Sunday, May 28, 2023
Issue 592: “A New Way to Autostar” or “Sweet Charity Combs the Tresses of Berenice” Part I
Well, muchachos, as is frequently the case of late, this is not what I intended this installment of the Li’l Ol’ AstroBlog from Possum Swamp to be about. What I had in mind was—never mind; I’ll surprise y’all another time. Anyhoo, what changed things was a delivery from the USPS.
It ain’t like the good old days at Chaos Manor South, where whatever
was small enough dropped through the mail slot in the front door with a
ker-plop. I have to walk out to a standard suburban mailbox on the freaking
curb now. One afternoon, I moseyed out there and found a fat envelope among the
junk mail and bills. “From Digital Optica? Who the hell is that?”
By the time I’d wandered back to the kitchen, it was
beginning to come back to your forgetful old Uncle. Sometime back, a nice
feller had emailed me about a new product from the above concern and wondered
if I might like to try it, a Bluetooth module for Meade Autostar scopes. I said
“yes” and promptly forgot all about it.
Anyhoo, I set the rather intriguing package aside temporarily,
as I had remembered something else: I
had an ARRL Field Day 2023 planning meeting this evening at our usual radio club
committee meeting spot, Heroes Bar and Grill (natch).
Upon my return (not too late), I recalled the package and got it open. What came forth was a professional-looking black plastic module and a USB cable terminated on one end with an Autostar HC connector. Perusing the instructions (before I had yet another cold 807, much less a dollop o’ the ‘Yell), it sounded pretty simple: “Plug module into base of Autostar and Autostar cable from scope into Bluetooth Module.”
The USB cable was, according to the instructions, to allow you to update the Autostar without having it connected to a computer. Could be handy, I guess, but I don't believe the standard Autostar has had a firmware update in a long while.
That was as far as I got on that particular evening. I was most
assuredly not up to fooling with computerized scopes and phones and computers
and pairing stuff and yadda-yadda-yadda. Before I turned on the TV at the
request of that rascally black cat, Thomas Aquinas, it came to me if I were to
test the Digital Optica Bluetooth widget, I’d better do something about
Charity Hope Valentine.
If you’re a faithful reader, you know Sweet Charity is my near 20-year-old Meade ETX-125EC. What would I need to do about her? Well, as I
have said before, at this juncture the girl is in better physical condition
than Unk and still works as well as her somewhat mercurial personality has ever
allowed. But I figgered before I started connecting girly to computers and
phones, I’d want to change out the fricking-fracking button cell battery in her
LNT finder.
“Her whatsit in her whosit?”
The PE ETXes were like GPS scopes without a GPS receiver. Enter time and date and location, and unless
you moved to an observing site a considerable distance away, you didn’t need to
enter anything next time. “LNT?” That stands for “Level North Technology,”
Meade’s Autoalign system. The little LNT finder assembly (that also serves as a
red-dot finder) includes level and north sensors. Charity aligns just like big sis LX-200 GPSes,
finding north, tilt, level, etc. and heading to two alignment stars.
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Nicely done indeed! |
Since this was a new idea at the time for Meade—the REAL
Meade, the John Diebel Meade, not no Ningbo-Sunny nor fracking Orion—they must
not have given much thought to batteries nor done much testing. They said it would
last four or five years. The reality? “About two if you’re lucky.” They later
redesigned the LNT finder and made the battery more accessible, but if you’ve
an older ETX PE like Unk, you are in for some work to get that dang battery changed.
Oh, I could replace the button cell with a pair of higher capacity AA batteries
in an outboard holder, but I want to keep Charity just as she is, lookin’ factory
fresh with no homebrew hacks.
So, one thunderstorm-bedeviled afternoon, I carried the girl
out to The Batcave, my workshop of the telescopes/radio shack. “Ain’t
nothing to it but to do it.” I
removed the first of two screws (which also serve as aim adjusters) and its
associated (small) spring without incident. I thought I was home free; Unk was
being extra careful, since at least one of the two springs usually winds up
hiding somewhere on the floor.
Sorry. Removed the vertical screw and, dadgummit
(this is a family friendly blog), that cotton-pickin’ screw went flyin’.
Sometimes Unk gets lucky, though. I could hardly believe it, but that cursed spring
landed right in my little magnetic screw holder dish (a Harbor Freight special)!
I carefully lifted the top half of the finder off (there is
a thin wire between top and bottom that powers the red-dot LED) and replaced
that battery. You can bet I was cautious getting those little bitty springs
back in their respective positions. All went well, though, and now I could do—had
to do following an LNT battery replacement, I recalled—“Calibrate Sensors.”
A procedure in the hand control that calibrates the electronic compass, etc.
While the evening was hazy in advance of yet more
thunderstorms, Polaris was visible most of the time. I got Charity on her
tripod in the gloaming, fired her up, and went through that sensor calibration stuff
again. This time I could indeed CENTER POLARIS. Done, I did drive
training, which allows the Autostar to take backlash into account, having you
center and recenter an object. The Meade manuals all say “use a terrestrial
target,” but I use Polaris most of the time and that works OK.
Done with all that-there good stuff, conditions were getting
worse and the skeeters was biting Unk’s legs (he was, foolishly, in shorts). I
needed to test Miss, though, who can sometimes amaze you with her goto
accuracy, and sometimes do the opposite. I powered the scope off, essayed a
normal Easy Align, centered two stars, and mashed the buttons for Messier 3,
which was fairly high in the sky, something that can sometimes give ETXes
problems.
Nevertheless, there was a big blob of glob in the eyepiece
when the slew stopped. It looked purty good given the punk conditions, and even
wanted to be “grainy.” Sometimes I reckon I’m too hard on Miss Valentine vis-à-vis
goto performance. I forget she is a 5-inch f/15, that a 25mm eyepiece gives you
almost as much magnification as in an f/10 C8, and that Charity is dang near 20
years old. Anyhoo, M3 admired for a bit, I decided “one more.”
Off to M53 in Coma Berenices. This is a much more subdued
globular than M3, and I wasn’t sure 5-inches would have an easy time with it in
the heavy haze and light pollution. But there it was when the slew stopped,
shining bravely. I looked upon that as a good omen. On to Bluetooth. But not
tonight…the sky was closing in for real.
As you might expect, a long succession of cloudy nights
followed…during which I got bored, decided to set Charity up indoors in the
Sunroom (natch), do a fake alignment, and see how the Bluetooth widget worked. Which
was probably a good thing. As above, there really didn’t look like there was a
whole lot to it…but outside in the dark, it’s always something, your old
Uncle is easily confused, and it’s just better for him to at least halfway know
what he is doing.
Hokay. Got missy on her tripod, plugged the Bluetooth module
into the base of the HC (which made for something of a handful), connected the
Autostar cable to that, applied power, and did a fake indoor alignment with
Charity, just accepting the stars she offered and mashing “Enter.” The
alignment seemed perfectly normal, and I went on to the next step, pairing the
Digital Optica module with…with…something or other.
I at first hoped that would be my iPhone 14 Pro Max,
which has a nice, big screen and is running the very latest version of SkySafari
Pro. I was skeptical, however, since the instruction sheet that came with the Bluetooth
module only mentioned “Android and PC.” I had a look at Siri’s Bluetooth page
anyway, but, no, no “ScopeAccess,” as the Wi-Fi thingie calls itself was
listed. Darnit. Oh, well. I’d realized from the get-go that might be the case.
So, it would have to be the PC, the module’s instructions
mentioning Stellarium. Well, alrighty then. Fired up a PC in the
Sunroom, turned on Bluetooth in Winders, and, sure enough, was able to easily
pair the Windows 11 PC with “ScopeAccess.” Now to connect Stellarium
(the most recent version) to it.
Which turned out to be a wee bit confusing for your
computer ignernt ol’ Uncle. Oh, there was that instruction sheet, but I
assume it must have been written for an earlier version of Stellarium or one
running an external scope control “helper” app. The instructions talk about
selecting “Type = Bluetooth.” You will search in vain for that on Sterllarium’s
scope set up menu, muchachos.
What works? Make sure the PC is paired with the ScopeAccess
module, then, in Stellarium, set up a connection for Meade Autostar. You
will see a com port associated with that (like com 3). Go with that, mash
connect, and you will be connected. The software is smart enough to establish a
virtual com port over Bluetooth and take care of ever’thing.
![]() |
And...we have CdC connected! |
If you haven’t looked in on Stellarium in a while,
you may be surprised. This is a much more expansive program now, and one far
more usable in the field with a telescope than it used to be, even a few years
ago. Oh, its many features are still buried in help-menu key-combination lists,
and its user guide is always several program versions behind, but it can do
what you want it to do. Like build observing lists easily. I did that, mashing
<alt>-B and making a list of objects fit for a spring night, the objects
from the “Tresses of Berenice” chapter of my book The Urban Astronomer’s Guide.
I love Stellarium. It’s my meat and potatoes
planetarium program in these latter days. I can use it with my deep sky planner
software, Deep Sky Planner. It works great with the Losmandy GM811. It
is really all I need. HOWSOMEEVER… Its
prettiness sometimes gets in the way on late nights on an observing field, and
sometimes having functions buried in menus or only easily avalable as key combos is annoying in
that setting. That means, an old favorite of mine is still used as well, Cartes
du Ciel.
With Stellarium squared away, Unk thought he’d get
CdC up and running on Bluetooth. “Shouldn’t be no big deal,” he thought.
The Bluetooth connection establishes a com port like any other. “Ain’t nothin’
to it.” Ha!
At first CdC refused to connect to the scope over Bluetooth.
Every time I tried, “connected” on the ASCOM (the scope driver system Cartes
uses) window remained a solid RED. That made no sense; why shouldn’t it
work. Then I noticed Thomas Aquinas looking at me with that “Daddy doesn’t
understand computers” look of his. What was I missing?
Well, could that be ASCOM itself? As in updating to
the latest platform? V6.6SP1? I did that and guess what? No workie. One
last thing to (easily) try, a new scope driver. A little looking around on the
ASCOM site turned up a link to a recent Meade “generic” driver. Installed that,
configured it, mashed “connect,” and we was in business, sending Charity on
fake gotos to various objects with Cartes.
Then followed still more cloudy nights (lower case). It finally cleared, but that coincided with a fattening Moon, so following the computer testing, I decided to make this a two-parter. I believe you’ll agree Unk has run on long enough. Meet me back here next time and we’ll see what Charity, Bluetooth-enabled Charity, did with the spring stars.
Next Time: Using Bluetooth Under the Stars...
Saturday, April 29, 2023
Issue 591: The Moon and You Volume 2, “I Miss the Moon”
And I do, muchachos, I do. “But Unk, the Moon is shining bright over Possum Swamp right now, just as she always has.” Well, yeah, but that don’t mean I’ve paid requisite attention to her. During the years of the Herschel Project, all Luna was was an annoyance, her shining face getting in the way of my quest for ever dimmer and more distant galaxies. When the Project ended, I cast about for a new observing project, trying out everything except our neighbor without success.
Slowly, ever so slowly, I came to believe my next observing
interest would be something with a little more form and substance than yet another quest for “small, dim, slightly elongated” PGC sprites. This looking for a new
something to look at also coincided with my retirement, which I struggled with
and which had left me less than willing to haul out big telescopes to look at anything.
Then, in 2019, I suffered a near-fatal accident that temporarily rendered me
unable to set up anything but the smallest telescopes. And left me permanently
unable to deal with the largest ones.
During that time, I found I wanted to look at something,
though. Anything. Something-anything just spelled, yes, good old Hecate.
As I related some time back, when I was a kid I knew the face of the Moon, her
mountains and craters, as well as I knew Mama and Daddy’s subdivision, Canterbury
Heights. But I let that slip away over the course of long years of deep sky
voyaging. I came to regret that, and decided I wanted to go home to the Moon
I missed.
![]() |
Eloise |
You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about that charm, and
found there is another way I miss the Moon. I miss the old Moon. The Moon
of Chesley Bonestell and Men Into Space.
A Moon of mystery, a Moon of razor-sharp peaks and crater walls. A Moon
where almost anything might happen. Oh, even when Unk was a sprout we knew Luna
was probably lifeless. But, still, who knew what strange things might lurk there?
I missed that old Moon, but it turns out she is still with
us. Yes, the landscape is a gentler one than that depicted above in an illustration from Doubleday’s old book The Moon (from their Science Service series),
but the mystery is still there. As I came to realize watching the recent
Artemis mission, the prelude to a new age of lunar exploration, we still don’t
know pea-turkey about the Moon. Not really.
Despite centuries of observation with telescopes, decades of
examination with spacecraft, and all too few years of manned exploration, we
haven’t even scratched the surface of our neighbor and friend. What might we
find up there? Who knows? Contemplating that, I grabbed a handy
telescope and got out under a just-before-First Quarter Moon.
Before I tell you what I saw on a gentle April evening in
the Swamp, though, maybe a word or two about the instruments I’ve used to explore
the Moon. I began with a cheap set of plastic binoculars from the toy department of our local discount store ‘round
about 1960 or so.
These were humble glasses to be sure, though they did,
unlike what you’ll likely find in toy departments these days, feature glass
lenses. Likely they weren’t really binoculars, so to speak, but actually
two Galilean telescopes side by side. But you know what? They showed, just
barely, CRATERS to little Rod’s amazed eyes when he thought to turn them
on the Moon (said glasses having been bought to use while playing Army).
VMA 8.0... |
Flash forward five years to my first telescope, a 3-inch
Tasco reflector. It really wasn’t much of a scope, being far inferior to most
of today’s similar instruments. I never could make out the rings of Saturn I
longed to see. The little thing did do a workmanlike job on the Moon, though.
Not just good enough to allow me to begin to begin finding my way across the
Moon’s labyrinthine surface, but to actually try taking pictures with my little
Argus box camera.
But what finally gave me the Moon? My 4.25-inch Edmund
Scientific Palomar Junior. Let me say this:
In lunar observing, more aperture is always better, always. But a
3 – 6-inch telescope is more than adequate—MORE than—for showing you the basic
wonders of the Moon, and to allow you to do as I did as a 12-year-old, learn
her surface (with the aid of the Moon Map in a long-ago edition of Norton’s
Star Atlas).
Of course, I went on to the bigger and better…a 6-inch Newtonian,
8-inch and larger SCTs, bigger and bigger reflectors, computer-controlled
electronic cameras, etc., etc., etc. Today? I am back to, yeah, 3 – 6-inch
telescopes. They show me what I want to see and they let me relax and enjoy it.
Imaging the surface of the Moon in detail with a big CAT and a camera was fun,
but the act of doing so always seemed a challenge, a test. Could
I succeed in bringing home images? Now I just bask in Luna’s silv’ry glow and
marvel at her, not unlike all those nights when I stared open-mouthed with that
3-inch Tasco.
![]() |
Unk's first Moon picture, 1965... |
Anyhow, I grabbed the 3-inch, Eloise by name (who has been
with me—GOSH!—for about a dozen years now), and headed for the back 40 just
after the passage of a rather violent storm front the day before. “Grabbed”? I
was abashed to realize “grabbed” wasn’t the proper word. Maybe “lugged.” As Unk
prepares to embark on his 70th trip around Sol in a few months, it
appears the 80mm refractor and “light” alt-az mount have put on weight! It was enough of a struggle getting Eloise and
the AZ-4 out the back door I decided to do it in two trips next time. Out back,
finally, I didn’t expect much. The Clear Sky Charts were predicting clear and
clean skies, yeah, but, in the wake of a front, as you might expect, seeing
would be so-so at best.
With Eloise out in the driveway, how was it once dusk had come
and gone? No, seeing wasn’t great, just as predicted, but it wasn’t that
bad. Luna looked pretty steady in the 3-inch. That’s one of the benefits of
smaller aperture: you are looking up through
a smaller column of air, and the wiggles are less obvious. Funny thing, though?
Used to be on a somewhat brisk, seeing-disturbed night we could expect crystal
clarity. Not of late. There was substantial haze the front hadn’t cleared out. The
reverse is also all-too-true now. On a hazy, humid night, we’d normally have
very steady seeing. Not anymore.
Anyhoo, I inserted one of my favorite 1.25-inch eyepieces in
the diagonal, a 16mm Konig I’ve had for 30 years (it was the first wide field
eyepiece more sophisticated than an Erfle I owned). Focused up at 57x, and had
a cruise up and down the terminator. Despite the haze, Diana was beautifully
sharp, being just past culmination. But where would I plunk down? Which area of
Selene would I concentrate on? My rusty knowledge of Lunar geography impelled
me to focus on the northern highlands rather than the crowded southern expanses.
What there was above all was Plato, the great walled plain, a dark lava-floored crater that extends about 100 miles. Foreshortening makes Plato look strongly oval, but it is actually round. What’s to see there? The game I’ve always played is “find the craterlets,” the tiny craters (a couple of miles across or thereabouts) that litter the floor. Replacing the Konig with a 6mm Plössl (151x) showed strong hints of ‘em, though, as you might expect, 150x is about where a 3-incher’s images begin to dim. But some of the little guys were not that difficult with Plato near the terminator on this evening.
VMA has pictures aplenty! |
Most beautiful aspect of this giant, however? The shadow of its rough, mountainous western rim. It hearkened back to that vision of the old days, those razor-sharp peaks. The shadows of Plato’s walls, which are relatively gentle in reality, looked just like something out of a Bonestell painting.
Next? To the south of Plato is another huge walled plain, Archimedes,
which is about half the size of Plato, but in other ways much like it, sporting
a dark floor and its own gang of craterlets. For some reason, lunar observers
tend to talk less about this amazing feature than Plato, but it is well worth
study.
As are the two great craters east of Archimedes, Aristillus
(34 mi.) and Autolycus (24 mi.). These are more normal looking craters
than the two walled plains, with Aristillus sporting an interesting and intricate
central peak and terraced walls. Autolycus is without a central peak but there
is still plenty of floor detail to pour over.
I didn’t really want to cross the lunar Apennine mountains,
so I turned back north, touching down on another pair of exceedingly prominent
craters, big Aristoteles (54 mi.) and Eudoxus (42 mi.). The former looks much like the walled plains
we visited earlier, but it doesn’t quite have the “plain.” Its floor has not
been completely covered with lava. There are numerous hummocks in the middle,
the remains of central peaks not drowned in lava. There is also wall terracing and other details
that invite exploration. Eudoxus? Heavily terraced and intricately detailed
walls will catch your eye in any telescope.
I thought I’d head over to the Alpine Valley next to see
what I could see. After that, maybe a stop at that fascinating crater, Cassini?
Uh-uh. Nosir buddy. Urania had other ideas and just as I finished exploring Eudoxus,
she covered her sky with more haze that in minutes devolved into clouds.
But that was OK. I’d seen a lot. And while Eloise was
definitely not as easy to haul around as Unk remembered, it was the work of but
a few minutes before your correspondent had put Eloise to bed and was sampling the
waters of Lethe (which come from a Rebel Yell bottle) while watching TV with
the cats.
Before leaving you this morning, let me insert a plug for Virtual Moon Atlas, which I’ve mentioned here a time
or two. I was embarrassed to discover I was a couple of versions behind and promptly downloaded and installed the current one, version 8.0, the 20th anniversary
edition (hard as that is to believe).
Sure glad I did. More “textures” than ever, including one
from the famous Lunar Aeronautical charts I love so much. Oh, and something you
will find useful for deep sky observing, too, “Calclun,” which at a glance will
show you lunar phases over the course of a year or give you details for a
single night. Go get it, muchachos—it’s still free!
“THE MOON AND YOU” (LeRoy Shield)
Friday, March 31, 2023
Issue 590: What Has Stuck with Me?
Stellarium: Now that's a pretty soft, paw-paw! |
Nota bene: this
time we are talking only about planetarium/planner software…some other time we
can jaw about imaging and guiding programs and stuff like that.
What Has Stuck
Stellarium
I was awful skeptical about this astro-soft for the longest
time. It was awful purty, sure. Very. And amazingly responsive on modest PCs
despite that beautiful depiction of the sky. But it just didn’t seem to offer
much beyond that. Hell, it wouldn’t control a goto scope, and its selection of
deep sky objects was quite limited. It was an “armchair astronomer” kinda thing,
I reckoned.
Not anymore. This freeware program has evolved into a
powerful tool for doing many things in amateur astronomy. It has built-in
telescope drivers, ASCOM compatibility, and a huge number of DSOs. Stellarium’s
visualization of the sky is prettier than ever, and the performance hasn’t
suffered.
Cartes du Ciel
Cartes du Ciel. As pretty as Stellarium? No, but very useful! |
Howsomeever. Understand that comes in a pretty plain
package. Oh, it has been frequently updated by author Patrick Chevalley,
and doesn’t look like a refugee from the early 90s, but it doesn’t worry about
an overly realistic depiction of the sky. Its display is plain but clear and it
is legible, which is often a good think out on a dark observing field.
Skytools 3
Author Greg Crinklaw has had Skytools 4 out for
a number of years. But you know what? I never got friendly with it like I did
with 3. Maybe that’s because the version
of ST4 I have is the imaging flavor and is far more powerful and
complex than simpleminded moi needs.
ST3 was the software that carried me through the Herschel Project, my quixotic quest (this is alliteration day) to observe all the thousands of deep sky objects discovered by Sir William Herschel. Skytools 3 gave me all the tools I needn't for that enormous observing project: a versatile log, robust planning features, a
highly detailed sky atlas, telescope control, etc., etc., etc. I think it is
fair to say I could never have finished the huge Herschel list without Skytools
3.
Deep Sky Planner
“DSP,” by Phyllis Lang, now in version 8, is, like Skytools, a planning program/logger. I don't doubt I coulda used this program to do the Herschel Project if that was what I’d had on my hard drive at the time. What initially drew me to DSP (when I rediscovered it; it has been around for decades), however, was something simple: its large screen fonts. I found them easier to decipher with my old eyes. Once I started using Deep Sky Planner, though, I realized what a powerful and versatile package it is. One feature I particularly like is it allows me to use my favorite planetarium programs for charting and integrates very well with them. DSP is what I mostly use these days.
Virtual Moon Atlas. Still free and still the best. |
As I have said many a time, for years I dreamed of lunar
observing software as detailed as the big deep sky planetariums and planners.
And once again Patrick Chevalley hit a homerun. Oh, there’ve been a few other attempts
at a computerized lunar atlas, but none has come close to this freeware
software.
What’s great about VMA? Well, the detail for one thing. It
leaves print atlases like the venerable Rükl atlas in the fricking dust. It
incorporates a lot of professional references and images like Lunar Orbiter data.
Hell, it will even send your goto scope to lunar features (I have done that and
it really works). I don’t have to dream about computer Moon atlases anymore. Virtual
Moon Atlas gives me everything I need and want.
What Hasn’t Stuck
TheSky
This is heresy, I know, since Software Bisque’s TheSky
is such a long-running and, I’ll readily acknowledge, powerful tool.
Straight skinny on it from Unk? I used TheSky 6 quite a bit years ago and dabbled with TheSky X, but the program was never quite silly old Unk’s
cuppa tea. It just seemed counterintuitive to the way I work. And, if’n you axe
me, overly complicated.
Another factor? I had transitioned to planners like SkyTools
and DSP, and didn’t really need a humongous standalone planetarium program. Finally?
TheSky is good software, but it ain’t cheap: $400 for the top-of-the-line non-imaging
version. That may be a very reasonable price for those who need its power, but
for the relatively simple observing I do of late, I just don’t need to spend
that kind of money. $400? That will pay off my bartab for quite a while.
Starry Night
I gave Starry Night (6) a good try some years
ago thanks to a review copy that came my way. I was somewhat impressed. Its depiction
of the sky was unarguably even more beautiful than that of Stellarium—its sky was stitched together with actual images by way of the old Desktop
Universe software (that the Starry Night folks had bought out). It had
some abilities I hadn’t seen in any astro-ware, too, like built in links to weather
services—that came in right handy one time down Chiefland Astronomy Village way. And yet…at yet…
Starry Night 6 seemed a little, I dunno, “clunky.” A
little sluggish, for one thing. Also, even more than Stellarium,
it didn’t seem as legible for my tired eyes at 2am as Cartes du Ciel, not by a
long shot. Then came Starry Night 7, which I am told was pretty derned
buggy. The current release is Starry Night 8, which I hear is quite
good. What dissuades me from giving it a try? Mostly the $259 price tag.
That, again, sounds like something that does more than I need. I’ll use
the money I save for yet another evening at my favorite sports bar, Heroes USA.
Deepsky
I used this venerable planning program for many years. I
believe it was the second planner on the market after Ms. Lang’s original
Deep Sky Planner (unless you consider David Chandler’s Deep Space 3D
the first planner, which maybe I do). It had some things other planners still
don’t, like the log entries of talented amateur observers like the late Barbara
Wilson. Unfortunately, it was never quite up there with Skytools
and DSP, lacking such simple things as a way to rearrange column order. Author Steve
Tuma gave up on it a few years back, but it is still available as a free download now…but… It always had a few problems and I suspect as
Windows has evolved it has even more today.
Finally, there’s that group of programs I might still use if
they’d run on a modern PC. The above-mentioned Deep Space 3D comes
to mind. It did pretty great charts; it was the first astronomy software to be
able to produce maps comparable to those found in a print atlas.
Another is Skyglobe. Like DS3D it was a DOS
program (a semi-working Windows version was released shortly before Skyglobe sank),
and you’d have to know more about Winders than I do to get it to run there. But
there has never been a better soft for quick “What’s up?” looks to see what your
sky is like right now.
Finally, there’s Megastar. After the transition
of its former seller, Willman-Bell, to the AAS, I believe this has been made into a free download by its author, but I’m not sure whether it would run on a modern machine. Be that as it may be, Emil
Bonanno’s software was the most detailed computerized deep sky atlas
ever seen when it came out in the early 1990s, and I shall remember it fondly.
To tell the truth, y’all, astronomy-computing is in transition
here. I have switched to Macintosh for many of my computing tasks, including
astronomy. I am currently using the Mac versions of Cartes du Ciel and Stellarium,
but am thinking about ponying up for the Mac version of SkySafari. I
love it on the iPhone, I do not hesitate to say. When/if I do, you shall here
all about it.
What else? I swear, y’all, I will get out with a scope next
month. I am about to go stir crazy here. Every night the same thing, TV with
the cats accompanied by catnip for them and cold 807s for me. I need some
photons!
Tuesday, February 07, 2023
Issue 589: A Tale of Two Comets
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Lovejoy |
In fact, in the past the arrival of one has driven some humans
plumb crazy. Halley’s brilliant apparition
in 1910 inspired a DEADLY COMET GAS scare. As the story goes, some poor
mooks were so frightened by the prospect of dying from AGONIZING COMET GAS
(cyanide in the tail) they committed suicide. I would guess that’s an
apocryphal story—the suicide part, anyhow, yellow journalism about comet poison
gas was very real.
The maleficent effect comets have on us isn’t something of a
century or centuries ago, either. Well I remember the madness associated with
the passage of another great comet, Hale-Bopp, back in ’96. That time the
suicides were all too real. Members of a crazy-ass cult, Heaven’s Gate, killed
themselves. Why? Their whack-a-doodle leader, “Bo,” told ‘em HB was really a
spaceship carrying their other guru, the recently deceased “Peep,” and they could
board it and join her if they offed themselves by gobbling Seconals washed down
with vodka.
A few years back…well, actually going on a decade now…your
old Uncle was excited by the visit of another
comet. While in no way “great”—it went mostly unheard of and unseen by the
general public—little Lovejoy, C/2014 Q2, put on quite a show in January
and February of 2015. At that time, your correspondent was pretty hardcore
amateur astronomy-wise and was determined to get plenty of astrophotos of the
wee, green feller, including from a dark site.
I was fairly successful in that quest, as you can read here and here. That
really ain’t the point, though. The point being the effect the visitor had on me. It
threw Unk for a loop. Those evenings watching the exposures come in
and—Shazam!—actually looking at the
comet occasionally with a pair of binoculars seemed to have an unlooked for
effect.
I don’t know exactly what it was. Maybe it was the lonely
nights under the stars. Or the contemplation of the fact we’d all be dead and
gone and forgotten when the little sprite paid her next visit to the inner
Solar System in, oh, ‘round ‘bout 8,000 years. Whatever it was, I entered a
period of contemplation of my years on this flyspeck of a world, focusing
mostly on the mistakes and missteps. No doubt the shock of retirement, going
from 50- and 60-hour work weeks to near full-stop, had more to do with Unk’s
mental outlook than the comet, but, still, this not-so-happy time did coincide
with the apparition of Lovejoy.
The denouement? Once the following year was out I had begun
to come to terms with Life, the Universe, and Everything—as much as any of us
can, I guess. Oh, there were changes going forward. A new mindset began to crystalize.
Some of that new mindset having to do with astronomy.
Talk about "well placed"! |
While I’ll still slap a camera on a telescope and fire up Nebulosity
and PhD Guiding on occasion, those occasions are fewer by far than they
used to be. I now want as little between me and the sky as possible. I don’t
want to lug equipment cases around nor spend an hour (or two) setting up a
scope. I just want to see.
So came this winter’s little visitor, The Green
Comet, Comet C/2022 E3 ZTF. The weather hasn’t been exactly conducive to
observing of late. It’s either been cloudy or cold, real cold. These days I
find I don’t bear cold weather as well as I did in, yeah, 2015. If my feet get
cold it is end of story, game over, zip up your fly. Still, something
about ZTF, mostly its passage exactly eight years after Lovejoy’s, seemed
auspicious. The sky cleared, and despite the presence of a full Moon,
I determined I’d have a look at the new comet.
When that Moon began to rise a little later, I thought I’d
better get a move on. The possibility of clouds is always with us down in the Swamp,
and I knew capricious weather could easily spoil my chances of seeing ZTF while
she was still bright. One other thing the last ten years has brought is
cloudier winters. It used to be unusual for us to get lines of vicious
thunderstorms this time of year. Now? Not so much. So, I’d get out to see the
comet right away. But, how would I see it? Not with DSLRs and goto
mounts and laptops, that was sure.
My first thought was to leave it at simple-as-simple-can-be
with my beloved Burgess Optical 15x70 binoculars. These excellent
glasses have shown me much over the <gulp> 20 years since I bought ‘em at
the 2003 ALCON convention in Nashville. Their
larger aperture and higher magnification compared to 10x50s allows them to do a
pretty derned good job in my suburban backyard. But, I dunno, that just didn’t
seem to be enough, somehow.
What would have been perfect or nearly so for a little comet
like ZTF? My old Orion StarBlast Richest Field Telescope, Yoda. A 4.5-inch
reflector capable of low magnification and wide fields makes comet-snaring as
easy and pleasant as can be. Unfortunately, when I was thinning the scope herd,
the StarBlast went to a new home. I just wasn’t using him and am thrilled his
current owner gets him under the stars frequently, which he deserves, being a
Good Little Telescope.
Tanya... |
Getting Tanya into the backyard was, of course, nothing. She
weighs maybe 10 pounds sopping wet with dew, if that. When darkness finally
came, that’s just what I did, waltzed her into the back forty. Well, it was
dark enough, nautical, not astronomical, twilight having arrived. With a
big Moon on the rise in the east and already illuminating a wide swath of sky,
I figgered I’d better not wait and quickly positioned Tanya’s OTA on the proper
spot using her red-dot finder.
Finding the comet’s position was trivially simple since she
was just a smidge, about a degree and a half, northwest of bright Capella. In
went Tanya’s cheap Celestron 26mm Plössl and to that eyepiece Went your Uncle’s
eye. Seeing was typical for winter—punk at best—but coulda been worse. At first,
I saw…nuttin’ honey. But I continued to look, slewing the little scope around a
mite…and…there it was! ZTF was subtle at first, just an unassuming patch of
nebulosity, but, yes, there.
I didn’t settle for just having seen the Green One (who was, not surprisingly, gray in the little
telescope’s eyepiece), I continued to watch, and as it got a little darker ZTF
took on form and substance. The coma became brighter and larger and a small
nucleus popped into view. Was I seeing a hint of tail? Maybe, maybe. ZTF
was good enough that I hopped inside and retrieved the Burgess binocs. At first
the comet wasn’t easy in the glasses, but soon it was looking marvelous with that
3D effect only binoculars can deliver. I went back and forth between RFT and
binocs for quite some time. Until the Moon got high enough to ring down the
curtain on the show.
Takeaways? Tanya, the Celestron 114-AZ really is quite
a little telescope. Every bit as capable optically as the StarBlast—the
StarBlast’s mini-Dobsonian mount is somewhat steadier. I suspect she’ll get a
fair amount of usage here. Well, every once in a while, anyhow. A suburban
backyard sky is really not much of a place for a Richest Field Telescope. As I
said last week, she’ll, like Yoda, likely eventually be passed on to some
deserving scope-less person.
The comet? It’s a pretty li’l thing; get out and see it
before it is too late. Your ol’ Unk was feeling pretty darned good after his
night of comet watching and takes ZTF’s passage as that rarest of things in
comet lore: a good omen.
Saturday, January 28, 2023
Issue 588: Uncle Rod and the Rescue Telescope
Back in her natural element... |
What in pea turkey is a rescue telescope?! A “rescue
telescope” is most often a modern iteration of the Department Store Telescope that
has fallen on hard times, has fallen about as far as a telescope can
fall. Maybe it began as a Christmas or birthday present to a young person or an
impulse buy by an adult. It was quickly found to be deficient in that its images
didn’t rival those of the Hubble Space Telescope. It was under the stars a few
times and brought its owner a pretty Moon but was soon found to be Too Much Trouble.
The briefly loved scope, its wonderfully gaudy box long discarded, finds its
way into a closet where it sits bereft of starlight for a long, weary time.
The scope’s descent doesn’t stop there. Sooner or later, it
becomes an annoyance, taking up room in that closet, crashing to the floor every
time the owner retrieves their galoshes, and making a general nuisance of
itself. Sometimes it’s given away and the story thus far repeats itself. Most
often, it is put on the curb, to be either plucked by the trash pickers or sent
to its final demise. Sometimes it gets lucky, though; the owner donates
it to a charity thrift store and sometimes, just sometimes, someone comes along
and gives the poor thing a second chance.
Anyhoo, one recent Thursday evening, Unk found himself
arriving a little early for a radio club meeting held at a Goodwill Community
Center adjacent to a Goodwill Thrift Store. The previous week I’d found a Simpson
260 multimeter in there for the grand sum of nine dollars. With a little
time on my hands, I wanted to see if I might get lucky again and headed for the
back of the store where the electronics are kept…but didn’t get that far.
At first Unk thought he was going crazy(er). I seemed to be
hearing a plaintive little voice. A little female voice: “HELP ME,
UNCLE ROD! YOU’RE MY ONLY HOPE!” My
puzzlement turned to understanding when I spotted a 4.5-inch Newtonian sitting beside
the aisle on her spindly tripod.
“Hello, little one. How long have you been here?”
“Oh, Unk, I’ve been here the longest old time!”
“Well, let’s have a look at you.” What was before me was a current
Department Store Telescope (DST). You thought they were gone? No, they, the telescopes
in-between toys and genuinely serious but inexpensive scopes like the Orion
Starblast, are still with us. They are
still sold in actual department stores, but also in hobby shops and, of course,
online. Most of them are the ubiquitous 114mm (4.5 inch) Newtonians, 60mm refractors
being less numerous than they once were.
How is the current crop compared to those of yore, like the
famous Tasco 11-TE? Compared to 60s – 70s DSTs,
they are mostly worse. The big and debilitating problem is their mounts are
shakier (and they weren’t the Rock of Gibraltar way back when), wooden tripods
having given way to extruded aluminum jobs barely adequate for low power. Eyepieces,
however, are definitely much better now. Most are fairly good 1.25-inch
oculars that blow the doors off the .965-inch horrors of the past. Finders have
improved, too, red dot jobs having displaced small-aperture, stopped-down optical
finders or the dreadful “reflex” finders Jason-branded scopes once sported.
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That glorious box promising wonders... |
Looking at the waif before me, I noted the label on her
(plastic) focuser read, “Celestron 114-AZ SR D=114, F=600, F=5.2, MADE IN
CHINA.” I almost walked on, knowing the limitation that would impose given
the spherical mirror I knew this little girl would have. But I didn’t. I’ve
seen Celestron 130mm scopes with spherical mirrors do OK on the Moon and other
subjects at similar focal lengths, so why not?
I’ve also gotta admit the Celestron tugged at my heart
strings, looking sad and pitiful with her banged-up steel tube tarted-up with
paint to make it look like carbon fiber.
And I am always on the lookout for scopes to pass on to enthusiastic young
undergraduate astronomy students. Also, there was the price tag on her, “$19.99.”
Finally, paraphrasing Charlie Brown, I said out loud, “Besides, I think this
little telescope needs me.”
The Celestron, who told me her name was “Tanya,” begged to
be taken home: “Uncle Rod, my red dot finder alone is worth 20 bucks. PLEASE
GET ME OUTA THIS PLACE!” I took a look at her primary, which appeared
bright and clean, and surveyed the rest of her. She looked complete with a
couple of cheap Plössls, one in her focuser and one in her little eyepiece tray.
Well, almost complete; her aperture cover was long gone. I scooped the girl up
and headed to the checkout, “Oh, thank you, Rod! I know we’ll be great
friends!”
A hard-knock life. |
My initial examination showed one of the two eyepiece
locking screws was jammed. It was so tight I had to resort to (carefully) unscrewing
it with a pair of vice-grips. To my surprise, it wasn’t cross-threaded and
stripped, just screwed down awful tight. When it was loose, I was able to extract
the 9.7mm Plössl (both eyepieces being Celestron’s extra-cheap ones with metal barrels
but plastic bodies) and examine the secondary mirror. A look in the now empty
focuser showed several big blemishes on it. Might just be dirt or might be
damage to the coating—there is no telling what a kid who got a telescope
instead of the battery-powered scooter they really wanted will do to torture the
poor thing.
Otherwise, it was clear Tanya had indeed led that proverbial
hard-knock life. There were several small dents and dings on the tube, and
something—who knows what?—had been sprayed on it here and there. There was also
plenty of the dreaded Chinese glue-grease (apparently made of ground-up weasels),
which had migrated from focuser, to tube, to mount, to tripod with the aid of
young fingers.
There was a crescent Moon in the sky, so naturally I got little
Tanya into the backyard for a look. Before doing that, I gave both her oculars
a good cleaning—they were filthy. How was that Moon? Not bad. It was sharp
enough given the obvious mis-collimation of the un-cooled-down optics, poor
seeing, and the only fair quality of the eyepiece (these plastic-bodied Plössls
are used on many of Celestron’s/SkyWatcher’s lower-priced scopes). Anyhow,
Tanya did well enough I declared she had possibilities and told her we’d get
her cleaned up in the morning.
That morning, if not too early that morning, I set
off to obtain something I knew I’d need, paper-reinforcers to make a center dot
for her primary mirror so I could collimate her. To my astonishment, Publix had
none. Neither did Walgreens. Nor did the Walmart food store. I finally turned
some up at CVS drugs. Is there a paper-ass*&^% shortage or something?
I did that, which was just as much of a pain as removing the
other screws, since all were held in place by tiny nuts and Unk couldn’t get
his fingers very far into the tube due to the thick plastic spider vanes. Finally,
all screws were removed, but the plastic assembly still refused to budge. It
was pretty obviously glued as well as screwed into place. One of the problems
with this and similar little scopes is they are not made to be maintained—they are
like Chinese puzzle boxes.
Ready for collimation. |
Next up was collimation, but to do that, I’d have to center-dot
the mirror. I was surprised not to see a dot on the primary. Even Celestron’s
lower-priced “amateur astronomy class” scopes like the aforementioned Starblast
have ‘em. I suppose they don’t bother with those like the 114AZ bound for
hobby/toy/department stores.
How do you center dot a mirror that ain’t got one? Grab a
compass, draw a circle the same diameter as the primary on a piece o’ paper,
fold it into quarters, snip off the apex of the cone formed, unfold it, place
it on the mirror, and carefully make a dot on the primary through the hole. Center
the paper reinforcer on the dot. If you’re as OCD as Unk, you’ll then take a Q-tip
moistened with alcohol and gently remove the sharpie mark.
I collimated the little thing using the Celestron combo
sight-tube/Cheshire I’ve had for years. If you want to know how to do Newtonian
collimation, see my blog entry on the subject.
Having done a Newtonian fairly recently, I did not have to reference my own
article. Denouement? Secondary and primary were both off a considerable
amount but were easy enough to get “in” in just a few minutes.
Done for the moment with the OTA, it was time to see what I
could do to improve the mount. The azimuth axis had a healthy dollop of that glue-grease.
So much of the viscous stuff the tube tended to continue moving in azimuth when
I stopped pushing it. A little of my favorite cure, DeOxit, and the application
of some Blaster synthetic lube freed up the motion quite a bit. There was only
so much I could do, since the azimuth axis was pressed into place and would
have been difficult or impossible to remove, but it was better.
Wasn’t a whole lot to be done for the altitude axis. A
little lube in the trunnions and that was it. The altitude slow-motion arm
(talk about a blast from the distant past) did not need any attention. Finally, I used some 99% isopropyl alcohol,
DeOxit, and WD-40 to banish the many patches of weasel grease on mount and
tripod.
The spider is part of the end assembly of the tube. |
Last thing? I tried to make poor Tanya pretty again
and was partially successful. I was, with mucho scrubbing and application of Pledge
furniture polish, able to remove most of the nasty-looking spots on the OTA.
Oh, she’ll never look like she did the day excited hands pulled her out of her
Technicolor box, but, yeah, she looked much better. I picked her up,
cradled her in my arms, and took her to the backyard to acclimatize ahead of
darkness. You know what? The little scope positively glowed sitting there.
While waiting, I thought I’d learn a little something about Missy.
It turns out she is a currently sold scope retailing for about 100 bucks at—fittingly—Kohl’s
department store. Seems to me I may even have seen a 114AZ in the Kohl’s up the
street last Christmas. I also solved a mystery: what the “SR” in the telescope’s model number
means. The 114AZ SR is smartphone ready. What does that mean? As
she came from the factory, the scope was furnished with a little cell phone
mount so you could take pictures through the eyepiece. That mount, which apparently
involved rubber bands, was not with Tanya at Goodwill, and had no doubt gone
missing along with the aperture cover (and a pack-in DVD of the Starry Night software)
long ago.
I sat and waited for it to get dark enough. But you know
Unk; I got “go” fever: “Hail, it’s dark enough to look at the Moon.” And it
was. The difference between bedraggled Tanya the previous night, and tonight’s
prom-queen Tanya was more than palpable. The just before first quarter Moon was
simply scrumptious.
At 60x with her so-so (or maybe not so so-so) 10mm
eyepiece, Selene was a thing of wonder. With darkness having arrived, I thought
I’d push her a small amount. I plucked one of Celestron’s slightly better Plössls,
a 6mm, out of its case to see what she could do with 100x, a more practical magnification
for observing the Solar System. With a little more power, the trio of craters,
Theophillus, Cyrillus, and Catharina, was simply breathtaking.
Was the wee scope perfect? Hardly. Even at “just” 100x,
there began to be problems. Not with the optics, but with the mount. At that
modest magnification, it began to border on unusable. Oh, I could get the
telescope in focus, but it was quite shaky and I had to exercise a light touch.
Combine that shakiness with the shallow depth of focus of its fast focal ratio,
and a scope like this challenges the very people it is supposedly designed to
serve, children and beginners. However, it is definitely at least OK with the
two supplied eyepieces, which furnish 23x and 60x.
Looking and feeling much better! |
While the sky was beginning to haze over, as it had been
since sundown, I just had to take a look at M42. The Trapezium was easy and
there was as much nebulosity on view as I’d expect any 4-inch to show on a
less-than-average night. Oh, we made a few other stops as well. The ET Cluster,
NGC 457 was pretty if more subdued than on a good evening. But we ended on Luna
again. I couldn’t stop marveling what at what this formerly debased little
telescope was showing me.
Frankly, I was thrilled I’d been able to bring this sad little
refugee back to life. Unfortunately, while the sky wasn’t looking any worse
than it had, and the winter stars were glittering bravely in the haze, the one
thing that always indicates it is time for Unk to end an observing run occurred.
My feet got cold. When that happens, it is end of story, game over, zip
up your fly. I picked the little scope up, deposited her in the Batcave (her
aperture covered with a shower cap), and was inside watching television with
the cats in just a few minutes.
When the time is right, yes, Tanya will undoubtedly go to
some deserving young person, but till then, yeah, it’s just as she said; we’re
going to be great friends.
Saturday, December 24, 2022
Issue 587: An Uncle Rod Merry Christmas 2022
In witness of that, I hoped we could take our Christmas Eve luncheon at El Giro's Mexican Restaurant, just as we used to all those long years ago (it
seems strange to say that, but, yes, those days are 25 years or more up the
timestream, though it doesn’t feel like it). Anywho, that's what Unk planned, El Giros, the new El Giro's out here in far west Possum Swamp.
Be that all as it all may be, back home, I ruminated on Christmases Past. Not those at Chaos Manor South, but those of long, long,
long ago. Christmases I’ve recounted in this here blog a time or three.
Two of those reminiscences, I think, sum up my feelings about this most
numinous time of year better than anything I could write on this Eve:
And…
Unk puttered about the place the rest of the afternoon. While it was comfy up in the main house, out in the radio shack, aka "The Batcave," the little heater struggled to keep the temperature at around 65F. But you know what? The cold made it seem a bit more like Yuletide than the usual Possum Swamp t-shirt weather does. While we can still have cold at Christmas, it's less frequent than when Rod was a boy. Hell, it's now getting rare for us to even have a hard freeze. Unk spent the remainder of Christmas Eve day with a wary eye on the sky. Clouds had begun to roll in just after dawn to his dismay.
As A Charlie Brown Christmas wrapped up on TV (thanks to a DVD), I found myself growing drowsy—couldn’t have that! I wasn’t at all interested in hanging out with any of those dadgum Christmas ghosts this year! I jumped up—badly startling the felines. I wasn’t gonna fall asleep and miss my Christmas Eve tradition.That's something that’s been a constant over many years: My Christmas Eve look at that greatest of all ornaments, Messier 42, the Great Orion Nebula. IF IT WAS CLEAR. Was it? Unk poked his head out the Sunroom doors. Despite being assaulted by an icy blast that near-about blinded him with tears...it was obvious it was, yes, clear. Time to get about my business.
How would I look at M42? “Simple” would have been my 80mm
f/11 SkyWatcher achromat. Given the insane temps, that would have been understandable. Understandable, but still The Way of the Astro-wimp. No. I would do it right, really right,
for the first time in a long while. With my ancient and beloved Edmund Scientific Palomar Junior.
I had got my Pal outside in late afternoon before the cold and a few eggnogs sapped my will, as I was pretty sure they would. I am a lot older and weaker than I was in these days, and the Palomar Junior sure didn't feel like she'd lost any weight over the intervening six decades. Getting the heavy old mount and pedestal out the door wasn't a bit easier than way back when (Luckily, I didn't have to worry about bashing Mama's prized mahogany coffee table in the process!). I got the scope to a spot on the turnaround with a clear view to the east, just as I might have in days of yore.
Tuesday, November 08, 2022
Issue 586: The Moon and You Volume 1
I’ve remarked here a couple of times how fast the days, weeks, months, and years seem to fly by at your Old Uncle’s increasingly advanced age. However, you could have knocked me over with the proverbial feather when I realized Charity Hope Valentine has been at my side for some seventeen years now.
“What in pea-turkey is Unk going on about now?”
It’s like this, muchachos. With a waxing Moon in the sky, I thought it was
time to seriously revisit her. For me, like for many of you, Luna, Selene, Diana,
Hecate, Artemis was my first love in astronomy, a love I’ve never quite got
over. So, I thought I’d drag a scope into the backyard for a quick look. But which
scope?
“Quick look” is just about synonymous with “3-inch alt-Az
refractor,” and I could certainly have used my SkyWatcher 80mm f/11 on her AZ-4
mount. I wanted “easy,” yeah, but I wanted more. I wanted to kick up the
power on an evening predicted to deliver good seeing. The scope that would excel in all those
things? Charity Hope Valentine is an f/15 125mm aperture Maksutov-Cassegrain
with excellent optics, an OK drive, and at least some claim to portability—if
not anything approaching that of the SkyWatcher reflector.
As above, I was gobsmacked to realize how long Charity had
been with me. That one of my first blog articles about her, “Two-and-a-Half Years After the Honeymoon,” had been
written in <gulp> two thousand and fracking eight! Not only has she been
with me for a long while, it has been months since Charity was out
of her case, and it was time. So, one morning out here in suburbia, where every day (they say) is like Sunday on the farm, your Unk determined to give the scope a checkout prior to lugging her into the backyard.
Protected by the decent aluminum case Meade used to sell for
the ETX scopes, Charity is in good physical condition. Frankly, she looks brand
new and has weathered the near two decades since she came to stay with Unk
better than he has. My main concern was her LNT battery, a button
cell that keeps date and time current among other things. I found a 12-volt
power supply with a cigarette lighter style connector, plugged Charity in, and
fired her up. I was hoping the battery was OK, since replacing
it ain’t no fun, lemme tell you. It had been over two years since I’d swapped
it out, so I wasn’t hopeful.
Power up, mash “Mode,” scroll down to time…and… It was way off. But the fact the
Autostar HC displayed the date of the last time I used the scope, January
of this year, not something random, led me to believe the battery might have
some life left. I entered the correct date and time, cycled power, and, yeah,
it stuck. I figgered if time were off by evening, I’d have to bite the bullet
and replace the cell—“soon.” I’d manually set in the correct time if necessary
and keep on truckin’.
Some months back, I talked about resuming my lunar series, Destination
Moon. So how come up top it says “The Moon and You,” not “Destination Moon Night
Umptysquat”? A good reason. That series
was largely concerned with me imaging lunar features. I planned to do 300 of
them, the prominent ones shown in the old Moon map in the mid-sixties edition
of Norton’s Star Atlas. I got a lot of ‘em, but not all of ‘em. The
holdouts were those of unimpressive nature visible at inconvenient times. So… I
didn’t quite make it. Just like when young Rod resolved
to draw those 300 and also got much of the way there…but not quite
all the way.
My conclusion was if I failed to finish those particular
300 features twice, it meant I was likely never gonna do ‘em all. Also,
I wanted this series to be a little broader in scope. If I wanted to capture
Selene’s beauty with my ZWO camera, cool. But if I just wanted snapshot Moon
pictures with a cell phone, that would be good too. Heck, if I only wanted to
look. Or maybe make a quick little sketch of a feature than interested me like
I used to do all those years ago, I’d write about that.
After essaying Destination Moon’s multiple installments, I
was left knowing the Moon a lot better than I had during my deep-sky-crazy
years. Heck, I now probably know her surface almost as well as I did when I was
a kid and it was as familiar as Mama and Daddy’s subdivision, Canterbury
Heights. But I’d still need a map.
I’ve got several, including the outstanding Rukl Atlas of
the Moon (autographed by its late author at a star party, the Peach State Star Gaze, right after he
finished enjoying the Moon in my old Ultima C8, Celeste). But if you use a star
diagonal with your scope, as I do with Charity (she has a built-in diagonal),
be it refractor or CAT, printed maps will never match what you see. You
get an upright but mirror-reversed image.
Also, once you get beyond basic lunar touring, the level of detail in
Rukl is a mite low.
What to do? Easy-peasy. Virtual Moon Atlas. Yes, this (Windows) program by the author of the Cartes
du Ciel software, Patrick Chevalley, and lunar expert Christian Legrand is
still around and better than ever. I talked about it frequently in the Destination
Moon days, but suffice to say it’s the program I always dreamed of for lunar
observing. In addition to displaying crazy-detailed charts that can be
customized to match the view in any scope, it will even send your goto mount to
lunar features. It’s free, and if you are interested in the Moon, it should be your
number one observing tool.
So, on a gentle Gulf Coast early-November evening, one on
which the Moon shone down turning the landscape to silver, I set Charity up in
the driveway, a spot with a good view of the eastern horizon. All ready to go,
I turned the on-off switch to “on” and checked date and time. The date was still
good, but time was already off by over six hours. I set it correctly and
returned inside for a box of eyepieces.
What sort of oculars would I use with Charity this evening?
Nothing fancy. I didn’t feel the need to drag out any of my heavy-metal TeleVue
or Explore Scientific eyepieces. Instead, I grabbed the box of Celestrons I won
years ago at one of the last Deep South Regional Stargazes I attended. They are
all 1.25-inch (Charity is limited to that format anyway) Chinese Plössls that
perform just fine. Frankly, it’s been quite a few years since I’ve seen a truly
bad ocular from any half respectable vendor.
In went a 32mm for alignment. I coulda grabbed a crosshair
reticle eyepiece out of Charity’s case up in the house, but I didn’t feel like
going inside again, and a so-so alignment would be good enough for lunar work
anyway.
Anyhoo, Charity is a PE model ETX, which means she can
perform an automatic alignment not unlike a GPS scope sans GPS. Set her in home
position and she does a little dance, finding north and level. This took a
couple of minutes, but eventually she headed for alignment star one, Vega. It
wasn’t in the eyepiece, but just outside it. The next star was a problem,
though.
Because of my position in the backyard, many of Charity’s
choices were in the trees. I rejected one star after another till we got to
Enif and could finish up. How was the
resulting alignment? Saturn was in the eyepiece at 60x when Charity stopped, no
problem. OK, OK! I’ll fess up. That was the result of my SECOND
alignment. In typical Uncle Rod fashion, I kicked the tripod by accident,
ruining the first one just as I finished centering Enif. In my defense, the
legs on Charity’s tripod are more wide-spread than on most.
It shouldn’t be surprising mighty Eratosthenes was my first
stop. It was perfectly positioned at 8.5 days, just a bit off the terminator.
It would be hard to miss even if this 60Km diameter crater didn’t display such
beautifully sharp, terraced walls. It is located at the termination of the
lunar Apennines; your eye just naturally follows their arc to this stupendous formation.
Despite blah-blah-blah seeing Charity easily revealed the complex central peak
and the rough floor of this great crater.
Where next? I moved north, flying over a tremendous amount
of territory LM style with a push of an Autostar direction button. I skimmed over many
wonderful destinations, but something had caught my eye; that “something” being
the amazing 101Km crater (or is it really a walled plain?), Plato. While Plato,
lying at the other terminus of the huge arc of mountains that begins as
Apennines and winds up near Plato as Alps, looks elongated due to its position,
it’s, like almost all craters, actually round.
What does every observer long to see of this
giant? Some of the craterlets that pepper the dark lava-floor. At eight and a
half days, the crater is a little far from the terminator to make that easy but running up the power to 250x and waiting for good seeing stretches revealed
a few spots that mark the (relatively) tiny pits.
What else is of interest in the area? Plenty. Only beginning with the Alpine Valley, which
runs for over 130 Km through this mountainous area of the Moon. It’s beautiful
in any telescope, but the prize is the rille down its center. About a mile
wide, this sinuous “channel” is a high challenge for a visual observer even
when the Alpine Valley is perfectly placed. I’ve seen it at those times, but,
frankly, the best way to view it is really in images with a planetary camera like my little ZWO.
One more, though. That “one more” was mighty Tycho. When the
Moon approaches full, Tycho is the most prominent feature on Luna thanks to its
draw-dropping system of lunar rays. End of story, game over, zip up your fly. But
even at this phase, it stood out like a sore thumb in the rough lunar
highlands.
What makes Tycho so prominent even when its rays don’t shine
is it is sharp, and it is young (the reason its rays are still so prominent). This
86Km diameter formation’s imposing walls contain a complex and interesting triple-central
peak. Anyhow, Tycho just looks young (it’s less than 1 billion years old) and is eye-catching at any phase.
And that was that. I could have kept going, but I decided to
savor what I’d seen and visit more old friends “next time.” One of the beauties
of Miss Valentine, of course, is she’s easy enough to get back inside and in
her case despite bringing quite a bit of horsepower to the observin’ field.
Soon, I was in the den watching TV with the cats, sipping a portion of Yell,
and strategizing about the upcoming eclipse…
The Great November 2022 Total Lunar Eclipse
Nah, not as good as a Christmas eclipse, but this one was pretty spectacular from the ‘Swamp. Course,
there would’ve been no eclipse at all for Unk if he hadn’t been able to drag
himself outa bed at freaking 4am. Amazingly enough, he did! I’d stationed a tripod bearing a Canon DSLR with a medium telephoto lens by the front door so things wouldn’t be too painful at
that now unaccustomed early hour (I went about ten years getting up a 4:30
every morning for work, but that seems a long, long time ago). I’d just waltz
into the yard with the rig, shoot some pretty pictures, and that would be it. I
hoped.
There’s not much more to tell. It had been a while since I’d
shot a lunar eclipse, but I still remembered how. Lens wide open, ASA 1600,
exposures under a second, 250mm of focal length, lots of shots. Despite my bleary
eyes, I could tell the images displayed on the Canon’s little screen were
pretty good. One nice thing was Luna was in a fairly star-rich area (and Uranus
was nearby), making her extra photogenic. It was a pretty dark eclipse,
too.
Done just before five, I downloaded the images to a laptop
to make sure all was well and uploaded one to Facebook to share with my
friends. Yep, looked purty darned good, I told Miss Dorothy, who was bustling
about, serving the felines their breakfast at their strong insistence.
To be honest, I’d been sorta dreading the morning…having to get
up so early, get a camera outside, and see if I remembered how to take lunar
eclipse photos. But it all went amazingly smoothly…the whole thing was, to
quote the poet, “simple — neat…no trouble at all — not the least.” I was glad I’d
imaged (and experienced) this grand eclipse.