Uncle Rod's Astro Blog

 

How’s one of my favorite telescopes of all time, Charity Hope Valentine, my ETX125 PE Maksutov Cassegrain, doing? Muchachos, the reason you haven’t heard much about her in long while is because the answer to that has been, “Not good, not good at all.” For all practical purposes my long-time companion was dead. I’d tried to take good care of her…but…

Charity,  you see, is no spring chicken; she is going on 21 years old. She’s had a good life for a small (5-inch) telescope, I think.  I know your old Uncle and his slightly neurotic ETX girlfriend have enjoyed countless astronomical adventures.  This one and this one being but two examples of many. Alas, time takes its toll on us all…

I tried to take good care of Missy, but things began to fail. First came her Autostar’s keyboard. I put that right, however, and she was fine for years. Her true decline began with the hand control’s coiled cable giving up the ghost followed swiftly by other minor parts and pieces—the power cord, tripod components, RA lock, etc., etc. It was no problem to replace these things, though (like the self-tapping screws that fell out of the Autostar of their own accord), and Charity said she intended to outlive Unk.

Alas, two years ago, the inevitable critical failure occurred: The Autostar hand control, without which the ETX can’t even track in RA, let out the magic smoke. This was heralded by the display turning to hieroglyphics and going blank as we observed NGC 5053 on an early summer evening. My heart sank. Normally, I’d have grumbled and bought a new Autostar HC, but with the fall of Meade that was no longer an option.

By the light of day, your Old Uncle got the Autostar open and surveyed the damage. I’d hoped it was “only” the display (which is becoming difficult to obtain for older ETXes), but I noticed several burned ICs, too. I trimmed the ribbon cable and cleaned the connector on the board and powered Charity up, but the display remained stubbornly blank. More looking revealed more damaged components. What would I do? What would I do? I’d have to give the situation some thought…and months and months rolled by…

Not that I didn’t think about Charity. I thought about her frequently. In my opinion, the PCB was a basket case, and the display was possibly bad as well. Trying to repair the hand control just didn’t seem like much of an option. So… I kept my eye out for a used Meade Autostar 497 at a reasonable price. I didn’t see one, though. Used Autostars are now going for as much as $400 with no guarantee they aren’t on the edge of failure—assuming they work at all. I considered ponying up the $200 - $400 they cost on the eBay anyway if that was what it took to revive my little girlfriend, but it just didn’t seem wise. Maybe there was a better way.

Deforking Charity was easy--at first!

What was that better way? Deforking the girl. Removing her optical tube from her fork mount, installing a dovetail bracket on her underside (sorry, hon), and using Charity on my Celestron Advanced VX mount—or maybe even purchasing a small GEM  for her. I’d considered that idea before but rejected it. I wanted Charity back just the way she’d always been.

Howsomeever, in addition to me beginning to lose hope about finding a good deal on an Autostar, I began thinking about what the reality of Miss C had always been. I’d originally been attracted to Charity because living here in Possum Swamp there are plenty of iffy nights. It would be nice to have a scope with decent aperture and more portability than a C8 for those “maybe” evenings. The ETX provided that to some extent, but I quickly found the MCT was heavier than I expected (don’t look at me like that, Charity!). Her fork and OTA were frankly not much more portable than a C8. Having the ETX’s tube separate from the mount would make her more manageable for your decrepit correspondent.

Also, the girl had her quirks. Some nights her goto pointing was flat out amazing. Other nights, even nights at the same site with the same alignment stars, she struggled to find anything, especially objects high in the sky. Her tracking? It was OK in alt-azimuth mode, but repositioning an object in the field was a pain due to backlash. Equatorial mode? Let’s just say you could forget doing any imaging other than lunar and planetary. There was plenty of periodic error in addition to the backlash that plagued the telescope no matter how often you did the “drive training” routine.

On the other hand, Charity’s optics are first rate. Also, 5-inches doesn’t fall that far behind 8-inches, not at a dark site, anyway. The times I’ve pitted my girl against Meade and Celestron 8-inch SCTs, she’s kept up with them. And, yes, I still loved Charity Hope Valentine, and in these latter days I believed I’d use her more than ever if I could just bring her back in slightly more portable fashion. If deforking her would allow the girl to live on, that’s just what I would do.

So, one afternoon this past June, I finally undertook to do the deed. With Charity on the operating table in my radio shack/workshop of the telescopes, the Batcave, I got to work. Removing the tube from the fork should have been simple, and on most ETXes it would have been. You just remove four hex bolts, two on either side of the rear cell, that hold the fork adapter plates to the cell. I did that and out they came, no fuss, no muss. Until there was muss. I tried to slide Charity forward or back to remove her from the fork, but she wouldn’t budge.

Done!

The main problem was a part unique to the PE series ETXes, a plastic collar that wraps around the top half of the rear cell. This (I found out after I got it off) is used to protect the cable bundle leading from the drivebase to the telescope’s LNT Smartfinder. That red-dot finder is mounted to the collar, not the rear cell—I’d always assumed the collar was part of the cell. Anyhow, after some experimentation it was clear that without removing this collar Charity wasn’t going anywhere.

The collar was attached to the rear cell with a single bolt.  The bolt was small, but looking closely, even my tired old peepers could see it was some kind of star head. Hokay. I had a bunch of star wrenches, including some small ones. Unfortunately, even the smallest was too large. There was, however, a gap between the bracket holding the collar in place and the rear cell. I was able to press it in enough to allow me to grip the bolt with a pair of forceps and remove it. Whew!

The rest was relatively easy. On most ETXes, you can pull the fork arms apart enough to make it easy to slide the OTA out. However, for the PE, Meade beefed-up the fork (like more recent 125s it is plastic outside, but aluminum inside), and I found it difficult to flex the arms at all. I finally discovered that moving the tube adapter plates that had been screwed into the rear cell down and out of the way provided enough clearance to allow me to free the OTA.  I have hung onto Charity’s fork mount in case it becomes possible/desirable to revive it.

The rest was easy. I got the girl up to the main house and bolted a William Optics Vixen-compatible dovetail bracket into the bracket on the underside of Charity’s tube (she wishes I would stop talking about her underside). Kudos to Meade for providing a ¼-20 “foot” on the ETX. It came to me that the Vixen dovetail would also allow me to use C on my SkyWatcher AZ-4 altazimuth mount on those (not infrequent) nights when I am really lazy.

How was balance when I mounted Charity on the AVX GEM? RA was no problem, though I did have to slide the single Synta pancake weight nearly all the way up to balance. Declination? Charity is quite front end heavy due to her deep and thick Maksutov corrector, and the tube had to be pretty far back in the dovetail, but, again, no problem.

Looking good on the AVX...

Finishing up, I gave the girl a good cleaning/polishing and installed a base for a Rigel Quick Finder on her rear cell. How’d she look? I thought her silkscreened/anodized tube (with a metallic-pink North America Nebula) looked as good as ever. Maybe even better out in the open on a GEM rather than nestled in a fork. As for the Quick Finder, I think that will be perfect. I had been worried about getting her old Smartfinder off and was glad it turned out to be attached to that removable collar instead of the cell.

The only thing I was concerned about? That Charity’s fixed diagonal would cause the equatorial mount to place the eyepiece in some inconvenient positions. Tube rings might be preferable, but they are difficult to find in the correct size, and I’m not a fan of loosening rings to change the eyepiece angle anyway. At best, that’s caused me to mess up my goto alignment and at worst to nearly drop a Newtonian OTA onto the ground. I do have an LAR adapter that might allow me to use a standard diagonal in C. We’ll see if that’s worth fooling with.

All that remained was seeing how the girl performed on the AVX under a starry sky…

I should have waited longer to give the “new” Charity Hope Valentine her First Light. The July evening I set her up in Chaos Manor South’s backyard was miserable, just miserable. When the sun finally began his exit from the hazy, partly cloudy sky, the temperature was still over 80F, the humidity was high, and the skeeters didn’t wait till full dark before biting your poor Uncle. But I was a man with a mission. Would the girl be useable on a GEM? I got to work getting AVX and ETX ready.

Not only had I not used Charity in a long time, I hadn’t used the Celestron mount in a while, either. I wasn’t too concerned, though. I’ve aligned the AVX a million times over the 13 years I’ve had it and know the procedure like the back o’ me hand. I got the tripod up, then decided it needed to be shorter. As above, that fixed ETX diagonal can put the eyepiece in inconvenient positions—mainly “too high” with the scope pointing at targets at lower altitudes.

Tripod? Check. Mount head? Check. Power cord and hand controller plugged in? Check. Counterweight? Check. Charity on mount and balanced? Check. With the telescope pointing toward the North Celestial Pole, however, I could see the eyepiece was still too high to reach. I collapsed the tripod legs some more and went inside to wait for dark.

When astronomical twilight arrived (not till nine freaking thirty), out to the backyard I went. Power up! The Celestron hand control displayed the correct time despite me not having replaced the RTC battery in… well, who knows? Anyhoo, I only fumbled a little with the alignment. I had to skip one calibration star the mount offered because it was too low, and at first wasn’t sure which button to mash to select another. Finally, my last star was in the field of the 25mm crosshair eyepiece at 75x when Missy stopped her slew. What now? Why M13, of course.

She looks right at home on the AZ-4.

If you want to know how the Great Globular looked in my reborn girlfriend, take a gander at last month’s AstroBlog, but I will say it didn’t look like much. Maybe more than I expected, but not much more. Next up? M92, that other Hercules glob. May I commit heresy? I thought M92 looked better than M13 on this lousy night.

By the time I’d spent a while with M92, the sky was, if anything, worse. The clouds weren’t the problem; it was the haze. Chaos Manor South’s sky was milk with only the brightest stars peeping through the mess. I thought I’d try a couple more deep sky objects, beginning with M27, the Dumbbell Nebula, but it was barely visible (it was low in altitude for one thing). I packed it in but didn’t pack it up. I tossed a scope cover over my girl and headed for the den. It’s aways nice to be able to leave a telescope set up in my secure backyard when rain does not appear imminent.

The next morning? The sky was clear, but blocking the Sun showed the sky was still crazy-hazy. I brought C and the AVX back inside.  I was satisfied, however, and had nothing to complain about regarding how Charity had behaved on the Celestron mount. There will be no more  of those evenings when she has some sort of meltdown and refuses to find DSOs. The only gotcha? I need to remember to keep the tripod as low as possible. No matter! Charity was back!

What would come next for my slightly neurotic gal pal? I wanted to try her on the SkyWatcher altazimuth mount when the Moon was back in the sky.  The Moon came back, alright, but with it came Tropical Storm Bertha, which despite Uncle Rod’s pleas, “Bertha doncha come around here anymore!”  brushed our coast. The main effect? More clouds, layers of them.

Nevertheless, I was able to get out and view a few stars and get a glimpse of Luna with Charity on the  AZ-4 mount. Verdict? A manual alt-azimuth mount is not perfect for such a long focal length telescope, but it was OK. At 315x via an Orion (Synta) 6mm Expanse eyepiece, the shakes were there but were bearable. The only somewhat objectionable thing? Due to the ETX’s fixed diagonal, the eyepiece was always to the side.

That’s not a big deal, but it is a deal. If it begins to annoy me, I can use a standard SCT diagonal via the L.A.R. adapter I mentioned above. And, yes, this mount does make C. into quite the portable telescope. However, only a full observing run with her in this configuration will allow me to decide if it’s a useable way for me to observe with The ETX.

Space Summer Comes Again

Ready to go QRV from Battleship Park!

Yes, your increasingly ancient Uncle just completed yet another trip around ol’ Sol last month, his 73^rd. I celebrated it as I have for a long while, with space, ham radio, and Mexican food. How did space travel and the space program come to be associated with my summertime birthday?

Back when I was a little squeaker, I liked to play space and spacemen during those glorious summer vacations of yore, even more than I liked playing army or monsters (“Werewolf’s Out Tonight!”) as the Sun sank on long July afternoons. Once Unk was finally grown up, there were summer vacation trips with Miss Dorothy to the Space and Rocket center in Huntsville, and Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This year? Unk’s birthday was decidedly more modest…

Of course there was ham radio. With the coming of Parks on the Air (amateurs go to a national or state park and “activate” it, contact as many fellow operators from there as possible) amateur radio has become more of a summer activity for Unk than ever. The way you play POTA as an activator is you set your portable station up in a park and work a minimum of ten “hunters”—hams hunting parks from home.

As Unk’s birthday week approached. I’d kept a weather eye on the sky, but it looked like I might get lucky this year. The days preceding my birthday on Friday the 17^th were stormy, but when Friday neared, it was obvious the weather gods would cooperate. I loaded the ham radio gear into Miss Van Pelt, my 4Runner, and headed to Battleship Alabama Park, Parks on the Air Park US-11376. 

The Great Gray Lady.

I got the little (Chinese) Xiegu G90 transceiver (20 watts) and my Chameleon portable (vertical) antenna up and got on the air. It was tough sledding, campers. The 20-meter ham band was not in great shape; it was up and down all day. Nevertheless, I got the required number of contacts and worked a couple more for good measure. As noon came in, however, and the temperature hit the mid-90s (let’s not even talk about “real feel”), your ancient Uncle knew it was time to head home.  

Of course, that evening Miss Dorothy and I repaired to my fave Mexican restaurant, El Giro’s (“The Special Chicken”) just down the road a mile or three from Chaos Manor South. There? That’s no mystery. I ordered, as always, the wonderful Number 13:  Chile rellenos, burrito, enchilada. Man was it good! And the margaritas? They were, if anything, extra good.

Back home at Chaos Manor South, I was too tired to take even a small telescope into the backyard, but I fulfilled the space part of Space Summer 2026 with the viewing a bunch of Project Gemini videos on DVDs I got from the old Spacecraft Films. After I’d watched the films to the accompaniment of a little of the Rebel Yell—and catnip for the felines—I began to doze off. I figured I was entitled to. It had been a big day and a fun day.

Next:  A Tasco Comes to Chaos Manor South…

 

Before we get to the subject(s) of this month’s blog, muchachos, I want to acknowledge an anniversary: This month marks twenty years—yes, twenty—of Uncle Rod’s AstroBlog. In that long-ago summer of 2006, did I have an inkling we’d still be here two decades down the line? Hell, no! I’d have laughed if somebody had suggested such an absurdity.

Not that there haven’t been changes as we’ve rolled along. The ‘blog began on AOL, on their long gone “Blogspot on AOL” site.  In the beginning, the posts were short, often centered on current events in amateur astronomy, and were aimed at least partially at my fellow astronomy club members here. Then, AOL began going, err, “belly” up, and I moved the AstroBlog to Google in 2006, where it has remained. That was just the beginning of the changes, however.

The big one came a couple of years later in July of 2008. Without me knowing where it came from, the idea popped into my head that the AstroBlog could be more, and I wanted it to be more. Articles, starting with “The Good Tasco,” became longer, more personal, and aimed at, well, everybody. Soon, I was publishing a new installment every week. I can hardly believe I kept to that schedule for nearly ten years, but I did.

Until 2018. In the spring of that year, I began to find reasons not to publish the ol’ AstroBlog. I’d had a hard time adjusting to early retirement and began to wonder if I really wanted to publish the ‘blog every week—or at all. Was I in need of a change? I eventually got over that, but then, in January 2019, I suffered a near-fatal accident. Being laid up with not much to do and not able to do much got me down in the dumps—again. When I had (more or less) recovered, I found I suddenly had two books to write. All those things conspired to keep the ‘blog off the air.

There was no Uncle Rod’s AstroBlog from April 2018 to November 2019 (I did publish in December 2018 for old time’s sake). Then, the coming of the pandemic and me needing something to do during it conspired to bring the 'blog back regularly starting in December of 2019. It felt good, and I wondered how I could have stopped AstroBlogging. I have reduced my schedule to once a month, though, and that seems to be just right.

‘Nuff said. But I do want to thank all the readers—my friends—who have supported The Little Old AstroBlog from Possum Swamp for (ulp!) twenty years.

Uncle Rod’s Yearly M13

“Yearly M13? What’s that mean, Unk?” If you’re a longtime reader here, you know. If not? Taking an image of the Great Globular in Hercules once a year is one of two annual astronomy rituals I perform—the other being observing M42, the Orion Nebula, on Christmas Eve. How and why did I start this “ritual” business? Don’t ask me; it began many years ago with M42. I suppose I just liked looking at the Great Nebula on Christmas Eve as a kid, turned that, into a yearly routine, and wanted something similar to do on a summer’s eve. I’ve long since come to look forward to these annual milestones.

Since the weather goobers were predicting an unusually rainy summer for us down here in Possum Swamp, I thought I’d best get after M13 at my first opportunity. That opportunity came on a June dark of the Moon evening sandwiched between thunderstorms. It wasn’t at all clear how much time I’d have on that Sunday night, so the telescope of choice would be my little ZWO S50 smartscope, Suzie. If things worked out, M13 would be in the can. If not, it is the work of but five minutes to get The Suze back inside.

What was the weather like? As mid-June came in, temperatures were already in the low 90s without involving the “real feel” business. The humidity was also high, natch. The sky on this particular evening as darkness began to fall (at fracking 9pm)? Milky. Mushy. Hazy. The general feel was what the old folks used to call “close.” Oh, did I mention the mosquitoes? Flocks of ‘em out for blood. If my intent had been to do visual observing, I would have hurried my butt back inside.

It wasn’t, though. Suzie is my ace-in-the-hole on uncomfortable nights like this one. I didn’t expect her to pull a masterpiece out of skies like these, but if the clouds held off (heavy rains were predicted for the morrow), I knew we’d get something. If we didn’t? I’d have spent the evening comfortably on the couch watching TV, not mosquito-bitten and sweat-soaked in the backyard.

With the girl on her wedge (I only use equatorial mode with the S50 now; it’s just mucho bettero) I fired her up, holding down the o-n/o-f-f button until Suzie intoned, “POWER ON! READY TO CONNECT!” I opened the SeeStar app on the iPhone and proceeded to polar alignment—which I’ve described here.

Polar alignment done, I remembered to turn on Suzie’s internal dew heater.  On damp nights, forgetting to do so is a dew-soaked disaster. Then, I headed inside to Chaos Manor South’s cool den. Settled on the couch with the felines, I brought up the SeeStar app’s built-in star atlas, searched for M13, and tapped “goto” when it was on the atlas screen. Suze went to M13, centered the cluster, and began her calibration and focus routines. While doing so, the app told me all about (via audio) M13’s vital statistics. Some find that annoying, but I rather like it.

Suze then began taking 10 second frames and stacking them. I put the phone down, turned on YouTube to watch some crazy ham radio videos, opened a cold 807 or two, and let Missy do the work. I would glance over at the iPhone occasionally to make sure all was well, and it always was. I let Suzie run for an hour, till it was obvious that despite the conditions, she’d got an OK Great Glob. After that, I almost headed to the back 40 to disassemble the S50, but it was still relatively early, and I thought I might catch M92, Herc’s other glob, too, which I did.

By the time half an hour of exposure had elapsed, though, it was after 11pm, well past your old Uncle’s regular bedtime, and he was thus driven to shut ‘er down. I brought Suzie inside and put her on charge—an hour and a half of exposure with the dew heater running had got the scope’s internal battery down to just over 20%. Then it was blessed nighty-night time…

The Messier Project Night 8

When the Moon began to grow old again, your Uncle had a thought (he still has them occasionally): “Say, there are only two Messiers in Hercules, M13 and M92. I’ve got new images of both, why not do some visual observing of them too, and put Hercules in the Messier Project “done” column?”

So, to the backyard I went when the clouds finally drifted off, and summer stars appeared. The telescope? My old girlfriend, Charity Hope Valentine, a Meade ETX-125PE. How would her five inches of aperture compare to the six inches of the little SkyWatcher Newtonian I’ve been using recently for Messier Project observing runs? I had hopes for the girl, since she has always boasted good contrast and sharp, tiny stars. Anyway, I had a reason for using Charity, which you will learn about next month.

M13

Is Messier 13, the so-called "Great Globular," really the greatest globular star cluster in the northern sky? Well, maybe it is, and maybe it ain’t. One of summer’s other deep sky wonders, M5, is glob that is a little brighter, a little larger, and a little easier to resolve. M13 has always been the greatest for me, though. It was the first globular cluster I heard about and was a grail for me when I was a young’un. You can read about my adventures (and maybe misadventures) with it here. But even when I became a more sophisticated (ahem) astronomer, it still had (and has) a place in my heart.

Messier 13, NGC 6205, is a magnitude 5.8 Shapley-Sawyer Class V (5) globular cluster residing near the western side of Hercules’ Keystone asterism. At 20.0’ across, it can nearly fill the field of a medium power eyepiece from a dark site. Although it’s possible for sharp-eyed observers to see M13 with the naked eye as a dim “star,” there’s no indication it was seen until Edmond Halley spotted it with his telescope in 1714. Yep, yet another “Messier” not discovered by Messier, who added it to his catalog in 1764.

I’ve observed this old granpappy glob countless times in the 61 years since I began watching the skies. What’s it like in the eyepiece? The most important thing to know about it is that while it’s midrange in concentration with its V classification, it’s still tight, and is difficult for small scopes, especially under light polluted skies, to resolve. As I’ve written before, I never did see any of M13’s stars with my 4-inch Palomar Junior when I was a kid. Maybe because all the experts, including one of my boyhood idols (along with Stan Lee, and Wayne Green, W2NSD), Sam Brown, claimed it could not be done with my little instrument.

Sure, these days, with a lot more observing experience under my belt, and telescopes to shame my poor Pal Junior, I’ve seen stars in M13 easily from my suburban backyard. Including with a fast, three-inch apochromatic refractor. To do that, though, the sky has to be good:  good transparency, decent seeing, and little or no haze.

I did not have any of those things when I set out to observe M13 visually in mid-July. It was hot and hazy with astoundingly poor transparency. My backyard is normally OK light-pollution-wise, bearable, anyhow. But when the haze is heavy, it scatters what light pollution there is, and on this night the sky looked like that of old Chaos Manor South downtown in the Garden District. So… what did I see when the ETX-125’s goto stopped?

There was no doubt we were on the right spot in Hercules. There it was, a big blob smack in the middle of the field of my 25mm Plössl (75x).  From a dark site on a good night, the ETX will show an M13 not unlike what you’ll see with an 8-inch SCT. Tonight? No way. It remained a bright(ish) blob. Well, sort of. As I stared, I could see the Great One looked grainy around its edges, and maybe even close to its core. No stars though, not quite. Upping the magnification close to 100x with a 20mm widefield ocular, however, did deliver the goods. There were stars winking in and out around the periphery of M13. I couldn’t hold any steady, but, yeah, they were there with averted vision.

Let’s turn to Mr. Messier Album, John Mallas to see what he thought about it with a 4-inch achromat from (I presume) a dark site. John opines that M13 is (natch) a magnificent object. The view in his Unitron? Not unlike what I saw with the ETX, just a little moreso ( I bet he didn’t observe on as yucky a night as Unk did). His drawing looks remarkably like what the 5-inch MCT, Charity, showed me: some stars around the periphery are resolved and more densely packed/grainy areas extend in to near the core. I would guess from his writeup that Mr. Mallas was able to hold the little suns steadier than I was (which was not at all).

M92

Over the years, some observers have opined that if M13 wasn’t around, Hercules’ second string globular, M92, would be considered one of the wonders of the sky. Nope. It’s good enough in its own way, but certainly not close to summer’s M5 or spring’s M3. It’s an OK, but just OK, bright globular cluster. I like it, though, and always look in on it when I am done with big sister, M13.

Messier 92, NGC 6341, is a magnitude 6.5 Class IV globular star cluster in Hercules a little less than 10° east of Messier 13. It is 14.0° in size making it dimmer and smaller and looser than M13. The cluster was discovered by Johann Bode on 17 December 1777. However, his discovery was apparently unknown to Charles Messier, who independently discovered/rediscovered it on 18 March 1781 and thereafter added to his catalog.

In Miss Charity Hope Valentine, M92 was nice, real nice, but a little on the small side. You wouldn’t think "only" 6’ less diameter would make M92 look so much smaller, but it does. Maybe because it is obviously looser—I also think the poor conditions had something to do with it. What was my main impression on a lousy night? It looked sharper than M13. Also, like John Mallas, my impression was of streams of stars giving the cluster an elongated appearance. I saw a little resolution here and there, but only a little. Note that under a dark sky M92 looks like a more normal globular in the 5-inch Maksutov. The verdict? As Mallas says, it is “a grand object,” if maybe not as grand as some make it out to be.

And then? Unk was hot and sweaty and scratching bug bites. I looked at a few more showpieces following M92, but they looked poor in the haze, and your tired old Uncle was soon enjoying cold 807s in the den.

Totals: 23 Down, 87 to Go…

Next Time: BIG NEWS! Big Charity Hope Valentine News!

Here we are, muchachos, we have walked through that door into summer. What does that mean for your aged correspondent at Chaos Manor South? Rain, rain, and more rain. Thunderstorms. The possibility of hurricanes in the Gulf (though with an El Niño coming, that may not be as likely this year). In other words, just about no observing. Astronomy weather apps like Scope Nights are predicting “not so hot” or “downright terrible” night after night.

So, we’ll hit a rest stop on the Messier Road this month. I felt like it was time for a break, anyway. Much as I love those deep sky objects, the same thing every month, even though I try not to make the Messier Project articles rote recitations, gets old. I’m not going to be able to make any new observations or images for a while, anyhow, it appears.

The genesis of this article came when I was hunting for something (who knows what?) in the copious files here at Chaos Manor South. I came across an old issue of Sky and Telescope, one of the first I appeared in (I had been writing for S&T’s sister magazine, Night Sky). For want of much else to do on a warm and muggy Possum Swamp afternoon, I sat down with the magazine and began idly paging through the fat December 2004 issue.

What was my impression? “LOOK AT ALL THE ADS!” While The Internet was an ever greater tool for astronomy dealers in 2004, most still believed in print advertising. Then I noticed something else. How many of the manufacturers and dealers who appeared in the issue are gone. Sure, astro companies come and go and always have. Onetime giants (in a small amateur astronomy way) like Unitron and Cave and Criterion came and went and left not a rack behind.

Despite that, it’s become apparent to me that some kind of an amateur astronomy golden age (of equipment, at least), one that stretched from the 1980s to the first decade of this strange new century, has passed. These are some of the outfits that inhabited that golden age. Some I loved and bought from, some I didn’t, but all were in their way unforgettable...

Questar

The little company with that memorable address, New Hope Pennsylvania, was, like many telescope manufacturers, the product of one man’s, Lawrence Braymer’s, dreams. His dream was to make Gregory-type Maksutovs as well as they could be made. So it was that the Questars came into the world. There was a 7-inch and even a 12-inch (very occasionally), but the 3.5-inch was always the most popular, if for no other reason than that while it was expensive, the larger apertures were insanely so.

How was/are the 3.5’s optics—which were never made by Questar? Usually, exquisite. Cave made the mirrors and correctors in the early years, but for most of Questar’s existence they were done and done well by J.R. Cumberland. It wasn’t all gravy, though. The telescope’s relatively simple design didn’t age well—for some. The fork limits access to the southern celestial hemisphere. Also, well into the age of goto and computers, there weren’t really any electronics in the Questars, only RA clock drives, which meant you had to polar align the Q3.5 for astronomical use. There wasn't even a declination drive (later there were upgrades available, including digital setting circles and dec motors).

What happened to Questar (who recently ceased operations and let longtime staff go with no notice)? Various and sundry things. The price was always a problem. Both in that it was high, and that there is a practical limit to what you can charge for a 3.5 inch telescope. Questar passed through several hands (Braymer died in 1965) and went into bankruptcy once, but kept on trucking, if in reduced prominence compared to the golden years of the 50s - 70s. Also, while for many the 3.5 was the ultimate classic, for some it just looked old. The final nail? Cumberland closed in 2024, and for the last two years Questar has focused on servicing existing instruments.

Yes, the optics in the faux Questar ETX 90 weren't bad, but they were not in the same league as those in a real Questar. Worse, Meade’s build-quality was light years—parsecs—behind that of Questar. The company will be remembered as the people who made a little telescope loved by those who owned it and lusted after by those who didn’t. If you want more information on the big Q, get yourself a free copy of my Used CAT Guide.

Meade

The whole sad story is known to most of y’all—all-y’all, I suspect. However, if you’d like to read the story of the  demise of the (onetime) biggest telescope company in the world, read this AstroBlog entry. I still cannot believe Meade is gone. It still seems impossible. I did have a love-hate relationship with the company; I don’t believe any Meade scope I bought was perfect, and some were quite literally projects, but I loved them all. RIP Meade, 1972 – 2024.

Coronado

David Lunt’s Coronado Telescopes brought H-alpha solar observing to the masses. Well, masses of amateur astronomers (and quite a few radio amateurs), anyway. His breakthrough was the PST, the Personal Solar Telescope, which initially sold for $500. Its images were not competitive with H-alpha rigs costing thousands of dollars, but they were still very good indeed.

So, what happened? Meade is what happened. In 2004, Lunt sold his company to Meade to (in part) give Coronado the resources to keep up with the demand for their solar scopes. All seemed rosy for a while, Coronado remaining in its Arizona location. Then, following Lunt’s death in 2005, the changes began. In 2006, Meade released the following, which coincided with the beginning of financial problems that would lead to its slow decline:

"The Company also reported the planned closure and consolidation of its Coronado(R) Instruments manufacturing and distribution facility in Tucson, Arizona, which will result in an additional estimated decrease of $800,000 in annualized operating costs. This consolidation will eliminate 16 employees by August 31, 2006. All Coronado operations are being consolidated into the Company's Irvine facility, with no associated increase in SG&A expense expected for that facility. "

Nevertheless, the Coronado “division” at Meade continued to produce decent telescopes—if ones with more QA problems than were normal with the original Coronados, I have been told. The end came when Meade fell. What will I remember them for? One of the first looks I had through a hydrogen alpha instrument. 

Orion

By “Orion,” I mean the U.S. Orion, “Telescope and Binocular Center,” who at the end was the owner of Meade (!). When the company began, it made the items it sold. In fact, Tim Gieseler founded the company in 1975 specifically to market his drive correctors. From there, he went on to be a dealer of a wide array of gear, including Meade, Celestron, TeleVue, and Vixen. As the years rolled on, however, and especially after Gieseler sold Orion, they began to rely on imported products. Specifically, products made by Chinese optical giant Synta.

Why did Orion fail? As far as I know, no insider has yet come forth with details, but it’s not hard to figure out. Orion’s sales had been declining for years, including during the pandemic when other astro-sellers did very well. Why? Part of it was the increasing emphasis on Synta to the exclusion of much else. With the coming of SkyWatcher (Synta) to the USA, people found they could buy, for example, a Synta EQ-6 mount from them for less money than they could from Orion.

At the end, there was not much reason to buy from Orion. Their legendary customer service had evaporated. What will I miss? Those wonderful old catalogs that seemed to come every week. More about the fall or Orion is at the link above. Anyhow, they went down at the same time as what was left of Meade, 2024.

University Optics

Most astro-companies make and/or sell a wide variety of astronomy gear. So it was with University Optics. This Ann-Arbor, Michigan firm sold everything from mirror grinding kits to eyepieces and everything in-between. But it was eyepieces that they were famous for. Relatively inexpensive oculars that were high in quality. Their Orthoscopics and Königs were particularly well-regarded and University’s eyepieces remained popular even with the advent of wide and ultra-wide oculars.

What took them down? Time. Jan W. Seyfried started the company in 1960 and kept it going till his death in 2014. University Optics continued in business for three more years before closing. I haven’t thought about them in a while, but I believe in later years Sayfried's son was helping him with the business, carried it on after his father passed, and then—for whatever reason—decided it was time to pull the plug. What do I miss? Those eyepieces, of course.

Parks Optical

Throw that (the scope I mean, of course) into the back seat of your Corolla!

Parks was always a bit of a puzzle. Why did they carry on selling heavy and expensive Newtonian telescopes year after year when few wanted them anymore? Parks was founded in 1952 by Dr. Maurice Sweiss. He was not interested in selling inexpensive telescopes like Criterion and Edmund, aiming to be a cut above the hoi polloi. How were Parks Newts? I don’t know. I have never encountered one—not one. I do have one of the their 6-inch f/8 primaries, which is pretty good, though not perfect.

Why did they fail? They didn’t so much fail as slowly wither away. Parks still focused on Newtonians and Cassegrains through the 1990s, a time when most amateurs wanted SCTs and Dobsonians. Also, there were some missteps. In the early 90s, they thought they had a breakthrough innovation, telescopes that could be switched between being slow classical Cassegrains and fast Newtonians, the Parks H.I.T. telescopes, which would be available in 10, 12.5, and 16-inch apertures.

People who hadn’t paid attention to Parks in years took notice and there was much discussion about the H.I.T. on the Fidonet astronomy board. Unfortunately, optical quality was reputed to be poor. I had a friend who was planning to buy the 10-inch, thinking it would be perfect for him (despite my warnings about what it would be like hauling that huge mount to the club dark site). Luckily for him, Parks struggled to manufacture the telescopes, couldn’t quote him a delivery date, and he bought a Meade LX-200 SCT instead. By the turn of the century, the company was even less active, relying on their eyeglass/optometry sideline. What do I remember Parks for? Running ads for huge Newtonians year after year—an interesting throwback, at least.

Scope City

Scope City was the dealer arm of Parks, and was based in Simi Valley, California like Parks, but had retail stores in Las Vegas and San Francisco as well.  I bought from them on occasion when they had something I couldn’t find at Pocono Mountain or Astronomics, my goto dealers. Scope City was OK. Their prices were average and so was their customer service. They were fine but didn’t distinguish themselves in any way. 

What killed them? I suspect competition with that other big California astronomy dealer with brick-and-mortar stores, Orion, didn’t help. I’d also guess the decline of Parks took them with it, with Scope City disappearing at about the same time as Parks. What do I remember about them? Sadly, a scam “Scope City” website that has appeared periodically over the years.

Pocono Mountain Optics

The only pic I have of the Pocono bunch (TSP '97). They are set up along the far wall.

Why mention Pocono? They’ve been gone these twenty-five years. Because when they had their house in order, they were one of the best astronomy dealers I’ve ever bought from. They had a big presence at the Texas Star Party and smaller events as well. What spoiled Glen Jacobs’ party? I remember it being said that opening a second store, “Pocono Mountain West,” had something to do with it. And that personal problems played a part as well. Anyway, I used the Desert Storm cover I got from them to project my truss tube Dob, Old Betsy, for well over a decade. What’s memorable about them? Great product selection, great service.

Lumicon

This is another one I can’t believe is gone. Most remember Lumicon for their filters, but they sold a lot more stuff—off axis guiders, film hypersensitizing chambers, even digital setting circles. The creation of Dr. Jack Marling, an astrophysics PhD, the company was one of the big players in amateur astronomy from its founding in the late 70s, till it went out of business for all practical purposes in the late 1990s. You can still buy Lumicon filters, but they have nothing to do with the original Lumicon.

What happened? By the early 1990s, the company encountered financial difficulties and Marling had to sell it. The person he sold it to was Maurice Sweiss, the  owner/founder of Parks Optical. He thought the acquisition would allow him to broaden his product line, especially with the highly regarded Lumicon light pollution reduction filters.

That worked well at first…but… as the 1990s ended, there were other problems afflicting Parks in addition to those above. Like their inability to adjust to Internet marketing, and a general decline in the service they provided their customers. Not long after the turn of the century, I tried to order a set of "Lumicon" digital setting circles from them, but they weren’t interested in/couldn’t actually provide them to me. Shortly thereafter the company was gone. What will I remember about ‘em? Those groundbreaking filters.

Adirondack Video Astronomy

If there were ever a small astronomy company that’s memorable (for me), it’s Adirondack Video Astronomy. You can read the story of my introduction to deep sky video imaging here but suffice to say I was all about astro-video for years. I used the company’s Stellacam II deep sky video camera for about half of The Herschel Project (until I got a Mallincam Xtreme). When skies or telescope wouldn’t allow me to see the fuzzy I was after visually, onto the C8 when the Stellacam. Herschels were nothing; it would show PGC galaxies in 10 second exposures.

The Stellacam was the brainchild of John Cordiale and was sold by Adirondack Video Astronomy of Glen Falls, New York. If memory serves, Cordiale didn’t own the business; that was a Jim Barot. While they sold an array of products not  unlike those sold by any other astro-dealer, the Stellacams are what made them the success they were in the early 2000s.

What killed “AVA”? A failure to keep up. Mallincam quickly left Adirondack in the dust. They had what we astrovideographers wanted, a cooled color deep sky video camera,  which AVA struggled to produce. Also, AVA never promoted their cameras as much as they could have and didn’t engage with the astronomy community to the extent they should have. They were another fixture in amateur astronomy that just faded away. They promised a color camera for a couple of years, but that never happened. I believe AVA still exists as a video equipment/production company, but there are no more Stellacams. What do I remember about them? ALL THE FAINT FUZZIES in near real-time.

My how your old Uncle does run on! I suppose that is enough for now. If I get enough huzzahs, I may do a part two of late greats.

Next Time:  I plan to try to bag My Yearly M13 (image) ASAP, and I guess that’s a good time to do the other Hercules M for the Messier Project, too.

 

Well, muchachos, down the Messier Road we go. Again. I’ll have some different articles for you in the coming months so the Messiers don’t get old (could they, really?), but tonight we are in for some Messier Masterpieces.

Though, by midmonth, I began to wonder if I would bag a single M for you. Our formerly dry spring is a thing of the past down here in the ‘Swamp; as that old Moon waned, the rains came—did they ever. I had to strategize. The SeeStar images here are older ones, both dating back to the time when The Suzie first came to stay at Chaos Manor South. I figgered it was best to concentrate on visual in the limited amount of time I’d have under the stars.

That visual telescope? I won’t lie; Unk was awful lazy. It’s already warm tending to hot, even into the dark hours—when they get here, damn this DST—and so humid that I felt like I could cut the air with that proverbial knife. So, no 10-inch Dob. The scope of choice would be a Dobsonian, yes, but Little Debbie, the 6-inch f/5 SkyWatcher. Also in the interest of making best use of the time I had under the stars, I would use Debs in full goto mode. While she is easy to use manually, or in “Freedom Find” mode (like digital setting circles), I knew I couldn’t dawdle on these late April evenings.   

Canes Venatici is an unassuming little constellation consisting of two medium bright stars, Chara (Asterion) and Cor Caroli, lying just northeast of the Dipper/Plough handle. You’d think the average deep sky hound wouldn’t give these dogs a second look. Ha! This is one time when looks sure can be deceiving. The constellation’s small area contains some of the most stupendous deep sky objects in the heavens.

Tonight, we’ll be back to comparing what Unk saw from the back 40 of Chaos Manor South, to what John Mallas saw from a dark site on long-ago nights. I enjoyed seeing what ace observer Sue French thought of the objects I viewed last time, but I guess John Mallas’ The Messier Album is just a touchstone with me and always will be.

Messier 51

I ain’t saving the best for last—if you consider the famous Whirlpool Galaxy the best of the Canes bunch. Oh, it can be a stunner from dark skies, but from a humid backyard? Well, we’ll see…

M51, NGC 5194, was first recorded by, yes, Charles Messier. He spotted it on October 13, 1773: "Very faint nebula, without stars."  Finally!  So far in this series, there haven’t been a lot of Messier objects actually discovered by Messier. To be clear, he saw M51, and only M51, not its famous companion, NGC 5195. That had to wait until 1781 when Chuck’s bestie, Pierre Méchain, saw that M51 was “a double galaxy.”

The Whirlpool appearance? That took even more time, until 1845, when Bill Parsons, the Earl of Rosse saw its spiral structure with his 72-inch dob-like scope. The galaxy’s starkly visible spiral arms (with enough aperture and dark skies) is one of the things that make the Whirlpool so striking. The other being the companion galaxy, NGC 5195. 

There it rested for many a long year. Nobody knew what  this funny “spiral nebula” was. Some thought it might be a Solar System in the process of forming. Most admitted they had no idea what M51 and the similar spiral nebule scattered across the sky were. Knowledge of that had to wait until the 20^th Century, the coming of the giant California telescopes, and Edwin Hubble and his contemporaries.

Brass tacks on M51? It is a near face-on spiral of Hubble type SA(s)bc pec. From its spot in Canes not far from the Dipper’s handle, it shines at a magnitude of 8.10. That doesn’t sound bad at all, but remember, that’s how bright this 11’12” x 8’24” object would be if it were compressed down to the size of a star. As is, its surface brightness is 12.77, not terrible, but it will not put your eye out.  The companion? NGC 5195, an SB0 peculiar galaxy, shines at magnitude 9.55 and subtends 4’21” x 4’23”.

You don’t have to know much about galaxies to know why M51 has that “pec” (peculiar) tag in its Hubble type. It and NGC 5195 are interacting. In deep images, it’s clear the “bridge” connecting the two, which has been pulled off the galaxies by their encounter, is accompanied by clouds of matter/stars flung off into intergalactic space. One thing not so obvious? NGC 5195 is in the background and is receding from M51.

What did I think of M51 in my salad days? When I got past the novice stage, it wasn’t one of the tougher galaxies for me. Hell, I once saw it from a spot just a mile or so from our big 1960s shopping center, Bel Air Mall, with a 6-inch f/8 Newtonian. It looked like nothing more than two blobs—a big blob and a smaller blob—but it was there and easy enough to see. So it was on the April evening of 2026 when I turned Little Debbie to it: two blobs. It was maybe easier to see for me than it was years ago, both because of years more observing experience and because f/5 Debbie’s shorter focal length made it easier to find an eyepiece that frames the pair well.

If You want to see spiral structure, get thee to a dark site. There, a 6-inch or 8-inch will show it convincingly. You really want to see the spiral pattern and the bridge connecting the two? For that, I need a 12-inch like my long-gone friend, Old Betsy, and dark skies like those of the Texas Star Party. Don’t have either? A small smartscope will have no problem showing mucho detail from suburban digs, as Suze did in this spring 2024 shot.

John Mallas was a master observer with a dark observing location. I know that, but what he brought home with a long focal length achromat, his f/15 Unitron, amazes me still. While John says his observation of the bridge and spiral pattern were possibly spurious and due to his familiarity with photographs of the Whirlpool, I believe he saw traces of both, quite a coup for that old-fashioned refractor.  I certainly agree with his declaration that M51 is  “one of the finest objects in the heavens.” That being the case, get outside and have a look at it ASAP. It is riding high in early evening right now, but will all too soon be crashing into the west.

Messier 63

M63, the Sunflower Galaxy, is mostly deservedly a renowned deep sky object. Like M62 over in neighboring Coma Berenices, this galaxy hold up well under light polluted skies. Its discoverer, Pierre Méchain, didn’t have to worry about light pollution, but he was hampered by his telescope’s crude design and small aperture. Nevertheless, he saw it. This was his very first discovery of a Deep Sky Object when he spotted it on June 14, 1779. He must have been excited, since he passed the discovery on to his friend Charles that very evening.

Messier 63, NGC 5055 is an SA spiral galaxy of magnitude 8.60 and a size of 13’10” x 7’56”. Despite its relatively large size, the galaxy remains bright thanks to its intermediate inclination to us. The Sunflower name is due to its multiple, dusty, patchy arms which supposedly make it look like an enormous cosmic blossom.

From dark sites with my 12-inch Dobsonian or C11, M63’s arms were easy enough to see. But whether in the eyepiece or in long exposure images, I’ve always had a hard time imagining this as a sunflower. Oh, the bright, elongated core does sorta look like a flower’s pistil, and I suppose the patch arms are the petals…but… What has it looked like to me most of the time? With most of my observing over the decades being done from light polluted backyards? What I saw one long gone spring evening with the old C11, Big Bertha, was typical:

M63 doesn’t reveal any of its spiral arms in the 12.5-inch Dobsonian. The disk is fairly large…and I can see both a smooth brightening towards its center and the occasional hint of a tiny, point-like nucleus. After trying a variety of eyepieces…I begin to think I am seeing spiral structure, but it is incredibly subtle and may have more to do with what I remember from photos…than with what I’m actually seeing.

John Mallas saw more with his 4-inch than I did with my 12-inch. He was using that Unitron from a dark site under drier conditions than I usually have, though. Nevertheless, seeing the spiral detail he recorded (his drawing of the galaxy is not much different from the book’s photograph by co-author, Evered Kreimer) is quite a feat and is one reason I keep coming back to this book all these long years down the road.

Messier 106

M106, NGC 4258, is strange. Mostly that strangeness concerns the fact that here we have a bright and detailed Messier galaxy that is rarely talked about by amateur astronomers. I can only suppose that is because it’s in a rather barren area of Canes Venatici northeast of the Dipper’s bowl.

M64 is a magnitude 8.40 Hubble Type SAB galaxy with an intermediate inclination to us. It’s large at 18’36” x 7’12”, but its inclination to our little rock keeps it quite prominent. In size and appearance, M106 is like M31. In other words, this is one big spiral in the eyepiece and in reality. M 106 is yet another discovery by Pierre Méchain. We don’t know much more about that than that he discovered it in 1781—presumably in the spring—and passed the info to Messier. Charles did not add it to his catalog, however. In fact, it was not a “Messier” until 1947 when Helen Sawyer Hogg added it to her version of the M-list.

Under dark skies with medium aperture instruments, M106 has an odd look. That is due to the presence of one spiral arm that’s different in apprance from the others. This large arm is yellowish and appears to have a preponderance of older suns. There are also some large dusty patches toward M106’s center. I can see these features from dark skies with larger instruments without difficulty. From the ol’ backyard with a scope like Little Debbie, I must be satisfied with a slightly elongated glow with a compact core. On the best nights, fleeting arm detail pops in and out of view.

Our old friend John saw a strongly elongated galaxy looking a little like NGC 7331 in shape. He also recorded “a fat central knot of fuzzy light.” Not much different from what Debs showed me, but given his drawing, Mallas was able to pick up the elongated disk with more ease than I could in my backyard with my seventy-something-year-old eyes.

Messier 94

Many years ago, when I first moved to the old urban Chaos Manor South, I began to call M94 “Old Reliable.” On most nights, I could depend on seeing M94 with any telescope I turned to it. This Sab near-face-on galaxy shines at magnitude 8.2 and, since it is only 11’12” x 9’6” (less is apparent visually), it stands out very well indeed.

What makes this galaxy so bright? It is compact, sur, but what cranks it up is its center, a blazing disk. The galaxy is thought to harbor a supermassive and (maybe) feeding black hole at its center. The oddness doesn’t end there, outside the central regions is a ring where a huge amount of star formation is taking place.

This beast is another Pierre Méchain discovery, with him observing it on March 22, 1781. Pierre got word of his new find to Charles, who not only added it to his catalog, but observed it with his small scope on March 24, 1781. To them, it was just a wee nebulous spot. As with other galaxies, its nature wasn’t known until the last century.

For me? I was always happy to commune with M94, whose nickname is “The Croc’s Eye Galaxy.” Under a dark sky with larger instruments, it does begin to resemble a reptile’s eye with its bright center, star ring and other faint details. For me and my little scope at Chaos Manor South, though, the galaxy looked like nothing more than a distant, unresolved globular cluster, a fuzzy spot of light with a bright center. From suburban sites my C11, however, could begin to pick up further details including the inner ring and traces of the elusive arms.

John Mallas saw essentially what I saw with my 4-inch and 6-inch telescopes from my urban backyard, a disk with a bright center. He does record one additional and interesting feature: an “extension,” a near straight “arm” connected to the disk. What he saw I am not sure. One of M94’s tight spiral arms at the very edge of detection? Maybe. Seeing even a trace of the Croc's spiral detail is a stretch for a 4-inch achromat, I’m afraid, but…maybe…

Messier 3

I suppose I did leave the best for last. Oh, the rest are beautiful, but Messier 3, NGC 5272, is spectacularly beautiful. It is a Magnitude 6.3 globular star cluster of Shapley-Sawyer type VI (“intermediate richness”). At mag 6.3, this 18’.0” x 18’.0” globular star cluster really lights up the spring deep sky. While I always think it as being in Boötes, it is just over the Boötes border in Canes.  

Lo and behold, another M originally discovered by Charles, who bagged it on May 3, 1764. Given his small telescope, what Messier discovered was nothing more than a small nebulous ball. First resolution of M3 into stars was by the world’s greatest amateur astronomer, William Herschel, in 1784.

I don’t believe I ever resolved M3 when I was a kid touring the deep sky with a 4-inch Palomar Junior reflector. Likely because I didn’t know how to resolve it, but not just that. In those days, amateur astronomy gurus preached two things:  "Don’t use high magnification," and "Resolving globulars requires 6-inches of aperture." These things aren’t always or even often true. Some globs may require that much aperture (all globulars are not the same, not hardly), but many only require it at low magnification. I can begin to see resolution in M3 with a 3-inch apochromatic refractor at 150x. In my backyard, Debbie had no trouble showing stars in the glob under our resolutely gray skies. The SeeStar, of course, was not challenged.

Mr. Mallas? What he saw with his Unitron is like what I see in my 3-inch William Optics fluorite refractor (an f/7), Some stars around the periphery of the cluster, and mucho graininess across the core. M3 has long been a fave of mine and is always a nice change of pace from spring’s dim galaxies. By the time the season ends, I become convinced it is just as good as M13. Of course, the first look I get of M13 as it climbs away from the horizon disabuses your silly old Uncle of that notion.

Totals: 21 Down, 89 to Go

Next month? On to the dense galaxy forests of Coma Berenices.

       

Little Debbie's new light shroud/dew shield has made a big difference!

As I have often said, “In spring, a young (or not so young) astronomer’s mind turns to thoughts of galaxies.” It’s difficult to believe spring is suddenly rolling along, and the summer star pictures are making their presence felt in the east, but here we are. Time to get after those island universes, muchachos.

If only it were that simple. At first it looked like it might be a good galaxy season this year. Clear skies had been the rule as winter transitioned to spring. Weeks went by with nary a drop of rain. Hell, the big topic with the OMs and YLs at Breakfast with the Hams at the Whataburger turned from scuttlebutt about the latest DXpedition to, “When are we gonna get some rain?!”

Of course, that didn’t last. Just as the old Moon waned and the spring stars climbed higher…yep, you guessed it. Clouds and thunderstorms returned to Possum Swamp. I did get a couple of decent if not quite perfect evenings, though, and thought I'd better get back on Messier Project Road while I could; spring is absolutely flying by.

I didn’t have a lot of dark-of-the-Moon nights, but I was able to visit Ursa Major’s wonders, M101, M81, M82, M108, and M97  on a couple of passable, if hazy, evenings. At least it was warm enough that your aged Uncle didn’t flee inside till 10pm. I did take some pictures, but I concentrated on visual observing when I could (not with M101 from my suburban backyard, of course). Said visual observing was enhanced by my latest project. I had done what I should have done a long time ago and rigged up a shroud/dew shield for my 6-inch SkyWatcher collapsible Dobsonian.

It is a good telescope, but the slightest bit of ambient light spoils the party. I’d tried various dodges, like wrapping fabric around the truss (difficult because the wee scope only  has two truss tubes). Finally, I hit upon the idea of using thin, black craft foam. And placing it inside the truss tubes.

After considerable cussing and mistakes (your old Uncle is an absolute menace with scissors) I was done. The plastic shroud moves with the tubes and upper cage (if you can call it that) and collapses with them. It has offered major improvement to field darkness—even when I thought stray light wasn’t getting into the system, it evidently was. If you face the same problem, a nice feller on the Internet thought of the idea before I did and has a good YouTube video on making a shroud for SkyWatcher’s small collapsible-tube Dobs. Just Google.

Anyhoo, let’s poke around in the bear’s den a bit…. We’ll be moving on from John Mallas and The Messier Album for tonight, and I at first thought I’d see what Scotty had to say about these deep sky objects. But then I changed my mind. Let’s see what that other dean of deep sky observers, Sue French, thinks of tonight’s DSOs.

M101

Every kid with a new telescope wants to see M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy. I know I did when I was an 11-year-old with a 3-inch reflector. Looking at pictures of this beautiful near-face-on galaxy in my few astronomy books had a rather profound effect on little Rod.  Those wheeling spiral arms made me believe astronomy, amateur astronomy at least, was for me. Of course, I longed to see this distant giant with my own eyes, and it looked so pretty in its pictures that I figured it would be easy to see. Alas, a wet-behind-the-ears amateur with a tiny telescope in suburbia didn’t have a prayer of seeing it. Indeed, I never even caught a trace of it in my Tasco.

Let’s do the just-the-facts stuff before we go further with observing. M101, NGC 5457, was like many of the other “Messier” objects, discovered by Pierre Méchain, who pulled it out of a dark French sky on 27 March 1781. Stats? This is a Hubble SAB type spiral galaxy. While it has the not-too-intimidating magnitude of 7.9, remember, that is how bright it would be if this large (28’48” x 26’54”) object were shrunken down to stellar size. As is, at near 30’ across it is challenging from poorer observing sites. Some rate M74 as even more difficult, but I disagree. M74 can be seen in drier and less hazy autumn skies. M101 is tough.

So, how well has your silly old Uncle been able to see it? From a dark site, it is not much of a problem. You want a telescope/ocular combination that places enough empty field around the galaxy to provide some contrast, but given that, it’s often easy. It doesn’t even take a big scope. Many years ago, the Pinwheel was spectacular in my old Ultima C8 from the pitch-black skies of French Camp, Mississippi and the Mid South Star Gaze, showing plenty of spiral detail. From the clear skies of West Virginia and Spruce Knob Mountain at the Almost Heaven Star Party? Like shooting fish in the proverbial barrel with 10x50 binoculars.

That’s out in the dark. How about the backyard? You must be satisfied just to have seen a trace. I was determined to observe the Pinwheel for my Urban Astronomer’s Guide, but nothing I tried worked from old Chaos Manor South’s urban backyard. I finally took my (focal reduced) C11 to the public Schools’ Environmental Studies Center in the suburbs. I could see it then, yeah… As a slight (and I do mean slight) brightening at the field center. I was able to replicate that observation with an 8-inch f/5 Newtonian.

At the new Chaos Manor South with the 6-inch f/5 SkyWatcher (who says her name is “Debbie”)? I simply have not been able to do it so far. Maybe I’ll wait for a particularly dry evening (“dry” is as important as “dark” for this one, just as with M74). I did want to see it somehow, though, so I gave little Suzie, the SeeStar S50, a shot. Easy-peasy. Even with just 45 minutes of exposure (there was enough light pollution-scattering haze that I was loath to go longer) the Pinwheel looks good as a bright-backyard snapshot.

So, what does Sue French think of the Pinwheel in her (excellent) book, Deep Sky Wonders? From a Dark site with her 10-inch, Sue calls the galaxy, “[A] grand Catharine-wheel firework shedding multiple spiral arms.  Two arms north of the core unwrap to the west.” While Sue’s views were like what I’ve seen with 8 – 11-inch instruments from dark locations, it’s clear she is a better observer than I am and picked up more spiral structure and more easily than I have. Bottom line? If you want to see spiral arms, get thee to a dark site (or turn a smartscope loose on it).

M82

On to the (Exploding) Cigar Galaxy. For any deep sky tourist, Messier 82 (and nearby M81) are prime stopovers. Since I talked about M81 in the last installment of the Little Old AstroBlog from Chaos Manor South, we’ll stick to M82. What is my fondest memory of this one? Not how it looked to me as a kid, but as an adult.

We’ll get to that in a minute, but let’s bone up on the Cigar’s background. M82 and M81 were first seen by Johann Bode in 1774. However, in 1779, Pierre Méchain  independently rediscovered both Ms  and reported them to his buddy, Chuck. So, I guess you can say Pierre is  batting a thousand tonight.  

This strange galaxy’s specs are impressive. It shines at magnitude 8.4—and looks it. M82, NGC 3034, is only 11’18” x 4’12” so its surface brightness remains high. It is classified as an irregular galaxy and is in a close to edge-on orientation to us. If you must observe the deep sky from the suburbs, edge-on galaxies are, you’ll find, some of the easiest to see (if not always easy). Anyhow, a look at M82 with even a small scope hints that something bad has happened to it. That was no doubt a close encounter with M81 a long, long time ago.

Also a long time ago, if on a human scale, I was doing a series of columns, “From City Lights to Deep Space,” for my local astronomy club’s newsletter, the pieces that later went on to form The Urban Astronomer’s Guide. I had my share of failures with deep sky objects from my urban back forty. Mostly when I was working at the low end of the aperture scale, using my time-honored 4-inch Edmund Scientific Palomar Junior reflector to see what I could dig out of urban skies. M81 admittedly wasn’t much—I’ve never seen its spiral structure at a compromised site with any scope—but M82 was a different story. The little cigar was bright and crisscrossed with a dark lane or three.

To go beyond that, larger aperture and a dark sky are required. Seeing the red gas plumes being emitted from the core? As far as I know, you need a camera, but you don’t necessarily need long exposures. I was able to see the “explosion” part of this exploding cigar with ease from the Chiefland Astronomy Village with my Mallincam Extreme deep sky video camera in 15 second shots. A hint of that is visible in Suzie Q's shot here if you zoom in. Maybe I should give the girl more time on the Cigar some night. 

Visually today, from the better skies of the new Chaos Manor South with a little more aperture? In 6-inch Little Debbie (she hates it when I call her that, “What am I? A cupcake, Rod? Don’t answer that!”) the view isn’t worlds different from what it was in my Pal Junior. The disk of is brighter, though, and the dark lanes and patches easier. With her 10-inch, Sue goes beyond what I’ve seen easily in similar aperture instruments, “This scope revealed the tapered form of M82…with three main dark patches. A broad one east of the galaxy’s center cuts across M82, with the brightest portion of the galaxy lying to its east.” Suzie turned in a nice portrait of the pair. The usual problem was present, though:  M82 is easy to OVERexpose.

There is a lot to see in M81 and M82, but you won’t see it with quick visits. Study, at least half an hour of study, on each is not too much. That will pay off, though. While you may never be in Sue French’s league as an observer, you will find that every time you visit you see just a little more.

M97

Ah, the good old Owl, M97, NGC 3587. Yes, this was another one I longed to see as a kid. Unlike M101, though, looking at this one’s photos gave me TOUGH ONE vibes. I wanted to see it, though, and most of all to see the eyes, those two weird dark spots staring across the light years. Amazingly, I did see it. With that very same Palomar Junior mentioned above.

The Owl Nebula is, of course, a planetary nebula, the corpse of a solar mass-range star that has shed its outer layers and is now a fading white dwarf (that central star is a dim magnitude 16). At magnitude 9.9, this medium-sized (3’24” x 3’18”) planetary is not a challenge for even marginally experienced observers.

History-wise, M97 is another catch by Messier bestie Méchain, who spotted it on 16 February 1787. There’s no mention of dark spots by him, and evidently the eyes were first seen (or at least recorded) and the “owl” name given the nebula by the Earl of Rosse who observed it with his 72 inch reflector.

The night I set out to catch an Owl in 1966 was one of the Saturday evening observing runs of our kid astronomy club, The Backyard Astronomy Society. Frequent naysayer Wayne Lee laughed, proclaiming I didn’t have a dog’s chance in hell of seeing such a faint object from his mama’s backyard. But there it was, if barely, No eyes, but the faint puffball of the planetary’s disk was plain in my ½ inch Ramsden eyepiece.

The secret to seeing the eyes in these latter days? They are not always easy, but an OIII filter can make them easier. While it might sound like an “averted imagination” observation with Little Debbie from the backyard of today's Chaos Manor South, I'm convinced I've spotted them. Maybe. The 6-inch showed the disk of the nebula without difficulty, however, if with a filter. Like many planetaries that were considered challenging 40 or 50 years ago, the OIII, a filter that enhances the Oxygen III emissions of planetary nebulae, has made all the difference in the world.

This being a rather small object for Suzie, the shot here was done last spring with Evie, the 4-inch Evolution smartscope. I was just learning to use the telescope, so the brief exposure wasn’t anything to write home about, but the eyes and the triangle of dim stars hidden in the nebulosity are easy to see in my snapshot. In 10-inch Zelda, the eyes are often visible from the backyard and always from a somewhat darker site I occasionally use.

Ms. French also turned her 10-inch reflector to M97. Ace observer that she is, she had no trouble at all with the dark patches. She notes that the nebula appears slightly oval. It is (very slightly), but I don’t think I have ever noticed that. Maybe I’m always too fixated on the eyes to get the bigger picture.

M108

I also saw this nearly edge-on galaxy, Messier 108, NGC 3556, the Surfboard Galaxy, as a novice observer; maybe on the same night Wayne Lee and I and the rest of the gang finally conquered the nearby Owl. On those long-lost evenings, I was even able to see some details with mucho difficulty. However, they gave me the wrong idea about this galaxy. In my small telescope, it looked quite a bit like larger M82, and me and my buds christened this one “Cigar Junior.” In truth, it is a far more normal—if dusty—spiral galaxy.

M108 is an SB galaxy that shines at magnitude 10 and subtends 8’42” x 2’12”. As with the big Cigar, being edge-on makes it easy(er) to see with small telescopes from bright backyards. Technically, this galaxy was another Pierre Méchain discovery on 19 February 1781, but it was “lost”  and subsequently recovered by Messier on March 24 of that same year.

In these latter days, knowing what M108 is, a dusty, not exploding, galaxy, that’s how I tend to see it. Truthfully, though, in a 6-inch at medium power, it still retains that M82 look for me. Even Suzie’s brief exposure, however, hints at its true nature. In the French 10-inch? Sue mentions, “mottled,” which to me hints at its M82 guise. But she goes on to call it “patchy,” which is an indication of its true nature. She doesn’t mention it looking anything like M82, either. Am I the only one who sees it that way (at times)?

And that is a wrap, campers. I know this has been a long one for “only” four objects. But they are terrific ones; there is just so much to see in this old bear’s den. If you’ve clear skies, get out there and scan the dipper while you can! Me? Little Debbie is safely resting in the Sunroom, and I am sitting in the den with the cats, drinking cold 807s, and supposedly watching YouTube, but actually still contemplating the Realm of the Great Bear.

The Bottom Line:

21 down 89 to go. 

Next Time? Canes and Coma…if the weather gods allow it…