Miss Dorothy and I again made the trip “down Chiefland way,” in spite of the blazing temperatures of a Florida summer and clouds that threatened to scuttle our expedition before it began.

This wasn’t the first time I’d been to CAV in July—I’d done the same the previous two years—so I knew how to beat the heat. You don’t hang out on the observing field in the daytime. That’s plain foolish. There is nothing to see, nothing to do, and no one to talk to. You stay in your motel, the Day’s Inn in our case, or in the Chiefland WallyWorld, or in Bill’s Bar-B-Q, or, as we did on Saturday, in the Rusty Rim Bar and Grill in nearby Cedar Key. You don’t head to the CAV field till Sundown, and you have a fan on the observing table to make the high 80s—even as you approach midnight—bearable.

What did Unk and Miss Dorothy achieve in the heat of night? Thursday was a wash (almost literally). Clouds and the threat of severe thunderstorms all day and into the night. We spent the evening in our motel room watching the dadgum SyFy Channel. (And, in Rod’s case, sipping…err… “sarsaparilla.”) Friday and Saturday nights worked out—did they ever. Neither evening was perfect, but that did not stop us from moving 150 Herschel 2500 objects into the “observed” category.

Sunday, August 07, 2011: The Herschel Project Night 26

‘Course I couldn’t do all my Herscheling from the cotton picking Chiefland Astronomy Village. If I were to pick up any aitches during the August dark of the Moon, it would have to be from the good, old Possum Swamp Astronomical Society dark site. The sky damn sure ain’t pristine, but the Milky Way is almost always visible, and if you confine your work to the west side of the Meridian, you can see a lot. Visually or with a camera.

This time out it would be “camera,” specifically my Stellacam II deep sky video camera. Not with Big Bertha, my NexStar C11, though. It looked to be hot, hazy, bug-laden, and dew-crazy. When I want to do Herschels on a night like that, it’s always a Celeste night. “Celeste,” my venerable Ultima C8 OTA, who rides on a Celestron CG5 mount, can, when equipped with the Stellacam, pull in the amazingly dim, and she is a joy to set up and tear down.

Unk spent the night feeling faintly miserable; I was soaked with dew not long after Sundown. The DewBuster heater controller easily kept Celeste’s corrector bone dry, though, so what could I do but press on? Which I did till around midnight, when the deep cycle battery I use to power the DVD recorder and video display gave up the ghost. Despite the hot and sticky wx condx I still wasn’t ready to throw the big switch. I removed the SC II and went visual for a another hour, observing, amongst other things, the year’s best comet, Comet Garradd, which was a real hit with me and my PSAS buddies.

Was it worth braving the giant mosquitoes of Tanner – Williams, Alabama for a brief spell under the stars? Boy howdy was it:

Final tally? Two needed Herschel 400 objects and thirty Big Enchilada aitches. Not bad for an evening when I had to struggle to convince myself to load up a ton of gear and head for the dark site. I can’t promise I’ll always have the gumption to defy heat, humidity, clouds, and bugs, but I’m glad I did this time.

Sunday, September 04, 2011: Down Country Roads

For some unknown reason, the good folk of NOVAC, the Northern Virginia Astronomy Club, one of our nation’s premier astronomical societies, enjoy listening to old Unk’s somewhat silly and somewhat disorganized presentations. To that end, they had me up to their big yearly star party, the Almost Heaven Star Party, again. For the fourth time.

I may question their wisdom regarding this old hillbilly’s PowerPoints, but I don’t question their ability to put on a pip of a star party. AHSP, as the name suggests, is held in West Virginia, up on the highest mountain in West Virginia, Spruce Knob. The facility is great, the people are great, and the skies are great. Well, the skies are usually great. Not this year.

Unfortunately, AHSP 2011 had the misfortune to coincide with bad, ol’ Hurricane Irene, who was hitting nearby DC just as the event got underway. Unk managed to make it to Dulles before the air transport system fell apart, but he didn’t see a blessed thing the whole time—well I did get a brief look at M13 thanks to Donovan Brock and his gigantanormous Dobsonian.

The clouds did not spoil my good time, though. Whether I was hanging out on the field drinking brewskies and eating Little Debbie Star Crunches with old friends, or listening to talks by my fellow presenters, or gobbling the great food, I had a wonderful star party. My only wish? That the AHSP organizers are DUMB enough to have me back for 2012.

Sunday, October 30, 2011: The Herschel Project Night 27

Like I done told y’all, 2011 was my first year on my new job as a navigation systems engineer on the Navy’s LPD program. The fact that the newest ship in the San Antonio Class, LPD 22, would begin her sea trials in October meant Unk and Miss Dorothy did not get to attend the Deep South Regional Star Gaze—first time I’ve missed it since 1992. And we weren’t able to head down to Chiefland to continue the H-Project, either.

Not that we didn’t catch any Herschels between August and December. Despite frustratingly poor weather, I did get out once. As per usual, everything did not go smoothly. When Unk arrived at the site, the neighboring soybean field was being harvested, which was kicking up clouds of dust, and when that finally settled and I decided to get the scope set up, I didn’t secure the C8 properly in the CG5, and she nearly fell to the ground. So it goes.

Those alarums and excursions did not stop me and Celeste. Once we got our act together, we began picking off the few Herschel 2500 objects available to us on this autumn night. The final haul was not overly impressive, we ticked off 27 new ones on the SkyTools 3 list, but we got what we could get without staying up till 3 a.m. I also got a shot of the excellent supernova in M101, just before the Catherine Wheel Galaxy sank out of sight.

Sunday, November 06, 2011: EQMOD Redux

Yes, almost unbelievably, Unk was running out of Herschel 2500 objects—in the Fall sky at least. When the next dark of the Moon came, I changed gears big time. As y’all may know, I’m an aspiring deep sky astrophotographer. Been one for over 45 years. Maybe because I don’t keep after it as often as I should. Come this November run at the PSAS dark site, the astrophotography bug had bitten hard again. Unk lugged the C8, the Atlas mount, the netbook loaded with EQMOD, and the Canon DSLR out to Tanner Williams for some long overdue deep sky picture taking.

In addition to wanting to get back into the astrophotography swim of things, I wanted to try out my new guide system, the Orion Mini Autoguider, the combination of a 50mm finder-cum-guide scope and Orion’s excellent StarShoot autoguider camera. I was a little skeptical that a 50mm guide scope could do the job, but it dang sure did. With the help of Nebulosity and PHD Guiding, Unk got recognizable, if hardly perfect, portraits of M13, M57, and M27. No, not perfect, but them consarned stars dang sure was round.

And that was it for 2011. Well, not quite it. The above things were just the highlights of my astronomical year. They do sum up the way the amateur astronomy wind blew for me, though. 2012? The broad themes will be the same: the Herschel Project, the Messier Album Project, and astrophotography. But at least one of the players will have changed. I have just taken delivery of a Mallincam Xtreme deep sky video camera. I am excited about that, and I am excited about 2012 in general. I think it’s gonna be a good year for Unk, and I hope it will be for y’all too. In other words: Happy new year from Chaos Manor South!

Next time: My Friend George...

A Chaos Manor South Christmas: 2011

2011-12-24T19:28:00.004-06:00

It’s Christmas Eve, muchachos, and Unk feels like telling a Christmas story. Something I’ve done a couple of times before, like here. The story this Christmas Eve? The events surrounding Stephanie’s telescope didn’t occur at Christmas, they happened just after, but the tale has the feel of Christmas, and I feel like telling it, so we’ll call it a Christmas story.

When did Uncle Rod’s magnificent obsession with the Great Out There begin? I don’t know. Honestly, y’all, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t thinking about OUTER SPACE. Certainly by the early 60s, when I’d got my hands on a cheap pair of toy binoculars and a planisphere, the idea of astronomy, practical astronomy, not just what I read in books, had taken root in me. Not that I knew what to do with that idea.

Stephanie’s Telescope showed me what to do, but that little A.C. Gilbert was actually the second part of a one-two punch that pushed me over the edge into a lifetime of wonder. The first part came the night of First Spaceship on Venus. If you’ve read my blog article about it, you know First Spaceship, along with The Angry Red Planet and Journey to the Seventh Planet, is a member of the triumvirate of Sci-Fi (not SF) films that have remained in this old boy’s pantheon for fifty years. It isn’t really Spaceship that is important here, howsomeever; it’s what happened after the movie.

Like I said in the blog entry, First Spaceship had its initial U.S. release in 1962, but it did not show up down here till a year or two later, when it was shown at the Roxy, Possum Swamp’s cheap-seats theatre. They played first-run films, too, but not first-run films like Lawrence of Arabia. More like Tammy and the Bachelor and one of Mama’s other faves, Horrors of the Black Museum. And they showed lots of second run (or third or fourth run) flicks starring Abbot and Costello and the Bowery Boys. And lots of sci-fi like First Spaceship on Venus.

I won’t say too much about that remarkable film from the exotic Soviet Bloc other than that, yeah, it was remarkable. In many ways it was ahead of its time, even years after it was filmed, and in the pre-2001: a Space Odyssey and pre-Star Trek days it was far stranger and more compelling than even the best American efforts like Forbidden Planet. All on what must have been a laughably miniscule budget. If’n you want to know more about the film and more about li’l Rod’s reaction to it, read its dadgum blog entry. Suffice to say that when the credits rolled Mama had a hard time prying me out of my seat.

Mama, in her usual slightly disorganized fashion, had got us to the theatre about ten-minutes after the movie started. I was so taken with it that I wanted to watch at least those first ten minutes—if not the whole movie—when they ran the film again. Back in those gentler times you were allowed, maybe even encouraged, to do that. You filled a seat, and you might visit the concession stand again. I know I would have begged Mama for a refresh of my supplies—ten-cent box of popcorn, Orange Crush, Almond Joy—if she’d agreed to watch First Spaceship again.

Normally, convincing Mama to sit through a movie twice wasn’t a problem. She preferred to stay at the Roxy till as close as possible to the time Daddy would arrive back home after sign-off at the TV station where he worked. As I have often said, Mama was in many ways a strong woman, but not when it came to enduring the hours of darkness alone in a house with a little kid. She would not assent this time, though, “We have got to get home, young man. Have you forgotten already? This is the night The Den is going out to look through the big telescope. I thought you were the one who was so interested in space?”

As y’all know if you’ve read this blog often, I loved Cub Scouting, and what made me love it was mostly my Den Mother, a very special—if somewhat peculiar and spinsterish—person, Miss Emily Baldwin. Mizz Baldwin had the not young – not old appearance some middle-aged and unmarried southern women assumed back then. She seemed utterly changeless year upon year. What also never changed was her commitment to us kids.

Not only did she serve as a Den Mother and as an MYF Youth Leader at our Methodist Church, she was a substitute science teacher at the Junior High School, and later went on to teach—or really preach—the wonders of science fulltime to a couple of generations of kids. I suppose I was very lucky to come to Miss Emily’s attention. She made my life interesting, if not always pleasant. Like Mama, she always had the idea I might be UP TO SOMETHING, and she was not shy about getting on the phone and communicating her suspicions. As I’ve said before, if only she and Mama had realized how timid li’l Rod really was.

Whatever. What mattered was that Miss Baldwin’s prime mission as a Cub Scout leader was to get her charges, and, I suspected, particularly me, Interested in Science. To that end, she was always arranging activities, contests, and field trips with a scientific slant to them. On this fall evening, she’d outdone herself. She’d arranged the mother of all field trips. She had set up a visit to Spring Hill College’s observatory.

Spring Hill College, then and now, is Possum Swamp’s kinda sleepy, kinda small, very pretty Jesuit College. As is sometimes the case with small, backwater institutions, they had an outstanding astronomy program due to the presence of a charismatic professor whose passion was the stars. As is also often the case, this program did not long outlast this person’s tenure. But for a while there was some pretty serious astronomy going on up at the ‘Hill. To the point where a domed observatory holding, Miss Emily told us Cubs, a gigantic telescope was built in a corner of Spring Hill’s golf course.

I don’t remember the drive out to the college, packed in the backseat of one of the moms’ cars with three or four other Cubs, but I sure do remember what I saw when we got there: a perfect little observatory dome. I say “little” now, but back then it looked enormous. Big enough to house Mount Palomar’s Hale Reflector, which I often obsessed about. I had read a cheap and tacky science fiction novel about Palomar Observatory, The Big Eye, seven or eight times, and that great instrument had become my totem, my touchstone, my religious icon. I know one thing: Miss Emily sure didn’t have to shoo me inside.

Spring Hill's scope, a 12-inch Cave reflector, was not what we'd call "big" these days, but when I entered the small dome I felt as if I were standing in the company of and dwarfed by the mighty Hale. I didn't mind waiting in line for a little while, either, since I could gawk at the indecipherable star charts (probably Becvar’s Skalnate Pleso atlas) and funny-looking clocks that were revealed in dim red light.

Above all, I could admire The Telescope with its lustrous, nearly glowing white tube and massive equatorial mount. No, 12-inches doesn’t sound like much today, but even now a 12-inch long focal length Newtonian on a large German equatorial is a big telescope. When it was my turn to ascend the ladder to the Cave's eyepiece, I felt as if I were climbing all the way to the Hale’s prime focus cage. Then it came: my first look through any scope.

Memories can deceive, but what's locked in my mind near fifty years later is a perfect vision of M51’s glowing spiral arms. That may even be accurate, since a 12-inch Newtonian would have been perfectly capable of revealing considerable spiral detail in the bright Whirlpool Galaxy in those not-so-light-polluted days, even for the newest of novices. It was all I could do to keep from tumbling off the ladder. My mind reeled, and then got a grip, a tiny grip, on the true scale and majesty of the Universe.

I didn’t begin to come back down to Earth till we all stopped at Possum Swamp’s brand new (and first) Macdonald’s. I munched those crazy fries and 10-cent hamburgers with the rest of the Den, getting ketchup all over our uniforms and the Moms’ cars in the process—no indoor dining at Mickey D’s in them days—but even then part of me was still far, far away, out among the galaxies.

I daydreamed—and dreamed—about The Telescope for weeks and months, but being just a little chirper in a big, wide world, I didn't imagine I could have a telescope of my own. I went back to my semi-toy binoculars and my star finder (planisphere) and the outer space shows on TV like my fave, Fireball XL-5. No, I had no idea I could have a scope. Until one after-Christmas show-and-tell day in the 4th grade.

Is show-and-tell still done in elementary schools? I don’t know, but it was very popular in the antique days of the early sixties, giving us and our teachers a break from our normal routine of studying the multiplication tables between duck and cover air-raid drills with Bert the Turtle. Show-and-tell went like this: you brought an item to school (a toy, a book, even a pet) and stood up in front of the class and gave a short talk about it. 47 long years later, I have no idea what I brought on that winter Friday morning, but I remember with laser clarity what my classmate Stephanie brought.

Stephanie usually had good stuff, being from the upper middle class rather than the middle-middle (really lower-middle) class like me and my buddies Wayne Lee and Miss Jitter Jones, but what she brought on this day was beyond good. Perched on a spindly metal tripod was a long black tube. Almost instinctively, I knew it was a telescope, a telescope for looking at the stars—not a dime-store spyglass like I used when me and Wayne Lee and Jitter were playing pirates.

I knew it was a telescope, but I couldn't figure out how you looked into it. The "eye thing" seemed to be on the wrong end. Stephanie soon explained all: this was a special sort of a telescope, a reflecting telescope, which used a mirror instead of a lens. She went on to tell us that she and her Daddy had used her Gilbert (I had one of their cheap microscopes) to see craters on the Moon. Imagine that: they could look at Moon craters. Any time they wanted. Stephanie let us all have a peep through the classroom windows at a distant telephone pole, and that was that. Which was enough for me. I had to have a telescope. HAD to.

Over the next few months, I made a lot of noise to Mama and Daddy (a.k.a. “The Old Man” or “The Chief Op” around our house) about wanting a scope, and I believe they allowed as how they'd "see about it" (usually code for "No, you'll forget about it soon enough; we can't afford it anyway."). No telescope was forthcoming. Perhaps they wanted to be sure I was serious in my odd new preoccupation, or maybe the money really wasn't there. It's easy to forget it amidst the nostalgia for those supposedly more innocent times, but in the late 1950s and early 1960s the lower middle class had resources more akin to those of po’ folks today. But I didn't stop pestering, and I think Mama eventually realized how serious I was and communicated that to Daddy.

I didn’t know pea turkey about that till one morning, just as I was waking up to get ready for school, when Daddy came through the door to my room with a telescope in his arms. I barely heard what he said, a simple “I happened to go by Joe’s Loan last night during my supper break and saw this and thought you might like it.” That was plenty. I didn’t care that the little Tasco came from a pawnshop. It looked new, and may have been. Daddy’s pal Joe sold a few new things in addition to his huge assortment of used, “hocked,” stuff. Used or new, it was love at first sight.

The new telescope, my new telescope, was a thing of wonder. Gleaming white metal tube, beautiful wooden tripod, and a couple of shiny lenses (what I called eyepieces initially). Most of all, this 3-inch Tasco Newtonian seemed to be straining in her traces, eager to gallop into the sky like a thoroughbred. You can bet that school day was a long one. All I could think about was my scope. I even tried the “Miss Stinson, I feel SICK! Can I go home?” ploy. Strict Miss Stinson applied a no-nonsense hand to my forehead and told me to HUSH, sit down, and get out my math book. Yeah, it was gonna be a long Friday…

When evening finally came, I turned the Tasco to the sky, taking first light on a nice, gibbous Moon. From that moment on my course was set, even though the Tasco did not turn out to be quite the thoroughbred I thought she was. Her optics were not-so-hotsky, doing OK on the Moon, OK on the few deep sky objects I could find, and poorly on the planets. I was not dismayed. Instead, I began drooling over the Edmund Scientific catalog Daddy gave me and, just like all us gear-mad amateurs today, dreaming of More Better Gooder that could take me farther.

I don’t have many mementoes from those days. For the longest time, all I had was a single snapshot of me posed with my wonderful telescope, my dog-eared copy of Stars, and a Moon picture or two I took with the Tasco and my Argus box camera. Then, not long ago, I took custody of what I believe to be the mount from Spring Hill’s old Cave reflector. The second I laid eyes on the time-worn GEM head, I was pretty sure where it had come from. Nevertheless, I was gobsmacked when further investigation revealed this relic was indeed part of that wonderful telescope from so many, many years ago.

What will I do with the mount? It still works—even the drive runs—though it could use considerable restoration. That will come, and I will put a suitable instrument on it. Maybe a big achromatic refractor. For now, I just pat it every once in a while in passing. When I do, memories from fifty long years ago come flooding back, memories of Mama and Daddy, and the Tasco, and Miss Emily Baldwin, and long-ago Christmases, and, particularly, of Stephanie’s telescope.

This Christmas…

It’s a slightly more melancholy Christmas than usual. This week, Miss Dorothy and I received the shocking news that an old friend, George Byron, whose name has appeared in this blog more than once, had passed away. George was a good friend and a good observer and the backbone of our little astronomy club for years. We will miss him terribly.

Tonight, Christmas Eve...

After a late lunch in celebration of stepdaughter Beth's birthday (at the Olive Garden as per usual), younger daughter Lizbeth joined us for the traditonal annual showing of A Charlie Brown Christmas (via DVD). Unk settled in to watch, savoring a wee nip of the Yell, of course, and ruminating on the Christmas of 1965, the year Charlie Brown premiered. I tried to settle in, anyhow

I was on EDGE, muchachos. Christmas Eve night had assumed the character of a race. As you know if you've been reading this here blog for a while, me and Miss D's other Christmas Eve tradition these many years has been to grab a scope and hie ourselves into the yard for a look at that greatest of all Christmas ornaments, M42. Our 3-inch Skywatcher refractor, Eloise, was near the front door and ready to go, but would we see anything? A front of heavy storms bringing thick clouds was approaching from the west as fast as ol' Orion was rising in the east...

For the second time in two years, Unk was victorious. All five us us, me, D., Beth, son-in-law Rob, and Lizbeth, trouped out into the front yard and, despite low altitude and haze and light pollution, the great nebula shone through. Did it ever. We drank in the ancient photons and one and all proclaimed it a good omen. Soon, your old Unk will be off to bed, visions of Mallincam Xtremes dancing in his head. I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas, a Christmas just as numinous as ours is turning out to be.

Excelsior, y’all!

Next time: Happy New Year 2012 from Chaos Manor South!

You Gotta Guide

2011-12-18T07:33:00.000-06:00

Yep, if you want to take astrophotos, long exposure deep sky astrophotos, you have to keep a “guide” star centered for the duration of the shot to make up for telescope misalignments and mechanical gear errors in your mount. Well, that’s not strictly true, I reckon. If you have an uber expensive, permanently mounted setup, or are willing to settle for multiple 30-second – 1-minute subframe exposures you stack into a final image, you can get by without guiding.

But that is not most of us. Most of us are using mid-level mounts, in the EQ-6 to G11 range. And most of us are of the opinion that our results will be better, our finished pictures more noise-free, if we expose each subframe longer. We may still stack multiple exposures into a finished image, but the longer we can go on each subframe, the better.

If you’ve been in the astrophotography game longer than about fifteen years, I don’t have to remind you what a pain guiding used to be. Back in the not-so-good old days of film astrophotography, we guided manually. What that meant was you stared at a dim star in a crosshair reticle eyepiece for long periods, often through a devilish little device called an “off axis guider,” an “OAG”

An off-axis guider was attached to the focuser or visual back ahead of your camera and had a small prism or mirror that intercepted light from the edge of the field and diverted it to the guiding eyepiece. The prism was small enough and close enough to the field-edge that its presence wasn’t noticeable in finished images, even in a 35mm frame. Course, being small and being at the field edge meant it was limited in the number of stars it could see. With an SCT, stars at the hairy edge of the field were misshapen too—often looking more like commas or seagulls than pinpoints. Locating a star bright enough and round enough to use for guiding was a challenge—to put it mildly.

Why didn’t we use guide scopes, separate small refractors (usually), to guide? Some of us tried, but over our long film exposures the chance of flexure was high with our long focal length guide scopes (their magnification had to be high to allow you to see any small “excursions” the star would make). If the guide scope flexed, moved independently of the imaging scope the tiniest bit, stars would be trailed in the final image no matter how carefully you guided. Then as now, no astrophotographer liked non-round stars, so most of us resigned ourselves to OAG hell.

Once there was a guide star sitting in the crosshairs of the guiding eyepiece, the fun had just begun. You stared at that star for the length of the exposure. If it moved off the crosshairs even a little, you pushed the appropriate button on the hand paddle, the hand controller, to bring it back.

Doesn’t sound that bad? Remember, this was usually for a half hour minimum. It might be cold. Or it might be hot with biting bugs in the bargain. Depending on the focal length of the imaging telescope and the quality of its drive and polar alignment, you might not dare to take your eye from the guiding eyepiece for an instant. Even with the aid of Celestron’s primitive PEC system, I was lucky to get the occasional recognizable M42 like my “masterpiece” here.

The coming of the CCD camera changed everything. The most important thing it did was shorten the length of most folks’ exposures. With sensitive CCD cameras, or even today’s ubiquitous DSLRs, many imagers, including Unk, start hitting the skyfog limit, the point where sky brightness due to light pollution becomes a problem, in two or three minutes. Three minutes is a lot easier to deal with for manual guiding than thirty, but by the time the CCD revolution was a few years old, we found we didn’t have to—guide manually, that is.

The autoguider revolution started with something called the “ST-4,” the first camera produced by the legendary SBIG, Santa Barbara Instrument Group. While the ST-4 could take pictures, its small chip made it mostly of interest as an auto guider for folks doing film imaging. We were skeptical that this (expensive) little widget connected to a box with a few LEDs on it could guide a telescope accurately, but it could—in the right hands. The settings, guide star, and mount all had to be just right, but the ST-4 most assuredly could work.

As the 90s came to an end, the ST-4’s guiding system, which issued relay-closure signals to the mount to guide, just like you were pushing the hand paddle buttons yourself, became the default standard. Mount makers left and right added “ST-4 compatible” autoguide ports to their mounts, and many CCD camera makers furnished ST-4 guide outputs on their cameras.

The ST-4 was there first, but almost any CCD camera could be used to guide a mount, a modern go-to mount, at least. You just needed the right software running on a PC. For a while, the standard was SBIG’s CCDops, the simple program that came with Santa Barbara’s cameras, and which most of us learned on. Then came CCDsoft from Software Bisque, which was definitely a step up, at least as far as features. Finally, there was Maxim DL, which was and is for some folks the king of guiding (and imaging and processing).

For those of us not stationed under desert skies with plenty of time to pursue pretty pictures, and those of us not after serious scientific results, Maxim DL was overkill, however, at 600 bucks. What if we just wanted to guide our mounts? Didn’t need lots of frills, and didn’t want to spend that much money?

A cool little (freeware) program called GuideDog was popular for a while. Not only was it free, it worked. Alas, it had some rough edges and was designed to use modified webcams for guiding rather than standard CCD cameras or guide cameras. Its author stopped developing it by about 2004, too. I kept looking, and eventually heard about PHD, “Push Here Dummy,” Guiding from Stark Labs. Amazingly, that was just what PHD Guiding was. You pushed a button (well, actually a couple of buttons), and it calibrated itself and just, well, GUIDED.

PHD did not control your imaging camera. It did not process images. All it did was autoguide, either through an ST-4 port or a serial (RS-232) port on the mount. It supported a lot of guidecams and CCDs, and was being continuously updated and improved by Mr. Stark Labs, Craig Stark. I used PHD Guiding, a William Optics 66 SD refractor as a guide scope, and the original Meade color DSI CCD cam as a guide cam successfully for several years. But I wasn’t overly happy with the setup aside from PHD.

One thing I didn’t like about it was my guidecam. The color DSI was more than sensitive enough to do the job, but it had a failing: it did not have an ST-4 output. Which meant I had to add an adapter cable, a Shoestring Astronomy adapter cable that converted parallel data from my laptop to the ST-4 switch closures my Atlas mount’s autoguider port understood. Oh, I could have guided from a serial port on the computer to the serial port on the mount hand control, but that still meant another snarfin’ cable plugged into the computer to go with the the DSLR USB cable, the guidecam USB cable, and the DSLR remote shutter control cable. I was kinda tired of the DSI, too; its chip was small. It would have been nice to have a bigger one that yielded a wider field and more guide stars.

Nor was I happy with my guide scope. The WO SD was a fantastic small refractor, but it was also a little on the heavy side, actually heavier than a short tube 80. My rings were kinda clunky, too. They worked, hell yeah, but they were a little light, and I was pretty sure I was throwing away more frames due to flexure than I ought to be. It was also a bit of a hassle to install the rings and 66 SD for an imaging run.

I could have invested in a Losmandy or ADM guide scope rings setup to banish the flexure problem, but you all know how cheap I am, and it would still be a pain to mount them and the 66 on the C8 before every imaging run. Why not go back to an OAG, then? A guide camera will work with one. Uh-uh. Nosir buddy. I had my fill of them tools of Satan back in the 90s.

I was stumped for a while, but then I heard salvation was at hand. Folks over on one of the Cloudy Nights discussion boards were talking about, a Canadian company, KW Telescopes in Ontario, who were selling the combination of a QHY5 autoguide camera (with an ST-4 output), and a guide scope made from a modified 50mm finder. According to the cats and kittens on CN, this system, the QWIQ Guide, was simple and worked well.

I was skeptical. How could you guide pea turkey with that little focal length and aperture? Yeah, I knew guide cameras do not need the obscenely long focal length guide scopes we needed back when we guided by eye, but, still, 50mm? Nevertheless, imagers were reporting the 50mm jobs worked like duck soup with imaging scopes of up to 2000mm focal length. I almost pulled the trigger on the QWIQ, but hesitated. Seemed too good to be true, even though I knew SBIG had produced some workable guide scopes for their cameras with objectives e’en smaller than 50mm.

While I was sitting on the fence about the QWIQ system, I did solve the guide camera conundrum. Orion (Telescope and Binocular Center) had begun selling a nice little guide cam, the StarShoot Autoguider, which was very much like KW’s QHY. For $279.00. Nice big chip, excellent build quality, ST-4 output, and proven to work with my beloved PHD. Orion even included a copy of PHD Guiding in the package.

I was lucky enough to receive a StarShoot for Christmas 2009 from the wonderful Miss Dorothy. I got the cam out once shortly after I unwrapped it, and it appeared to work well, but… Late 2009 was when The Herschel Project got underway and I put my DSLR away for a while. With nearly 3,000 dim Herschel Objects awaiting me, I hardly used anything other than my deep sky video camera for dang near two years. With the H Project finally under control as of this past fall, though, astrophotography reared its ugly head again as it always does. Yes, I’d get the Canon Rebel out of mothballs, but I wanted to fix my guide scope problem first.

There was that QWIQ finder-guide scope. If it worked, it would be just the thing. A 50mm finder is a light little thing, and even the somewhat rudimentary Synta finder mount would likely be less prone to flexing than my rings/66mm scope. In a bit of synchronicity, just as I was considering giving KW a call, Orion came out with their version of the QWIQ setup, the “Mini AutoGuider” package. You could get the whole shebang, including the modified finder-guide scope and the StarShoot camera for a nice price, $349.00, considerably less than what KW wanted given the exchange rate at the time. Since I already had the guidecam, it was even sweeter, a mere $89.95 for the Orion Mini 50mm Guide Scope.

Since this set up would be destined for my C8, Celeste, I would have to provide an SCT compatible mounting foot for the finder-cum-guide scope, one which could be had for the not too unreasonable sum of $16.95 (Orion provides a mounting foot with the guide scope, but not with the spacing for an SCT’s accessory holes). That would mean sacrificing Celeste’s original finder, or at least its mounting. But that was OK. Her finder was a well-made Japanese job, but I’d never liked its ring mount. Only its forward ring had adjustment screws; the rear ring had a rubber O ring to hold the finder in place while allowing adjustment. I don’t know if that O ring was just getting old and drying out or what, but the finder would not maintain its alignment for long.

I wasn’t too sorry to see the Celestron finder itself go either. Its polar alignment reticle is not very useful anymore, I rarely use its illuminator, and I like my Orion (Synta) RACI correct image 90 degree finder better. The RACI would fit the mounting foot and would be real sweet on Celeste when I wasn’t using the guider.

In due time the Mini AutoGuider scope arrived, and I was somewhat impressed. It appeared to have been made, or at least professionally modified, for its intended purpose, and included a straight-through 1.25-inch eyepiece holder with three set-screws, a rear dust cap, and the typical “screw-unscrew the finder objective” focus setup. Only minor complaint? Like most 50mm finders, the dewshield/objective end of the tube didn’t extend far enough forward to do much good for either dew or glare.

Getting the original Celestron rings off, the new SCT finder mount on, and the mini-guider installed on Celeste was the work of maybe 15-minutes. It looked super, but how would it act? To find out, I’d need to head to the PSAS dark site in Tanner-Williams. I gave you a report on that run here, but I’d like to go into a little more detail about the guiding end of things.

Set up was easy enough. Mounted the Mini Guider on Celeste, wrapped a 2-inch dew heater strip around its barrel just behind the objective, and inserted the StarShoot camera into the 1.25-inch port. The Mini AutoGuider came with a little parfocal ring to go over the camera’s 1.25-inch nosepiece to allow you to preserve rough focus once you find it. I slid that over the nosepiece. Cabled the StarShoot up, with the guide output on the camera going to the ST-4 autoguide input on the mount, and the USB from the StarShoot to my little netbook, which was loaded up with the latest release of PHD.

First order of bidness was getting the guide camera focused. Brought up PHD and pushed the button that starts the program “looping” images from the guide camera. The Mini AutoGuider’s instructions tell you to focus roughly by loosening the set screws that hold the camera in the guide scope and sliding the camera in and out. I found that unnecessary. Vega was close enough to focus to allow me to get it sharp by using the fine focus method, screwing and unscrewing the objective.

With PHD’s exposure set to 2-seconds, I observed Vega’s image and started unscrewing the objective…close…close…alright! As I neared focus, I was gratified to see dimmer field stars popping into view. I had been a little concerned about the StarShoot’s CMOS imaging chip being sensitive enough to reveal many stars, especially with a dagnabbed 50mm scope. That, it appeared, would not be a problem. Satisfied with focus, I snugged up the finder’s knurled focus lock ring against the objective. I tightened the parfocal ring up against the camera with its (tiny) Allen screws, and focusing was done.

If I haven’t mentioned it already, the instructions that come with Orion’s Mini AutoGuider set up are sufficient. Barely. They do have a serious omission. Nowhere do they tell you you will need to adjust a very important setting in PHD.

The way PHD works is this: you begin looping exposures, and, when you can see a suitable guide star on its display, you press the Stop-sign icon and hit the Guide icon. Before the program can begin guiding on the first star of the evening, though, it must calibrate. It must move the telescope north, south, east, and west to see how the mount reacts. There are several settings under the “brain” icon that concern calibration. The one we are interested in when using the mini-guider is Calibration Step.

This setting determines how long the program will pulse, will move the mount for each calibration step. Normally, with a typical guide scope setup, the default, 750 milliseconds, is fine. With a very short focal length scope like the Mini Guider, it needs to be changed. Leave it as short as it is, and PHD will need to make many steps during the calibration before it sees sufficient movement to complete the process.

Luckily I had read about this need to change Calibration Step on one of the Cloudy Nights boards. PHD might calibrate correctly with the default settings, but it would likely take a long time to do so. By changing the setting to 2000ms, increasing the step size, the calibration completes in a reasonable length of time. The Orion instructions really don’t have much to say about any PHD settings; but this is likely the only one that will need to be changed. If you do need help with PHD, the best place to get it is the Stark Labs Yahoogroup.

Anyhoo, I slewed the scope to M13, maximized PHD, and had a look. Plenty of guide star candidates were visible in 2-second exposures. I could probably have got away with 1-second exposures, but since the Atlas is pretty well behaved, I stuck with 2-seconds to get a larger selection of stars. Bottom line? The sizeable chip (as guide camera chips go) of the StarShoot when combined with the wide field of the 50mm finder-cum-guide scope insured I had plenty of stars to choose from. More, actually, than I got with the 66 SD or Short Tube 80 and the DSI.

Alrighty then. Clicked on a star close to M13 (the cluster was visible as a fuzzball in the StarShoot frame), PHD calibrated, and immediately began guiding (you know it’s guiding when it puts a green box around the guide star). All I had to do was get the imaging scope going with Nebulosity which I will talk about in greater detail in a blog entry devoted entirely to it. Real Soon. I stared at the netbook screen nervously until the first couple of two-minute subs had come in, “Cool! Nice round stars at f/6.3!” (That’s an enlargement of the star field below.) M13 was way too low in the sky to deliver much, but at least I got my traditional yearly shot of the Great Glob.

Does that mean every single subframe I took on this evening was perfect? Hell, no. Are they ever? Mine aren’t anyway. I did throw out a few on the three targets I essayed, M13, M27, and M57—but only a few, a very few. It’s a waste to throw away any subframes, of course, so I did some troubleshooting by the light of the next morning.

First thing I did was check EQMOD’s (the program I use to run my Atlas) ST-4 guiding setup. Turned out I’d left the ST-4 guide rates for Right Ascension and declination at EQMOD’s rather low default, “.25,” which, if not crazy, is substantially slower than what I normally use, .50 or even .90. That may have been a contributing factor; we’ll see how it goes at .50 next time out.

Anything else? During the run, I had noticed the cables from the StarShoot, the USB and ST-4 cables, had got awful stiff in the (for us) cold low 40s F temperatures, and had hung up on the scope/mount a time or two. I’ve secured the cables’ to the finder stalk with a Velcro strip, and, again, we’ll see how it goes next time.

After laying off DSLRing for at least two years, I was able to get the Orion/Stark Labs guiding system running without any, and I do mean any, trouble. Maybe I can improve my good sub-frame count even further next time, but even if I can’t, throwing out a mere three or four over the course of the night at 1300mm is more than good enough for this old boy. If, like me, you’ve been struggling to improve your long exposure deep sky images with better guiding, run (virtually), do not walk to the Orion website and get the Mini AutoGuider package. I don’t care what you may have heard through the grapevine, it works, muchachos, it just works.

Magazine Plug: For once, this is not in Unk’s own self interest. I have never once appeared in Astrophoto Insight. The talents of the imagers who write articles for this superb e-zine are so far in advance of mine as to make my paltry efforts downright laughable. But that is OK. I have learned one hell of a lot from AP Insight. It is a treasure trove of how-tos and reviews. Go get it, campers.

Next time: It’s Ho-ho-ho and mistletoe and presents to pretty girls! As is our custom here, the next blog entry will appear on Christmas Eve rather than on Sunday. See y’all then!

My Favorite Star Parties: The Chiefland Spring Picnic 2002

2011-12-11T07:54:00.006-06:00

With the weather as punk as it can be down here in the Swamp, and the fricking-fracking Moon swinging back into view, and Unk not having any observing expeditions planned till after the first of the year, what can he do but take you-all on yet another trip down memory lane? This time to the Chiefland Spring Picnic of 2002. Y’all know something about this one. You’ve heard me complain about it often enough, I reckon. So, if I complain about it all the time, what’s it doing in the “My Favorite Star Parties” series? All shall be revealed, muchachos—eventually.

In 2002 the Spring Picnic, which a decade ago was one of two yearly star parties held at the Chiefland Astronomy Village, was scheduled for May. May 10 – 12. That was when my buddy Pat Rochford and I planned to be there, anyhow; some folks, we’d heard, would be down at the CAV at least a week before that doing hard core observing on the cusp of summer.

Pat had spoken to Jeannie Clark, one of the prime organizers of the do, a couple of weeks previous, and she had said she didn’t know how many folks to expect, “Could be twenty, could be two-hundred.” That sounded alright to us. Lots of folks on the field would be fun, but so would a small group. The weather forecasts weren’t outstanding (“partly to mostly cloudy”), but they didn’t not sound overly dire for late spring, either. What Mr. Rochford and I, unfortunately, did not take into account was that other factor in late spring Florida weather, TEMPERATURE.

Not that I’d have let that change my carefully laid observing plans. I was on a mission, you see. I’d just bought a new telescope, a NexStar 11 GPS, Big Bertha, a short time before and had not had a chance to give her a real shakedown cruise. Chaos Manor South’s orange-sky backyard, yeah, Pat’s light polluted observatory, yeah, but out in the real dark, no. I was one antsy little camper to do that.

If Pat and I had checked the Weather Channel, we would have seen that Chiefland, Florida was sizzling, with temperatures well into the 100s before figuring in the heat index. That shouldn’t have been a problem; once field setup was done, we’d hide out in a cool motel room till sunset. That’s what we would have done had we not decided to economize. Who needs a cotton picking motel? A tent on the observing field next to the scopes would be more convenient and nearly as comfortable. Uh-huh.

Come Friday morning, Pat and I loaded up his little Isuzu Trooper mini-SUV and a borrowed U-haul-type trailer with the tons of stuff we considered essential for a star party weekend back in them days. At the time, Pat was still using the beautiful 24-inch Dobsonian he’d built (today it’s been replaced by a big Meade SCT); that went in the trailer, suitably padded with sleeping bags and our other camping gear. Bertha rode comfortably in the back of the Trooper in her JMI case. Loaded, we hit the road at 8:15 a.m. for six hours of Interstate-10 and Highway 19. We pushed it as hard as we could with a trailer, since we wanted to be assured of having plenty of set up time—there’d be tents to erect as well as scopes. To that end, we skipped lunch (horrors), in favor of an early supper in Chiefland.

Chiefland, ah, Chiefland. When we hit town I couldn’t help feeling bad for the little burg. It looked as if the mini-recession at the turn of the century had hit ‘em hard. There were lots of empty stores in town and plenty of unworked fields to the south. It took a few years for me to realize that’s just the way Chiefland always looks, come economic rain or shine.

Arriving at the CAV, we were some kind of surprised. Jeannie Clark’s words had led us to expect a small crowd. As we rolled onto the Club field, it was obvious there were easily 100 – 150 eager observers already set up with more arriving every minute. It was crowded enough that we had to make several passes of the field before we found a spot with enough room for the two scopes, the tents, the Trooper and trailer, and us. We were not able to get close to one of the field’s electrical outlets, but that was OK; I came prepared to operate the NS11 completely off batteries. As long as I could get my jumpstart battery (for the scope) and my lawn tractor battery (for the DewBuster) charged during the daytime, all would be well.

All would not be well if we didn’t get the picnic canopy up in a hurry. It was now mid-afternoon and the observing field was boiling hot. We needed shade, and we needed it right away. We got one of my old pre-EZ Up canopies erected as fast as possible, fighting tangled tent ropes and lost stakes all the way. When we were done, our little patch of shade made us feel cooler, if far from cool. Still had to get them cotton-picking tents up, though.

I got mine, the little Coleman dome tent I’d used at the Texas Star Party a few years before, pitched in record time, but I noticed Pat was struggling. His tent resolutely refused to cooperate. I lent a hand, and got his sleeping quarters up with only a moderate amount of cussing. By now, Pat and I were soaked. Squinting through sweat-stung eyes, I adjourned to my tent to change into shorts and T-shirt and flip-flops. That helped some, but the interior of my tent was already like an oven, and by the time I was dressed my change of clothing was soaked too.

If Unk and Pat had had good sense, they’d have seen the handwriting on the wall, and right then and there would have said, “You know, this just ain’t gonna work. We’ll go straight into town and find a motel room. If we can’t get into the Holiday Inn Express, the Pregnant Guppy Motel (Rod’s nickname for the Manatee Springs Motel) will do just fine.” But we didn’t have good sense. We convinced ourselves that a ride into town, a tour of Wal-Mart, and a late dinner/early supper would let us cool off from set up and that everything would thenceforth be fine. All I can say is we were a little younger and a lot dumber almost ten years ago.

Not that it wasn’t a good idea to visit Wally World. We bought plenty of bottled water and several big bags of ice; it was clear both would be desperately needed. After the Wal-Mart A/C had brought us back to life, we were off to Bill’s Bar-B-Q. We were also too dumb in those days to understand you ALWAYS order the legendary Lunch Special and salad bar at Bill’s, but the pork sandwiches we got were good, anyway.

What then? Back to the field to trot around and visit with friends old and new. I was particularly happy to meet some SCT User Yahoogroup and sci.astro.amateur (if’n you remember what that was) friends in non-virtual space for the first time. As always, it was cool to survey the huge array of scopes our fellow CAVers had brought out. In those days, the Dobsonian was still king at Chiefland, almost to the exclusion of anything else. This was when the Starmasters were riding high, but there were Dobbies of every description scattered across the field.

There were also some cool CATs on the field, including at least three NexStar 11s in addition to Bertha, a brand new NexStar 8 GPS, and numerous LX200s old and new. Particularly attractive was a big TEC Maksutov Cassegrain on a beautiful (no longer made) Millennium Mount. I looked forward to getting a peep through that high-flying bird, but the owner never seemed to do much with it, uncovering it briefly during the day and covering it back up at sundown. Go figger.

Other than mucho hot, how was the weather? It was variably cloudy all day, but it was usually clear enough to allow old Sol to beam down his blistering rays with a vengeance. I slathered on the sunblock, but that didn’t make me feel much—if any—better. Yeah, it was a little cooler under the tent canopy, but only a little. Our mighty star’s radiation was being reflected back up off the field and into our faces from all sides. Clouds would actually have been welcome in mid afternoon, but, naturally, they held off till sundown. By the time Sol was out of sight, the clear stretches had assumed the character of the dreaded SUCKER HOLES.

The result was that on Big Bertha’s first dark sky evening I had to cool my heels for at least an hour before a sucker hole big enough to allow me to do a two-star go-to alignment wandered in off the Gulf of Mexico. Today, I take Bertha’s excellent go-to accuracy for granted, but this was all new to me a decade ago, and I was gobsmacked. The C11 pointed north, took a GPS fix, and headed to two alignment stars, which I centered. Took maybe five minutes to do, and for the rest of the evening, and for the rest of the weekend, she put every blessed object I requested in the relatively small field of my 12mm Nagler at f/10 (233x). Wow.

Bertha ready to go, things was looking up. The temperature had fallen a little, to the liveable 80s at least, and the bad, old clouds had changed their minds and scudded off. They returned occasionally over the course of the night, but we were never completely socked in, and there was always plenty to see. I got to work, and what work it was. The skies of the Chiefland Astronomy Village are good today, remarkably good, but ten years ago they were just a wee bit darker, and Bertha and I took full advantage of that.

I saw lots of wonderful sights Friday evening. This was the first time in my life I toted up over 100 DSOs in one observing run. I tried to give each one the eyepiece time it deserved, but some got the short shrift. This was, after all, a shakedown cruise, a “commissioning” run, to allow me to see what Bertha could do and how she would do it on a wide variety of objects all across the late-spring/early summer sky.

I did get stopped in my tracks by a couple of wonders. One was the lustrous M5, the great globular cluster in Serpens. As I mentioned last time, a few years before I’d made up my mind that M5 was actually “better” than its famous neighbor, M13, and my view of it on this night just reinforced that. Second best in my eyes that night wasn’t M13, either, but a more distant marvel, NGC 3115, the Spindle Galaxy. In the NS11 on this dark night, it was amazingly bright, showing traces of the faint nebulous envelope that surrounds its spindle-shaped body.

What else? After a couple of hours of relying on my memory for gooduns, I began to run out of targets. Not to worry. Out came Kepple and Sanner. The whosit of the whatsit? The Night Sky Observer’s Guide, which is the best guide-book available for the working deep sky observer. Yes, it is better than Burnham’s Celestial Handbook. The Handbook will always be number one in my heart for its thoughtful, poetic take on the sky, but if you want a book with lots of objects and lots of data on those objects, Kepple-Sanner is where you go.

With the aid of Volume 2 of NSOG, Bertha and I continued to cruise to target after target. Some familiar, some not so familiar. We did every—well almost every—globular cluster in Ophiuchus. Let me tell you, muchachos, that is a lot of globs. As I said last week, I laugh when somebody opines that all globulars look alike, and our tour of Ophiuchus really gave the lie to that: big, small, bright, dim, odd shapes, and “normal” globes of stars; they were all there.

As the clock ticked on to midnight and after, I just kept going, Bertha quietly humming (Who says all servo motors are loud?) and delivering. I was particularly taken by the NexStar hand controller. It was so simple to operate that when I got The Stupids at 3 a.m. in those dark days before Monster Energy Drinks, I could still figure out which button to push. Right then and there I decided the real strength of the NexStar 11 wasn’t its high-tech, but its refreshing simplicity.

And so it went until 3:30 in the cotton pickin’ a.m., when it began to cloud up seriously. Me and Pat, who’d been pushing his 24-inch Dob hard, took a break to wait for the next clear stretch. When it became obvious that would not happen any time soon, out came the Rebel Yell. After about 4, the sky did look to be improving slightly, but not enough to encourage us to get started again. Around 5 a.m., I finally lay down in my now semi-cool tent. First thing I noticed? Even with an air mattress under you, a sleeping bag on the ground ain’t that comfortable when you are approaching age 50. Second thing? There was a clear patch to the west, and I had a lovely view of the stars of the Dipper plunging into the horizon through my tent’s little screen window. Which was the last thing I saw before I plunged—into a deep sleep.

But not a long sleep. A combination of heat and noise meant I was resolutely awake after no more than three hours. Tired as I was, it didn’t take long after Sunup for the interior of my little dome tent to become breathlessly hot. And, as is always the case at a big gathering, some early risers (!) just cannot keep quiet. One goober was serenading the field in off-key fashion as he marched to the shower. Which I did, too—headed for one of the showers, not burst into song. Refreshed in the clean shower stall on the field edge, I strolled around a bit, visiting with my fellow observers before the field became too hot to bear again.

Next thing on the agenda was grub. I’d not yet bought a modern propane Coleman stove, and the thought of messing with the old one’s cans of white gas did not appeal, so Pat and I had resolved to take our meals in town except for the picnic in “Chiefland Spring Picnic,” which would be our evening meal Saturday. Where to? The Huddle House (like Waffle House) beckoned, but we’d been told Bill’s Bar-B-Q did as fine a job on breakfast as they did on dinner and supper. Pat and I, in the company of another couple of visiting amateurs, feasted on omelets that easily violated B. Kliban’s rule: “Never eat anything bigger than your head.”

After that? To Wal-Mart again to enjoy their a/c for a while and pick out our contributions to the Saturday afternoon picnic. I chose, as usual, the most disgustingly butter-cream-frosting-drenched cookies in the bakery. Pat chose a healthy vegetable tray. Go figure. Then it was back to the field, where we tried to keep cool without much success. If it had been hot Friday afternoon, it was H-O-T Saturday. Even Pat and I, Gulf Coast residents that we were, found it almost too much to take. Make that “too much to take.”

We somehow persevered until picnic time. Sitting under the big pavilion, drinking cold cokes and gobbling the barbeque chicken CAV residents had grilled, it was barely possible to keep my mind off the incredible temperatures, which had now passed 110F out on the observing field. Eventually, though, the picnic at the Picnic was done, and we slowly headed back to our little patch of shade. I swear, y’all, I thought I was gonna melt.

We were saved by the kindness of our host, Mr. Tom Clark. Tom showed me and Pat the impressive observatory dome he’d just completed for the 42-inch monstro-scope he was building. With a fan running in the dome, it was almost cool, and a damned sight better than that desert of a field. Even better, Tom invited us to walk over to his AIR CONDITIONED shop where he was fabricating components for the big scope that would soon be known far and wide as “The Beast.”

Sitting there with Tom, shooting the breeze about the astro-business, sucking down the icy-cold co-colas he passed out, poor ol’ Unk actually began to feel human again. We probably strained even Tom’s generous hospitality by remaining resolutely glued to the folding chairs he’d set up for us for hours, but—my gosh—we just couldn’t face the thought of going back out into the terrific heat. We stayed undercover until the Sun finally began to sink and the outdoors became, if not comfortable, at least endurable. I’ve been down to Chiefland in July more than once over the intervening years, but it has never felt as hot as it did that May.

Saturday night started out a lot like Friday night. Plenty of passing clouds, with the clear stretches less frequent than the overcast ones. By the time I was finally able to get Bertha aligned, however, it was obvious Saturday would be a better night than Friday. When the sky suddenly and almost magically cleared, I hit the showpieces again: M13, M5, M10, M12, and the rest of the late spring treasure trove. Howsomeever, my main focus this night would be galaxies, and I headed straight for the great fields of Coma – Virgo, where I spent the next several hours.

So enthralled was I by my Virgo haul under these excellent conditions—I almost convinced myself I saw M87’s jet at high power—that I almost forgot to look at that greatest of globular clusters, Omega Centauri. When I caught the big thing just after culmination, it was the only time that night that I wished for a smaller telescope. At 30’ across, the great mass of suns was hard to frame, even in my 35mm Panoptic eyepiece. ‘Twas still a mindblower: tiny and uncountable stars filling the field of my big glass.

I spent most of both nights at Chiefland with my new telescope, but that don't mean I didn’t take a few looks through other folks’ instruments. It took a lot to pull me away from Bertha, but Jeannie and Tom Clark’s Yardscope II, a 36-inch monster, which was set up on an observing pad outside Tom’s shop, did that easily.

Yeah, I had to climb a towering ladder, but it was well worth it for a look at the Antennae Galaxies with this much aperture. You’ve heard people claim the images in their scopes “look like photographs,” but rarely is that true. It was with the Yardscope. The Antennae were bright, but, most of all, amazingly detailed. The dust lane in the Sombrero Galaxy was, it was easy to see, uneven and scalloped along its edges. M5 didn’t just look like Omega Centauri had in Bertha, showing a huge number of stars, those stars were dramatically colored: white, orange, and, here and there, blue. I don’t think I’ve ever had a better visual experience with a Dobsonian—well not until the Clarks got The Beast going a couple of years later.

I was honored to sign Tom and Jeannie’s observatory guestbook with, “Thanks for a wonderful time and the wonderful hospitality. I will be back.” And I was. This visit to CAV would be followed by a long, long string of Chiefland trips.

The 2002 Spring Picnic wasn’t quite over yet. There were a few hours of darkness left, and I had yet to see the sight that would be the capper for a trip that was horrible in the daytime and wonderful at night. After my visit to the Yardscope, Bertha and I made another pass on the Coma – Virgo Cluster of galaxies. Not only was I able to see the famous Playing Mice in Coma, Big Bertha even showed a little detail in those distant sprites. But the best view of the trip wasn’t a galaxy and came around midnight when a new batch of clouds had covered the western side of the sky. That forced me back east, to the little constellation, Scutum. After a good, long look at the Wild Duck Cluster, I punched in NGC 6712, a globular cluster I didn’t recall having visited before.

I won’t burden you with details, since I raved about NGC 6712 last week. I will just say that the vision of a little knot of a globular star cluster almost subsumed by an enormously rich star field in Scutum is one that will remain with me to the end of my days.

When I was finally able to pull away from Scutum’s remarkable star cluster, after at least half an hour, the clouds had again wandered off, and I resumed my journey across the sky. I carried on till near 4 a.m. before pulling the Big Switch. I hated to do that, even at 4, but I’d only had about three hours sleep the whole weekend, and there’d be packing and the drive home purty early in the a.m. Mr. Pat would be doing the driving, but I felt it incumbent upon me to at least try to stay awake during the trip home.

When I look back on this adventure, the phrase that comes to mind is “no pain, no gain.” Yes, it was hot. It was really too hot. Pat and I should never have tried to tent camp on the field. This was, in fact, the last time I set up a tent at any star party anywhere. And yet, it had been well worth the pain. I’d seen what my new telescope could do, which was offer me a surfeit of nighttime wonders that easily outweighed the days’ blistering heat. I’d do it again, I thought, but with a motel room in the mix. Which is just what I did and continue to do to this very day, muchachos.

Next time: You gotta guide. Yep, if you want good deep sky images you’ve got to autoguide your telescope. Don’t be afeared; guiding ain’t quite as painful as it used to be.

My Favorite Fuzzies: Unk’s Globular Star Cluster Top Ten

2011-12-04T07:20:00.004-06:00

I am an admitted galaxy-a-holic, muchachos. Nothing fires my imagination like giant island universes shining dimly across the dark light years of intergalactic space. I’ve been one for a while, too, though doing The Herschel Project has further educated me about the beauty of the less visited of these massive night birds and their incredible diversity. Still, there was a time when galaxies were number two on my deep sky hit parade.

“Globs,” globular star clusters, are giant balls of suns orbiting the nucleus of the Milky Way, swinging out into deep space in the course of their enormous elliptical orbits. Some are older and some are younger and some are more massive and some less so, but all are old and huge as we reckon such things. They are typically composed of hundreds of thousands of metal-poor stars, very old suns, fading embers that may have witnessed the birth of the Milky Way itself.

There are exceptions to the above; there are always exceptions when you are talking about the strange and far away deep sky. Some of the largest globs are thought not to be globular clusters at all, but the remains of small galaxies the Milky Way has devoured. And not all globular stars are yellow or red. Most clusters are peppered with “blue stragglers,” old stars who’ve got a second lease on life, maybe thanks to collisions and mergers with other old stars, and blaze away like younguns.

That’s the science, but how do they look? In a telescope with less than 5-inches of aperture, globular clusters are pretty blah: round fuzzy blobs not unlike many of the other deep sky objects a small scope will reveal. Get to 8-inches, though, and their appearance changes dramatically. “Dramatic” is a good word to describe them. Globs are the most dramatic of deep sky objects. In a medium-size telescope, the brightest are shown as what they are, giant balls of stars. Go to 12-inches and the most prominent globs become mind-bending forests of suns, while the dimmer ones begin to give up their stars, too. Increasing aperture just brings ever more globulars into the dramatic camp.

Anyhoo, globs were Unk’s faves for a long time, since he got up the gumption to stop just pining for a 6-inch Newtonian like the expensive Edmund Super Space Conqueror and RV-6 Dynascope and do something about it, home brewing a pipe-mount six. I still like globs, but I don’t spend nearly as much time with them as I used to. If I give a globular more than a glance these days, it’s usually because I’m using it as a focus “tool” when I’m preparing to image galaxies. But even now I sometimes find myself staring in wonder at a far away globe of stars and pushing the shutter release on it in spite of myself.

All globulars star clusters are not created equal. I have to laugh when some (usually novice) amateur says they all look alike. Like people, some are kings and some are peasants. They range from Messiers possessed of too many suns to count, to dim little smudges like the Palomar globs that the biggest scope won’t resolve visually. When you look at them, really look, you’ll find all globular clusters have strange and wonderful features peculiar to them. Which globs show these things best for amateur visual observers? Like anything from butterflies to race horses, “the best” is subjective, but I’ve been looking at globs for a long time, and these are my loves…

Before we begin, we’d better edumacate the greenhorns about the Shapley - Sawyer Scale. What is it? Why should we need to know what it is? In the late nineteen-twenties, American astronomers Harlow Shapley and Helen Sawyer Hogg set out to classify globular star clusters according to their concentrations. The most highly concentrated, “tightest,” clusters are assigned a Roman numeral class of I. The least concentrated, “loosest,” are Class XII. So what? Its Shapley Sawyer class has everything to do with how a glob will look in your telescope. Not only its general appearance in the eyepiece, but how difficult it is to resolve. A Class VI, for example, is way easier to break into stars than a III. Okay? Let’s go glob busting on Unk’s top ten star balls.

1. Omega Centauri (NGC 5139). Magnitude 3.9, 36.3’x36.3’, Class VIII. M13 is the best globular cluster visible from the northern hemisphere? Uh-uh, nosir buddy. Even from higher northern latitudes mighty Omega steals the show, and once you get lower than 30 N, there is simply no comparison or contest.

How good is it? One Chiefland Star Party, I forgot to look at the Big O till it was nearly too late. It had got so low that it was partially obscured by my tent canopy. On a whim, almost, I sent the NexStar 11 over that-a-way anyhow. Despite me using maybe half my aperture, Omega was still more than spectacular, a great egg of countless teeny-tiny stars. Frankly, this thing is so large, about the size of the full Moon, that you don’t need a big scope to appreciate it. Hell, it looks as good in a 50mm finder as many globulars do in a C8.

My history with Omega Centauri, I’m embarrassed to say, doesn’t go back that far. Maybe because I’d spent a considerable portion of my formative amateur years at the high (relatively speaking) latitude of Little Rock, Arkansas. I just never thought to look at it. Till one evening about twenty years ago after I moved back to the Swamp and was out at our old club dark site just over the Mississippi state line. I was staring at the southern horizon. Hmm… Centaurus was culminating. That fuzzy star, wasn’t that Omega? I sent my 8-inch Coulter Odyssey to it (by muscle power, of course). The result? My fellow observers musta thought I’d gone nuts with all that hooting and hollering.

How far south do you have to be to get a good look at Omega? At its declination of -47, it is above the horizon all the way up to 43-degrees north latitude, but to get a decent view you gotta be farther south. At 31-degrees (Possum Swamp) it is getting there. At 29.5N (Chiefland) it is considerably better. From the keys (Winter Star Party), it is better still. My dream? To see it overhead from southern climes some day. I can scarcely imagine…

2. 47 Tuc(anae) (NGC 104). Magnitude 4, 30’x30’, Class III. “Is it M13 time now, Uncle Rod?” Not yet, Skeezix. Even our number two is much better than M13. Much. Or so I am told. I’ve not yet had the pleasure of feasting my eyes on the cluster that some Southern Hemisphere boys and girls will tell you tops Omega. 47 Tuc (“tuck”), they say, has all the majesty of Omega Centauri, but packed into an area that’s slightly smaller and with a considerably tighter concentration. These things tend to make it a better object for larger telescopes.

The pros are not as concerned about looks as we are, but find 47 Tuc nearly as interesting as we do—or maybe moreso. An amazing 22 pulsars (neutron stars resulting from supernovae explosions) have been found in 47 Tucanae. Why, you may ask, do Omega Centauri and 47 Tuc have primary designations more suited to stars? Because both are fairly easily visible with the naked eye, and early observers mistook them for stars.

One day I will get a look at this thing. But only when I finally get down south—way south, as in south of the equator. With a declination of -72, it’s never above the horizon till you get to latitude 19-degrees north. Add at least ten more degrees to that so it’s more than just over the horizon, and the result is that nobody in the continental U.S. of A. gets a look at 47 Tuc. Dammit. In fact, even at the southernmost U.S. possession, Palmyra Atoll (uninhabited Pacific island), it’s only 14 degrees up. Sigh.

3. M5 (NGC 5904). Magnitude 5.6, 17.4’x17.4’, Class V. And it is still not time for M13, campers. While M5 is a little smaller than M13, and it’s Shapley – Sawyer class is the same, and it’s only a little brighter, it seems better resolved in any scope I use on it. To me, it also looks noticeably brighter than M13, brighter than the small difference in magnitude would suggest. It just looks “flashier” to me, whatever the hell that means. Strangely, while M13 has a yellowish cast in my 12-inch, M5 always looks “blue” to me.

I’ve always liked M5, but like a lot of y’all, I didn’t look at it often. That changed one night in 1998. My friend, ATM Pat Rochford, had just finished converting my much-loved 12-inch Meade Dobbie, Old Betsy, from a plebian Sonotube scope to a more upscale (and easier to pack) truss tube job. I took first light at one of the Escambia Amateur Astronomers’ Association’s dark sites; one that was, if not perfect, at least very good. For whatever reason, I turned Betsy to M5 as her first light object, and was blown away. Hell, it looked way better than M13. Went to M13 and back to M5, and I didn’t change my mind. Ever since, M5 has displaced M13 in my affections.

4. M13 (NGC 6205). Magnitude 5.8, 23.2’x23.2’, Class V. Finally. My putting it at number four is just quibbles from of your curmudgeonly old uncle; it is a wonder even if you have looked at it thousands of times. My history with it goes back to my earliest days as an amateur, and if I had a love - hate relationship with it in the beginning, it’s pure love today. Rare is the evening when the Great Globular is over the horizon that I don’t at least take a quick peep at it.

Reservations? If you are like I was near 50 years ago, a wet-behind-the-ears newbie with big dreams but a small scope, don’t expect too much. At a Shapley-Sawyer rating of V, it is a tough nut for small telescopes to crack. I can’t do it with my 80mm Short Tube refractor. I tried as hard as I could one spring with my ST80 from the fairly good skies of Indian Springs State Park and the Peach State Star Gaze. Pumped the Short Tube up in magnification as high as I could, but nary a star did I see. I can resolve a few of its sparklers with a 4.5-inch StarBlast at 150 – 200x, and my 5-inch ETX MCT delivers the goods big time.

5. M22 (NGC 6656). Magnitude 5.2, 24’x24’, Class VII. In the number five slot we have a cluster that would put M13 and M5 both in the ground if it were a little farther north in declination. As it is, this Sagittarius glob with a dec of almost -24-degrees south is too low to look like much for most northern observers. Even down here in the Swamp, it’s a wee bit far into the horizon hash to strut its stuff like M13 and M5 do.

It took me a while to turn on to this southern cluster’s charms, but when I did I was hooked. It’s sitting adjacent to the teapot’s lid, but it is so big and so bright that it burns through all that atmosphere nevertheless. Shortly after I tried the Short Tube 80 on M13 with disappointing results, I hauled it out to my buddy Pat’s observatory where, in less than perfect skies, the little refractor resolved stars in M22 like a champ. If you’ve got a small scope and yearn for globular stars, M22 is where you go.

6. M3 (NGC 5272). Magnitude 6.3, 18.6’x18.6’, Class VI. M3, yeah, M3. It’s a beauty, of course, but it suffers by being in the spring sky where it must compete for our attentions with the hordes of spring galaxies. It’s also got the misfortune to be just in advance of M13, and M5, and M22, and M94, and M10, and M12 and the rest of the summer gang. M3 is not the biggest or brightest or best resolved Messier glob, but, still, imagine how folks would rave about it if it were in the winter sky in place of M79.

My experience with M3? I’ve always liked it, but I’ve never longed for it. It’s a good meat and potatoes glob, but I don’t think I’d be wrong to say it’s a little on the blah side amongst the Messier spectaculars. Also, in the days before go-to, it suffered by being a bit of a pill to find. It’s in a relatively star poor area, and it’s hard to know how to approach it. From the east, from Boötes, or from the west, from Coma? I eventually learned the latter is easier. When I did find M3, I was always happy with it, if not crazy happy.

7. M53 (NGC 5024). Magnitude 7.7, 14.4’x14.4’, Class V. If M3 is sometimes ignored, M53 is the forgotten man of the Messier globs. It has three strikes against it. Like M3 it is in the spring sky when amateurs tend to be focused on intergalactic space, it’s a little lackluster at nearly magnitude 8, and it’s somewhat hard for small instruments to resolve at Class V. And yet, and yet… It’s still a Messier, and that means g-o-o-d. If nothing else, this one provides a welcome break when you tire of observing yet another faint fuzzie in Coma - Virgo. You do need 8-inches of aperture before M53 begins to look like much, but when you have at least that you may be surprised at how good it is.

One thing M53 has going for it, it is incredibly easy to find without go-to. It is located less than a degree northeast of the bright star Alpha Comae, Diadem. Not that I ever spent much time finding or looking at it. Till one year at the Texas Star Party when I was hunting NGC 5053 with my 12-inch Dob. NGC 5053 is a small, very loose (Class XI), very subdued glob that is Gilligan to M53’s Skipper. M53 entered the picture because I wasn’t using digital setting circles, and was using M53, which is only about a degree west of NGC 5053, as a signpost. After setting and resetting on M53 a few times on the way to its little pal, I was struck by what a beauty, a lustrous beauty, the Messier is when set in an exceptional sky.

8. NGC 6712. Magnitude 8.2, 4.3’x4.3’, Class IX. Sometimes a globular is great not because of imposing magnitude and size specs, but because of its field. That is true of M71, which we’ll get to shortly, and it is true of Scutum’s NGC 6712. On the face of it, this one shouldn’t be much. It is loose, approaching open cluster loose, it is small, and it is dim, past magnitude 8. One look, though, will knock your socks off; it is in the midst of one of Scutum’s amazingly rich star fields.

I didn’t discover NGC 6712 until 2002. If I’d glanced at it before, I didn’t remember it, and must have seen it from poor skies. It took one evening at the Chiefland Spring Picnic for me to realize this glob is, well, “WOWSERS!” Not that I’d have hunted it down (well, punched it into the go-to hand control) if I hadn’t been forced to work Scutum. The 2002 Spring Picnic’s weather was hot, and it was hazy, and it was sometimes stormy. We had some hours of absolutely incredible skies, but these were frequently punctuated by clouds. One evening when the largest sucker hole was centered on Scutum, I sent my new NexStar 11, Big Bertha, to the glob, took a good look with my 27 Panoptic, and the next thing I knew my buddies were picking me up off the ground. Yes, that good.

9. M71 (NGC 6838). Magnitude 8.3, 6.1’x6.1’, Class XI. In the number nine spot is M71, which is a lot like NGC 6712: a loose globular in a rich star field, this time in Sagitta. Despite its Messier number, it’s not quite as good as 6712, since it’s both dimmer and looser. Still, what a view! The cluster itself looks more like an open cluster than a globular, and is in a field literally packed with stars. For years, amateurs and professionals (some of ‘em, anyway) wondered whether this wasn’t really a rich M11-like open cluster. But one look at its color - magnitude diagram shows M71 to be old, very old, and it is indeed a member of the glob ranks.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love M71. This was one that, unlike M13, my humble Palomar Junior 4.25-inch Newtonian could resolve from the OK but less than perfect skies of Mama and Daddy’s backyard in the 1960s.

10. M15 (NGC 7078). Magnitude 6.4, 12.3’x12.3’, Class IV. And so we come, inevitably, to number ten. Fall’s M15 rings down the curtain on the globular show for another year. Yeah, we’ve still got M79 in Lepus to look forward to, but it ain’t much, muchachos, it ain’t much. The claim to fame of the Horse’s Nose Cluster (M15 is in Pegasus not far from Enif)? Not that it’s easy to resolve, it is not at Class IV. The draw is the opposite: its incredibly compact, bright core shining bravely in the lonely skies of autumn.

The attraction for me as a sprout was not seeing M15’s stars—I couldn’t—but that it was so bright and easy to find. As the years went on and we learned about black holes and the pros began to wonder whether there might be one at this glob’s heart (they’ve gone back and forth on that a few times), this mysterious globular just became more intriguing. My best view? There’ve been many, but maybe the most memorable one was the night I set up my new 12.5-inch Dobbie in the uber light polluted backyard of Chaos Manor South and turned her to M15. Old Betsy blew this one apart and into stars without even breathing hard.

11. NGC 2419. Magnitude 10.4, 6.2’x6.2’, Class II. Yeah, I know this is eleven, but I figured I am due one more since I ain’t actually seen 47 Tuc. The problem? Which one? Wasn’t M2 entitled? Howsabout M92, my fave underappreciated globular? Or the weird looking M30? When the rubber hit the road, I decided on the offbeat, which is thisun in spades.

The Intergalactic Wanderer, as it is sometimes known, is definitely out in left field. Waaay out. Not only is it in a seldom visited constellation, Lynx (Unk has spent considerable time there tracking down Herschel galaxies), it is far, far away. NGC 2419 is one of the most distant globulars known at 91.5 kiloparsecs out in space—beyond the Magellanic Clouds. In fact, at one time it was thought not to be bound to the Milky Way at all—hence the “Wanderer” bidness. That wasn’t true, it turned out. The globular is indeed orbiting the galaxy, but what an orbit. It takes three billion years to complete one trip around the Milky Way.

I’ve looked at this one a bunch of times, starting when I read Scotty’s column about it in a long ago “Deep Sky Wonders” and was intrigued. And I’ve always been fairly satisfied with it. Yeah, it’s dim and it’s tight, but my C8, Celeste, easily teased a few stars out of it at the Deep South Regional Star Gaze a couple of years ago.

It’s the fate of top-ten list makers that nobody ever agrees with them. And I don’t expect you to agree with all my choices, much less my rankings. What I want to know is what you think. You can add comments to this here blog, you know, and I’d be very pleased to see your Best of the Best.

Next time: Come with Unk to the hottest star party ever.

Requiem for an ETX

2011-11-27T08:07:00.001-06:00

Not my ETX and not all ETXes, muchachos, just the best of the breed, alas. When Meade revamped its website a few weeks back, a couple of sharp-eyed ETXers noticed both of Meade’s Maksutov Cassegrain design ETXes, the 90 and the 125, were gone. All that was left of the ETX tribe was the 80, a wide field achromatic refractor on an ETXish base. That dean of ETXdom, Mike Weasner enquired with the powers that be at Meade, and they responded that this was just an “oversight.” The ETX would live on.

Which was true, as far as it went. What Meade meant by “live on,” apparently, was that the ETX 90 would continue in some form. After a week or so, the 90 reappeared, but she was alone. No ETX 125 to be seen. And the 90 wasn’t exactly the same, either. It was on a redesigned (cheapened?) base and fork not unlike that of the ETX 80. Which is a shame. The ETX 90 as it was was probably the best it has ever been, with most of the hardware and software bugs out (finally).

Things actually haven’t been rosy in ETXdom for a while, with Meade seemingly unsure what they should do with the little Chinese-made telescopes. There was talk of the ETXes being discontinued a couple of years back, and though the small wonders survived, changes were afoot. The fancy and truly useful new features in the latest and greatest ETX incarnation, the PE model (onboard clock, north and level automatic alignment), were abandoned.

What will hurt with the passing of the ETX 125 is that it was the most useful ETX. The 90 is cute, and beginners love it, but there is a limit to what you can do with 3.5-inches of aperture, no matter how fine. The 5-inches of the 125 put it in another ballpark. Not only is it still reasonably portable; you can actually do some fairly serious observing with it. Its superb Gregory-type (aluminized secondary spot on the corrector) optics do not give up much to a C8 on the planets and are surprisingly competitive on the deep sky. Add to that full go-to for an incredible 800 bucks—even less lately.

I thought it would be appropriate this Sunday to recount where we have been with the little MCTs, or at least where I have been with them. I will admit I am a bit of a Johnny-come-lately to the ETX brigade, but I have at least admired Everybody’s Telescope from afar since it hit the streets.

Yep, “Everybody’s Telescope,” the working name for the project Meade embarked on in the mid-1990s. Frankly, they could have called it the “clone the Questar 3.5 project,” since that was what it was. What they decided to call the new telescope as their work neared fruition, though, was “ETX.” I suppose that sounded glitzier and more high-tech than “everybody’s telescope.”

Fifteen years ago, us Boomer Amateurs still ruled the roost, and most of us had got our start in the 1960s, when the inside front cover of every single issue of Sky and Telescope was reserved for a full page ad for the Questar 3.5. It was just so beautiful, so gemlike, that most of us bought into advertising that at least implied the tiny Maksutov could outdo our homemade 6-inch Newtonians. It couldn’t, of course, but most of us never got to find that out, since the Questar went for the equivalent of at least five thousand 2011 dollars.

Nevertheless, lots of us carried a torch for the Questar into the 1990s, and if we couldn’t convince ourselves that one was a sensible buy, even if we could now actually afford one, we still wanted one. Meade solved that problem for us. The ads for the ETX that hit the magazines like an earthquake in 1996 showed a beautiful little telescope that looked a lot like the Questar. Oh, it wasn’t stainless steel and shiny aluminum, but the Meade blue tube and the black fork and base looked scrumptious, anyway. No, there was no beautifully engraved dew shield or Brandon eyepieces, but the ETX 90 went for an amazing $495.00, meaning it very nearly was everybody’s telescope in that almost everybody could afford one.

It appeared the ETX might even have some advantages over its “inspiration.” Yeah, it had a flip mirror on the rear cell, but that was merely to allow you to attach a camera to the rear port. Unlike the real deal, it had a normal finder instead of the weird and dew-prone through-the-main-eyepiece job. Not only that; the ETX 90 was battery powered. The basic Questar 3.5 limped along with an AC synchro clock drive.

As is often the case, reality, bright morning daylight reality, was a little different from what the Meade ads seemed to promise. Yes, the ETX was attractive, but if we hadn’t already suspected it, one look at the scope in person showed the drivebase, the fork, and the rear cell were all plastic. Those cool looking little legs sticking out of the drivebase? They were every bit as useful as the same thing on the Questar: completely useless, in other words. The drive in the drivebase? It was indeed battery powered, but that was the only advantage. Move to a new target and it might take 30-seconds to kick in due to gear slop. The finder was almost as good as the one on my Tasco 11T 4.5-inch reflector—not-so-hotsky, that is.

I certainly hadn’t expected a leather case and a build quality so good and so beautiful that I’d want to display the ETX under a glass dome in my study as I lounged around in a smoking jacket (kaff-kaff). But I did hope the little upstart would at least have good optics. I’ll admit I began to lose hope as those initial “plastic and clunky” reports came in. I was wrong about that. The ETX turned out to have world class optics.

Y’all know I am a pretty easy-going kinda guy. I’m not the sort of writer who normally inspires hate-mail, but I got some over the ETX. I used to write occasionally for a semi-pro astronomy-zine called The Practical Observer. It wasn’t a bad little magazine, and I would probably still be contributing to it if I could at least have gotten copies of the issues I appeared in, much less a paycheck, from the publisher, but that is another story. What’s relevant to this story is the firestorm of angry mail engendered by my article about the ETX.

I had the temerity to say the ETX 90’s optics were close enough in quality to those in the Questar 3.5 as to be for all intents indistinguishable from them. I did not rely on memory of looks through Qs and 90s, either. I was lucky enough to have a buddy with a Questar and a buddy with an ETX. I did a shootout between the two, and, much as I tried, I could not see much—if any—difference in their images. Both were extremely good within the bounds of what a 90mm telescope can do. I did point out that mechanically the Questar was worlds ahead of the Meade, but that did nothing to assuage the hurt feelings of the folks who’d dropped 4 grand on a Q 3.5. Ah, well, I called it as I saw it, and what I saw was that, yes, the ETX was fully competitive with the Questar optically.

We now entered in upon a period in the life of the ETX similar to the days when the Commodore 64 computer was at its height, if on a smaller scale. The ETX was so popular that I’m surprised nobody came out with an astronomy magazine devoted solely to it. Companies like the late, lamented Scopetronix were springing up right and left to cater to 90 owners with accessories and add-ons, and one of the best amateur astronomy web sites there has ever been went on the air to serve the huge demand for ETX info. I am talking, of course, about Mike Weasner’s legendary Mighty ETX site, which is still around and still going strong, if in slightly less frenetic fashion.

Me? Unk? I didn’t rush out and buy an ETX, but I didn’t quite forget about it, either. After my shootout between Q and M, I’d check in on Mike’s site every once in a while to keep an eye on the ETX 90 and her new sisters. When it was clear the ETX was a big hit, Meade added a 105(mm) near-twin and, then, a big sister, the 125, to the lineup. Not only that; they shortly equipped all three with computers, the famed Autostar, which would soon be used on all the company’s go-to rigs, putting the antique looking hand control of the LX200 (classic) in the ground.

Still, I hung back and refused to join the ranks. I’d had some additional experience with an ETX, a 125, and had not been overly impressed. The scope in question was donated to the Possum Swamp Public Schools by Wal-Mart (good on ‘em), and I had the opportunity to give it a shakedown cruise. I loved the optics. They were excellent, just like the 90’s, but in an aperture large enough to allow me to actually see some good stuff. Unfortunately, all Meade did to produce the 125 was scale up the 90. Among other things, the plastic fork was just not good enough. Way too shaky. Ah, well.

Fast forward a few years, to 2005. As Unk truly entered upon middle age, he felt ever more strongly the need for a grab ‘n go scope. But something with a little more oomph and features than his Short Tube 80 and StarBlast. Something with cool optics in the 5-inch range. Something with go-to. I’ll be honest, if the NexStar 5 had been in production at the time, I would have got one, but it was undergoing another of its intermittent hiatuses. So I naturally gravitated to the “improved” ETX 125.

Overnight, the ETX had undergone a fairly radical redesign. Gone was the tiny finder, replaced by a red dot job controlled by the Autostar. The New ETXes, the “PEs,” also incorporated a battery-backed real-time clock. What that meant was that you had GPS without the GPS. Kinda- sorta. Input time, date, and location, and unless you carried the scope to a significantly different site to observe, you didn’t have to re-enter any of that stuff. The time and date were kept current, and the previous location was held in memory. With the PE’s North and Level Automatic Alignment, all you had to do was set the scope in a very simple home position (cranked all the way counterclockwise to the hard stop), turn on the power, and center two star with the red dot finder when Miss ETX finished her northing and leveling dance.

What got my attention even more than the ETX’s new alignment system was the word that the 125’s fork had been significantly strengthened. It still looked like plastic but that was on the outside; inside was metal. To make the little scope look more modern, I suppose, the tube was now silk-screened with an astronomical image—the North America Nebula. It wasn’t all gravy, though; at about this time the first ETX to fall fell. The 105, which had been significantly less popular than her sisters, was suddenly discontinued.

Should I or shouldn’t I? After reading Mike’s website for years, I was well aware of the ills the ETX was heir to: everything from computer hiccups to broken plastic gears. Yeah, I’d rather have had a NexStar 5, but I couldn’t get one, and for my purposes the ETX seemed just about perfect. Gripping my credit card in a sweaty hand, I picked up the phone and dialed Scopetronix.

When the 125 arrived at good, old Chaos Manor South, what were my impressions? First of all, that this little telescope was not so little. It was more portable than a C8, but not as much as I’d imagined. Secondly, the silk-screened tube some of my mates had pronounced “gaudy” looked awful purty to me. Finally, the tripod that was included in the package was hardly overkill. In fact, it seemed cheap and too light.

Thankfully, that tripod was at least good enough. Out in the backyard, it supported the ETX without too much shaking. What I was more interested in at first light, however, was the scope’s go-to accuracy. Verdict? Like the tripod, sufficient. Objects were not always centered in the field, but were almost always somewhere in it. At f/15, the 5-inch optics produced 75x with a cotton-picking 25mm eyepiece, so the Autostar-fueled go-to was actually fairly impressive when I took that into account. Tracking? Good enough for visual. Imaging? Fuhgeddabout it.

Which is not to say the scope was perfect. When slewing at full speed, she sounded like she was ready to strip a gear—several gears. And, while her design was OK, the QA/execution was not. The RA setting circle was firmly stuck to the base and could not be adjusted (not that I would ever use it), the Meade label on the tripod was glued on upside down by the Chinese person who applied it, and, most worryingly, the eyepiece tube was cross-threaded into the rear cell and crooked and bright objects showed wicked-nasty reflections.

I fixed all those things without much trouble, removing the Meade label and gluing it back on right-side-up, unsticking the RA circle, and unscrewing and screwing-in the eyepiece tube till it was right. But combine Meade’s QA missteps with the weird noises the little scope made when slewing, and it seemed possible she would fall to the observing field in a self-pitying heap at any moment. That never happened, but the scope’s slightly neurotic demeanor inspired the name I chose for her, “Charity Hope Valentine,” after Shirley Maclaine’s hapless heroine.

Despite her occasional faux pas, which have mostly involved her insistence on receiving “drive training” every once in a while if she is to put her go-to targets in the eyepiece, mine and Charity’s friendship has mostly been a beautiful one. I’ve had her out on many “iffy” evenings when I wouldn’t have dreamed of dragging out a larger scope, and she’s showed me plenty of beautiful things I wouldn’t have seen if I’d stayed home. The only significant maintenance I’ve done in a long time has been a keyboard repair when the rubber keys on the Autostar became unresponsive—a problem suffered by all Meade’s Autostar scopes, not just the ETX.

Which brings us to this past Saturday night. My club, the Possum Swamp Astronomical Society, is lucky to have an excellent, secure dark site at a private airstrip. The person who owns this facility is one of the honchos of the local Coast Guard Auxiliary (a little like the Civil Air Patrol, y’all). Each year, a big picnic is held at the site for members, and it has become the PSAS’ custom to set up scopes and show these folks some pretty stuff. They seem to like that, and supporting the event is the least we can do for the people who have been so kind to us. Only problem this time out? The weather, natch.

It looked bad, muchachos. My plan went from “Haul the Atlas out, show the Auxiliary members some bright objects, and start DSLRing” to “Should I even bother?” The answer? It would be a Charity Hope Valentine night. If it weren’t actually raining, I’d head for the dark site with my neurotic girlfriend.

Come three o’clock, I loaded up Charity in her aluminum case (the Meade model I purchased shortly after I bought her), and just a few extra items. On a Charity night, that is usually a small camp table, the eyepiece box, my main accessory case, and that is it. I had another agenda this time. I wanted to try Deep Sky Planner’s go-to features. I’d planned to try it with EQMOD, but that clearly wouldn’t happen. I could still see how DSP’s telescope control worked with the ETX, though. To that end, I brought the larger camp table, the PC shelter, and the netbook. The little Asus will normally go so long on her internal battery that big batteries and inverters are not needed. ‘Course I threw a couple of Monster Energy Drinks in the truck.

The skies didn’t look that good, but they also didn’t look that bad at departure time, 4 p.m. At least it wasn’t completely socked in like it had been a couple of hours before. If I could just show the picnickers Jupiter, it would be “mission accomplished.”

On the way out to the site, for once I didn’t play “what did I forget;” there was so little astro-stuff involved in this expedition that even I would have had a hard time forgetting something important. Instead, I spend the 45-minute drive listening to the Real Jazz channel on XM. Until I got my 4-Runner, Miss Lucille Van Pelt, whose stereo is XM capable, I was skeptical about satellite radio. Not anymore. Now that I have it, I love it. Not only are there plenty of excellent “stations” for any musical taste, audio quality is great and it is a trip to drive to Atlanta or Chiefland and back listening to the same channel the whole time. If you spend much time on the road, get satellite radio; you won’t be sorry, muchachos.

At the site, I got set up, which took all of ten minutes, including the computer, and waited for darkness and clear skies. Sadly, by the time the sun had set, the clouds had come back. Lots of ‘em. There was a breeze blowing, though, and the bad fluffy things were moving with some speed, so I didn’t give up hope.

When the next break/big sucker hole came, I didn’t waste time. I got the ETX aligned as quickly as possible, which wasn’t very quickly this time. I’ve often talked about Charity’s glitches, but this time the glitch was mine. As I mentioned, time and date are held in the scope’s memory from session to session. Meade claims the battery that does that, a button cell, will “last years.” Six-months is more like it. The battery had been failing for a while, but I had not got around to replacing it. On my model of ETX PE, that requires disassembling the north-level red dot finder module and doing a couple of “calibrations” when the new battery is in. Me being me, naturally I put that off.

The ETX PE is fully useable without the backup battery; you just have to enter time and date in the Autostar at the beginning of each session. Which is fine as long as you get the time and date right. I got the time in OK, but not the date, which was evidenced by Charity stopping a long, long way from her alignment stars. She normally lands within a degree or so of ‘em, so I knew something was up, and checked date and time with the Mode key. Whoops. I centered the alignment stars anyway. The clearing was barely holding and enthusiastic Coasties were lining up for a look at Jupiter. Having the wrong date wouldn’t affect slews to deep sky objects. It would mess up go-tos to the planets, but it would be easy enough to aim at Jupiter with the red dot finder.

Which is what I did. Centered up Jove, inserted a 15mm Expanse eyepiece, and let ‘em look. Jupe was pretty good despite the punk weather, with his cloud bands starkly clear, clear enough that even the youngest observer in the crowd was able to see them. Of course, the moons were the big hit.

After Jupe, I sent Charity to M15, which she put in the field without a problem. With a little coaching, “Look away from it, not straight at it,” most of my audience was able to make out that the glob wasn’t just a blob, but made of tiny, tiny stars. As we were looking at M15, I was peppered with lots of questions, several of which concerned “dead stars.” Perfect segue to M57, the Ring Nebula, I thought. Sent Charity Hope Valentine that way, she put the little donut smack in the field center, and I let the folks have a peep. I tried to let ‘em have a peep. Two people got a glimpse of the Ring before the sky closed down again with a thud.

That was disappointing, but at least I’d been able to show my guests something, and they left happy and wanting more, which is always a good way to leave ‘em at a public star party, I reckon. I spent the next hour fiddling with Charity. During the next bout of temporary clearing, I connected to the ETX with DSP. The program was smart enough to know the scope’s date was different from what was in the netbook, and complained about that, so I redid the go-to alignment after correcting that cotton-picking date, which I’d missed by two weeks.

As I’d expected, Deep Sky Planner worked very well with the ETX, and the scope toolbar it throws up was a joy to use. I went to M27, M57, and a couple of others with DSP before the clouds came back to stay. Charity didn’t miss a beat, but that is not to say she was perfectly behaved. I noticed the silly thing had developed an occasional nervous tic. Every once in a while there was a “jump” in her tracking. I am not overly concerned; she has done that before and the cure has always been exercising the azimuth lock and rotating her back and forth in azimuth manually a few times.

And I shouldn’t complain. She did exceptionally well in the clutch. She was easy to set up, showed images good enough to impress the novice observers—hell what she did under these conditions impressed me—and was, most of all, easy to get back in the truck. By 9 p.m. I was again within the comforting walls of Chaos Manor South watching my new Blu-ray DVD of Star Wars.

I just checked Meade’s website and the 125 is still gone, so it does look like the curtain has finally rung down on the ETX 125. Yeah, there’s the similar Lightswitch 6-inch (which was originally counted among the ETXes), but it is an SCT, and much as I love SCTs my choice at the small aperture level is an MCT. Charity’s images are just so astounding. It’s like having a big, long focal length refractor that’s been shrunk in the wash. The ETX 125 may be gone, but I’ve got mine. If you hurry and call around to dealers, you may be able to get yours, too. I think you should.

Next time: It’s been a quiet Thanksgiving holiday at the old manse. All the kids are on their own and most of ‘em are far away, so it was just me and Miss D. We didn’t do our traditional New Orleans trip this year, so I hoped to get out to the dark site with Atlas and Canon. The weather gods thought otherwise. The only observing I got in was a couple of looks at Jupiter with the StarBlast and the 37 year-old telescope (mounted on my Synta AZ-4 mount). Anyhoo, hope all y’all had a good break with plenty of turkey and football, and I will see you on the flip-flop.

My Favorite Star Parties: TNSP 2003

2011-11-20T08:24:00.018-06:00

It’s still cloudy, muchachos, and I have a sea trial for the Navy’s newest ship, LPD 22, to ride, so this week it will be another trip down memory lane to one of Unk’s most fondly remembered star parties. This time way up north to Tennessee and lovely Camp Nakanawa.

Some of my favorite star party outings have been to those events like the Deep South Regional Star Gaze and the Chiefland Star Party that I return to year in and year out like a dadgum swallow to Capistrano. Not this time. I had never been to the Tennessee Star Party before the 2003 edition—hell, I probably didn’t even know there was a TNSP—and I haven’t been back since. That doesn’t matter; the good times I had there are still fresh in memory eight years down the road.

The story of me and Miss D’s TNSP trip actually begins at the 2003 ALCON, the 2003 Astronomical League Convention. Unk fulfilled a lifelong dream by not just attending the ALCON, but by being a speaker at that storied event. When I was a young sprout looking at the pictures of those serious ALers in Sky and Telescope, I didn’t dream that one day I’d be among them; not just as an attendee, but as a speaker. Which is a nice story, but not the story for this Sunday.

The 2003 ALCON was hosted by Nashville’s Barnard – Seyfert Astronomical Society, a large and active club. Apparently my presentation impressed these good folks (believe it or no) and they decided to invite me up to their big state star party. While the journey from Possum Swamp would be a not inconsiderable one, sitting under hot, humid, cloudy skies it sounded great; even if we only got to spend a couple of days there. TNSP was a young event, and, like many new star parties, it was initially only a two-dayer, 26 – 27 September in 2003.

The 2003 TNSP’s site, Camp Nakanawa, is on the national historic register as it should be. This privately owned camp has been around since the early years of the last century in mostly unchanged fashion in the east-central part of Tennessee near tiny Crossville. It was founded in 1920 by Colonel L.L. Rice with its express purpose being to help “young ladies” reach their potential. Young ladies have changed a lot in the near century that’s elapsed since then, but the basic mission of Nakanawa hasn’t, and good on ‘em. The pictures we were able to find on the Internet showed us the summer camp’s incredible scenery, but didn’t prepare us for the amazing antique-but-still-alive feel of Nakanawa. Before we could experience that, we had to get there.

The drive from Possum Swamp to Crossville is a long one as I judge such things, and one I probably wouldn’t have made it if I were doing it on my own dime. The condition of Nakanawa’s sky would be a partial unknown, and the knowns didn’t sound any too good. Looking at a map, Crossville was barely 75 miles from Chattanooga, and I doubted that was quite enough distance to completely dispel the huge light dome of that big, spread-out Tennessee city. But what the hey, this was a speaking engagement and if I saw anything at all, that would just be the cherry on top.

Since Miss D. and I would be driving up, this was one time I’d be able to take a telescope with me on a professional engagement. That telescope would be my almost new Celestron NexStar 11, Big Bertha. While I’d only had her a year or so, I was already blown away by her capabilities, and being not-quite-over-the hill at the time, I was taking Bertha with me everywhere. In addition to the scope we packed a few, support items: observing table, gear boxes, etc. We tried to keep the astro-stuff to a minimum. TNSP was only two days, and the prime goal was, as always, to do a good job as speaker, not to go deep sky crazy all night long.

But, yeah, we had to get there first, and Miss Dorothy’s schedule prevented an early start. We got going before afternoon, but just barely, loading up the Camry for what would be a near nine-hour drive. Our late departure impelled us to make the trip up a two-dayer, which was actually kinda fun. It would have been even more fun if the motel Unk picked, just outside Huntsville, hadn’t been situated in a dry county. When I tried to order a beer at the nearby Applebee's, the waitress said, “No way, hon. ‘Round here it is coke or sweet tea.” Oh, well, I had plenty of “supplies” back in the room.

Next day, we did get an early enough start, if not too early, since we were practically in Tennessee already. The last part of the journey wasn’t quite as quick as I thought it would be, though, since it consisted of two hours on two-lane country roads. I was a little P.O.ed at that (“put out;” this is a family-friendly blog, you-all), but it turned out to be the best part of the trip up. Those two hours were filled with beautiful mountain scenery as we climbed to the plateau on which Crossville and Camp Nakanawa are located.

Even in those pre Tom-Tom days, we had no problem finding the star party; the directions provided on the Barnard-Seyfert AS’ excellent website were more than sufficient. We soon found ourselves at registration, which was held under a park-style pavilion near the entrance to the camp. I prefer to be treated like one of the guys, usually, but the way the BSAS folks went out of their way to get us settled was mucho appreciated and reassuring, since we were in unknown territory with (mostly) folks we did not know.

Housing? There were several options available for star party guests, but D. and I were assigned to the oddest and maybe the coolest cabin I’ve ever been in at a star party, a tiny two bed chickie that Miss Dorothy immediately pronounced “adorable.” While it was like a chickie cabin, it was quite different from those you usually encounter at out of the way camps. It was clean, in excellent repair, very comfortable, and had the same historical gravitas of Nakanawa’s other buildings.

Next thing on the agenda was, of course, equipment set-up. I didn’t find much to criticize about the observing field. It was for sure more than big enough, its huge expanse making it way more than sufficient for the 150 or so observers at TNSP 2003. It would have provided plenty of room for future star party growth if TNSP had stayed at Nakanawa over the long run (more on that later). If there was a single down-check, it was that the field had just been cut, and the grass must have been pretty high when it was. The clumps of mown grass covering the field were an irritation if not an impediment to getting tents set up.

Actually, Miss Dorothy and I made do without our usual tent-canopy. The short stay, weather reports that didn’t sound overly astro-friendly, and my intention to focus on my role as speaker led us to downsize on gear more than we had before or have since. But that was OK; at least set up was derned quick. Since my presentation wouldn’t be until the next day, Saturday the 27th, all we had left to do was wait for supper and darkness.

Supper, ah yes. A sign on one of the buildings near Nakanawa’s huge, old, and perfectly preserved dining hall proclaimed “Our food is really good!” And it was as simple as that. Simple, yes—we had spaghetti that night—but prepared with obvious care. Even better than the food, though, was the company. The BSAS folks were all very friendly and eager to make us feel at home. And there were a few familiar faces from across the southeast. Dorothy and I were very happy to be able to have ALPO’s Dr. Richard Schmude, who we’d met at the AL conference that spring, as our dinner companion.

Good food and good people, right on. But let’s be honest, what you and me think and obsess about at a star party is “What is the sky gonna do?” The answer on Friday night was “Hard to say, but don’t look so hot.” Oh, things started off pretty promisingly at sundown, but the humidity was high, real high. As you know, moisture laden air makes any light pollution far worse than it is under dry conditions. There was a fairly prominent light dome from nearby Crossville, and there was noticeable sky-brightening to the south in the direction of Chattanooga, as I’d expected.

Still, that sky had possibilities and I thought it might be impressive under better weather conditions. Frankly, we were lucky to get in any observing at all on Friday night. The haze turned out to be in advance of a fairly violent storm system. Nevertheless, I was able to see some pretty stuff with Bertha, including the Veil Nebula, which was surprisingly prominent, and little NGC 404 near Beta Andromedae. Staring at Mirach’s Ghost, I began to wonder if conditions were as bad as I thought they were and whether they might actually be getting better. Not. I continued on for a while, focusing on the bright favorites of late summer and early fall, but clouds, real clouds, began to cover the sky about midnight.

I wasn’t quite ready for bed, so I covered the scope and wandered over to the big open air pavilion on the west side of the field that served as the vendors’ hall. There I found some old friends, Bill Burgess of Burgess Optical and Ken Dauzat of Ken’s Rings and Things. Bill’s setup included several of the Chinese achromatic refractors he was selling in those days. I was particularly impressed by the view of Mars I got through his 127mm f/8 rig between cloud bands. Mars was just a month or so past its record breaking 2003 opposition and was a welter of detail in Bill’s scope. It was all I could do to resist pulling out the credit card. Wisely, I moved on to Ken’s tables.

Mr. Dauzat was showing a lot of cool accessories, but what really caught my eye was his custom ETX 125 OTAs. These telescopes lacked the normal plastic rear cells and flip mirror assemblies of a standard ETX, being equipped instead with metal cells and 2-inch capable rear ports. The only drawback to these scopes, which were originally designed to be used in an optical communications system, was that the correctors were not coated. You’d never have known that from the images they produced, though.

I spent quite a bit of time admiring the pretty playthings and sucking down the coffee and hot chocolate the TNSP organizers served during the wee hours. I took frequent looks at the sky, but it was clearly getting worse instead of better, and I was finally chased back to our chickie by the sound of thunder. In those benighted days I didn’t travel with a laptop and barely knew what a DVD was, so after a few minutes of listening to the rising wind and booming thunder and drinking Rebel Yell it was off to night-night land.

When I awoke I didn’t have to look outside to know the weather situation had not improved. It wasn’t just thunder I was hearing, but rain. So it goes. It was time to focus on my presentation, “The Care and Feeding of a CAT,” a talk concerning, as you might guess, the maintenance of a Schmidt Cassegrain Telescope to include, naturally, collimation.

After a breakfast and a lunch that were worth getting rained on for, Miss Dorothy and I were off to the building where the talks would be held. “The Wigwam” was possibly the most historic structure still standing at Nakanawa, a somewhat strange round construction of braced tree trunks and rough hewn planks decorated with paintings and drawings done by girls during their 1920s summers. I was gobsmacked by how recognizable the camp in their drawings still was. After marveling at these amazing relics, we settled in to listen to presentations on everything from cosmology to planetary observing. All were excellent and well received. I just hoped mine would be.

Big group, including some very prominent amateur astronomers, and Unk was naturally a little nervous. I needn’t have been. My audience was polite and, I was relieved to find, genuinely interested. Let’s face it, SCT collimation is a black art for novices, and even veterans are always anxious to hear about new collimation methods and ideas. I got not just rapt attention during my talk, but dozens of questions after. When these finally slacked off, I was asked to join a panel discussion with the day’s other presenters where we fielded audience questions on everything from String Theory to ETs and flying saucers.

After the talks were done and the rain had passed, I wandered around the camp, videoing all and sundry and marveling at my surroundings. Lake Aloaloa was shrouded in an eerie mist following the storm, and when a breeze brushed by I thought I could hear echoes of the laughter of long-ago little girls in it.

Striking as everything looked after the storm, it was also damp. And slippery. Wouldn’t you know it? I tripped and slipped and went you-know-what over teakettle. Luckily, my pride was more hurt than my bod. Nursing my scrapes, I hoped a front would come through and dry things out. Even if it cleared, the high humidity would mean conditions no better than the previous night.

After supper, another really great supper, it became clear a front would barrel through. The temperature was dropping precipitously and the clouds were fleeing with ever greater speed. It took until about 10 p.m. for the mess to completely blow out, but when it did it was obvious we were in for a treat.

Not only was the sky clear, it was black, velvet black, studded with a million stars. Yes, I could still make out some skyglow from Crossville and Chattanooga, but it was nearly gone. The sky at Camp Nakanawa was now gorgeous. With my speaking job done, it was time for fun. I set to work with a will on this excellent night, or what remained of it. Bertha showed me almost a surfeit of wonders. I’d go-to a target, suck down every photon I could, punch in the next destination, and Bertha would hum and lead me unerringly to yet another marvel.

The deep sky object of the evening? No doubt about what that was. By 2003, I was an old hand when it came to LPR filters: UHCs, OIIIs, hbetas, I used ‘em all. Still, e’en with the aid of a filter, I classified the Eagle Nebula, M16, as a tough object. Oh, the cluster was easy, and I could always see the nebulosity, but details? Hints of the mighty Pillars of Creation? Tough, very tough. Except on this night. The combination of a 2-inch UHC filter, a 35mm Panoptic eyepiece, and my beloved Big Bertha allowed me to see those tantalizing details like I’d never seen them outside CCD images.

I had to admit, though, that as good as the nebula was in my Panoptic, it was far better on the monitor screen of Dennis Williams’ Stellacam. Yeah, I saw hints of the “fingers of god” in my eyepiece, but Dennis’ 10-inch LX200 showed them in detail with the aid of the deep sky video camera. Right then and there I decided the Stellacam was for me. I’d been impressed by what one could do from the parking lot of (very light polluted) Nashville’s Embassy Suites hotel during ALCON, but out here in the dark what the Stellacam revealed was nothing short of astounding. Yeah, today the little black and white video camera has been far surpassed by the Mallincams, but nearly a decade ago the Stellacam was a revelation.

The only bringdown? The long journey back to the Swamp in the morning. We absolutely had to make the drive in one day, and I reluctantly threw the Big Switch shortly before midnight and did a little preliminary packing. Which don't mean I trotted off to bed when I was done. No, I was so enthralled by the images Dennis’ LX200 and video camera were delivering that I stared at and marveled at his monitor for at least another hour. When it became obvious to my fellow observers that Unk had shut down his scope, I quickly got several requests to check SCT collimation, which I was happy to do. When everybody was satisfied with Polaris’ diffraction rings, it was off to the chickie for a little Yell and a little shut-eye.

Whatever happened to the TNSP? I’ve checked the BSAS’ and other Tennessee groups’ web pages every once in a while over the years, but as far as I can tell the TNSP has only been back to Camp Nakanawa once, seven years ago in 2004. In fact, I am not at all sure there is a TNSP anymore. I know there is a TSSP, the Tennessee Spring Star Party, and that it appears to be quite popular, but it is the work of another group, and is held in a different location, a state park near Spencer, Tennessee.

The fact that the TNSP was a onetime good deal for me doesn’t diminish the experience one bit. Maybe it enhances it. Dorothy and I still talk about the wonderful time we had at Nakanawa, and whether there’s still a TNSP or not or whether it ever goes back to that beautiful camp or not, the good folks who put it on should be proud of what they achieved and the good memories they planted.

Next time: If it clears, out goes the Atlas and the Canon, you-all.

Unk’s Deep Sky Plans

2011-11-13T08:34:00.004-06:00

Hey, y’all, ain’t it funny how time slips away? Seemed like ‘twas just the other day I first heard about Phyllis Lang’s Deep Sky Planner and resolved to give it a spin. When I stopped and thought about it, though, I realized that was at least a decade back. Giving “DSP” a try was one of those things I kept meaning to do, but which for one reason or another kept slipping to the bottom of Unk’s ever growing to-do list.

Oh, I’d had a look at DSP once, sort of. Somebody at a star party somewhere showed me a (crippled) evaluation copy of the software, and I was impressed by what I saw. Then and there I should have called Miss Phyllis and arranged to review her program, maybe with an eye toward including it in the software section of my last book, Choosing and Using a New CAT. But I screwed up. I didn’t do that.

Well, I’ve finally got round to trying Deep Sky Planner, and I sure am glad I did. Phyllis contacted me the other day and asked if I’d like to see a copy of DSP, the new DSP 5. My reaction? “Heck yeah!” Turns out it’s actually a good thing I waited, since DSP v5 is the strongest version of this program, yet.

“Now hold on Unk. What the h-e double L are you talking about? What is Deep Sky Planner, anyhow? I’m guessing it’s a computer program, but what kind of computer program? Is it like, uh, Cartes du Ciel?” Nope. It can work with CdC, but it is not like that famous program at all. If you’ve read many of my software reports here, you know the sort of astronomy program I favor is planners. And that is what DSP is.

What’s a planner? A planner is an astronomy soft that is list-centric. One is designed to help you see lots of stuff by making observing lists, organized lists of objects to view on a given date and time. One can also help you find objects and record your observations when you’ve found them. Some well-known astronomy planning programs are SkyTools, Deepsky, AstroPlanner, and Eye and Telescope. Most planners de-emphasize chart drawing, and some eliminate it all together—Deep Sky Planner has no charting engine. Which doesn’t mean you can’t use charts with it, as we’ll see directly.

Deep Sky Planner is, like a lot of astro-ware these days, available two ways: as a downloadable file from the program website’s store, where it is sold for the very reasonable price of $65.00, or as a CD which will be mailed to you for the also strikingly reasonable sum of $73.95. While I could have downloaded DSP and been using it the very night I exchanged emails with Miss Phyllis, I requested a CD instead. Lots of amateurs, especially older semi-Luddite amateurs like Unk, still prefer a brick and mortar product, and I wanted to go through the whole nine yards of installing from a CD. Oh, if’n I ain’t mentioned it, Deep Sky Planner is Windows only.

After just a couple of days of waiting, the DSP CD came through the mail slot of Chaos Manor South with a clunk, scaring the cats and bringing me on the run. Hot dog! A new astro-soft! Well, sorta. What was on the CD was v5.0, but Phyllis had alerted me that a major update, version 5.1, was in the offing, in just a week or two. I definitely wanted to wait for that before giving the program a serious look. I would install the current version and download the update from the DSP website when it became available.

The first part of the install was pretty much warm milk and cookies. Insert the CD in the optical drive (a USB optical drive I use with my astro-puter, an Asus netbook), click a few OKs and you are done. Like the recently reviewed Eye and Telescope, however, Deep Sky Planner requires online “activation” after installation.

This procedure is clearly explained in the docs that come with the CD, and wouldn’t normally have been a problem. Alas, it was for me. Due to a nasty little bug, the mostly automated activation process didn’t work just right. When it completed, the website warned me that the resulting registration number I would need to enter would not be emailed automatically, and that it might take a short time for it to be sent. Unfortunately, I had the feeling I’d never get the number—I could tell something had hung up somewheres.

I was right. But Phyllis was on the ball, sending me an email right away that advised me to download a program update that would eradicate the nastiness. I did so, re-did the activation business, and shortly had the number entered in the program. Not that it would have been a tragedy if I hadn’t been able to obtain the code number right away. You can use DSP for 30-days before it must be activated. As I mentioned in my initial article on Eye and Telescope, I find the registration/activation process for software annoying, but I do understand the need for it.

Then I left the program alone, waiting for the all important update. When I heard via DSP’s active Yahoogroup that the v5.1 upgrade was available, I downloaded and installed it. Somehow, I resisted the urge to dig in and start playing immediately, figuring I ought to have at least an idea of how much horsepower was under the hood. The extensive Help file (which is in the program’s directory as an Acrobat file, too) is really a well-written and extensive manual. Me being me, I didn’t feel like wading through 295 pages at the moment, but I did scan the program’s specs. To wit:

• Over 1,000,000 objects in the database. Many are cross-referenced.
• Sun, Moon, and planet data can be calculated for any instant or over a range of times.
• Same-same for comet/asteroid data.
• Comprehensive logging facilities which are tightly integrated with the program’s database reports.
• Supports the Sky Quality Meter (the electronic widget that tells you how good your skies are).
• Manages multiple observing projects.
• Selective data backup and restore.
• Export reports in .html and other formats. Compliant with OpenAstronomyLog 2.0 standard.
• Provides telescope control with ASCOM.
• Smart integration with TheSky, Starry Night, RedShift, and Cartes du Ciel.

That all sounded cool. It was clear this was no lightweight of a program, and I resolved to sit down with the manual eventually (as I always advise y’all to do with planning programs), but for now I just wanted to mess around and get a feel for how DSP looked and acted.

Clicking the program’s purty icon caused hard drive activity, and after a not undue waiting period with my somewhat speed-challenged netbook, DSP’s main screen appeared. It’s kinda plain, but that is OK; it’s generally good to start with a clean slate, and I sometimes get put-out with planners that try to cram too much stuff on their “home page.”

What you get with Deep Sky Planner is a fairly standard Windows menu bar. You know, “File,” “Options,” “Window,” and “Help.” Naturally you’ve got some astro-oriented choices too: “Observing Log,” “Telescope Control,” and “Equipment.” Below that is an icon toolbar with small but nicely designed pictographs. Running your mouse pointer over ‘em will reveal help bubbles in case you have trouble puzzling out what the icons do.

Where to start? Every astronomy program wants to know about location and time. I pulled down “Options” for a look see. Sure enough, there was “Location Manager.” It was easy to select my little city from the list that appeared when I clicked “United States” on the tree menu. If my city had not been on the list, or if I had wanted to specify a custom site for my exact observing location, that would have been easy enough to do by pushing the “New Location” button on the Location Manager’s toolbar and entering latitude/longitude, time zone, and the other usual things.

Like most planners, DSP also wants to know about your equipment: telescopes, eyepieces, filters, Barlows, and cameras. This setup is accessed by going to the Equipment menu and selecting “instrument browser,” “eyepiece browser,” etc. as required. One slight downcheck here? Most planners give you access to lists of common equipment and all you have to do is click on your stuff to add it to your inventory. You can download some equipment lists from the DSP “Community” web pages (accessible from within the program with Help/Community Page), but these are just static text files. NOT big deal. Equipment entry is something you don’t have to do often, and the process of adding gear is simple.

After I finished keying-in my gear lineup, I entered myself with “observer browser,” and it was time to get rolling with a Plan. No, I still hadn’t got around to reading the instructions—y’all know my lack of patience with manuals, even well written ones like this one. I did think it would be a good idea to get some guidance in putting together my first Plan, though, and watched a video, a Youtube video, on the subject, which is linked from the DSP web page. Big help. Big, big help. If you have the appropriate TV/Blu-Ray/game system, you can even watch Phyllis’ excellent videos on your big-screen TV while sipping…er… “sarsaparilla,” which is what Unk did.

Turned out all I had to do to start a Plan was click “New” on the File Menu, select New Observing Plan, and—bang—I had an empty Plan Document onscreen. Gotta populate that, with objects, of course. I decided I’d put together a Plan from one of Sue French’s tours from her wonderful new book Deep-sky Wonders. After a little head scratching, I clicked the arrow beside the little galaxy on the icon toolbar, which the bubble-help told me was “Deep Sky Catalog Search Documents,” and then “NGC.” There are mucho filters you can apply, but I wanted to see how the program dealt with great big lists, and just hit Search, which would put the whole fracking NGC in my search document.

Good news: the NGC came up quick like a bunny, and scrolling though it was fast and responsive. I really like the program’s “drag and drop,” paradigm, and all I had to do to add objects was scroll to ‘em, highlight ‘em, and drag ‘em into my Plan (I’d used the Window menu to tile my Plan and the search document horizontally to make dragging and dropping easy). You can use shift-click and ctrl-click to highlight and drag contiguous and non contiguous groups of objects.

Want to find stuff from different catalogs without switching catalogs? Mash the little galaxy icon, not the arrow next to it, and highlight all the catalog choices (about 25) in the list window of the Search Document that appears. Then, enter your object’s catalog designation in the “Common Name” field on the right, hit the Go Button (“Search,” natch) like I did with Stock 2, and you will be rewarded. DSP’s collection of catalogs is not crazy-lavish—the star search document couldn’t find Sue’s somewhat offbeat Stein 368—but in my judgment it is way more than good enough. Since you can easily enter objects manually with the “Edit Plan” button, having every obscure catalog is not a necessity. It was the work of maybe five minutes to produce my small Plan of Seven objects.

Was there anything I found wanting in my finished Plan? Y’all know me. I ain’t never found a perfect piece of software. Naturally, Deep Sky Planner is no exception. I could not find a way to display object details beyond the fairly basic data that’s in the plan spreadsheet. I like, for example, to know a galaxy’s Hubble Type. This is not fatal, however. Since you’ll normally be using DSP in conjunction with a planetarium program, you’ll have that program’s object info resources at your beck and call.

Got a Plan. What next? There might not need to be a next. Carry the PC and scope into the field and observe the suckas, clicking the Observed box as you do. But this program is capable of a lot more cool stuff than that. For example, I like to have pictures of my targets available to help identify the harder stuff. Like most other current planners, DSP downloads object images from the Digitized Sky Survey (the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey, that is).

Somewhat unintuitively for silly ol’ me, you set up images on the “Localize” tab at the top of the Plan, where you assign an image server and specify image size and other parameters. The program will then paste an image LINK to each object in your plan. You must then download each object individually and store it on the local drive if you want to do that. You can tell the program to automatically download an image for objects without a stored picure, but you still have to click on each object to make it do that.

This image-handling method was one of the few things I did not like about DSP. I would like to be able to download batches of object pictures. If I’m gonna hit a hundred Herschels tonight, I want an image for each of them, and I don’t want to have to click on each one to download its pic. Yes, as is mentioned in the documentation, pictures take up a lot of space on the hard drive, but in these days when humble netbooks have 250 GB drives, that is really no longer a factor. If you, like me, often observe from a site without Internet access, you’ll want all the pictures you need on your hard drive before you head for the boonies. Miss Phyllis, please provide a batch download facility.

What else do you need for a night under the stars? You need a chart. Or you may want one, anyway. Even with a go-to rig and an extensive plan, it’s nice to know what else is in the neighborhood of your targets. Like I done said, DSP does not have charts of its own. But you will not miss them. It works seamlessly with the above mentioned planetariums. I prefer Cartes du Ciel, but heavy hitters like TheSky X and Starry Night work, too.

Why are the charts “smart,” as was touted in the program specs? Because Deep Sky Planner does more than just center the object of your desire (right click on a plan object and choose “charts”) on the planetarium. DSP tailors the field-size of the resulting chart to suit you. You can even tell DSP to size the charts based on the size of the target object. Way cool. Only thing that surprised me? Unlike some similar programs, DSP does not start the planetarium program by itself; you have to have it running first. On the other hand, Deep Sky Planner works with considerably more planetariums than similar programs I know about.

Now you’ve got a plan, pictures, and charts. Ready to go? Not so fast. If you’ve got a go-to rig, don’t you want to go-to objects with Deep Sky Planner? I haven’t tried DSP’s go-to abilities in the field—yet. Hell, I haven’t even connected the program to a real telescope inside the house. And yet, I have no doubt it will work well in this regard. Why? Very simple: it uses ASCOM. That universal telescope driver system purty much makes it a no-brainer that your go-to rig will work with the program.

Well, almost any go-to rig that has an ASCOM driver should work with an ASCOM compatible program, anyway. There was the unpleasant matter of AstroPlanner and that very special ASCOM driver, EQMOD. AP worked very well with any driver except EQMOD. That isn’t a huge shock, I reckon. EQMOD is, after all, a very complex driver. It takes the place of the Synta SynScan hand control and must do one hell of a lot. Could DSP handle it? I connected to the EQMOD simulator to see.

Deep Sky Planner worked so well and so smoothly with the simulator that I can’t imagine it not working with the real thing (I promise I will give it a try in the field ASAP). Since DSP does not have onboard charts, there is no way to click on alignment stars on a map; you’ll have to put together a Plan list of alignment stars, but that will be easy. I was just overjoyed that it appeared Phyllis’ wonderful program would work with EQMOD. What was super cool? DSP adds a telescope control icon bar to the screen when a scope is connected. These buttons—park, unpark, track, and more—worked with EQMOD! Whoo-hoo!

When you are done looking at your deep sky wonder, you want to log it, doncha? All I need is a place to state the bare facts: object, date, time, and my comments. Deep Sky Planner’s log works fine for that, but it is capable of doing a heck of a lot more. You can record the current weather conditions in detail, for example. Hell, if you have an Internet connection you can get a weather report via a mini-browser built into the log. I’ll probably never do that, but it sure is groovy.

“What else can this program do, Unk Rod?” Sorry, Skeezix. We are well and truly out of time and space for this Sunday. But rest assured this very efficient piece of code has a feature set competitive with anything on the astro-market. I do intend to write a full review of DSP in the near future, and I will keep you posted on that.

The bottom line? I love Deep Sky Planner. Not only does it have lots of features, it has very good bones. It never crashed. It never did crazy things. It just worked. Is there stuff I’d like to see in it that is not there? Well, sure, there always is with any program. In addition to my comments above concerning object info and pictures, I’d like to see a more robust Import function. Yes, you can import data from programs that support the Open Astronomy Log format, but I could not see a way to import Plans/objects from a plain text file.

That is just quibbles. This is a great soft. I’ve had a lot of fun using it already, and I suspect you will, too. So why doncha? YOU CAN DOWNLOAD AN EVALALUATION COPY. FOR FREE. It is limited to the Messier and Caldwell DSOs, but it is fully functional. In other words, with a few mouse clicks you can be enjoying this wonderful program tonight. Go get it, muchachos.

Next Time: Once the dadgum Moon gets out of the way Unk will do some more DSLRing and we’ll talk some more about my fave imaging program, Nebulosity. Till then? Stop by next Sunday and see, muchachos.

EQMOD Redux

2011-11-06T06:36:00.017-06:00

When it comes to astrophotography, your old Uncle Rod is the perennial beginner. I’ve been trying to take long exposure pictures of the deep sky for over 40 years, and while I’ve had some middling success, you will never, ever see my shots in the Gallery section of Sky and Telescope.

Not that that’s all bad. Since I am still a beginner at heart, albeit one with a lot of experience, I have an easy time writing articles on introductory imaging, like the one I did for Sky and Telescope’s Skywatch annual this year. And despite the fact that I’ve resigned myself to the reality that I will never be a celestial Ansel Adams, I almost always have fun with astrophotography. When the astro-imaging fever is on me, I spend nights and days having a ball taking and processing astrophotos. Our tools have changed from film and darkroom to digital and computer, but the process is still much the same and I still like it.

Why haven’t I joined the ranks of the advanced astrophotographers after so many years? Well, muchachos, there are a couple of reasons. One factor is the Possum Swamp weather. It is not at all unusual to go weeks, especially in the summertime, without having skies good enough for visual observing, much less long exposure deep sky work. After long periods without being able to push the shutter release, your skills atrophy. I ain’t complaining, mind you; just saying.

Another reason for my failure to join the “10-hour exposure through multiple filters” club is that I am the original astro-dilettante. There are many pursuits in our broad avocation I enjoy. Tonight it’s sketching, tomorrow night I’ve got a video camera on the scope, and the night after that I am back to visual work with my wonderful Ethos eyepieces. No, I maybe never get as good at any one of these things as the more single minded, but I think this has kept amateur astronomy eternally fresh for me. There is always something new to try.

As there was on my first DSLR imaging run in a long, long time. What was new was my 50mm Orion guide scope and StarShoot guide camera. The guide scope is genuinely new. I’d heard folks were getting good results with these converted finders, and one seemed like a good solution to me. What could be simpler and more effective than a wide field guider that mounts easily to a C8 in a dovetail finder bracket? A mounting that would probably be more sturdy and less prone to flexure than the el cheapo rings I use with my 80 and 66mm guide scopes. Course, the aperture would be a lot smaller. Would that mean a lack of guide stars, especially when used with my StarShoot guide camera?

Ah, yes, the Orion StarShoot autoguider the lovely Miss Dorothy gave me Christmas before last, and which I’d been able to try briefly exactly once. At least it looked good: nice metal body, ST-4 guide output, and an amazingly large sensor (a ½-inch 1.3 megapixel job). The only bummer is that this chip is a CMOS one like those used in consumer digicams, not a CCD. CMOS chips work well for imaging of all kinds, but they are less light sensitive than CCDs. The single time I’d tried the StarShoot, it seemed to pick up stars OK, but that was with a larger aperture guide scope than the 50mm one I’d be using now.

I also wanted to give EQMOD a workout, even if it ain’t so new. I’ve known about this wonderful program for over four years, ever since I bought my Atlas (EQ-6) mount. What’s it do? It’s a telescope control program that runs on a PC and replaces the mount’s SynScan go-to hand controller. It’s a lot like NexRemote, but for Synta-branded scopes. It adds more features and makes some things easier. It, for example, allows you to use a wireless gamepad instead of a wired HC to move the scope and issue some commands. I much prefer a joystick to four stinking little buttons.

While I’ve not just used but written about EQMOD, that was a long time back, and the program has added significant new features since then, including a polar alignment utility. Above all, if I was going to drag out all the imaging gear, I wanted to give it the best possible chance to perform well. Since I’d gotten good results with EQMOD the first time I ever used my Canon DSLR for astrophotography, it made sense to use EQMOD again after a long layoff from DSLRing.

When you think about long exposure digital imaging, you naturally think “lots of gear,” but, honestly, compared to all the stuff I lug out for a video run, a night with a DSLR is actually relaxing gear wise. I can eliminate the DVD recorder, the portable DVD player I use as a video display, several cables, and the big deep cycle marine battery that powers the recorder. I did bring a small 12vdc battery, a lawn tractor battery, and an inverter with me on this run to ensure the netbook had enough power to get through the evening. The StarShoot guide camera draws current from the computer’s USB port, and I was afraid that would shorten the Asus netbook’s normally amazing internal battery life.

My equipment load was lighter, yeah, but not exactly light. In addition to the C8 OTA, the Atlas mount, the new guide scope, and the StarShoot, there was the Canon Rebel DSLR, the remote shutter control widget (needed for older Canon DSLRs), a box full of cables, a wireless gamepad and receiver for EQMOD, and all the usual stuff I need for any run beyond the most informal. Can’t do without multiple accessory cases, DewBuster controller and heaters, dew shield, chair, table, computer shelter, etc., etc., etc. Since this would be a cold night as we judge such things, low 40s, I made sure I brought my heaviest coat and plenty of (disposable) chemical hand warmer packs from Bass Pro.

Since the Sun would go down shortly after 6 p.m., I needed to leave the Old Manse no later than 4:30 to allow plenty of set up time. As I was driving down Government Street in my new truck, Miss Van Pelt, I, as I always do, started playing the “what did I forget” game. Doh! Left my thermos of hot tea and my Monster Energy Drink sitting on the island in Chaos Manor South’s kitchen. I decided I’d keep going. Traffic was bad, and tea or coffee eventually makes me feel colder rather than warmer, anyway. I did want a Monster, though, and stopped at a filling station not far from our dark site and bought a monster of one.

Out in Tanner - Williams, I was dismayed that turnout was even worse than it had been the previous Saturday. The only other PSAS member who showed was my good buddy George. I reckoned that, once again, the cold temps and the (still-running) Greater Gulf State Fair accounted for the lack of interest in observing on what would be a beautiful evening

Once again, there had been zero doubt the weather would cooperate. We hadn’t had much in the way of rain in quite a while, and the universal forecast was “clear and cold.” Not crisp, though. Humidity was fairly high and appeared to be spiking up as the Sun set. Felt like the air would be just damp enough to make light pollution a problem for imaging. The Milky Way is almost always easily visible from our site once in climbs out of the Possum Swamp light dome in the east, but damp air propagates the glow from that light dome across much of the sky on a humid night.

Some folks complain about the weight of the Atlas GEM head. I’ll admit it ain’t a lightweight, but at about 50-pounds it is not insane, not even for a broken down old hillbilly like me, not when I’m careful. And as I’ve said before, at this price point you’ll have to accept “heavy” if you want “steady.” If you are willing to pay about five times what the Atlas commands, you can get “steady but light” with a mount like the wonderful Astro-Physics Mach 1, but Unk is way too stingy to consider that, given his minimalist needs.

Weren’t any hiccups during set up. I used a good compass to get the mount roughly aligned on Polaris’ position before that distant sun peeped out. Hooked up the computer. Mounted the guide camera. Installed a 1.25-inch diagonal and visual back on the C8. I’d do the go-to alignment with a 12mm crosshair eyepiece and then mount the camera. As is almost always the case, my C8, Celeste, was wearing the Celestron f/6.3 reducer-corrector I bought for her at the 1997 Texas Star Party (from the late, great Pocono Mountain Optics). Done, I kicked back, drank about half the Monster, and waited for dark.

When Polaris finally turned up, it was time to get on the stick. Lit off the netbook, brought up Cartes du Ciel v 3.4, and connected to EQMOD. If you haven’t heard, EQMOD is not really a program; it is an ASCOM telescope driver. It is a very sophisticated ASCOM driver, but it still must work in concert with an ASCOM compatible program like Cartes.

How does this CdC/EQMOD combo talk to the Atlas? Over a standard serial cable connected between the PC’s serial port and the hand control port on the mount. There are a couple of gotchas, here, though. First off, no modern laptops or netbooks (or even desktops) that I know of have serial ports. That means you must provide one, usually via a USB – serial converter cable. Do yourself a favor and get a Keyspan, since they are known to work reliably with EQMOD. That’s not all you need, however. A PC speaks RS-232, but the Atlas only understands TTL. That means you must have a level converter module, an “EQDIR.”

The EQDIR, a little widget that translates between data formats, can be plugged in at either the computer or telescope end of the serial cable. I usually place it at the computer end; I don’t like the EQDIR sticking out of the mount’s DB-9 socket. That’s just asking for me to bump into it and either break it off or unplug it.

Where do you get an EQDIR? There are several sources, but here in the U.S. of A. most people buy from Shoestring Astronomy. Who has another product that’s even easier to use, the “USB2EQ6,” which incorporates a USB converter, an EQDIR, and a serial cable. Plug one end into a USB port on the computer and the other end into the DB-9 hand control port on the mount and you are ready to roll.

Don’t have an EQDIR and want to try EQMOD right away? If you have a SynScan serial cable and a hand controller running version 3.21 of the firmware or higher, you can. Run that cable from a serial port on the computer to the RJ socket on the base of the SynScan hand control, set the HC for “PC Direct” mode, and you are good to go. Most of us prefer to leave the SynScan HC out of the loop, but you can get your feet wet with PC Direct.

The mount’s cabled to the computer and the planetarium is running and connected to EQMOD. What happens next? When the EQMOD window opens, click the tool icon on its top right to expand it to reveal the set up display. There are quite a few settings to make including alignment method, gamepad options, and auto guiding parameters; the EQMOD docs explain exactly what must be done and how. Most importantly, enter the observing site’s latitude and longitude and save it to the hard drive. It is critically important that this lat/lon be exactly the same as what is in the planetarium program. Once EQMOD’s set up is done, it’s polar alignment time.

Since I usually only take two to three minute subframes, about the limit of what my site will stand before sky fog from light pollution becomes too bad, a decent alignment with the polar scope is all I need. I’ve always liked the Atlas’ polar borescope with its nice, wide apparent field of view. Too bad it’s tough to figure out how the R.A. axis of the mount should be rotated to put the little circle where Polaris goes in the right spot. Used to be tough, anyway. Thanks to Chris Shillito and the other gurus continuously developing EQMOD, borescope polar alignment is now a breeze.

How does it work? When Polaris is visible, unscrew the dome-shaped cover on the rear end of the Atlas RA assembly to reveal the borescope eyepiece and also remove the plastic plug from the forward end. At this time, the mount should be in normal “home” position, with the counterweight shaft down and the declination at 90, so the tube of the telescope is parallel to the RA axis of the mount.

On EQMOD, press the park/unpark button to unpark the mount, and uncheck the check box for “mount limits” on the right of the driver window. Ensure Polaris is selected as the pole star in the Site Information area of the display (it should be by default), and click on the Pole Star H.A. button to bring up the Polar Scope window. Back at the scope, use the gamepad to slew the OTA in declination (north/south) until it is perpendicular to the R.A. axis, 90-degrees to the R.A. axis, in order to open up the hole in the counterweight shaft the borescope looks through.

Ain’t got a wireless gamepad? Get one. There are slew buttons on the EQMOD display, but it’s a pain to move the scope with them, especially when you are trying to center alignment stars. The good news is that EQMOD will work with almost any wireless PC game pad, and can even be made to use Wii or Playstation or Xbox controllers. Me? I found a perfectly good wireless pad/joystick in the dadgum Wal-Mart for 10 dollars.

When the polar scope’s view is clear, set the Polaris circle on the reticle to starting position. This position is selectable, but I find “6 o’clock” easiest to use. Center the North Star in the crosshair of the reticle with the mount altitude and azimuth adjusters, and then crank up in altitude until the star is on the big circle (not in the little circle) on the reticle. When it is there, use the gamepad to move the scope in R.A. to place the small circle around Polaris. Push the Set Polar Home button, the one with the plus sign and house icon on it, to record this starting position for future use.

Just about done. Mash the Align Polar Scope button (arrow and yellow star), and the mount will move in right ascension until the Polaris circle is at the proper angle for polar alignment. If you are using a telescope with a tube much longer than that of an SCT, make sure this movement will not result in the tube ramming a tripod leg. It that is a possibility, remove the OTA (and counterweights, natch) before polar aligning. Once the mount stops slewing in R.A., just use the altitude and azimuth adjusters to put Polaris back in the little circle, push the Park button to send Atlas back to Home Position, re-enable mount limits, and you are done.

Subsequent outings will be even easier. Disable mount limits, unpark, bring up the Polar Scope window, click the Move to Polar Scope Home button (arrow and house icon) to go to start position, click Align Polar Scope to slew in R.A., put Polaris in the circle when the mount stops, park the mount, and you are done.

Did all that in about two minutes, unparked the mount again, and was ready to get started with go-to alignment. EQMOD’s alignment method is one of the things that make it different. Different but good. Instead of picking stars from the SynScan’s too-small display window, you click on them on a planetarium program’s screen (I like to use Cartes’ all-sky display), center them up in a crosshair eyepiece with the gamepad, and push the “sync” button on the astro-program.

If that sounds too different for you, EQMOD also has a more “traditional” dialog based alignment system where you click “yes” on a window to accept stars. To enable the dialog system, select “Dialog Based” instead of “Append on Sync” in the Alignment/Sync section of the driver setup display. I used to prefer “Dialog,” since I could accept stars at the telescope with the gamepad, but I changed my mind when I realized I’d have to go back to the computer to select the next star, anyway, and that it was quicker to just to click Cartes’ sync button than to fool with another window. You can assign “sync” to a gamepad button, but I’ve never felt moved to do that.

Which stars do you sync on? I find making a huge, sky-encompassing triangle with three stars works very well. I usually pick a star in the northeast, one in the northwest, and a final one in the southeast. I try to keep them close but not on the horizon, maybe 10 – 15 degrees high. I have never had a problem with go-to accuracy when I have done this, with every object winding up somewhere in the field of a medium power eyepiece.

Need more better gooder? You can add as many alignment stars as you want. At any time. Just go-to a star, center it, and sync. The EQMOD docs go into detail about what’s good and what’s bad and how many are better in this regard. However many you choose, once you’ve synced on your last star, you are done. Minimize the EQMOD window and click on and go-to anything you want on the planetarium screen.

Other than the “new” (to me) polar alignment utility, EQMOD worked just as I remembered. Aligned on three stars, clicked to go-to Vega for focusing, and everything just worked. Vega was centered in a 15mm eyepiece when EQMOD said “Slew complete!” There are quite a few new features, and I refer you to the docs linked above for a complete rundown on them, but the main thing I noticed was that EQMOD now talks. Like NexRemote, it announces “Slewing to target” when you start a go-to, “Slew complete” when you get there, and many other things. As with NR, I find this both cool and useful. I do not like looking at the PC screen any more than I have to.

Mount aligned, next thing next was getting the guide scope focused. After the alignment, I’d plugged in the guide camera cables, brought up PHD Guiding, set exposure to 1-second, and begun looping frames. Vega was a big, fat blob at first, but screwing out the objective end of the guide scope to focus made it appropriately small. I was happy to see that as I approached focus many dimmer stars appeared. The StarShoot is more than sensitive enough. None of the three imaging fields I visited on this night lacked candidate stars. Focused, I snugged-up a knurled ring behind the little scope’s objective cell to lock focus down.

Now it was time to get the imaging camera, the Rebel Xti, mounted and focused. The DSLR screws onto the f/6.3 reducer using a standard SCT prime focus adapter and a T-mount ring that takes the place of the Canon’s lens. I plugged in the camera’s remote shutter release module and USB cable and fired up my control program, Nebulosity.

I know some people don’t use a PC with a DSLR, but I much prefer running the camera with a computer rather than setting exposures with a handbox and storing images on a Compact Flash card. Nebulosity from Craig Stark, the same talented dude who wrote PHD, is great. It delivers a big focus display, stores your images as .fits files on the hard drive, and allows you to set exposures and exposure sequences with drop downs and menu buttons. Nebulosity deserves a blog entry all its own, but for now I will just say that it is so nice to focus easily, set up a sequence of exposures, tell Nebulosity to start work, and walk away.

Although I had not used Nebulosity in a long while, it is so user friendly that I was ready for my first target in just minutes. Slewed over to M13, centered it using Neb’s frame/focus function, and set up a series of 10 two-minute exposures. Didn’t want to go longer since the Big Dog Glob was already a mite too low for comfort. Nebulosity ready, I maximized PHD’s window, selected a guide star (the StarShoot actually showed M13 as a blob in a mere 2-second exposure), and hit the guide button.

Before it can begin guiding, PHD will need to calibrate. That takes a few minutes, but it only has to do this on the first guide star or when you move to the opposite side of the Meridian. During calibration, PHD slews the scope north, south, east, and west, to get an idea of how the mount responds to commands. Since my tiny guide scope has a large field, I was aware I should change guide-steps (pulse durations) so the star would move enough for a good calibration. I clicked the “brain” icon on PHD and changed that parameter to “2000” from the default of 700 or so. In due time, PHD finished its cal successfully and began guiding.

I told Neb to start exposing, waited for the first frame to be displayed, and when it did and I saw its stars were nice and round, I walked over to George’s set up to see what he was looking at, letting scope and computer do their thing on their own.

And so it went for the balance of the evening. After M13, it was the Dumbbell Nebula, M27, and finally, the good, old Ring, M57. Since Nebulosity takes and applies dark frames as well as light frames, twenty minutes of exposure takes something close to an hour from start to finish. I knew that, but when I finished with M27 I could still hardly believe it was getting on to 11 p.m. I also couldn’t believe I wasn’t cold. My heavy coat helped, but mainly I’d been so busy and excited that I forgot to be cold.

Since I wanted to give EQMOD’s go-to accuracy a trial, slewing from horizon to horizon, I decided that would be a good way to end the evening. Stowing the camera and guide camera would put me a little ahead of the game when it was time to pack up, too. Off came the camera and prime focus adapter, on went the 1.25-inch diagonal, and out came my beloved Orion Expanse eyepieces. Maybe I should have brought the Ethoses and the Denkmeier Powerswitch diagonal with me, but this was an imaging run, and I wanted to cut down a little on the gear overhead.

They ain’t Ethoses, but with the reducer-corrector in place, the stars in my 20, 15, 9, and 6mm Expanses were respectably sharp, even at the edges of the fields. What did I look at? Ever’thing from M42, which was barely over the eastern horizon, to M37, which was nice and high in the northeast, to M27 in the west, to M15 up high, to NGC 253 way down South in Sculptor. All looked good, but that was not what I was interested in. I wanted to know how good EQMOD was.

To cut to the chase, EQMOD was impressive. If a go-to system has problems, accuracy will usually fall off somewhere: at the zenith, in the south, on the horizon. Obviously EQMOD did not have any problems, because every single object I looked at was somewhere in the field of the 9mm Expanse eyepiece. I didn’t leave it at the above four targets, either; I went all over the sky, trying to get EQMOD to put something out of the field. Nope. In my opinion, its accuracy is fully the equal of Celestron’s NexStar firmware, which is acknowledged to be the best in the business.

So Unk didn’t make any mistakes or do anything silly? What do you think? It wouldn’t be an Unk Rod night if there weren’t any weirdness. I was set up on the opposite end of the field from George. I did that so the computer’s and cameras’ red LEDs wouldn’t disturb his visual observing. Toward the end of the evening, he hollered, “I’ve got the Veil!” I swear I thought he said “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” I came at a run, needlessly disturbing George’s contemplation of his favorite supernova remnant. Oh, and I spent half an hour searching for the C8’s rear cell cap when I was packing up. Couldn’t find it anywhere despite much scanning of the ground with a flashlight. Naturally, next morning it was right where I put it in the accessory box.

Back within the nurturing walls of Chaos Manor South, I resisted the urge to look at my subframes. Doing that when it’s late and you are tired is a sure recipe for disappointment. Unprocessed frames always look terrible, but even they will look a lot better IN THE MORNING. Instead, I plunked myself down in the den and poured out some Rebel Yell and did a little channel surfing. What I landed on was the EXTREMELY SILLY but entertaining Ancient Aliens on the History Channel. Not that I paid much attention to the show’s…uh… “exaggerated” claims. I was ruminating on how to go about processing the night’s haul into something that would at least please me, if not win any prizes. And that’s what it’s all about, ain’t it, muchachos?

Next Time: Phyllis Lang’s Deep Sky Planner

The Herschel Project Night 27

2011-10-30T01:06:00.005-06:00

Well, muchachos, another Herschel Project run has come and gone. No, before you ask, everything did not go smoothly. But that is OK. It would be pretty boring for y’all if all I had to say here was “Yep, took the telescope out to the dark site, saw some cool stuff, packed up and went home.”

Last Saturday dawned to beautiful, crisp weather. The sky was that dark shade of blue that says, “Don’t worry about the weather, Unk; it will be just fine.” For once, I didn’t have to give a moment’s consideration to clouds; the weather-goobers were reporting “No chance of rain for the foreseeable future.” Course, as is usually the case, Unk would pay a price for his clear skies. Temperatures would go down into the consarned mid-40s.

Now, before you condemn all us Gulf Coastians as complete wimps, remember we are usually dealing with a lot more humidity than y’all. I have sometimes felt colder down here on a damp 40s winter day than I’ve felt in Maine on a dry one in the 20s. And there is nothing that will make you feel more miserable than for all your gear—and your clothes—to be sopping wet with dew.

All Unk could do was prepare. Heavy enough but not too heavy coat, layers under that, and plenty of battery power for the DewBuster. On a dew-heavy night, which I expected this one would be, I devote a single 25 amp-hour jump start battery to the ‘Buster, which is only running a single heater strip, one on the C8’s corrector plate. That wouldn’t be overkill, either, since I was purty sure the DewBuster control box would be set at “10-degrees” all night long. Actually, I share the battery between the ‘Buster and my Stellacam, but the uncooled camera hardly draws any current.

So, I’d brave the damp and chilly dark. What would I brave it with? Not much question about that. It was time to get the Herschel Project back on the road after a hiatus of three months due to weather and work. I thought briefly about giving our 12-inch Dob, Old Betsy, a tumble, but the fact is that nothing is more efficient in allowing me to see lots of aitch objects in detail and in numbers over the course of a short Saturday night run than a deep sky video camera-equipped SCT. The C11, Big Bertha, would have no doubt done a sterling job, but, being lazy, I demurred. A four or five hour night is a C8 night. It would be my old girl Celeste, a 1995 Celestron Ultima 8, riding on my CG5 German equatorial.

Unk is still using his Stellacam II black and white 10-second exposure video camera despite the fact that deep sky video has come a long way in the six years since I bought it. The Mallincams have brought cooling, long exposure, COLOR, and computer control to the observing table. On a cold, clear night the Stellacam can still amaze, but there comes the time when even Luddite ol’ Unk Rod must bow to Modern Times. Muchachos, I have pulled the trigger on a Mallincam Xtreme, and am pretty excited about that. I believe it will add a whole ‘nother dimension to the Herschel Project. So, this evening would likely be one of the good old SC’s last hurrahs.

Anyhoo, come four o’clock I had the evening’s gear marshaled in Chaos Manor South’s front parlor: C8, dew shield, CG5, tripod, two jumpstart batteries (one for the mount, one for the camera/dew heater), observing table, eyepiece box (just in case), computer shelter, netbook, camera, portable DVD player ( I use as a monitor), DVD recorder, deep cycle marine battery and inverter to power the recorder, thermos bottle of hot tea (forgot to buy dadgum Monster Energy drinks), MP3 recorder for note-taking, and two large equipment cases. One of my club buddies out at the site asked if it didn’t take an hour to load and unload “all that stuff,” but I told him, truthfully, that I’ve done it so often that it takes maybe fifteen minutes.

A huge boon lately has been my new vehicle, a 2011 4-Runner, Miss Lucille Van Pelt. Packing the gear is one hell of a lot easier when you have room enough to be a little sloppy. To get everything in my former vehicle, a Camry, I had to be very organized. Loading the astro-junk was like putting together a cotton picking jigsaw puzzle. Whatev. I got everything loaded in the truck and sat down and watched a repeat of an episode of The History Channel’s Universe (which I still like) while waiting for the afternoon to pass.

By 4:45, I was on the road for the PSAS dark site. ‘Twas a good thing I’d looked up the Sunset time. The year has plumb got away from me. Earlier in the day, when Miss Dorothy asked me when Sol would go down, I replied, “Oh, about seven, right?” Wrong. The sun is sinking at 6:15 p.m. now, and that meant I’d need to be at the site by 5:45 at the latest.

The trip out was uneventful once I’d avoided all the crazies hell-bent on making it to the Greater Gulf State Fair ahead of the crowds. Miss D. and I had done our fair-going the previous evening, opening night, well before the hordes, and Unk was able to enjoy his traditional fair fare, a jumbo corndog, in relative peace.

At the dark site as Sunset came on, I was a little disappointed that only three other observers had made it out. I’d a-thought the splendid clear skies would have drawn a few of the Mebbe Gang (you know, “Mebbe I’ll take the telescope out tonight.”) as well as the usual hard core. I reckon the combo of cold weather and the State Fair had put the kibosh on that. Oh, well. I set to work with a will getting set up. It looked like it was gonna be a great run. That’s what I thought, anyway, till a loud roar washed over the observing field.

The roar came from the field just to the south, which was having its soybeans harvested by two giant combines, the source of the noise. They didn’t just make a loud noise, either. They had our observing field as well as the bean field they were working illuminated with powerful headlights, and they were kicking up enough dust that it looked like an approaching fogbank. Just my luck. So much for observing, I thought. These days, farmers don’t own huge equipment. They pay travelling companies to do their harvesting for them, and those combines will often work ALL NIGHT LONG.

So the night’s edition of the Herschel Project was doomed? Maybe not. Looked like the field was about finished, and the very light breeze was keeping most of the dust from covering us and our telescopes. In due course, the workers climbed down and drove off and the night was saved.

Mostly. These workers would come back a couple of times over the course of the early evening, painting us with the high beams of their pickup trucks. Likely they wanted to make periodic checks of their gear, and were maybe concerned about what them folks with all that weird stuff were doing right next door. After about seven o’clock, though, they must have decamped for the nearby Silver Slipper Inn, since we saw no more of them.

Unk was set up and ready to go just before the first bright stars winked on, but what would he have a go at? If you’ve been following the two year old saga of The Herschel Project, you’ll recall I have finished the part of it that was to be documented minutely in this here blog, the Herschel II. Since y’all seemed to enjoy my tales of my quest to follow in the footsteps of William and Caroline, though, I decided to continue on and report on my pursuit of The Whole Big Thing, The Big Enchilada, all 2500 objects discovered by Will and Lina.

While I would document my experiences with the 2500 in the blog, I promised not to bore y’all with minute details on every fuzzy. The Herschel I, the Herschel II, and the Herschel III (a new list by Tom Hoffelder you can look at here) cherry pick the most beautiful and spectacular out of the Herschel 2500, and what you are left with is scads of fairly dim galaxies. While there are still marvels in the aitch beyond those three lists, there is no denying that much of the rest is “Small, round elliptical galaxy. NO details.”

Why look at ‘em at all, then? In my case there are a couple of reasons. One is that I’ve been thinking off and on that I might like to do a book about the Herschels and their objects. All of them. A bigger reason, a far more important one for me, is that doing all these objects has opened my eyes to the larger Universe. I thought I had a pretty good idea of what was in the Great Out There after nearly 50 years of deep sky observing. I had no idea. Not till I decided to systematically observe nearly 3,000 DSOs, most of them galaxies.

“Well, that’s cool, Unk, but what did you look at specifically on this Saturday evening?” Before leaving home I fired up the astronomy program of The Herschel Project, SkyTools 3, and had a look at what would be available from the 2500. Surprisingly, given that Unk is “only” about 1600 objects into the list, the pickings were fairly slim. I’ve not only pulled most of the aitches out of the summer sky, I’ve harvested the autumn galaxy fields of Pegasus, Cetus, and Aquarius, too. Most of the remaining 800-some fuzzies live in the spring heavens. But not all of them.

I noticed that there was a good handful of hangers-on (all galaxies) in Hercules, I hadn’t done any of Corona Borealis’ objects (all galaxies), and I needed to revisit Pegasus for a few aitches (all galaxies) that, while they were marked as “observed,” I didn’t have log entries for. All told there’d be 27 potential targets this evening. Which would be just about right, I figgered. I could do that many in an hour, easy, which would leave me time to visit some Real Pretty Stuff, look at the comet (Garradd), see if I could see the supernova in M101, and be back in the warm and comforting halls of Chaos Manor South before I froze into a Rod-sicle.

With Polaris peeping out, I did a rough polar alignment, just centering the star in the hollow polar bore of the CG5. Then it was power-up time and on to the alignment. Lit off NexRemote on the netbook computer, connected the Wireless Wingman gamepad I use as my HC, and got going with the center-the-alignment-star business.

At first, everything went as per normal: centered two stars, added four calibration stars, and Celeste, in her Microsoft Mary voice, intoned, “ALIGNMENT SUCCESSFUL!” Next up was polar alignment. I use the old CG5 firmware (easily selectable in NexRemote) that has you center Polaris with the altitude and azimuth adjusters—it’s quick and easy and yields an alignment more than good enough for video work. Since I’d moved the mount a fair distance in altitude (a rather larger distance than I expected) to polar align, I redid the 2+4 star alignment. That’s when the trouble began.

You didn’t think the only problem I was talking about earlier was the consarned combines, did you? Unk always pulls some kind of hare-brained stunt; especially when he has had a layoff of a few months. During the first alignment, something seemed funny. When slewing in declination, the mount seemed to be laboring. Almost as if it didn’t have sufficient power. Oh, it was moving in dec, but what I was hearing was worse than the mount’s usual weasels-with-tuberculosis sounds. At times, the dang thing was squeaking like a cotton pickin’ mouse. Did the declination gears need lubrication? Since they hadn’t had any in going on seven years, I thought they might. Oh, well.

Then, on the next to last cone-alignment star. Unk almost had a litter of kittens right there on the PSAS observing field. Just as the mount was nearing the sparkler, there was a loud CLUNK, and the telescope OTA began to slide backwards in its dovetail! I grabbed the C8, you betcha, but by the time I did, it had already stopped sliding, hanging up on the safety screw.

Weeeeeell doggies! It was obvious what had happened. The mount had been laboring in declination because the tube was way off balance. Apparently I hadn’t seated the dovetail correctly, and it had slid back in the saddle without me noticing. Only when it had tried to go the rest of the way out had I caught on to what was happening.

When the old ticker finally slowed down and Unk was able to breathe again, I finished up the alignment and confirmed that the funny declination noises were gone. Looked to me like the tube had been canted up as well as moved back in the dovetail, so it would probably have been a good idea to have redone the polar alignment if not the go-to alignment. It was pretty clear now why I’d had to adjust so much in altitude.

Lesson learned? Always double-check the scope’s attachment to the mount. And always make sure the safety screw, if there is one, is tight; that was all that had saved my bacon. In retrospect, I shoulda listened to the little voice in my head (one of the voices in my head, some folks will tell you), which had been whispering that something wasn’t right with the telescope and mount.

Yep, I reckon I shoulda redone the polar and go-to alignments, but the sky was well on the way to good and dark, so I decided to see how the mount performed on a test target without any changes. Over to M13. When I focused up good and sharp with my JMI Motofocus, the Great Glob was a thing of wonder as always. I noted that the cluster was smack in the center of the smallish field of the Stellacam when the slew stopped. Tracking seemed OK, too.

First target for the evening was the now famous supernova, 2011fe in M101. Due to work and weather, I had neither seen nor imaged this Type Ia, and was anxious to add its portrait to my slowly growing supernovae rogues’ gallery. I wasn’t too concerned about it being too dim for the Stellacam; the last I heard it was still hanging in at about magnitude 12. What I was worried about was how low it was getting. At 7 p.m., the Catherine Wheel Galaxy was less than 15 fracking degrees above the northwestern horizon.

When the slew stopped and the Stellacam’s first refresh came, I didn’t have any trouble picking out the supernova. Easy as pie. While the spiral was considerably subdued in the haze and light pollution at the horizon, its pattern was pretty clear, too, and looked considerably more well-defined “live” than it does in the quick screen grab here.

What now? Time to get started. Corona Borealis was getting low in the west, too, so there was no time to waste. None of the Northern Crown’s 10 galaxies gave me any trouble. But none of ‘em was much of a standout, either. Not only were they all pretty small, the same thing afflicted them as M101: low in the sky with a bright background. On a whim, I screwed on the Orion Imaging Filter I’d got a while back.

This filter is a mild light pollution reduction filter, not much different from Orion’s Skyglow or Lumicon’s Deep Sky. It is designed to darken the sky background a bit without dimming galaxies and clusters too much. Verdict? I had a hard time deciding. I thought it brought out the lowest in altitude of Corona’s galaxies a little better, but the effect was subtle. One thing was sure; it did darken the background, making the image look smoother and better. And yet…and yet…

I decided I preferred the way my images looked without the filter and unscrewed it. Only then did I notice that I must have turned down the camera gain by accident when shortening the exposure time to allow me to re-focus (the filter changes the telescope’s focus quite a bit). So, I guess the jury is still out on the Imaging Filter. I didn’t want to waste time experimenting any more. The next set of objects, galaxies in Hercules, would be getting low before I knew it.

What’s that Skeezix? You didn’t know there were galaxies in Hercules? Well, there are. The Hero is far enough away from the backbone of the Milky Way to allow our gaze to extend to the intergalactic reaches beyond him. There are some large and detailed and pretty island universes in the area, not that I’d be visiting any of those tonight. The objects from The Big Enchilada remaining in Hercules were, like those in Corona, on the small-smudge side.

Even so, I got some good views here. Not only were there some surprisingly rich galaxy fields
including several Hickson groups); all are set in nice rich star fields. The combination of multiple galaxies in a frame dusted with many hard little stars was a beautiful one, especially since Hercules was still high enough in the sky to offer dark backgrounds. Standouts? My fave was probably a pretty pair of galaxies in one of these rich star fields, NGC 6500 (H.III.957) and NGC 6501 (H.III.958). In addition to the two bright magnitude 13 galaxies looking like a pair of eyes, there was a lovely triple star less than 10’ to the west.

Even after all the alarms and excursions concerning my near disaster during the scope’s alignment, it was barely 10 p.m. by the time I finished the last of the evening’s objects. The total for Night 27? A fitting if somewhat paltry 27 fuzzies. Twarn’t nothing for it, though. There wouldn’t be any major target areas rising till after 0300, and I certainly wouldn’t be hanging out till then. There were a couple of hours still to go before my usual dark site pumpkin time, midnight, however. What could I fill them with? Comet Garradd, for one thing.

If you’ve seen the comet recently, I don’t reckon there’s much reason to rush out and take another look at it; nothing much has changed. Garradd, C/2009 P1, has been hanging in our sky for months, glowing just brightly enough, around 7th magnitude, to make it an OK binocular object. It still looks about the same as it did when I first visited it a couple of months back. I did notice that with the gain cranked way up on the camera I could see a little more tail and maybe hints of an ion tail—which may well have been Unk’s overenthusiastic imagination. The good news? We’ll have this halfway decent little guy with us pretty much as he is now all the way through February.

Comet captured, I toured globular clusters bright (M15 and M2) and dim (Palomar 10 and Palomar 12) before settling in to look at and record some summer and fall spectacles. I went to M13 again, but there were other standouts, too. That loose little globular, M71, (which Garradd passed by not long ago) was scrumptious. Its squarish shape was barely a condensation of stars in the incredibly rich Sagitta field. The often subdued Crescent Nebula, NGC 6888, was an arc of detailed nebulosity.

I can’t say M27 looked as good in my Stellacam as it does in my buddy Mike Harvey’s color Mallincam shot from last summer, but it was beautiful nonetheless, easily showing the dim lobes on each side of the “apple core.” M57 was bright. Even the donut-hole interior was bright. So bright that at f/3.3 I had a hard time picking out the central star.

Thence to the fall stuff, which was now out of the Possum Swamp light dome. The Blue Snowball (planetary) Nebula in Andromeda was a perfect little ping-pong ball floating among the stars. In my mind’s eye I could imagine it glowing an electric blue. If only I’d had that color camera tonight. Nearby M33 was incredible; its loose spiral was painted across my monitor as clearly as I’ve ever seen it. Scattered across its arms were sharply defined patches that are its nebulae. Again, I wished for color.

When I’d finished admiring the Pinwheel, it was getting on toward midnight. It was also getting c-o-l-d, with my thermometer reading “43F.” I’d layered on the sweatshirts and jackets, put on a fuzzy hat, broke out the chemical hand warmers, and drank hot tea every once in a while, but I had to admit I was chilled. As I’d figgered it would be, it was damp, with all the gear now bathed in cold dew. The DewBuster kept the corrector plate dry, but that was the only thing that wasn’t sopping. One more go-to and it would be Big Switch Time.

Us astro-videographers don’t normally consider M31, the Great Andromeda Nebula (Galaxy), much of a target. It’s just too big for our small chips at normal focal lengths. It can still be mind-blowing, however; you just have to focus on the details. That’s what I did, cruising the huge beast, taking in its star clouds and dark lanes, its burning nucleus, even the brightest of its globular star clusters, G1. After recounting my PSSG observation of Andromeda’s best glob for you last week, I had the yen to take another look at it. Picked it up right away. Yeah, just a fuzzy “star,” but still…

And that was that. I worked slowly and methodically to get all the gear re-packed in the truck, since I was working by red light. A couple of my buddies wanted to stay on despite the cold dew until Orion was a little higher. Not Unk. I had got what I’d come for. An hour later I was ensconced in the warm den of Chaos Manor South, sipping the Yell, watching a late night marathon of The World’s Strangest UFO Stories, and contemplating the truly strange and wonderful things I’d seen on this deep fall night.

Spurious Book Review: Sue French’s Deep-Sky Wonders

When Sue French took over Sky and Telescope’s “Deep Sky Wonders” column, some folks were skeptical. How could anybody fill the shoes of that dean of deep sky observers, Walter Scott Houston? It soon became obvious Sue could. Not only is she a gifted writer, she has a personal vision of the deep sky and the talent to communicate that to her readers.

Sue's new book, Deep-Sky Wonders, is a collection of 100 of her best sky-tours. How is it? They (you know, THEM) say you can’t judge a book by its cover. This is one time they are wrong. The cover of this large format hardback is beautiful. So are the pages inside. It’s the words that count, though, and Sue’s sure have what it takes. If you love the deep sky, you will love Deep-Sky Wonders. Go out and get a copy right now, muchachos. I insist.

Shameless Plug Department: Do you look forward to Sky and Telescope's Skywatch "annual" every year? I do. Even when I am not in it. Skywatch is an excellent mix of general interest and beginner-oriented articles with a cherry on top, handy all-sky charts and "what's up" guides for the coming year. But I am in Skywatch again this year with an article on beginning astrophotography, and it would not hurt my feelings nor, I'm sure, the feelings of the good folk at S&T if you ran out and bought a copy or three. I am not kidding when I say Skywatch makes a great Christmas gift for your astro-friends.

Next time: I’ve got some cool stuff lined up for y’all over the next two-three weeks. I hope to get out and do a little DSLR imaging despite a sea trial in the offing. Even cooler? I’ve finally got my hot little hands on an astronomy program I’ve wanted to look at for a long time, Phyllis Lang’s famous Deep Sky Planner.

The Christmas Telescope

2011-10-23T08:18:00.000-06:00

We’re approaching the end of October, muchachos, which now marks the beginning of the Christmas season. Which for you and me is more than just ho-ho-ho and mistletoe and presents to pretty girls. It is also the coming of Christmas telescope season. Some of your friends and family will get one; maybe this Christmas. When they do, they will be full of questions, questions they will direct your way. You are the TELESCOPE GURU, after all.

Need I explain what I mean by “Christmas telescope”? Prob’ly not. I’m guessing every amateur knows what I am talking about. I don’t just mean “a telescope you get for Christmas,” but that most maligned member of the telescope tribe, the department store scope (DSS). One of those shiny 60mm refractors you admired in the big store downtown way back when, one bearing a logo that read “Tasco” or “Jason” or “Sears” or “J.C. Penney.” The DSS is still alive and kicking, if slightly bruised and battered and now mostly found in Wal-Mart (locally).

Whoever makes ‘em, Department Store Scopes share some common characteristics: they are relatively inexpensive, they are imported, and, most of all, they are sold by anyone but astronomy dealers (usually). There have always been Newtonian reflectors in their ranks, often 4.5-inch f/8 jobs, and there have been a few 3-inch and larger refractors, but most DSSes have been 60mm refractors. Many of the early ones, especially the more expensive models, were at focal ratios of f/15 - f/16, while those from the 80s and on tend to be considerably faster, closer to f/10.

DSS Mounts have varied over the years, but until recently the best of the breed were on EQ-2 sized German equatorials. On the lower end of the price scale there were small fork alt-azimuth mounts—often used with sub 60-mm refractors and sub 4-inch reflectors. Over the last five years or so, most of the GEMs have disappeared, and the majority of scopes are now on alt-azimuth mounts, often single-arm forks equipped with electronics like (rudimentary) digital setting circles.

What besides a scope and a mount was in that mind-blowing, psychedelic 60s box? In the hey-day of the DSS, the accessories could be lavish, if quality was sacrificed for quantity. Most scopes shipped with two or three eyepieces, a Barlow, a Sun projection screen (or a dangerous solar filter), sometimes there was an illuminator for the tripod accessory tray, and most had a finder scope of some kind—Unk’s 3-inch Tasco Newt came with a sorry looking peep sight. It’s about the same today. The bad, old Sun filters are gone, but there is lots of other junk in the box to play with.

Most of the stories about dreadful DSS accessories concern how terrible their eyepieces are. That’s true, though usually the longest focal length ones have been at least bearable, and through the early 80s the more expensive DSSes (like the best Sears refractors) had pretty good .965 oculars. The Barlow lenses? Fuhgeddabout it. Those plastic-barreled horrors have never been any good. Their sole purpose? To get your 2.4-inch scope up to the 600x trumpeted on the box.

A close second in badness to eyepieces is the DSS finder. Even forty years ago, finder scopes were way too small. The best you could expect would be a 23 - 25mm job, too small even for a 60-mm scope. As the years went on, finders became ever smaller, eventually devolving into pitiful things with tiny single-element objectives fitted with masks to aperture them down even more (to keep them from turning into a kaleidoscopes). Surprisingly, back in the 60s – 70s the Tascos and Jasons weren’t the only offenders. Their very expensive cousin, the Unitron 60mm, had a way-too-small finder too.

If DSSes old and new have had a single strength, it has been their optics. You may have heard folks say replacing the scopes’ eyepieces improves performance a lot. That is true. Most refractor objectives were and are surprisingly good, showing very little color at their typically slow focal ratios. The mirrors of the reflectors have always been spherical, but they have often been very good spheres and perform well at the accustomed f/8 focal ratio. A couple of new eyepieces, a decent finder (or a zero-power sight), and a 1960s through 1980s DSS may amaze. You-all may have noticed I keep mentioning those three decades as the salad days of the Department Store Scope. What’s up with that?

There had been small telescopes for sale to the public long before the 1960s, but they were usually insanely expensive. They were most assuredly not mass-market items. That changed post World War II for three reasons: the Baby Boom generation of kids was ready to be entertained and educated, the space race was on and Mom and Pop wanted their kids to learn science, and Japan was hell-bent on developing an optical industry.

The first telescopes to be widely marketed to children were not from Japan, but from the U.S. of A., from A.C. Gilbert. Alfred Gilbert’s company made things that could be described as toys, I reckon, but they were toys of a different sort, toys made, like Gilbert’s famous chemistry sets, to educate sprouts about the ways of the scientist. With Sputnik soaring overhead, Mr. Gilbert decided to bring astronomy as well as chemistry to the children of America.

The Gilbert 2-inch Newtonian reflector turned a lot of us Boomers on to astronomy. If there had not been an A.C. Gilbert telescope, Stephanie’s telescope, I suspect it would have taken considerably longer for me to find my way into astronomy. These simple instruments and similar ones from Skilcraft and others showed that kids (and maybe their parents) were ready for astronomy. People noticed that, including businessman George Rosenfield, the owner of the Tanross Supply Company of Miami, Florida.

A lot of folks have wrong ideas about Tasco. I know I did when I was a sprout. Me and my astronomy-crazy buddies knew Tasco telescopes came from Japan, and “Tasco” sounded vaguely Japanese, so we assumed Tasco was a Japanese company not far removed from those stamping out tin toys from cast-off G.I. tin cans. Nope. Japanese industry, and in particular their optical industry, was well beyond the tin can stage by the early 1960s, advancing by leaps and bounds. Even in the early 50s, Nikon was turning out cameras and lenses that were amazingly good. Many famous Japanese optical houses found their feet at this time, but Tasco was not one of them.

Tasco—TAnross Supply COmpany—was George Rosenfield’s resolutely American company. They never, ever made a cotton pickin’ thing, either. Tasco was an importer. What makes them important to the amateur astronomy story in the second half of the twentieth century is that George decided there was a market for telescopes and began bringing in some real good ones.

Real good ones? Ain’t “Tasco” synonymous with “crap”? Read “The Good Tasco” if you like, but the bottom line is that while, yes, Tasco did import some junky telescopes, they also sold some excellent ones, including most of their GEM mounted refractors and the famous “11T/11TR” 4.5-inch Newtonians. Hell, even the cheapest 60s Tascos would likely be considered pretty darned high in quality today. While my 3-inch reflector was kinda punk optically, it included a strong wooden tripod, a decent focuser, and no plastic anywhere.

The secret to this goodness was that George bought the products of renowned (today) Japanese companies like Royal Optical and Goto and Towa. Were any of these scopes as good as what U.S. companies like Cave and Unitron were selling in Sky and Telescope? With the exception of Tasco’s magnificent 4-inch 20TE “Observatory” refractor and the only slightly less magnificent 10TE, neither of which you were likely to find in your town’s Big Store, probably not.

Tasco’s emphasis was on small apertures, 4.5-inch reflectors and smaller and 3-inch (only a few of those) refractors and smaller. But these scopes were not as expensive as the American stuff, either, and you could trot down to the corner Sears or Monkey Wards and get one and be observing that very night. Good luck with that if you chose a Cave.

Tasco telescopes started a lot of young folk on the road to an amateur (or professional) astronomy career. Hell, I was mightily impressed by the 4.5-inch Tasco Newtonian I bought in an Air Force Base Exchange in the mid 1970s. I had to admit it was well made and performed well, even if it was not perfect (never did like them little .965 eyepieces), and was quite a value. Tasco continued to thrive, importing plenty of good telescopes for over twenty years. What happened after twenty years? H-A-L-L-E-Y.

Tasco had always had some competition in the telescope market. Sears and Penney’s were bringing in scopes and putting their brand-names on them, and there was another Tasco-like importer doing the same thing in a big way by the late 60s, Jake Levin’s “Jason/Jason Empire.” These companies coexisted, though, all selling similar telescopes for similar prices. Quality was still a concern, and nobody seemed out to seriously undercut anybody else.

That changed with the coming of Halley’s Comet and the growth of the Taiwanese optical industry. As the 80s began, anyone selling telescopes realized the comet was a potential gold mine. Everybody would want a scope, and the fact that you could now buy telescopes from Taiwan meant you could get a lot of telescopes and you could get them cheaply. That’s what all the importers began doing, including Tasco.

The early to mid 80s were a golden age for the DSS. At first, quality remained reasonably high, and the flourishing of big box jewelry stores like Service Merchandise gave Tasco and Jason the perfect place to peddle their wares. No doubt these two sold a lot of scopes during the comet’s run, but when the unimpressive Halley passed, the spigot quickly shut off.

Faced with ever more need to economize, “Chinese” became the norm for the importers, and quality began to decline precipitously. It got noticeably worse at Tasco after Mr. Rosenfield’s retirement and the sale of his company, and quickly went beyond ever cheaper accessories to the plastification of the telescopes. So it was with all the DSS importers. Everything that could be plastic instead of metal was plastic. If a part was still metal, it was the cheapest casting possible.

Where are we today? Tasco is still around, though they have been bought and sold a couple of times. I haven’t seen a Jason in a long time, but they are also apparently alive. J.C. Penney and Sears? You can still buy telescopes from Sears, though they are usually only available online at Sears.com. Last time I checked, J.C. Penney sold no telescopes of any kind, online or offline. The DSSes Sears sells are no longer branded with their name, and are an assortment of the good, the bad, and the ugly from Bushnell, Tasco, Celestron, and Meade.

Bushnell, by the way, ain’t the Bushnell of old. Like Tasco, their name has been bought and sold several times. They, along with Jason and Tasco, are now all the property of an equity firm, “Mid Ocean Partners.” Which doesn’t really mean pea-turkey, since all the brands are and always have been nothing more than badges pasted on imported telescopes. The key to the goodness or badness of the scopes is what these companies choose to import at any given time.

Celestron and Meade, and especially Meade with its “DS” series (I wonder what those letters stand for?), have been major players in the DSS game for almost two decades. Over the last four or five years I’ve seen fewer of their DSS models sold locally, though. Maybe because of economic conditions, and maybe because the “science stores” like Discovery Channel Store, which were a prime outlet for lower level Ms and Cs, have all gone out of business. Meade and Celestron DSS range scopes are still common at online retailers, though.

There is, I was surprised to notice, one new player in the DSS game. Ioptron, the Minitower/Cube mount folks, are not just peddling Cubes paired with minimalist OTAs on eBay; they are selling genuine Department Store Scopes, 60mm GEM-mounted refractors in your choice of red or blue paintjobs, in various online venues. How do they look? Remarkably like the GEM refractors of twenty-five years ago.

Ioptron’s entering the Department Store Scope bidness is about the only news I have to relate this year. Tasco and Bushnell are sputtering along, but seem to be offering fewer scopes this season. The quality of these scopes, while not at an all time low, is nothing to write home about, either. There is still way too much plastic and too much of the production budget goes into modern gimcracks like digital setting circles and go-to that rarely work—even poorly. Optically, not much has changed. The objectives and mirrors are still mostly OK; it is the everything-else that sucks if anything sucks.

If there’s bad news about DSSes this Christmas, it’s that their makers and importers are continuing their love affair with short tube reflectors, long focal length Newtonians with short tubes. What they do to achieve that is furnish the scopes with fast f/4 mirrors and install “corrective lenses” in the focusers. Problem is that these fast mirrors are still spherical and the corrective lenses are just cheap and crappy Barlows. The combination, not surprisingly, results in absolutely horrible images.

Want a really bad scope? Welcome to the wonderful world of eBay astronomy. If there are heirs to the worst of the 90s crew, you can find them on the ‘Bay. A tip-off as to their badness is that what is often most prominently advertised is not their design or aperture, but their tube color: “red telescope,” “blue telescope,” etc. Not only are they usually worse than the worst of the Wally World bunch, you will pay considerably more for them after ponying-up outrageous shipping fees. Want the straight poop? Read the Cloudy Nights review my friend Jon Isaacs wrote about a “Baytronix” short tube reflector.

With the depression (I ain’t afraid to say it) still on, the market for DSS telescopes has been much reduced the last couple of years. There were no Christmas scopes at our Wal-Mart last year, and I have not seen any there this year—yet. So far, the DSSes I have seen have been in drugstores and sporting goods stores and have been distinctly on the low end of the price/quality scale. I saw minimalist 60mm refractors in the Chiefland, Florida CVS Drugs last Christmas, and discovered a brace of ‘em in the Possum Swamp CVS this past weekend. I also spotted several little 50 - 60mm fellers prominently displayed in the front of the local Academy Sporting Goods. But that has been about it.

Wherever they come from and in whatever numbers, there will be DSSes this year. Like the Whos’ Christmas, they will come ANYWAY. And you will be called upon to help with them. While there’s little that can be done to improve the lowest of the low, the 20 dollar 50mm scopes, most DSSes, e’en today’s somewhat debased breed, can be helped.

What do you say when a novice brings you one? What you do NOT say is, “Well, that’s junk. Here’s an Orion catalog; I’ll help you pick a real telescope.” It may be appropriate to dispense that catalog when (and if) it is time for Jane Novice to upgrade, but, for now, hold your peace. How would you like it if someone pronounced your beloved scope “junk”? Joe Novice will feel exactly the same. Maybe even moreso. That clumsy telescope may have been wished for and dreamed about for weeks and weeks.

What you do say when presented with even the crummiest DSS is “Great! You’ll have a lot of fun with it. I can show you how to use it, and we can tune it up a little to make it easier to use.” And that is the truth. When I was a kid, an humble Gilbert, which could show the craters of the Moon and the rings of Saturn, if only dimly, would have been incredibly wonderful to me. And even the cheapest Wal-Mart refugee of today can do those things better than that 60mm cardboard tube Newtonian could.

To paraphrase one of my heroes, Linus van Pelt, “It's not a bad telescope at all, really. Maybe it just needs a little love.” What do most DSSes need in addition to love? Glad you asked…

Eyepieces

Oculars are the place to begin. While the longer focal length eyepieces shipped with a DSS can be workable, they are certainly not optimum, and the shorter f/l ones generally have nearly zero eye relief, tiny eye lenses, and poor optics. The DSS makers are still sticking to the tried and true of their trade: Kellners if you are lucky, Huygenians if you are not. There is one light in the forest, though. Many DSSes now have 1.25-inch focusers. With good .965 oculars a rarity, you can now upgrade to 1.25-inch eyepieces without resort to replacement focusers or hybrid diagonals.

What to replace ‘em with? Ideally, with a couple of the cheap Plossls you’ve got squirreled away in the back of a drawer. How many? Start Jane off with two, maybe a 25mm and a 12mm. If you’re doing your job correctly, Jane and Joe Novice should understand they don’t need high power and why. If they seem doubtful, crank it up with the plastic Barlow and 4mm eyepiece that came with the scope. What if you don’t have any spare eyepieces to give out? Chinese Plossls are cheap and good. My fave loss leaders are Gary Hand’s GTO Plossls, which can be had for less than 30 bucks a pop. You can likely undercut that at a swap table at a star party or on the Astromart.

Focuser

If the focuser has so much slop and shift it’s impossible to get the image sharp and keep it centered, you need to fix it. That can often be as simple as tweaking adjustment screws. Do be careful, since most DSS focuser bodies are plastic. At worst, you might have to install some shims. If not sure what to do, enquire with an ATM buddy.

Tripod

Right after poor eyepieces, the number one offense of DSSes is that their mounts are too shaky. Let’s fix that starting with the tripod. Once upon a time, Department Store Scopes came with wooden tripods that were usually OK. Today, extruded aluminum is the norm. When properly done, aluminum tripods can be fine, but they are, natch, rarely done properly in the DSS. What to do? Start out by tightening all the hardware, especially anything associated with the accessory tray. Don’t strip any bolts and be careful to leave anything loose that needs to be loose for proper operation. One way to make a huge improvement is to replace the accessory tray with a triangular piece of plywood firmly attached to the legs. Downside is that the tripod will no longer be collapsible—but the improvement will be worth it.

Often just tightening bolts provides a real steadiness increase, but if not you can try filling the legs of an extruded aluminum tripod with sand or some other material. But that is a pain and usually doesn’t make much difference. What will make a difference is vibration suppression pads—like those Celestron and Orion sell. With one under each tripod foot, the scope will be much steadier. Unfortunately, a set is 50 dollars or more, but you can gain at least some of the same benefits using things like hockey pucks or bathtub drain stoppers under the tripod legs. If the tripod is tall enough for your apprentice astronomer to use comfortably with the legs retracted, you might instruct her to always observe without extending the legs, which will always make the scope steadier.

Mount Head

Whether GEM or alt-az, make sure all hardware is tight and that the head is firmly attached to the tripod. What else? Depending on the size/sturdiness of the mount, fill either a gallon or quart milk jug with some water and suspend it from the bottom of the mount head. That will do a lot to reduce vibration. If slow motions are too tight or too loose, adjust gear mesh so they are easy, but without too much backlash. You won’t get it perfect; “good enough” is good enough.

How about electronics? If you can get DSCs or go-to working reasonably well and can show your novice how to do the same, OK. If not, tell your buddy to forget about that stuff for now. Instead of agonizing over a gadget that will, at best, only get “kinda close” to objects, encourage your Padawan Learner to use the scope manually.

The OTA (tube)

If the telescope is a Newtonian, collimate it and be SURE to show the owner exactly how to do that, too. Unless the telescope is one of the nasty little short tube reflectors (which are often impossible to collimate), collimation is not difficult. Mirror alignment is not too critical at f/8, but every little bit helps.

Is the scope a refractor? Check its collimation by observing the diffraction rings of a slightly out of focus star. A lens scope will often be OK, but not always. If not, collimate it. Unfortunately, the objective cells on most DSS refractors do not include collimation adjustments, but you can still collimate. Loosen the screws that hold the tailpiece/focuser to the tube and move as needed to make the diffraction rings concentric, retightening the screws when done. Usually the screw holes in the tube will be large enough to allow sufficient tweaking.

Finally, put a decent finder on the scope. My choice for beginners is a zero power sight. If the tube is too small to accommodate a Telrad (the best), a Rigel Quickfinder or one of the red-dot sights like those sold by Orion is almost as good. Having a right-side-up, non-magnified view will make aiming so much easier for your “client.”

What else? The usual things. Set your Padawan up with a set of star charts—maybe the computer programs Cartes du Ciel and Stellarium—and a planisphere and show her/him how to find good stuff. Make sure the idea of using a red light at the scope is understood, and give or make your apprentice one. Also give Joe or Jane a good beginner’s book, or at least the title of a good one. Caution about cleaning optics (in other words, DON’T), and then…and then… You might give the novice a check ride under the stars, but mostly it is time to let your little bird fly.

Don’t be discouraged if it turns out your novice’s interest in astronomy was a fleeting thing. When it comes to being an amateur, many are called but few are chosen. It’s a special type of experience, and one that requires real work. If you did your job right, though, it’s possible the owner of that Christmas scope will be coming to you next year for advice about a REAL TELESCOPE.

Even if that does not happen, many of these much-maligned telescopes have long and productive lives. They may not get used every night or even once a month, but they do get used when their owners suddenly have the yen for Moon craters or Saturn’s rings or Jupiter’s Moons again. I am tempted to say there is no such thing as a bad telescope; even the most humble and silliest can open a young person’s eyes for the first time. I don’t grumble about the little scopes in the gaudy boxes at the front of Wal-Mart anymore. I welcome them every Christmas.

Next time: The Herschel Project rolls on.

My Favorite Star Parties: Peach State Star Gaze 2001

2011-10-16T07:12:00.009-06:00

I planned to bring you an observing article this week; one about DSLR imaging with the Atlas/EQMOD, or maybe about a Herschel Project run with the Stellacam. ‘Twas not to be. The first Saturday of the month’s dark of the Moon window was resolutely clouded out. On the second Saturday, Unk was onboard LPD22 for her sea trials in the Gulf. We were scheduled to get in Saturday morning, so I had some hope, but, naturally, events fell behind schedule, and it was after dark before we pulled back into port.

Not that there wasn’t anything astro-related going on. Miss Dorothy and I traveled to Pensacola, Florida to the excellent Escambia Amateur Astronomers’ Association for telescope guru Doc Clay Sherrod’s annual talk. Miss Dorothy and I had a great time visiting with my old friend Clay and his wife, Patsy, and listening to yet another of Doc’s amazing presentations, “Doc Clay’s Delorean Time Machine.” The EAAA is a great club, and Miss D. and I always appreciate their generous hospitality. Wish your coulda been there. But, no, we didn’t do any observing. Not e’en a look at Jupiter with the Starblast, muchachos.

So, today will be the beginning of a new series. What I mean by “my favorite star parties,” by the way, is my favorite individual outings, not my favorite events. I love the Texas Star Party and think in some ways it is The Greatest, but I have actually had better nights at Chiefland, and at the Deep South Regional Star Gaze, and at the subject this time, Georgia’s Peach State Star Gaze (PSSG).

It takes more than great skies to make a star party especially memorable. How good a time I have is often affected by what else is going on. When work is super stressful, getting down to Chiefland is super special. The 2001 edition of the (old) Peach State Star Gaze came right after a date that will, like 12/7/1941, live in infamy: 9/11/2001. If ever I and everybody else needed to de-stress, that was the time, and PSSG seemed like the perfect way to do it.

If the star party went on as scheduled. PSSG registrants were quickly informed via email that it would indeed. Since I work in the defense industry, I did wonder if I’d be able to take a few days off. Turned out I could. The shipyard was revamping and enhancing security and they did not want us around. So PSSG 2001 was G-O. The only problem would be for anyone who intended to fly in for the event; the air travel system was still at All Stop.

I bet most of you Johnny Reb amateur astronomers know all about Peach State—hell, I’d guess a lot of you Yanks know about the star party held at Georgia’s equivalent of the Chiefland Astronomy Village, the Deerlick Astronomy Village. Well, that’s not the PSSG I am talking about; I am talking about its twice-removed ancestor, the original Peach State, held at Indian Springs State Park near Jackson, Georgia.

Back in the early 1990s, key members of the Atlanta Astronomy Club, including the current editor of The Strolling Astronomer (ALPO), Ken Poshedly, began asking themselves why there was no star party in Georgia. I’ve often asked myself the same thing about Alabama, but Georgia’s lack of a star party was even more curious. Seemed strange a state that’s home to an astronomy club as large and active as the AAC didn’t have a big event to call its own. “Kenpo” and company set out to change that starting in 1994.

The original home of the PSSG had pluses and minuses. A big plus was the state park where the event was held. Indian Springs was adjacent to a beautiful lake and was possessed of a slightly-larger-than-football-field sized open area for observing, a large dining hall/auditorium perfect for star party talks and meals, another building that served equally well as a vendors’ hall, and fairly modern, clean cabins. The small town of Jackson, Georgia was only a few miles away—close enough to make its stores and restaurants a good resource, but far enough away to make its light dome a non-factor.

Course, like any site, there were the downers, too. While the field was nice, it was barely large enough to accommodate the Atlanta crowd, and as the reputation of the PSSG began to spread and it began to attract observers from Alabama and Tennessee, astronomers were packed in like consarned sardines.

There was the sky condition, too. Jackson, Georgia is only about 50 miles from Atlanta, not far enough to disperse the huge light dome of that megalopolis. That was not fatal, though, since the worst of the light pollution was confined to the northwestern sky, an area of relatively little interest. And, thankfully, Atlanta’s light dome petered out quickly as it approached 30-degrees of altitude. As I have often said, it’s worth it to me to put up with less than perfect skies for a site with wonderful amenities like Indian Springs.

Back in the early years of the last decade I was teaching my university astronomy lab two-nights a week, one of which was Wednesday. I planned to leave bright and early Thursday morning, but by the time I finished stuffing the sprouts’ heads with astronomical knowledge, I was too tired to do much packing. I did manage to drag some of my astro-stuff into the front parlor. Thursday morning I double-checked the gear checklist, loaded the fairly substantial pile into my 1996 Camry, and hit I-65 a little after seven.

My 1995 Ultima C8, Celeste, would be the primary instrument for this expedition, but on a whim I threw my still relatively new Celestron Short Tube 80 refractor into the backseat. I’d bought a simple and somewhat crude but very economical and very useable piggyback bracket for the little scope from Ken Dauzat, and I wanted to see what the 80 would do under PSSG’s fairly dark skies. The few times I’d had “Woodstock” out of the city, the 80mm f/5 had performed amazingly well; the North America Nebula was a treat in the refractor’s wide, wide field.

This was in the days before I embraced go-to, and Celeste was on her original large fork mount and in her original large case, so she took up a substantial amount of space in the trunk. Add various eyepiece and equipment boxes, a tent canopy, an observing table, an ice chest, and numerous other necessities (no laptop in those days), and the Toyota was on the full side. Since Miss Dorothy was unable to attend, I could be a little sloppy with my packing to save time, letting the overflow flow into the passenger seat.

The trip from the Swamp to Indian Springs is about equal in length to the trip to Chiefland, Florida, six - six-and-a-half hours, and without the lovely Miss D. to talk to, I had to find something to occupy my mind. I listened to the 9-11 news on NPR for an hour or so, until I just couldn’t stand no more, and started a book-on-tape (really on tape back then), Michael White’s Newton, the Last Sorcerer. Ten cassettes would be about right for the trip up and back, and if it were good, it would make the trip go much faster. It was good. I still remember the book vividly ten years down the line and recommend it highly.

I wasn’t in a huge hurry, since the field would not (supposedly) open till 1 p.m., so I stopped off at one of me and D’s traditions, the Stuckey’s just south of Montgomery. Hell, y’all know me: if there is the remotest possibility of a fried chicken biscuit for breakfast, I will make time for it. After gorging myself—hey, I had a glass of orange juice to make breakfast "healthy"—it was back in the Camry for the run into Georgia on I-85.

Before long, I was taking the first Newnan exit for the last 100 mile leg of the trip. It took a little longer than I thought it would, since I got behind every dadgum farm pickup truck and tractor in central Georgia, but eventually the narrow two lane highways gave way to improved roads as I approached Jackson, which is just about smack in the middle of the state.

Jackson was a little town that was hanging on somehow. Its old and picturesque main street had obviously suffered some decades of economic hard times, but it looked like new life was stirring, with the town hotel being renovated. I’d heard retirees from Atlanta were moving south, and that, I thought, might help this still clean small town.

Using the driving directions I’d printed off the Auburn (Alabama) Astronomy Club’s excellent website, I had no trouble at all finding PSSG. This wasn’t my first visit, which helped, but if you could get to Indian Springs, which wasn’t hard, you could get to the star party site, which was held in a section of the park referred to as “Camp Macintosh.”

I pulled up at the main building, picked up my information/registration packet and T-shirt from the uber organized staff, and took a look at the observing field. Rut-roh. I had wondered if the attendance would be as large as normal due to the events of 9-11. Was it ever. At 1 p.m. the observing field was packed. Which teed off Unk a little bit. One of the few criticisms I had of the old PSSG was that they apparently did not enforce their rule that the observing field would not open till afternoon on the first day. At least they did not enforce it for everyone.

It was catch as catch can field-position-wise, with me securing a spot on the southwest side on a semi-slope. That was OK in that it gave me good access to objects coming up in the east and provided some shade from the still fierce Georgia afternoon Sun. It pretty much denied me the sinking southern wonders of summer, however. With close to 250 folks in attendance, even if I’d got there earlier, I probably wouldn’t have been able to do much better.

Got everything unpacked, C8 assembled, tent canopy up, and paid a visit to my cabin. While this was an open bay arrangement, a large room with about ten beds, it was clean and so was the bathroom. As usual, I didn’t worry about bedclothes, just plopped a sleeping bag down on the bearable G.I. bunk.

How did I spend the remaining hours till darkness? Wandering the field, visiting old AAC friends, hanging out with the Possum Swamp AS and Auburn AS members who’d made the trip up, and having “eyeball QSOs,” meeting in person for the first time with several members of my SCT User Yahoogroup, which, like the other many Yahoo astro-groups, was going strong a decade ago, before the Cloudy Nights discussion groups began to take over.

What was on the field besides nice folks? Not too many new scopes. The usual mix of Meade LX200s, Big Dobs, Celestron SCTs old and young, a few APO refractors, some classics, and an Ultima 2000 C8 or two. This was during a lull in the astro-biz, just as the new generation of go-to SCTs was aborning. The NexStars were around, but not in any numbers, and Meade hadn’t shown anything new in a while. Just before dark my good buddy Pat called with the hot-off-the-presses news that Meade was discontinuing the much-loved LX200 classic in favor of a new SCT they were calling the LX200 GPS. “Well, I’ll be dogged,” Unk thought.

After touring the field setups for a while, it was time to think about F-O-O-D. At this stage of the game, the PSSG did not offer a regular meal plan. Thankfully, the AAC Women’s Auxiliary (who at the time were calling themselves “The Ladies of the Night” (!)) were selling hotdogs and hamburgers. Commendably, they’d decided to donate the proceeds to the Red Cross that year. A burger and a dog and some of the junk food I’d brought along (Fritos; I had yet to discover the joys of Jack Links), and I was set and ready for darkness.

Yeah, the site was not perfect, whatever that is, but as darkness came on you coulda fooled me. The Summer Milky Way was bright and prominent overhead, and as long as I didn’t look north I almost forgot I was in spitting distance of Hot Lanta.

As I stood gazing at the stars winking on, the horrific events of two days before seemed far away. Until I stopped and realized how different the sky was. Oh, it was no darker than usual, but it was a lot less busy. Jackson is in the glide path of Hartsfield International Airport, and astro-imagers really have to keep an eye peeled for descending airliners. Not on this night. With the airlines still shut down the heavens were spookily empty.

What did I look at on this very nice evening? I’d brought a list printed with Deepsky 2000 (this was before I discovered SkyTools), and the AAC’s deep sky guru/astro-writer, Rich Jakiel, had put together an excellent list to hand out, “Peach Fuzzies.” On this first evening I kept it a little simpler. To start off, I toured the best and brightest of the late summer early fall marvels. Nothing hard—M13, M15, M27, M57, M2, the usual suspects. I was a little weary, but I wanted to see some different stuff too. Since I didn’t feel like spending the night squinting at a star atlas or fussing over my C8’s analog setting circles, I decided I’d do a detailed survey of the Great Andromeda Nebula, M31.

It had been a long time since I’d looked—really looked—at this huge marvel. Like most of ya’ll, I take a quick glance at it once every fall and move on. On this night, I gave it plenty of time and saw one hell of a lot, from its tiny and somehow almost frightening star-like nucleus, to subtle details near the nucleus, to the immense star cloud NGC 206, to two dark lanes, to satellite galaxies M32 and NGC 205. I didn’t stop there. I’d had this project in mind for a while, and had a finder chart that pointed the way to M31’s more prominent globular star clusters. I spotted the brightest of those, G1, with fair ease. It didn’t look like much, just a slightly fuzzy star, but I was gobsmacked to think my humble C8 brought me the globular cluster of another galaxy.

Celeste showed off Andromeda’s details beautifully, but you and I both know this huge thing is best at very low power. That’s one of the reasons I’d decided to toss the ST80 in the car. In the short refractor, M31 really looked like a galaxy. The little scope picked up the dark lanes with amazing ease, and the immense disk seemed to stretch on forever. It was even better than in binoculars, since I could use a variety of magnifications with the Short Tube 80.

After that? The clock was, unbelievably, now ticking on toward 3 a.m. One last look at sinking globular cluster M15 with the C8, where it was glorious, and a peep at it with the Short Tube 80, where it was very good, if not showing even a hint of resolution, and I was ready to pull the Big Switch. Not only was I weary, it was getting chilly and damp and the sky was beginning to close down, with haze moving in.

Scope covered and gear secured, I sat in my lawn chair and toasted the heavens with a Dixie Cup of Rebel Yell, ruminating on the strange constellations of autumn. Yeah, the stars of winter were beckoning, but they would wait. I headed for the warm bunkhouse.

I must have been more tired than I thought, since it was well after 9 a.m. before I finally crawled out of my bunk Friday morning. No need to worry about breakfast, since it was nearly time for lunch by the time I left the cabin. I ran a weather eye over the sky and wasn’t pleased at what I was seeing. The haze that had moved in early that morning had been followed by real clouds. No use worrying about what I couldn’t change. I moseyed on over to the meeting hall.

Following hamburgers, hotdogs, and chips, the programs got underway. The excellent talks more than filled the hours till supper. They were all good, but two that stood out were Rich Jakiel’s presentation on the history of deep sky observing and Art Russell’s talk about the hows and whys of star hopping. Only sad thing? The keynote speaker was to have been legendary celestial cartographer Wil Tirion, but the shutdown of the airlines prevented him from flying in from Europe (he made it to the next year’s PSSG, but that is a story for another time).

During a lull in the presentations, Unk naturally wandered next door to the vendor hall. Usually, the PSSG was host to three or four dealers, but this year only Wolf Camera from Sarasota, Florida showed up. I assumed the events of 9-11 had encouraged some of the usual sellers to stay home. No matter. Wolf’s Chuck Pisa had a lot of nice gear on display. Somehow I resisted buying everything in sight, and confined my purchases to a 2-inch Kendrick heater strip.

By the time I finished shopping, the shadows were lengthening and it was near-about time for supper. The AAC wouldn’t be doing a meal, so I’d need to head into town for some grub. My friends from the Auburn club insisted I just had to try the Fresh Air Barbecue, which was just down the road from the park.

I don’t know if the barbeque there was really “the best in the south” as the Fresh Air claimed, but man was it good. The menu was not extensive, but it was more than sufficient: pork sandwiches, chopped (not pulled) pork, chicken, good sides, some of the best Brunswick stew I have had anywhere in Georgia—which is saying something. I was more than satisfied. I also had the amusing experience of seeing one of my fellow observers from a place well north of Georgia attempt to order mayo on his pork sandwich. I was right behind him in line, and the little counter girl turned to me and said, “What is wrong with him? Is he one of them YANKEES?!”

After this outstanding meal, it was back to the site to wait for dark. When the Sun finally got out of the way, I was hopeful. There were still clouds, but it appeared to be tending to “clearing,” and there were some sizeable sucker holes along the Meridian. I got started in the Cygnus area, doing about a dozen DSOs, including a couple of cool planetaries from Rich’s Peach Fuzzies list I’d never seen before. Alas, the clearing trend began to reverse itself well before midnight, with the last of the holes closing by 11 p.m.

What to do? I wasn’t a bit sleepy and had no intention of turning-in at 11 fracking o’clock. I wandered over to the meeting hall and found a lot of my fellow observers felt the same. I spent the next several hours shooting the breeze with buddies including my old friend Kenpo, drinking coffee, eating Little Debbie cakes and other sugar-laden treats the AAC had laid out, and peeping outside at the sky every few minutes.

About 2 o’clock, I stuck my head out to find the weather had not improved; we were totally socked in. Oh, well. I wandered back onto the field to my picnic canopy, broke out the Yell, had a dollop or three, and headed for the bunkhouse. As frequently happens when Unk throws in the towel, it did clear, but not till after 3:30. By which time I was snoozing heavily. If I had to miss some dark sky time, at least I didn’t miss much.

The weather was much improved when I awoke on Saturday, the last day of PSSG 2001. The heavens were that beautiful shade of blue that spells “deep sky heaven.” The clouds of the previous night had been in advance of a cold front, which had moved through bringing, not just clearing, but blessedly cool temperatures. Thank god, no more roasting in the Georgia Sun.

As afternoon came in, it was time for that star party institution, the raffle. I don’t care if I am at the Peach State Star Gaze or the Idaho Star Party, one thing is a constant: Unk Rod rarely wins a blessed thing. So it was this year, with my chances not being enhanced by the fact that the prize count was down compared to 2000. In 2001, the economy was sputtering a little, though not like it is now, and I assume some prize donors had to cut back.

Walking out of the main building, I was suddenly concerned about the sky again. More clouds, including some of the dreaded high cirrus. This had nothing to do with the front that had moved past; instead it was the remnants of a late-in-the-season tropical storm, Gabrielle, whose clouds had been the source of at least some of our weather problems all along. The good part? The weather reports we were able to pick up on radio were unanimous in insisting the sky would clear. The only question was when.

Supper this evening was off-site again, at a much recommended restaurant, Buckner’s up on the Bucksnort Road (I am not making that up). A bunch of us hopped in cars and convoyed to the restaurant, Unk riding with a fellow Alabamian, my old pal Robert Rock. What did we find when we got there? A clean little restaurant combined with a bluegrass/gospel music hall. There was a long line to get in, so us PSSGers figured we were in for a treat.

Buckner’s chief claim to fame (attested to by many glossy photos), was that they had once hosted Donna Douglas, who played the erstwhile Ellie Mae Clampett of Beverly Hillbillies fame. That seemed about right for this very country place. What was a little odd was the way the food was served. You were plunked down at a big round table with up to a dozen fellow diners. The food was placed on a huge lazy Susan mounted to the table. You served yourself, turning the thing to bring the dish of your desire to you.

What kind of dishes? The food was good old southern country cooking and NOTHING else: fried chicken (really good fried chicken), barbeque, pork chops, ham, greens and other down-home vegetables, lots of cornbread, all washed down with gallons of sweet tea. Pork fat was involved in almost everything, which was cool with me. As Emeril Legasse, whose cooking show was everybody’s fave back then, used to say, “pork fat RULES!” All us southern boys and girls were happy. Even if this was not the fare we ate day-in, day-out, it was still familiar from grandma’s table. I will say that a couple of our northern brothers and sisters were badly puzzled by the cuisine, “What is this green leafy stuff with the CHUNKS in it?!”

Back at Indian Springs and the PSSG, the darned clouds lingered on. Man did they linger. It wasn’t till 11 p.m. that the wind sprang up and began to blow them out. But in short order they were gone, revealing black skies spangled by diamond-hard stars. It was the last night of the star party, and I’d want to get up reasonably early to pack and hit the road, so I pushed the C8 hard, trying to cover as much deep sky ground as possible in the few hours left to me.

The cleanliness of the sky allowed me to see objects and details I’d have thought impossible from this supposedly “average” site. The Crescent Nebula, NGC 6888, which is usually kinda hard for a C8, even from a better location, wasn’t just there; it was exquisitely detailed, especially in my Lumicon OIII filter-equipped 12mm Nagler. SWEET!

The night was getting old now, and the lustrous stars of winter were peeping up over the horizon. Naturally, Celeste and I headed that-a-way. We visited quite a few winter favorites in the time remaining to us, doing a tour of as many of Auriga’s multitudinous open clusters as we could find. The hit on this evening wasn’t a star cluster, though, but a galaxy. Yes, there are galaxies among the winter stars away from the Zone of Avoidance, and NGC 1023 in Perseus was a spectacular one on this night.

At 300x in the surprisingly steady seeing, this usually small SB0 galaxy was large and detailed. What was really cool was the way the distant sprite gave a chilling reminder of the true depth and scope of the Universe. Compared to the galaxy, the clusters in Auriga were my friendly next door neighbors, no more distant than Jackson, Georgia. I looked and looked and looked, trying to drink in as many photons as I could before Big Switch Time. I kept on keeping on till nearly 4 a.m. before pulling that accursed switch.

Somehow, someway I was up at 8:30 to pack and was on the road not much more than an hour later, saying my farewells to beautiful Indian Springs, maybe forever. Why forever? For its 2002 edition, the star party would be moving to a new location, White Water Express up in Tennessee. The field at Indian Springs was cramped, the skies not perfect, and the star party management thought it was time for a change.

That particular change did not last. For a variety of reasons, the Tennessee site was not viable over the long run. One of those reasons was that for non-Atlanta based attendees Tennessee was a little far to go. Several competing fall events like the Chiefland Star Party and the Deep South Regional Star Gaze (the PSSG’s original inspiration) were within that nearly perfect 6 hour driving range. I gave the 2002 PSSG a try, but didn’t return after that. Nice place, and I had a real good time, but just a little too far given skies that were hardly perfect. The event stayed on in Tennessee until 2007, when a more convenient and darker site was found, the Deerlick Astronomy Village, which is not only dark, but much closer to Atlanta.

No, I’ve never been back to Peach State, though if, as planned, Miss Dorothy and I retire to Atlanta, you can bet I will be a PSSGer again. I did make it back to Indian Springs. When the AAC departed, another Georgia club, the Flint River Astronomy Club, began holding a new event, the Georgia Sky View, at Indian Springs. These good folks had me up as a speaker several times, and I hope to get back to that lovely park again some day. Even if I don’t, I have my wonderful memories of PSSG 2001, the year when we all needed a break and got one with good skies and great people.

Next Time: If all goes as planned, I will have words on the new edition of one of the top astronomy computer programs for y’all. If not, we’ll talk about the telescopes the jolly fat man with the white beard—Santa, NOT Bubba down to the club—brings down the chimney.

Eye and Telescope 3.0

2011-10-09T07:30:00.001-06:00

What? Not another article on dadgum software! Yep. In part at least. I want to tell you-all about Eye and Telescope 3, which is now available in the good old U.S. of A. after what seemed like an interminable wait. I said most of what need be said about this excellent soft in my full review in Astronomy Technology Today magazine (Volume 4, Number 1) and a blog article nearly two years ago, but there are a few loose ends to tie up. The other part? It’s fall and time for the Possum Swamp Astronomical Society’s Autumn Public Sky Watch, so, yep, my yearly paen to public outreach.

Let’s talk about E&T first. What is Eye and Telescope, anyhow? It’s a planner. Y’all know how I preach the benefits of planning-type astronomy software, so I was predisposed to like it from the get-go. For those of us who engage in big observing projects, or who just want to see a lot of good stuff instead of the same old things every night (“Seen M13, seen M27, seen M57; reckon I’ll call it a night.”) the planners, which are essentially giant databases with provisions for making log entries, and even drawing charts, are just the ticket. With an organized list, you have a plan, and you see much more than you would by wandering aimlessly across the sky.

But Y’all heard all that last week. What’s new this week is that we now have another very good planner (for Windows) that’s stable and fast and attractive and which you can buy for a song—$75.00 (from Cambridge University Press). In some ways Eye and Telescope is like last week’s subject, AstroPlanner, or any other planning program, but it brings its own features and paradigms to the table. For the straight poop, the minutiae on Eye and Telescope, go back and read the blog article in the link above. The program is still in v3.0, and everything I said there still applies. Just want the short and sweet? Hokay: here ‘tis…

I reckon I was aware Thomas Pfleger had E&T’s publishing/distribution difficulties sorted, finally, but I hadn’t thought much about his program in a couple of years. Not till one recent afternoon when a package dropped through Chaos Manor South’s mail slot with a thump, scaring the cats and getting my attention. Opening the thing revealed Eye and Telescope in its new English-language garb with a (short) English manual. What did I do? I immediately grabbed the netbook and set about installing the program.

Why in tarnation did I have to install the cotton pickin’ thing again? It’s still in v3.0, the same version I received two annums ago. Because the computer where E&T resided, my much-loved Toshiba Satellite, died from a smoky failure of the internal section of its power supply in the interim. Also, I figured that if the program ran good on my modest Asus netbook, it would run good on anything. Finally, I wanted to refresh my memory on the install process.

Which is simple. All you gotta do is slap the E&T DVD (there’s only one) into your optical drive—an outboard USB one in the case of my netbook—and mash “OK” to begin. You then click through the usual installer dialogs: where, how much, etc., and you are done. One thing I didn’t recall? That the install is slow—fifteen minutes or so. The long waits are for the Hubble Guide Star Catalog to load and for 9,000 deep sky images to be transferred. The length of my wait may have had a lot to do with having to use a USB DVD drive instead of the speedier onboard one of the Toshiba, since I don’t remember being kept waiting so long when I loaded the program on the old laptop.

Despite the long install time, E&T ran very well once it was on the hard drive. It was substantially quicker to start than last week’s subject, AstroPlanner, and any function seemed snappier in E&T than it did in AP. On the other hand, Eye and Telescope doesn’t quite have the feature set of AstroPlanner, and certainly not the wealth of catalog data, and I’d expect a somewhat slimmer program to run better. It’s a trade-off, in other words. Nevertheless, I appreciated Eye and Telescope’s impressive speed on my modest astro-puter.

Once the program is installed, you click on the cute little icon it’s put on your desktop and proceed to doing what you do with every astro-ware the first time out, entering user data: location, time, date, etc. Actually, before you do that you have to get rid of the help window the program launches automatically at startup (which you can, thankfully, turn off in the Options menu). You also have to register the program. If you don’t want to do that right away, you can run E&T in unlicensed mode (with only the Messier catalog available), but you might as well get 'er done.

The program serial number is found on the back of the slim instruction manual, but you must also input a license number. There was a sheet of paper in the DVD case that had my data on it, but I suspect most users will have to get their number off the program’s online registration website. As I noted in my original review, the process is a little annoying—it took me several tries to get the LONG serial number, which includes both upper and lower case characters and which is case sensitive—input correctly. But, hey, you only have to do it once.

When you’re done, go to the User Info menu on the toolbar and tell the program about your site’s (or sites’) location and time zone. A couple of cautions here. First, latitude and longitude need to be entered in degrees and decimal minutes—30.5 instead of 30d 30’, for example—and you have to go to the Options window to set your daylight savings status. The former is not much of a problem, but the latter is something of a pain in the butt. Not because you have to leave the site screen to set it, but because, as far as I can tell, you have to turn DST on/off manually when it comes in/goes out of effect. I wish all programs would give you the option to read/use the computer’s time/zone/DST. Oh, well.

I suppose I was more impressed by E&T this time out than I was at first blush in 2009. A major reason for that was that I still remembered how it does things. While I hadn’t used the soft in a while, I knew about its take on observing lists. There are, confusingly at first, two kinds: You have Plans and you have Projects. Plans are for short lists, small collections of objects you want to visit on any given evening or weekend. Projects are for large lists like the vaunted Herschel Project.

How about go-to? The program uses ASCOM, so it should be able to deal with almost any scope. “Should.” AstroPlanner should have been able to work with the EQMOD driver for my Atlas mount, but it couldn’t. While I haven’t tested Eye and Telescope with EQMOD in the field, I was relieved when a quick test with the EQMOD simulator went well. I believe E&T will work splendidly with that special program. Only nit? Eye and Telescope does not have a go-to button on the toolbar. To send the telescope to its target, you right click on an object and choose “go-to” from the menu that appears.

No, Eye and Telescope does not have extensive charting facilities, but the maps it generates look good, and, most importantly, work well. I was never kept waiting for charts to draw. If these charts are not enough, the program will, like AstroPlanner, work in concert with external planetarium programs like Cartes du Ciel, TheSky, Starry Night, and many more.

I often find it useful to look at an image of my target object, especially when I am going after the uber faint stuff, and E&T has that covered. While the program cannot download Digitized Sky Survey Images (why not, Mr. Thomas?), its collection of nearly 9,000 pictures will make that less necessary than it would otherwise have been.

Final verdict on E&T 3.0? I like it just as much now as I liked it the first time I ran it. And my wants for it remain the same. I’d like a dedicated button on the toolbar to send the scope on go-tos, and another one to access the ASCOM connect/setup dialog. While the program features lots of objects, over 100,000 (mostly galaxies, natch), I’d like even more catalogs. Finally, I’d like lots of ready-made observing lists available for download. Mr. Pfleger now has several posted on his website, including the H-400, but there needs to be many more. I would guess that if the program catches on, users will take care of that.

Also available on Thomas’ site is the beta of E&T version 3.2. I loaded this up and it ran great. I haven’t used it much yet, so I’m not sure what is different about it, but it seems ready for prime time given my brief tests.

Getting a program working is one thing; using it is another. I decided I’d generate an observing list with Eye and Telescope for the PSAS’ fall public Sky Watch. Nothing fancy, four or five bright Messiers like the Ring and the Dumbbell. I chose to use the “plan” function rather than the “project” mode for such a short list. I wouldn’t take the computer into the field, either; instead, I’d rely on a print-out.

As I noted in my initial reviews of E&T, that’s where the Plan bidness really shines. You don’t print your list per se. Instead, you export it as an .html file. That sounds weird, I know—that’s what I thought at first, too—but it ain’t weird; it is wonderful if you don’t want to tote a computer. Open the resulting .html file (with your web browser), and you’ll find not just a list of objects, but detailed data on each, numerous pictures, and more. That came in handy at the Sky Watch for help in answering the little folks’ numerous questions.

List in hand, it was time to gird my loins for the dreaded (by some) public outreach. I’m not going to talk your ears off about the whys of public star parties, since I did that just a little while back, but I would like to spend some time on the hows if’n you don’t mind.

Come star party day, allow yourself plenty of set up time. I usually arrive on site about 45-minutes beforehand. Why? At most public events, you’ll find your guests will begin to trickle in well before the published start time. Our Fall Event was scheduled for 7 p.m., but, sure enough, excited little folk and their parents began to show up by 6:30. You’ll find it much easier to set up before they get there; it’s hard to remember what goes where and hooks to what when you are fielding a constant stream of questions like “Is that a telescope,” “Can we look at a star?” “How come I can see the Moon in the daytime?” and the ever popular “WATCHA DOING, MISTER?!”

Plenty of set up time is good, but what do you set up? What sort of telescope and what sort of ancillary gear? I tend to keep it simple telescope-wise. I often use my 80mm f/11 alt-azimuth mounted SkyWatcher refractor, Eloise, because I am lazy. She is painless to haul around and put together, she looks like a telescope to kids and parents, and 80mm of refractor is more than sufficient for the targets I show my customers: the Moon (most of all), a bright planet (if there is one), a bright star (very popular), and maybe a bright DSO or two (save those for the tail end of the evening).

And yet, and yet… Sometimes I kick it up a notch with my venerable 6-inch f/8 Criterion RV-6 Dynascope, Cindy Lou. With her big and relatively heavy 60s style German mount, she is not nearly as easy to lug around as the refractor, but she has several pluses. Most of all, she has a decent clock drive. Not having to re-center your telescope between kids is a godsend. She also has enough aperture to make the best and brightest of the Messier look like something for patrons old enough to appreciate them—little kids have a hard time seeing deep sky objects in any telescope—and show-off the planets in astonishing detail. Best of all? She is still simple. No computers to fuss with, no alignments to do. Plunk her down with her polar axis facing roughly north and I am done.

So you shouldn’t bring out your go-to scope? That’s up to you. A C8 on a go-to mount can be a very good public scope. It’s got an eyepiece position that’s perfect for young and old, and kids are naturally attracted to a high-tech computer hand control. B-U-T…make sure you can get your mount aligned in a hurry. The wee ones will be onsite before it is dark and will want to look at the Moon IMMEDIATELY. They will not understand your need to wait for alignment stars to appear. Luckily, most computerized mounts allow you to do a Solar System Alignment (on the Moon), a “last alignment,” or just a "fake" alignment so you can get the thing tracking in R.A. before you can see alignment stars. Go-to functionality? I suppose you could do a better alignment after the stars wink on, but you’ll probably be too busy showing off Luna, and you won’t need go-to to get to her, Jupiter, Vega, and M57, anyway.

What else should you bring? Eyepieces, of course. I leave it to you whether to haul out the Ethoses or stick to bargain Plossls. Yes, you will likely get a little teenage mascara and sticky kiddie-finger stuff on the eye lenses, but that can be cleaned off. Me? I use my Orion Expanses. They have nice big eye lenses that are easy for the little folk to look into, deliver very good images in f/8 Cindy Lou, and are inexpensive and easily replaceable if the worst happens.

Bring a flashlight, of course. Doesn’t even have to be red, since there’s not much need to worry about dark adaptation. And a step-stool. Even if your telescope is kid-friendly (which a ladder-bound dob ain’t, so leave it at home), the smallest observers will still need to either be lifted to the eyepiece (by their parents), or stand on something. A small one-step stepstool is very handy. Do keep it out of the way when not in use; you don’t want anybody tripping over it in the dark. Allow the little tykes’ parents to assist them on getting on and off and standing on the stool.

Make sure you have notes on the objects you intend to show off. I guar-ron-tee the first thing your clients will ask after getting a look at anything is “HOW FAR AWAY IS IT?” If I hadn’t had the notes on the list I generated with Eye and Telescope, I’d have used my iPod, which has the astro-apps Sky Safari, Distant Suns, and (Celestron’s new) SkyQ running on it. I brought the iPod anyway, just in case I got off the beaten path of the list.

How’d it go? It went well. OK, OK, it went well after the usual Unk Rod floundering and foundering. Set up Miss Cindy Lou, inserted my 20mm Expanse, and pointed her at the just-before-First Quarter Moon, which was exquisite in her excellent optics. Only… Selene kept drifting, with me having to re-center frequently despite the fairly low power. Went to M13. Same “away she goes.” What the heck? During one of the infrequent lulls—we hosted well over 100 kids and parents—I decided to check and see if the Dynascope’s AC powered synchro drive was plugged into the inverter securely.

DOH! The drive wasn’t plugged in at all. Despite my recommendation to y’all that you get the scope ready before the kids arrive, I spent too much time shooting the breeze with my PSAS mates and finished set up in a hurry. I’d plugged the scope in, alright, but not into the AC receptacle on the inverter. I’d inserted the plug into a couple of vents on the sides of the inverter’s plastic housing instead, and naturally it hadn’t supplied a bit of power to the scope. Plugged the drive in for real and Cindy began tracking in her usual reliable fashion.

After M13, I went on to M57, another favorite this time of year. To cap off the evening, I finished up on brilliant sapphire Vega. Surprisingly, the one thing both kids and parents request more than anything after the Moon and Saturn is a simple, bright star. By the time everybody who wanted to had had a look, it was creeping on toward 9 o’clock, Jupiter was still too low to do anything with, and the last remnants of our audience were heading for their cars. Time to ring down the curtain on another successful PSAS Sky Watch. I was particularly gratified by how many attendees, young and old, thanked us profusely for sharing the sky with them. Even if they hadn’t… I know it sounds corny, but I still find public outreach rewarding and even FUN.

Whatev. One of the beauties about the RV-6 is that she’s quick to tear down. Yeah, the GEM mount’s a handful, but it fits easily into my 4-Runner, and the telescope’s (Bakelite) tube is astoundingly light. In about 10 minutes I was on my way back to the Old Manse. It had been a good week. Beautiful weather for the star party (for once), and Eye and Telescope to play with. You? You, muchachos, should do a public outreach session NOW while the weather is still so fine, and have a look at E&T. If you don’t have a planning program, or even if you do, it might make you very happy.

Next time: Unk was at sea on sea trial for San Diego, LPD 22, so he missed the dark observing window this time around. So, what next? My Favorite Star Parties installment one.

The Revenge of AstroPlanner

2011-10-02T06:23:00.003-06:00

Well, maybe “revenge” is not the correct word. “Revenge” is, after all, not a Jedi concept. How about “The Return of AstroPlanner”? The whosits of the whatsits? The return of AstroPlanner, as in the release of the long awaited v2.0 edition of one of my favorite observation planner-type astronomy programs. Confusticated? I’d better start at the beginning, which was in August of 2005, in the wake of hateful hurricane Katrina.

Come to think of it, my relationship with AP actually goes back farther than that. Author Paul Rodman sent me a copy of his program shortly after the Windows version got off the ground. AP was the first observation planner for the Macintosh, but Unk was then and still is a Winders kinda guy—though I keep threatening to switch. Whichever computer the program ran on, I was interested in taking a look at Paul’s AstroPlanner since “planning” type programs, giant databases of deep sky objects, had become my favorite sort of astroware.

I found and find that software that allows me to make observing lists, even software that deemphasizes star charts in favor of lists, is more helpful than planetarium type programs with photo-realistic depictions of the heavens. The planners, like SkyTools and Deepsky and Eye and Telescope and Deepsky Planner, keep me organized and seeing lots of stuff. I tend to stumble around a planetarium soft’s virtual sky just like I stumble around the real sky. I need a PLAN.

I was somewhat impressed by that first version of AP. Paul was obviously a talented programmer. B-U-T. The Windows version was almost there but not quite. The fact that Unk was running the kludgy Windows 98 didn’t help, either. I set AP aside to wait till it matured a bit and my OS was upgraded to the fascinating Windows XP. In due course, I received a new AstroPlanner disk, and was about to give it a spin when Katrina blew up.

Miss Dorothy and I were lucky. Everybody in the Garden District, and indeed our entire little city, was lucky. While Katrina definitely made her presence known, what we got was more of a brush than a hit. Which was a good thing, since me and D. declined to evacuate

Early on it became pretty clear the storm was going to miss us, drawing a bead on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and points west. You can never be sure what these damned things will do, of course, and I kept a weather eye on the maleficent spiral filling the Gulf, but neither of us was in the mood to jump in the car and light-out for points north. We were suffering evacuation fatigue.

Yeah, fatigue to the tune of two recent and unscheduled trips to Atlanta running from hurricanes. One due to a “mandatory” evacuation (as if the city could have enforced such a thing) of the southeastern part of town. Which turned out to be entirely unwarranted. Muchachos, you have not lived until you have spent a night in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the bleak stretch of I-65 between Mobile and Montgomery. And have had to sit in the lobby of a Holiday Inn in Atlanta for three or four hours waiting for a room to become available. So we hunkered down in Chaos Manor South and waited for the wind to change.

Change it did. We turned on the Weather Channel as soon as we awoke on Monday the 29th. Just past dawn, we could hear the winds beginning to howl outside the Old Manse, and, according to the dude on the Weather Channel (probably storm-crow Jim Cantore), Katrina would begin moving ashore before long. Just as those words came out of his mouth, our lights flickered, went out, came back on briefly, and died. That was the last of our electricity for about a week. But we were lucky, very lucky. The water rose in Selma Street, but it never got high enough to pose a threat, the wind blew but at most blew off a shingle or three.

Not that the aftermath of Katrina wasn’t a pain in the butt relatively speaking. One thing you can expect after a big storm? It gets hot, real hot. After a few hours of no A/C, Chaos Manor South, whose windows and storm windows swelled in the extreme heat and humidity until they could not be opened, became an oven. No drinking the water, either, after the city’s pumps had been off for a while. There was also a little craziness—some idiot decided he’d get the last of the gas at Griffith Shell, even if he was at the end of the line, and pulled a pistol to effect that. The cops drug him off, but it looked like it might be a good idea to examine our options.

We spent night one after Katrina at home, and I’m embarrassed to say it was kinda cool. “Embarrassed” because I am well aware of the travails and horrors being visited upon our brothers and sisters to the west at that very time. But, yeah, cool. Our old neighborhood was lit with candles and oil lamps, and it was like you’d stepped back a century or two. The police patrol clip-clopped by on their horses, and even used a formerly ornamental hitching post when they stopped to check on one of our street’s grand Little Old Ladies. I popped into the front yard for a look at the clear and now amazingly dark sky with the StarBlast. The North America Nebula practically put my eye out, muchachos.

Comes the dawn and the heat, we did some checking via the still-working landline phone. Not only did the University of South Alabama where Miss Dorothy was a Department Chair still have power, the Jaguar Shopping Center MacDonald’s was open. Hot damn! I was not too interested in more Campbell’s heated on my camp stove or another can of Vienna sausage. We decamped for D’s office. Which not only had power, but Internet. Being a Chair, she had a nice large space with a comfy couch. Heaven, relatively speaking.

How to while away the hours? I had brought my laptop with me, a fast Toshiba satellite running that newfangled XP. I spent quite a few hours surfing the web, trying to absorb the depressing facts on the condition of the Mississippi coast and New Orleans. When I couldn’t stand any more of that, I started thinking about AstroPlanner again. That new CD Paul Rodman sent me was in my laptop bag. Why not give it a go?

Why not indeed? I installed AP and lit it off. I was frankly amazed at how well behaved and responsive the program was. In retrospect, that likely had more to do with my now decent hardware and O/S rather than any fixes Paul had had to do. Being free of the “resources” problems of pitiful old Windows 98 allowed AstroPlanner to finally strut its stuff.

What did I find? A fully mature and functional planning program that grabbed me. It did some of the things I had wished for in other programs, but what really got my attention was that here was a planner that didn’t just organize my observing, but which was actually organized itself.

One of the beauties of AP was that I didn’t have to continually bring up different pages and click through hordes of menus. I could literally do anything on the “home page,” the screen that displayed my observing plan (list). There was a lot more to this page than just a list of objects. I could see when the optimum time for viewing NGC umptysquat would be. I could send my go-to scope on a go-to to it. I could get a passel of information about it. I could see a little image of it (downloaded from the Digitized Sky Survey). Hell, I could even fill in a log entry about it without leaving the observing list screen. I was sold from the get-go, and used AstroPlanner happily for a year or two. Till I stopped.

Why did I stop? That had more to do with me than with AstroPlanner. I’d got a new rig, an Orion Atlas GEM mount, which I drove with EQMOD. Yes, AstroPlanner had plenty of built in drivers for go-to scopes, but, alas, it was not designed to work with that universal scope driver system, ASCOM. Since EQMOD is an ASCOM driver, I couldn’t use AP with the Atlas, which was a show stopper.

And it wasn’t just that I had a new rig, but that I had gone back to an old one. I was running through the Herschel 400 with my 12.5-inch Dobsonian, Old Betsy. This little jaunt, which was to eventually evolve into The Herschel Project, was aided by the new set of Sky Commander digital setting circles I’d installed on Bets. Despite the computer, I found detailed charts were a help, especially when dealing with the less than perfect skies round Possum Swamp. Yes, AP, had a charting engine of a sort, but, frankly, it paled in comparison to that of SkyTools.

While I didn’t use AstroPlanner anymore, I did occasionally check in on its Yahoogroup. I was pleased to learn Paul was hard at work on a new version of the program that would, among other things, address my prime problem: no ASCOM. AP, like a lot of other astro-ware, is a one-man production, so I knew good and well it would be a while before 2.0 hit the streets. Mr. Rodman wanted to get it right, I’m sure, and that took a few years, but during those years I never forgot the wonderful nights I had with AP under the stars. I resolved to give 2.0 a spot on my hard drive when it came out.

I’d begun to despair that the new AP would ever see the light of day when, one recent afternoon, our kitchen workstation bleeped the weird Outlook bloop that means “mail’s in.” It was a missive from Paul announcing the release of AP 2.0. You can bet I grabbed up the netbook and quickly downloaded the new soft—well as quickly as you can download 50 gigs. Which really ain’t that big in these days of broadband, I reckon, and which went tolerably fast. To tell the truth, this is a fairly small size for a program with as many features as the new AstroPlanner has got.

Installing AP is easy, even for the more computer-ignorant among us like your old Uncle, whether you choose to purchase a DVD or just download from the website. Why would you order a DVD? Mainly if you would like copies of larger catalogs like the Hubble Guide Star Catalog. Given AP’s fairly limited charting capabilities, I’m not sure having the DVD is a big deal, but if you want a disk, get one; you won’t hurt my feelings.

Once the download completes, installation is as simple as executing the file. Exactly how you do that will depend on which browser/browser version you are using, but it is usually a no-brainer. When the install program begins, you’ll click through the usual windows: Where do you want to install the program? Do you want a desktop icon? Yadda-yadda-yadda. Please note that I am referring to the Windows version. You Mac owners will do your own thing, which you know more about than I do.

Once the program is installed, you can click its purty little icon to start it up. No big surprises there. I did note AP threw up a window saying I should be patient while some “threads” were running. Even on my little Pine-Trail netbook, however, the program came up fairly quickly. I then got a window that said something about converting old AstroPlanner files, but since I didn’t have AP on the netbook there were no v1.x files to convert. I assume that if’n you’ve got the old one in residence, initial start up will take longer while 2.0 does whatever it does to the 1.x files.

All the details about going from the old AP to the new AP are in the excellent user manual, and let me advise you, as I always do when talking about planners, to read it. At least go through the abbreviated version available on the download page. There’s nothing to be a-scared of, but my experience is that if you are to take full advantage of the features of a planning type astro-soft, or even get one to do much at all, you really ort-ta read the directions.

You AstroPlanner Old Hands will want to know “What’s changed?” Most changes have to do with improvements and optimizations concerning how the program runs on and interacts with the computer. All of which is invisible to the user; it just runs good is all Unk knows. The visible changes are fewer, but important.

The first thing you will notice is that there’s no longer both a tab for observing and a tab for planning. You open catalogs, select objects from them, and move them to the observing list. I was fine with the old way, but I suspect this will be less confusing for AP novices. I also note there are no longer “local” and “global” observations. What were those? Don’t ask me; I never did figure out the difference and will not miss that “feature.”

Not all the changes were welcome. You can no longer make log entries on the “home” observing list screen. You now have to open a tab, “Observations.” Not a huge deal, but not having to go to different tabs while observing was, as I done said, one of the things I really liked about the old AstroPlanner. It ain’t all bad, though. The new logger has some real improvements. You can, for example, now attach images and files to your observations

How about charts? Yes, AstroPlanner does have ‘em, with a “sky” tab and a “field of view” tab. Map drawing in v2.0 is at least somewhat improved in speed, and downloaded images can now be overlaid on charts. Other than that, not much has changed, which ain’t entirely a bad thing. Yes, when I am using a non-go-to scope I do like to have the remarkable maps SkyTools 3 produces. But with a go-to? Not So Much. All I need are eyepiece field sized charts to help me identify objects, and somewhat wider, maybe constellation sized, maps to show me what else is in the neighborhood. AP does both those things with aplomb.

Keep in mind, too, that you can operate Cartes du Ciel 3.0 (and several other planetariums) in concert with AP. This is easy to set up in preferences, and after fumbling around just a little I had Cartes charts centered on my selected AstroPlanner target opening whenever I requested “field of view.” This ability to work pretty darned seamlessly with CdC goes a long way to offsetting any sky mapping deficiencies in AP.

Once you’ve got the program up and running, just as with other astronomy software, you need to configure it. That includes not just location—latitude and longitude—and time and date, but your various equipment setups to include eyepieces, telescopes, filters, and cameras. There are two ways to go about this, the dumb way and the smart way. If you’re dumb like Unk and didn’t read the instructions carefully enough to find out about the new setup wizard, you can click resources on the Edit/Resources menu and go through everything “manually.” If you’re smarter, you’ll let the wizard do some of the work for you.

Even if you eschew the wizard, getting your equipment into the program is easy; there are prefab lists of telescopes and eyepieces to pick from. Naturally, you won’t find everything in these lists. Still using grandpappy’s Clark refractor and his box of Claves? You can enter anything you’ve got manually.

Next step? Catalogs. The download comes with a basic set including the NGC and Messier already installed, but for many of us that ain’t enough. We want MILLIONS of objects whether we have any need for ‘em or not. AstroPlanner is and always has been blessed with an astounding number of astronomical catalogs; everything from the everyday like the PGC to the obscure like the Bernes Dark Cloud Catalog. If you bought the DVD, you can load the catalogs off the disk. If you purchased the download version of the program, you’ll download the catalogs, too. Which is easy and automated.

Open File/Catalogue Manager. You will be shown a long list of catalogs, with the ones already installed being labeled as such. All you have to do is go down this list checking the ones you want. When you are done, you hit the “go” button, “Install,” and the program will download and install your picks. Naturally, big catalogs like the PGC will take a while, but the process is not annoying at all.

Everything set up and installed, you finally get to do something—like build an observing plan. I decided to set up a list of the (near) 2500 Herschel Project objects. Not only is that what I am working on at the moment, it would show whether the poor program would choke on so many DSOs. A pleasant surprise? I didn’t have to import an ascii file of the Herschel Big Enchilada and try to get it to work. There was already a catalog file of all them aitches. Cool! If I had needed to import it, though, the program does have (improved) import facilities.

How exactly do you make a list? Easy as pie. You can go simple, which was all I had to do: Mash file/new to start a new list, select “Show Catalog” from the row of buttons toward the bottom of the screen, open the Herschel, select the whole list of fuzzies (click on the first object, shift click on the last), and push the “Add Selected” button to add ‘em to the plan. I could have selected targets one at a time with a simple mouse click, or non-contiguous groups with control-click.

You can go complex in your list making, too, searching multiple catalogs and filtering to your heart’s content. Does making a list bore you? AP has quite a lot of ready-made observing plans, most of which were contributed by users. To start downloading this good stuff, go to File/User Contributed Plans and have a ball.

What can you do from the list page once you’ve composed or loaded one? You can’t log from here anymore, but you can do quite a few other things, like view images from the POSS and numerous other resources. Once downloaded, these pictures will be automatically displayed on the right side of the list when you click on an object for which there’s a picture. You have to get the images, first, of course. Open the Image menu on the toolbar, select, “Download Images” and you can grab pictures for individual list objects or for the whole thing at once. Having these (which are cached for future use) on the observing list has often been a huge help for me.

There’s also AP’s visibility tools. On the left is a nice graphic of the selected object’s visibility throughout the night; on the right is one that shows the DSO’s status throughout the year. Nothing to complain about here; perfectly legible and useable. There’s also indicators that show telescope azimuth and altitude, and a new visibility tool that shows the selected object pinpointed among the stars of its constellation. Unfortunately, on my netbook this graphic is a wee bit small to be of much use.

If you intend, like Unk, to send your scope to targets with AstroPlanner, you need to set the program up to work with your go-to rig. Go to the resources/telescope menu, pull down the “computerized mount” menu, and select your driver from the many built-in ones listed there. Or, you can now run your scope with ASCOM. Pick ASCOM from the driver list, click “ASCOM configure” on the window that appears, and set up the driver of your choice in the usual ASCOM way.

I had high hopes for this, but I had the sense to try it with the EQMOD simulator indoors before dragging the whole works out to the PSAS dark site. Sad to tell, it almost worked, it wanted to work, but AstroPlanner would inevitably lock-up when used with EQMOD. It’s possible this might work on a computer with more horsepower, or that Paul might be able to squash whichever bug is causing this behavior when he gets a chance. Other, more “normal,” ASCOM drivers work, but I can’t help saying, “Well, shoot. AP plus EQMOD woulda been SWEET.”

The bottom line? I still like AstroPlanner. It’s improved, but it is still the program I used so happily for so many dark nights. Criticisms? Not many. If I had to make one, it would be that, compared to similar programs, it seems a little slow. It takes longer to boot up, and some things, like charting, seem to keep me waiting longer than I would expect. Do note that thus far I have only tried AP 2.0 on my modest netbook. If you have an even marginally faster machine, which you probably have, your impression may be different. Be that as it may, it is still more than good enough on my Asus.

One very impressive thing? Despite preserving AstroPlanner’s many features and adding more, Paul has managed to keep this program reasonably user friendly. Yes, you need to read the manual, but you’ll find a quick browse is enough to get you started. The menus are fairly intuitive and standard and the amount of time you’ll spend learning “the AP way” will be minimal. I have not tried the Mac edition, but I suspect the same will be true there. Maybe even moreso.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about AstroPlanner 2.0? Paul Rodman almost gives this power away. I mean, 45 bucks for a download and 60 bucks for a download plus a DVD must be the the most reasonable prices ever for a program with this kinda horsepower. In other words? Go get it muchachos. Even if you have never used a planner before, you will like this one.

Thises and That’s: For those of you who’ve so kindly expressed concern about the health of dear Miss Dorothy, you’ll be pleased to learn all the surgery is now behind her. Her chemo port is history and she is well and truly on the mend.

Will there be Christmas telescopes this year? They have been absent from our Wal-Marts for the last couple of Christmases. And there are not any there yet despite the nearness of the Christmas season—which seems to be moving to the start rather than the end of October. I do see the CVS Drugs on Dauphin Street is wall-to-wall with 60mms. No, they ain’t likely very good telescopes, but they are telescopes, and contrary to what the curmudgeons down to the club will tell you, can provide tremendous enjoyment and start some lucky boys and girls on the road to amateur (or professional) astronomy. Long live the Christmas scope! Even the Christmas department store scope!

Next time: By the time you read this, Unk will be back from nearly a week at sea onboard San Diego, LPD 22, for her sea trials. If I got back in time, am not too tired, and the weather gods cooperate, I might do some observing. If not? MORE SOFTWARE, as in the new Eye and Telescope.

The Ultra-wide Revolution

2011-09-25T06:19:00.005-06:00

Unless you’re such a committed (in more ways than one) astrophotographer or astro-videographer that you never do any visual observing at all, eyepieces are a fact of life. And for better or worse many Joe and Jane Amateur Astronomers determine the worth of an eyepiece by its apparent field of view. In other words, today wide fields = good, narrow fields = bad. Whether you think that is wise or not, the big AFOV 82-degree plus “ultra-wide” oculars rule the roost in the hearts of most amateurs.

What brought this subject to mind? The brouhaha engendered by the release of Explore Scientific’s new 120-degree apparent field 9mm eyepiece. Oh, how an eyepiece no one had seen—much less used—was condemned. Too much field. Why would we ever need that much? Hell, 30-degrees of apparent field via a Ramsden was good enough for us back in the day; why should things be different now? Too expensive. A grand for a fracking eyepiece? COME ON!

I suspect the same things motivate the naysayers as last time this became an issue, when Unk Al released the first of his Ethos oculars. For some folks it just seems like too much of everything. There is a thread of Puritanism running through Americans that insists there’s always a piper to be paid. Unk mentioning that folks pay far more than the 900 bucks Scott Roberts and company will be charging for the 120 on far more ephemeral things like big screen TVs and four-wheelers doesn’t do pea-turkey to change these worthies’ minds.

“But how about all that field, Unk? Aren’t they really right about that? Do we really need 120-degrees worth?” Do we need 100? How about 80? How about 50? The size of an eyepiece’s apparent field does not necessarily determine its quality, no, but for some observers it does determine how comfortable an eyepiece of any quality is to use. I am one of those people. I’d no sooner go back to peering through the soda-straw hole of a Ramsden or a Kellner than I would go back to (trying) to image M101 on a roll of Tri-X film.

But, in typical Unk fashion, that is putting the consarned cart before the horse. Where did these fancy-dan EXPENSIVE eyepieces come from? What is this “apparent field” business all about, anyhow?

My eyepiece story begins, not surprisingly, with my first telescope, a 3-inch Tasco Newtonian Daddy got me after I’d been begging for a scope for 6-months. This “instrument” was bought in the pawn shop of a buddy of his. Actually, Daddy probably traded his expertise at TV repair for the pretty little thing. Not that it looked little to me. It was smaller than the huge stove-pipe of an f/12 6-inch we’d borrowed for a while, but it was big enough, little Rod thought, and looked oh, so much better than the home-built scope, with a gleaming white tube and a beautiful wooden tripod.

Alas, this telescope never lived up to its appearance. The Moon looked pretty good and deep sky objects were acceptable within the bounds of what can be expected from a 3-inch telescope from a somewhat (though not yet badly) light polluted 1960s suburban backyard. The planets, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars? Blobs. I’ve often wondered what the problem was. The mirror was likely a sphere, but at f/10 or so it should have been OK if it was even halfway competently made. It’s possible the mirror clips held it too tightly in its cell and I didn’t know enough to check that. Prime suspect then and now, or at least a contributor? The nasty little eyepieces.

The Tasco didn’t come with many accessories. Hell, it didn’t even have a finder; just a couple of perforated metal tabs that served as a peep-sight. But it did feature a pair of eyepieces, an 18mm and a 10mm I recall. These were Huygenians, two-element eyepieces as simple as an eyepiece can get and still be worthy of that name. Barely. They were not only simple; they were small—.965” barrel diameter Japanese standard oculars. That came to spell “junk” for me, though that was not always true even then. Not only were these oculars’ eye lenses small, I had to really jam my peeper up against them to see the whole field, which even to my inexperienced eye seemed tiny. Despite these things, I didn’t give the eyepieces too much thought at first, blaming my sorrows on a bad mirror.

The more I read and learned about telescopes, though, the more I began to suspect the eyepieces (I now knew enough to call them “eyepieces” instead of “lenses” thanks to my mentor Patrick Moore). The Christmas after I got the scope, I asked Santa to bring me a new ocular. Daddy helped Santa by showing him the catalog from this company he’d heard about, Edmund Scientific. I asked for HIGH POWER, a 6mm .965 Ramsden that was within the Jolly Old Elf’s price range. I’d probably have been smarter to ask for low power, but how was I supposed to know that? All I knew was the eyepieces I had didn’t show me much of the planets, and maybe more magnification would help.

Ha! As I think I kinda expected, the Ramsden (nearly as simple and cheap as a Huygenian) gave images that were like something that came out of the wrong end of Aunt Lulu’s poodle dog. I gave up my bad eyepiece theory and went back to blaming the primary. The denouement? When I got my wonderful Palomar Junior, I fashioned a .965”- 1.25” adapter out of a cardboard tube and tried the 6mm in the new scope. The images were nearly as horrible as they had been in the Tasco; maybe the eyepieces had been at fault after all. Not that it mattered; the 3-inch was long gone, sold to help finance My Pal.

Experience has taught me that Uncle Al Nagler is right when he says the eyepiece is as important as the mirror or objective lens. I actually figured that out on my own; it just took me a few years. I progressed slowly, ever so slowly, moving from war-surplus-optics Ramsdens and Kellners like those that came with the Palomar Junior, and which I thought were incredibly good—and were incredibly good compared to the Huygenians that came with the Tasco—to the More Better Gooder.

The first eyepiece that showed me what an eyepiece could be? Somehow, someway one of my fellow members in our little teenage club, The Backyard Astronomy Society, acquired a special new ocular, an Erfle, just before the club broke up for good toward the end of high school. I’d never really understood what the books meant by “Apparent Field of View” till I looked into this thing. Going from the keyhole of a 35-degree AFOV Ramsden to the picture window of a 70-degree AFOV Erfle was a revelation. No, it was more than a revelation; it was a REVOLUTION. I had to get me one of them things. If only they weren't so danged expensive.

Before we go further, I need to ‘splain something to the greenhorns round here, “Apparent Field of View,” which seems to be a difficult concept for some novices to wrap their heads around. The least confusing way I’ve found to describe it? Consider television sets. Larger versus smaller apparent field is (somewhat) analogous to viewing The Andy Griffith Show on a 12-inch portable compared to a 60-inch big screen. You see the same vista of Mayberry, but in wider, far more expansive fashion on the big screen job.

This analogy ain’t perfect. Since the true field of a telescope, the amount of actual sky it takes in, is dictated in part by the size of the apparent field (true field of a telescope equals apparent field divided by magnification), the actual expanse of sky, the true field delivered by a wide apparent field ocular, will be greater, too, but I still think the comparison is purty apt. The benefit of large apparent field is that the eyepiece field circle, the “screen,” is larger and more comfortable to view. It is, as Uncle Al has always said, the spacewalk experience.

Big AFOV is always better, then, right? Not always. If there’s not enough eye-relief to let you see all of it comfortably, what good is it? “Eye relief” is the maximum distance you can hold your eye from an ocular’s eye lens and still take in the whole field, and is almost as important a specification (especially if you must wear glasses to observe) as eyepiece focal length or apparent field. I had to jam my eye up against my Huygenians because of their lack of eye relief.

I didn’t completely desert narrow field eyepieces after that first look through an Erfle. There were those narrow AFOV but much lusted after (in the 1960s) Orthoscopics that I was finally able to afford as the seventies came in. By the time I’d moved from my last homebrew 6-inch to a Cave Newtonian and, shortly thereafter, my first C8, I was observing, like many “advanced amateurs” (that’s what we called ourselves, anyway), with a combination of Erfles for low power/deep sky work and Orthos for high power/planetary viewing. And we and I were perfectly happy with that. Till everything changed.

What changed? The SCT revolution of the 1970s was followed by the Dobsonian revolution of the 1980s. With (almost) everybody going to large and thus relatively long focal length Newtonians on undriven alt-azimuth mounts, the idea of eyepieces with large apparent fields of view had real appeal. Big portholes on space would mean you wouldn’t have to nudge the scope as often as with narrow AFOV oculars. It was also true that the big telescopes were showing us the beauty of the deep sky in a way we’d never seen before, and bigger windows on the Great Out There would, we figured, allow them to show us even more of the majesty of deep space.

Sometimes the stars all align the right way, and that’s what happened in the 1980s. We wanted wider apparent fields and Al Nagler was there. Unk Al began his business, TeleVue, in 1977 selling very good Plossls (and lenses for the projection TVs they had in the freaking discos), but didn’t stand still. In 1980, TeleVue debuted the eyepiece that changed visual amateur astronomy forever, the 82-degree AFOV 13mm Nagler.

Sure, there had been ultra-wide field eyepiece designs before the Nagler, but not one that not only delivered that huge amount of space, but whose other characteristics were so good that the eyepiece was a joy to use in our fast new Dobbies. Despite its quantum leap in apparent field, the Nagler’s images were worlds better in f/4.5 – 5 telescopes than those of the Erfles, which could be horrible at low focal ratios.

What did Unk Rod think of the Naglers? I thought they were expensive. They were probably the most expensive eyepieces I’d ever heard tell of, with the 13 going for a solar plexus punching $250, equivalent to at least 600 of our smaller 21st century dollars. I didn’t think much more than that till I got a look through one at a star party. Then they became spoilers.

They were spoilers in that they spoiled my eyepiece collection. No amount of rationalization could make me happy with the keyhole/soda straw experience of Orthos or even those (for me) newfangled Plossls. My Erfles just depressed me. I resisted for some time, but eventually gave in to the urge for ultra-wide viewing. Miss Dorothy got me a 12mm Nagler Type II on one of our first Christmases together, and I never looked back.

I loved the 12mm Type II and used it happily until just a few years ago. I didn’t rush out and buy a boxful of Naglers, though. I am a stingy sort, and was able to use my one Nag happily with the aid of a TeleVue Big Barlow and a Celestron f/6.3 reducer corrector for just about everything. It would have been nice to have a longer focal length Nagler to use in my Dob, Old Betsy, though.

Just when I was fixing to fill my case with Naglers (and empty my bank account in the process), I discovered the Uwans. The William Optics Uwans (“Ultra-wide Angle”) came in from China early in this century, and were a sign, if we needed one, that Chinese optical competence was improving by leaps and bounds. They’d gone from early, pretty putrid ultra-wides to eyepieces that were actually better than Naglers at some focal lengths. Unfortunately, these eyepieces, which are now also available from Orion, where they are called the “MegaViews,” have never expanded beyond the initial line-up of 28mm, 16mm, 7mm, and 4mm focal lengths. Nevertheless, I was happy with the Uwans until, a couple of years ago when everything changed again.

I was aware of TeleVue’s new 100-degree AFOV marvel, the Ethos. How could anyone even on the periphery of amateur astronomy not be? But that was not the same as getting a look through one. When my good buddy Pat and I were able to borrow one for a few minutes one beautiful winter’s night on the old field at the Chiefland Astronomy Village, the 13mm, and I got a look at M42, the deal was sealed. My bank account would suffer. Badly. To the tune of about 600 bucks, which was, as when the Nagler bowed in, more than I ever dreamed of paying for any ocular.

What I loved and still love about the Ethoses is not just that 100-degree apparent field, which fulfills all my spacewalk dreams, but the fact that that aside they are just damned good eyepieces. Mechanically, the Es are very finely done, as you’d expect, if big and heavy, as you’d also expect. Optically? The sharpness and contrast they display is incredible. Despite the 13mm’s much wider field, it is better in these respects than my much loved 12mm (which soon went to the Astromart). Edge of field? Free from aberrations and bee-you-ti-ful.

Which don’t mean, of course, that the eyepiece won’t display coma in a fast telescope. Some newbies and some not so newbies wonder if very expensive, very good eyepieces will dispel the coma comets. The answer is “no.” I know of no eyepiece with a built-in coma corrector, which is what would be needed to do that. Good eyepieces like the Ethoses can reduce other aberrations—like astigmatism—and make the edge look better than it would with a less capable eyepiece, however.

So here’s where I stand now: Ethoses, the 8mm and 13mm models, and my 7mm, 16mm, and 28mm Uwans (I still like my Panoptics, too). Why haven’t I pressed on to the 21mm Ethos? I tried the very similar Explore Scientific 20mm 100-degree jobber-doo at Chiefland one evening, and decided neither it nor the equivalent Ethos would be useful for me. The eyepiece vignetted in my SCT with the f/6.3 reducer in place. Not bad, but quite noticeable. The field was cut off before it was supposed to be. And I have no doubt the 20 E would do the same. I can stand a little vignetting, but there didn’t seem to be any need to.

Thing is, I can get as much field as the 20/21 offer at f/10 with my 13mm and an f/6.3 reducer-corrector. The 13mm works great with the r/c or a Denkmeier reducer in my CATs. So, not much incentive to break the piggy bank again. Not that either eyepiece is not wonderful. If I used my Dobsonian, Old Betsy, more often, I’d have one or the other.

So, you’re a novice who thinks this space walking stuff sounds like fun? Or you are an old hand who has finally been convinced that the ultra-wides might offer an experience noticeably better than that of Plossls and Orthoscopics, and maybe even put some fun back in visual observing? What do you do? You could buy a caseful of Naglers and Ethoses. Can’t go wrong there.

But, yeah, I know not everybody is willing to jump into the deep end of the pool right off the bat. You can’t go wrong by buying the best eyepieces available, no, but there are some interesting ultra-wide alternatives that won’t hurt quite as bad moola-wise as TeleVues. In some cases these eyepieces can even offer, like the Uwans, not just “nearly as good,” but “better.”

The Uwans

Yeah, the Uwans were a surprise for me. Hell, they near about bowled me over with their quality and utility. You would have to go a long way to best the 16mm model, especially. I love all these oculars, which feature truly useful integral eye-shield/cups and beautiful coatings, and that is tempered only somewhat by the afore-mentioned lack of focal lengths. The prices ain’t bad, either. The top of the line 28mm, which compares very favorably to the 31mm Nagler, is $399 vice over $550 for the TV.

You can actually go even lower in price than the Uwans or the Meade Series 5000s (below) and still get 82-degrees, but you won’t be overly happy with the result. Chinese import eyepieces like the Owl Astronomy Ultra-wide Angles can give you a taste of spacewalking, but don’t expect the field edge in a faster scope to be anything to write home about. In fact, depending on you and your scope, it may not even approach acceptable. Alas, in the ultra-wide game, it is still TAANSTAFL—there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

The Meade Series 5000 Ultra Wide Angles

Not long after Uncle Al established the Naglers as a whole line of eyepieces, Meade, in a fit of expansion fever, came out with their own “Naglers,” the Ultra Wide Angles. Some folks looked down on these eyepieces as mere “clones,” but since Al and company didn’t complain, I didn’t see any reason for me to, either. If nothing else, the Meades were available in slightly different focal lengths and were also (slightly) less expensive. These oculars have their fans, then and now, and can certainly perform well in any scope for a fare a little lower than the Nags.

About five years ago, Meade was still booming and had just released their ill-fated RCX SCT scopes. At this time, they also updated the Ultra Wides. This refresh mostly consisted of new bodies for the oculars, snazzy things that looked a lot like Celestron’s Axiom ultras (a line which, while Unk doesn’t know much about it, is rumored to be good and might stand some investigation on your part). Unfortunately, while the “new” eyepieces looked modern, these new bodies were not well thought-out.

The prime offense was that they incorporated hard, built-in eyecups, just like the Uwans. Twist to raise, twist to lower. Thanks to the kindness of a Meade rep, I was checking one of these out at the 2006 Cherry Springs Star Party, where I was a speaker. Extended the eye-shield. Purty cool images. Then I grabbed the barrel to remove the eyepiece from the scope, and encountered the dreaded Chinese glue-grease (weasel fat based, I reckon) when I touched the section of barrel exposed by extending the eyecup. Had a hell of a time getting the stuff off, and it made me appreciate TeleVue’s attention to detail all the more.

Explore Scientific Ultra Wides

Everybody and his sister knows about Explore Scientific (Scott Roberts’ “new” company) and their 100-degree wonders, but did you know they produce 82s as well? I suppose I knew they did, but didn’t know much about them till my buddy Pat showed me one at the PSAS dark site a little while back.

Verdict? A hit. At least as good as a Uwan, and, while I haven’t done a shootout, the eyepiece and those I’ve had the opportunity to try since, are close to the Naglers in my opinion. You even get “nitrogen purged,” just like the ES 100s. The “82 Series” oculars are available in seven focal lengths from 4.7 to 30mm, and are insanely nicely priced, ranging from $99.95 on the low end to $249.95 on the high end. If they are all as good as the couple of focal lengths I’ve tried, the operative word is B-A-R-G-A-I-N.

But what made Explore a household name (in amateur astronomy households) was their Ethos competitor, the “100 Series.” I have little doubt you would be happy with any of these, the 9mm, the 14mm, or the 20mm. Their images are, to my eyes, indistinguishable from those of the Ethoses. AND…they are not only available in slightly different focal lengths, they are significantly less expensive, with the most costly, the 20, going for a startlingly reasonable $399.95. If I didn’t have the 8mm and 13mm Ethoses, I’d have the 9 and 14 ESes. Does everybody agree with Unk that these eyepieces are as good at the Ethoses? No, but I can only report what I experience, muchachos, and even those who think the Es are better admit the difference is SLIGHT.

You may be wondering about one of the ES 82 and 100 features, the nitrogen purging business. What’s that for? Hard to say. The eyepieces are certainly waterproof, with Mr. Scott demonstrating that at NEAF one time by dipping a 100 in a fish tank. But what good is it? I’ve never dropped an ocular in a fish pond, and I’ve never had a problem with moisture inside my TeleVues, even in the muggy ‘Swamp, but I suppose the nitrogen might help prevent or reduce internal fogging. Maybe.

It was not the ES 100s that inspired this article; however, it was their new 120. This eyepiece, with a field bigger even than TeleVue’s 110-degree 3.7mm Ethos SX, a focal length longer and more useful than the SX at 9mm, and a price higher than any TV at a projected $999.95, naturally inspired much heated discussion on the Cloudy Nights by eyepiece Luddites. Same old same old: we don’t need all that field. It’s too expensive.

What does Unk think? At first I was inclined to agree with the naysayers. But then I started cogitating. Let’s face it, you WILL notice an increase in apparent field from 100 to 120, and a 9mm eyepiece would, in my CATs, give both a huge picture window and plenty of magnification to reveal detail in small objects. It would also probably perform like a champ at f/6.3, yielding the equivalent of a 15mm eyepiece. A 15mm with 120-degrees of AFOV. You can bet that gave Unk pause. If only he had an extra grand lying around, he’d get him one of these argon purged wonders. I don’t know that is likely to happen anytime soon, but if it does, I’ll let you-all know. Hell, you can be sure I’ll let you know as soon as I even get a look through one.

And there you have it. The ultra-wide story, at least as remembered by Unk. If you insist on clinging to your soda-straw Zeiss Orthos and Tak LEs and Claves or whatever else floats your eyepiece boat, good on ya. Just don’t expect Unk to be there with you. He is a field-o-holic and will likely remain one.

Next time: The Revenge of Astroplanner!