Uncle Rod's Astro Blog

 

I had just finished last month’s AstroBlog, muchachos, when I was moved to begin the next one. The way the weather’s been this summer, and the knowledge it will likely get worse as September and October approach, impelled me to get back to work rather than take a break. One late July evening it ‘peared the sky might be good enough for the SeeStar, Suzie, to take a few of her little celestial snapshots. The Gulf beginning to churn with storms, I figgered I’d better get after it. I’d do some visual observing of the objects next break in the clouds. Whenever that was.

“Wut objects, Unk? Wut objects, huh?”  Well, Skeeter, I’ve kinda been on a roll revisiting the chapters of my urban deep sky observing book, The Urban Astrnomer's Guide, so I figgered I’d keep on keepin’ on with that for now. Specifically, with the Cygnus chapter, “Star Nests in Cygnus.” The ol’ Northern Cross would be near-perfectly placed in the east mid evening, and maybe the weather gods would indeed show your ever-hopeful Uncle some mercy.

By “star nests,” natcherly I meant “open (galactic) star clusters.” They were a favorite of mine when Miss Dorothy and I lived downtown in the original Chaos Manor South. They were the one deep sky object I could see easily and well. “Opens” became something of an obsession with moi—one time I set out to view all the clusters in Cassiopeia visible with a 12-inch telescope from an urban backyard (recounted in Urban Astronomer’s “The Cassiopeia Clusters”). That’s a lotta star clusters, campers, but, amazingly, I wasn’t tired of ‘em after that binge and soon went on to survey the Swan’s clutch.

Anyhoo, after checking-in to the Mobile Amateur Radio Club’s Wednesday Night Net, I stuck my head out of the radio shack and had a look. As astronomical twilight came in, it was just as Astrospheric had said: “Mostly clear.” But that blessed clear sky was accompanied by haze and poor, very poor, transparency. Oh, well, as Unk often says, “Ain’t nuthin’ to it but to do it.” I’d see what Suzie could pull out of a milk-washed Cygnus.

I had set the SeeStar up on my old Manfrotto tripod just before dark. She was leveled (a good idea if you want decent tracking) and ready to go. All I had to do was remove the scope cover I’d put over her to ward off the errant shower—they can show up any time of the day or night in the Swamp. Mashed the power button, and The Suze intoned, “Power on! Ready to connect!”

Zelda.

Once I’d connected to the girl with the iPhone app, next step was turning on her built-in dew heater. Sure felt like she’d need it on this night. I also installed the plastic dewshield I purchased some weeks ago. The heater would probably have been enough to keep the wet stuff at bay, but the dewshield also keeps ambient light off the girl’s objective. That was it. I headed inside, plunked myself down on the couch, and enjoyed the glorious air conditioning. Outside it was just under 90F at 2100 local.

The first target would be Messier 39, an old favorite located to the Northeast of shimmering Deneb. To get to it, I brought up the SeeStar’s star atlas on the iPhone, searched for and located M39, and chose “gazing.” Suze performed her usual initial calibrations, and, in a minute or three, headed for the cluster. Our target was obvious even in the short “gazing” exposures. As usual, she had placed it dead center in the frame. I started the exposures, ten second exposures, rolling in, and headed to the kitchen to retrieve some cold 807s (for me) and catnip (for the felines).

All Unk and the cats did for the balance of the evening was choose the next target when the stacked results Suzie delivered to my phone looked good enough. Given the conditions, I didn’t want to go too long. Also, I hoped to cover all the targets in one night, and, so, limited each open cluster to 10 minutes or less. With just a few minutes exposure, they looked purty derned good. I did go a little longer on globular cluster M71 and M27, The Dumbbell Nebula, my pièce de resistance for the evening. Suzie did a nice job given the conditions.

Anyhoo, that was part one of the observing for this one. The next morning, Miss Dorothy asked me if I didn’t miss being outside with the telescope, “Not on a night like that one,” was my quick reply, but, truthfully, I did miss being under the stars. That came some days later when we got another clear—if no more transparent—evening.

Into the backyard went the 6-inch SkyWatcher (who whispered to me her name is “Brandy,” which seems to fit). It was pretty much a semi-scrub. Out there in the humid heat, I refamiliarized myself with the SynScan Pro app on my iPhone that serves as Brandy’s hand control. Once I got the hang of it, gotos were fine, even with just a two-star alignment. But you know what? The punk sky conditions were just too much for the girl.

An extra inch of aperture compared to Charity, the ETX 125, helped some, but not enough. To be honest, it was hardly noticeable. And Charity certainly has a contrast advantage. In the haze, M13 was a slightly grainy blob and M3, which is getting low by 2100 local, was almost invisible. The gap between what I could see with my aged eyes and what young Suzie could see with her electronic sensor was vast. Ground truth? Neither Charity nor Brandy would be good enough this time of year when I wanted to get semi-serious about visual backyard deep sky observing.

I was disappointed, but not much surprised. Thinking back to my initial visual testing in the backyard of New Chaos Manor South a decade ago, that was exactly what I’d experienced. Yes, of course the skies are better than they were downtown. On a good, dry night, magnitude 5 stars are visible in this suburban/country transition zone. On a dry night, which is something we don’t often get in spring and summer (and increasingly, fall) in Possum Swamp. On a humid summer’s eve, the heavens look much like they did from the original Chaos Manor South in the Garden District.

How much telescope is needed for rewarding deep sky observing under these conditions? The aforementioned testing showed that often even 8-inches wasn’t enough. At 10-inches, however, the improvement was marked. The deep sky went from “kinda icky” to at least “interesting.” It looked to me as if the visual scope for work from my backyard would have to be my 10-inch Zhumell (GSO) Dobsonian, Zelda, at least until summer wanes and some semblance of autumn comes in.

Miss Zelda is a great telescope with a surprisingly excellent primary mirror. No, she’s not grab ‘n go in any shape form or fashion, but it’s no problem to leave her outside under a scope cover in our secure backyard as long as violent thunderstorms are not forecast. The only question was whether I could still get her safely into the backyard without damaging her, myself, or both of us.

One mostly clear if hazy afternoon, I found the answer is still “yes.”  To begin, I cautiously removed Zelda from her rocker box—first time I’d done that in several years, I was embarrassed to realize. Heavy, but not too heavy; at least not when just lifting her out and standing her up on her (sorry, girl) rear end. Well, there would be a problem if somebody decided to push the tube over with a paw, which is why I locked the felines out of the sunroom to their outrage.

Moving the rockerbox/groundboard to the backyard was simplicity itself. There’s a nice big handle on the front. Then, I returned to the tube, lifted it with one hand on the rear cell and one arm around the middle of the OTA. It’s harder to describe than do but suffice to say that while I wouldn’t want to waltz Miss Zelda across the dance floor, carrying her ten meters into the yard was no problem, even considering I had to go down three steps.

The verdict? The tube is heavy. Heavier than I remembered. Eventually I’ll likely have to use a hand truck to get the scope into the back 40. But if I must do that, I will do that. The last 30 years, a 10-inch has come to be thought of as a “small” telescope. It’s not. One is a powerful performer on the deep sky.

In the 1960s, and even into the 70s, for the amateur astronomer a 10-inch was a big, even huge, telescope. It is, in fact, the largest instrument used regularly by that sainted dean of deep sky observers, Scotty Houston. As many of us age out of owning or even dreaming about owning 20 or 25 or 30-inch telescopes, I think the humble 10-inch might regain some of its lost glory. Anyhoo, I have no intention of giving up one’s horsepower as long as I can safely manage a "10."

Zelda mostly ready to go, I plugged in the battery pack that powers her cooling fan; she’d been in the air-conditioned house, and, while not as bad as it had been, the weather wasn’t exactly cool as the afternoon waned. Next? A little TV with the cats until the long, slow DST hours between now and astronomical twilight passed…

Nota Bene:  The order of the objects I looked at with Z was the same as in the book, Urban Astronomer.

M39

It took me a long time to learn to appreciate this galactic cluster, which lies well away from the Northern Cross asterism, about nine-and-a-half degrees to the northeast. On a summer’s eve’ as a kid astronomer, I’d maybe take a quick look at it and move on. All it was was a patch of medium-bright stars, with the more brilliant ones forming a triangle. It was soon in the rearview mirror as me and my fellow members of the Backyard Astronomy Society continued our fruitless search for the veil nebula with our long focal length three and four-inch scopes.

As the years rolled on, and I turned more appropriate instruments on M39, my opinion of this magnitude 4.6 cluster began to change. What’s “appropriate”? A scope/eyepiece combo that puts some space around this half-degree size group. Oh, and aperture doesn’t hurt either. Enough dark space to frame it, and enough aperture to begin to show off the magnitude 12 and dimmer stars that lurk inside the triangle of magnitude 6-range suns, and you begin to have something.

While M39 will never be a showpiece, yeah, it is something. How do you look at it? On this evening, it showed off plenty of stars in Zelda with a wide field 13mm ocular, but it just wasn’t pretty.  I knew the solution:  more field, less magnification. Inserting my 35mm Panoptic into Zelda’s focuser rewarded me with the, yes, awful pretty. All those dim stars higher magnification revealed had disappeared, but just as in Urban Astronomer, where I switched from a "big" scope to my old Short Tube 80 (mm) refractor, I thought it was worth it. With plenty of space around it, M39 it looks more distinctive and just better.

How about the SeeStar, Suzie? As you can see, she’s a mite field-challenged for this one given the geometry of her chip. Oh, she shows scads of stars. Everywhere. Yes, the bright triangle stands out. But the cluster doesn’t have much snap. It doesn’t pop out of the background as it does with a wide-field visual scope.

M29

Something puzzled me and my BAS buddies back in the day. There’s only one other Messier object in Cygnus, a rather lackluster galactic cluster that pales compared to some of the other sights in the Swan. Why? Who knows, and be that as it may, with M29, it is what it is.

Once you’re on M29, which lies just under two degrees south-southeast of bright Sadr at the Swan’s heart, don’t expect much. What I had in Zelda with a 13mm Ethos eyepiece was a little dipper-like asterism of stars maybe ten minutes across. I do sound fairly enthusiastic in the book, “Four bright stars stand out extremely well at 48x in the 4.25 inch…I can see seven other cluster members despite scattered clouds and fairly heavy haze.”  And that is about what I saw in similarly heavy haze with Zelda. Oh, a few more dimmer suns were visible, but not many. As I also say in the book, after 6-inches of aperture, M29 doesn’t improve much.

Suze? I devoted a mere 6-minutes exposure to Messier 29, and that was all it took. Even in that snapshot, many dim background stars are visible across the frame that weren’t seen in Zelda. The cluster itself looks much the same; it sure stands out from the background. What helps this magnitude 6.6 group? That small 10’ size. Dare I say it? It’s almost photogenic.

M71

Despite titling this chapter “Star Nests in Cygnus,” I did take some detours, including to nearby Sagitta’s M71, which is 5 degrees south-southwest of its famous neighbor, M27, the Dumbbell Nebula. The only claim to fame M71 has is that while it is a globular cluster, it doesn’t look much like one, appearing to be a rich and compressed open cluster like M11. There was supposedly some debate over its status for a while, but I’m skeptical about that. One look at M71’s color-magnitude diagram says “globular.” And that is what it is, a (very) loose Shapley-Sawyer Class XI glob.

So, what’s it like visually? You’d think this magnitude 8.6 object would be as challenging as Lyra’s M56 or Coma’s NGC 5053. Nope, it’s easier with smaller aperture scopes due to its small, 7.0’ size. It was certainly visible with a 6-inch telescope on good nights. As I observe in Urban Astronomer, though, more aperture helps. In the 12mm Ethos in the 10-inch, it’s an obviously resolved little clump o’ stars.

In pictures, this wee globular is pretty and interesting if not spectacular. Missy Suzy easily resolved hordes of cluster stars set against a very rich background. You know what M71 looks like in Suze’s shot? It looks amazingly like the Wild Duck Cluster. But, no, M71, which I’ve heard called “The Angelfish Cluster” (?) in recent years, is a globular star cluster, y’all.

NGC 6910

And that exhausts the Messiers. What’s left galactic clusters-wise is, yes, NGC clusters. Now, now, don’t take on like that. Some of ‘em ain’t that bad, like 6910 which those long years ago I thought was, “A real surprise with the 8-inch f/5! Very nice indeed for a non-Messier…about 10 – 15 stars visible.” In Zelda with the 150x delivered with an 8mm Ethos, what was in the field was a scattering of dimmish stars around an acute triangle of 9 – 10 magnitude ones. As on that long ago night, there appeared to be around a dozen dimmer stars visible.

In the SeeStar? When looking at an image of a galactic cluster, it’s hard to say what’s a cluster member and what isn’t. Maybe 25 – 30 likely member suns? At any rate, unlike some NGC opens, it is “well detached” from the background. One look at the picture and you see the cluster.

NGC 6866

What did I see when I took a gander at 6866 with my old Meade 12.5-inch way back in the 1990s (it seems odd to say that; lately it seems like yesterday)? “Beautiful field with the cluster looking like a miniature M39.” And that’s still accurate; that was also my impression with Zelda: a vaguely triangular shape of suns (I’ve heard this group called the “Kite Cluster”).  This magnitude 7.6, 6.0’ size cluster is another NGC open that’s easy to see.

Suzie did a nice job on this one in only 5 minutes. Yes, there are hordes of background stars, but the cluster is again easy to pick out. Maybe it even looks a little more like a kite than it does visually, with two curving arcs of stars that aren’t as noticeable visually forming the sides of the kite.

NGC 6819

This is yet another example that makes a lie of the old saw, “All NGC open clusters are the same—boring.”  The somewhat well-known Fox Head Cluster has a combined magnitude of 7.6 and covers a mere 6.0’ of sky. In the book, I pronounced it, “A very attractive NGC open cluster in the 11-inch Schmidt Cassegrain…looked more oval than square.” In Miss Z, the impression was, conversely, a diamond shaped pattern of many tiny stars.

Inexplicably, I didn’t get NGC 6819 on my observing list and, so, didn’t get a SeeStar image.

NGC 6834

For this one, we leave the “cross” area of Cygnus and head towards Albireo. Our quarry is a small magnitude 7.8, 4.0’ across group. My impression in the 10-inch Dobsonian was “small and dim,” and that was also what my old 11-inch SCT showed in the glorious Day: “Small and dim. In the 11-inch scope, I see a 5.0’ oval of faint stars…crossed by a prominent line of brighter stars.

Which is exactly what Suze pulled in in 6 minutes. She did pick up many, many even fainter stars I couldn’t see visually, and in her shot, the cluster begins to assume a more triangular than oval shape.

NGC 6830

And yet another good NGC open star cluster glowing softly at magnitude 7.9 and extending 8.0’.  For this one, I again ventured out of Cygnus to another small nearby constellation, Vulpecula, The Little Fox, home of the abovementioned Dumbbell. In Urban Astronomer, I found 6830 to be, “Very distinct from the rich beautiful field it is set in. Rectangular in shape.” Today? Much the same. A vaguely rectangular or diamond-shaped pattern of a fair number of magnitude 9-10 stars and many dimmer ones. Oh, for some inexplicable reason, some call this “The Poodle Cluster.”

In the Suzie-shot, the cluster is identifiable around a diamond of brighter suns, but, admittedly, it is beginning to recede into the background. In the image it’s still easy to pick out but proceeding toward “not well detached.”

NGC 6823

This magnitude 7.0’, 10.0’ size group is involved with a large complex of nebulosity which was totally invisible in my urban skies. What was visible was a nice enough galactic cluster: “A nice medium-sized open cluster in the 8-inch f/5.” I also observed that the cluster looked like a miniature Scorpius. I didn’t see that on this latter-day night with a 10-inch. What I saw was a rather shapeless sprinkling of magnitude 10 and dimmer stars.

That is what I saw with the SeeStar as well. I didn’t expose for long, and didn’t use a filter, so any nebulosity that might be there wasn’t visible. I do note some star chains that give 6823 a vaguely flower-like shape.

Albireo              

I ended each chapter of Urban Astronomer with a double star. For this chapter, Albireo was obviously it. Now, the lustrous blue and gold “Cub Scout Double” is not an object for a 50mm f/5 scope, but Suze still did a fair job, showing a pair of strongly colored stars.

And that was that.  Oh, on my imaging night, I did send Suzie to M27 to see what she could do, and she did a very fine job for a wee telescope. All that remained was to throw a cover over Zelda (I didn’t feel like—ahem—wrestling with the girl at the tail end of a long and hot evening). She’d be fine in our secure backyard, and getting her back to the Sunroom would be a far less daunting task in the morn’.

So…I saw some cool sights and found I could still (fairly) easily set up the 10-inch.  This night was a win, then, especially since I’d had a good time, and it had brought back some nice memories of my Urban Astronomer runs.

Next up? Another observing article, but we’ll give Urban Astronomer a rest in favor of something (sort of) new.

 

Chalk up another one, muchachos. Another orbit of our friendly G2V star by your aged Uncle. That makes 71.  A few years ago, I wouldn’t have told you that. Like many of my fellow Boomers, I’ve wrestled with old age—we just didn’t believe it could happen to us. But I think I’ve finally come to terms with it, at least to the extent of being able to say, “It is what it is.” Of course, I didn’t let any philosophical mumbo-jumbo interfere with another grand birthday in the old style.

As with many of Unk’s birthdays, this one combined “space” (as in building a new model Launch Umbilical Tower to go with my recent Airfix Saturn V build), Mexican food, ham radio, and a sizable portion of amateur astronomy. Actually, the amateur astronomy got done the evenings prior to and immediately following the big day, since I knew I’d likely be tuckered out from activating a park for Parks on the Air and too full of Tex-Mex chow and margaritas to even think about taking a telescope into the backyard…

Indeed, I was. We had a great time at Park US-1042, Gulf Shores State Park, but oh-was-it-hot. We made 40 CW QSOs with my new Yaesu FT-891 in just over an hour, and that was enough. It was crazy hot, even under a picnic pavilion and even with the constant sea-breezes blowing. Back home, I dumped the sand out of my Crocs, spiffed up a little, and made tracks for Unk’s longtime fave Mexican place, El Giro’s. Many margaritas cooled me off, and I was soon ready to tuck into my unwavering birthday fare, the famous #13.  A little TV with the felines thereafter, and it would be night-night time. I’d hit the backyard the next eve.

If you are a long-time reader of the Little Ol’ AstroBlog from Chaos Manor South, you know five years ago, it had almost run up on the rocks. In 2019, there was but one new post—and not until the end of December of that year! An accident the Rodster suffered at the beginning of ‘19, and the lingering effects of a rather un-looked for early retirement almost spelled curtains for the News from Possum Swamp.

I got back in the saddle as 2020 came in—I found I still wanted to bring the AstroBlog to you—and we are now on the reasonable schedule of one issue per month. At my age and with my physical infirmities, I don’t travel as much as I once did. I did make it back to one star party last year and hope to do so again this fall. But…  No longer traveling from star party to star party like a demented Johnny Appleseed means I don’t have as much to tell you about. It sure ain’t like 2016, the year I did so many events a friend of mine started calling the annum “Uncle Rod’s Farewell Tour.”

Not being hither and yon much and having cut back on my astro-gear addiction means the emphasis now is on observing. In part, that is choice. I just don’t need (and don’t want to spend on) more and more astro-goodies. In part that is necessity. Post-pandemic, there ain’t as much astrostuff to spend on. Mostly, though, as the autumn of your Old Uncle’s time on this world deepens to winter, observing is more important to me than buying. And most of my observing is now right back where it began all those decades ago, in the backyard…

And so, we’ve come to summer in Chaos Manor South’s backyard. This is a better time for me to view the spring deep sky objects than earlier on. They are across the Meridian, into the west, and out of the trees and the most egregious part of the Possum Swamp light dome. Oh, there are more bugs than there were, and it’s hotter and muggier, but at least Suzie the SeeStar, and my friendly old (don’t tell her I called her that) ETX, Charity Hope Valentine, and I, can get a better good look at the great galaxies of Spring.

The Number 13!

And how your Old Uncle does run on! But maybe that has always been one of the strengths of this here ‘blog; leastways, that’s what I tell myself. But, onward to Coma Berenices! I had set out to do this with Charity about a year ago but got sidetracked. I am happy to have finally been able to set the girl loose on the amazing DSOs of Coma. The objects here are in the same order as in “The Tresses of Berenice” chapter in The Urban Astronomer’s Guide. If you’d like to buy a copy and follow along, it wouldn’t hurt my feelings none, but I don’t insist upon it.

Nota Bene:  The imaging was done over the course several evenings, and the visual work on a couple of separate nights…

Do you have to be crazy to do deep sky astronomy in Possum Swamp at the height of a Gulf Coast summer? No, but it helps <badda-bing!>. Me and the girls, Charity and Suzie, did our best, but every evening was plagued by haze and often by drifting clouds. There were nights when it didn’t get much under 90F till near midnight.  Suzie’s exposure times were limited, 30 minutes being about as long as she could often go. Sometimes, Charity and I would cool our heels for quite a spell while waiting for the sky to improve.

M3

Yeah, yeah, I know, Skeeter. Messier 3 ain’t in Coma but in nearby Canes Venatici. So what? On any night it's above the horizon, I am gonna take a look at the ruler of the spring globs (not that it has much competition).  Honestly, I didn’t expect much. The sky was literally milk. There wasn’t a Moon in the sky, however, so Charity and I remained hopeful and went that-a-way.

One long ago Urban Astronomer observing run, I turned my scope to Messier 3 from the heavily light polluted backyard of the old Chaos Manor South. That scope happened to be my humongous C11, and I was amply rewarded: “MAN is M3 beautiful! 127x with the C11 reveals many tiny stars from the outer periphery of the cluster and extending right across its core.”

Beautiful M3...

Alas, that C11, Big Bertha, is long gone to a new home, and I had to make do with Missy’s 5-inches of mirror. Yes, there’s less light pollution out here in the suburbs than there was in the Garden District, but the night I observed this big boy with the C11 was just better, light pollution or no. Oh, it was easy enough to see the cluster when Charity’s slew stopped—she put the glob smack in the middle of the field of my 26mm Meade Plössl —but there wasn’t much to see. A round blob with some slight hint of granularity. My old trick of increasing magnification didn’t help. Going from 75x to 125x with a 15mm widefield Synta ocular made the glob disappear into the bright background this time.

Susie? As you can see, she delivered a credible M3, even with just 21 minutes of exposure. Despite the icky skies, Messier 3 shined on—yeah—just like some crazy diamond. Not only that, one of my favorite little “field” galaxies, NGC 5263, shows off its minute disk in the shot. The image, by the way, is nearly unprocessed. It’s just the .jpg that Suze sent to my phone after she stacked it. I adjusted levels a bit, but that was it.

M64

Hokay, over to tonight’s stomping ground, Coma Berenices. I began where Urban Astronomer begins, with one of the constellation’s showpieces, M64, the Blackeye galaxy.  When Miss Charity stopped her weasels-with-tuberculosis slewing noise and I put my eye to the eyepiece, there the Blackeye was. Well, the galaxy, anyway. Given the sky and the fact M64 is now getting down in the west, I had to guess at the black eye, the dark spot near the M64's nucleus. I thought I could detect it with the 15mm Expanse eyepiece, but that verged on wishful thinking.

Which was really not much different from what I’d seen with my 6-inch Newtonian and younger eyes those years ago at Chaos Manor South: “I convinced myself I saw evidence of the black eye, but, in truth, I’m not sure if I saw it or not. It’s incredibly subtle in this aperture in the light pollution…”  Wanna make the dark feature pop out in the suburbs? 10-inches of telescope and high power on a night of steady seeing is what is needed.

It should be no surprise by now that The Suzie laughed at the minor challenge of the Blackeye. Not only is the feature starkly visible in her images, enlarging the picture and doing some processing revealed surprising detail. Other than cropping, the pic here is, again, purty much as it came out of the telescope.

NGC 4565

There are some deep sky objects that never look bad. Almost any telescope and any sky will give you something of them. That said, NGC 4565, the vaunted Flying Saucer Galaxy is a galaxy, and no other variety of deep sky object is more damaged by light pollution. Nevertheless, one spring eve I had a go at the ‘Saucer with my C11 downtown… 

With direct vision at 127x, NGC 4565 first appears as a round nebulous blob about 1’ or less in diameter with a tiny, bright star-like nucleus.  A little averted vision quickly reveals the edge-on disk that forms the saucer. I’m confident I’m seeing at least 5’ of disk on either side of the core.”

Blackeye lookin' good!

I didn’t mention the equatorial dust lane because I didn’t see it. If I did see the attractive adjacent saucer, NGC 4562, I didn’t mention it—and I do not remember ever seeing it from the Chaos Manor South backyard.

I was afraid Charity’s answer to “Have you see the saucers?” would be NO. My best girl surprised me though, turning up 4565 without fuss in the 26mm Super Plössl. That said, on this eve we didn’t get farther than the “round, nebulous blob” stage, and I’m not convinced I saw a trace of the nucleus, either.

By the time Suze set her sights on the Saucer, it was riding high, and I didn’t think she’d have much trouble with it. I did know that the higher an object, the more apparent the field rotation, but that isjust the way it is with an alt-azimuth mount. Anyhow, Suzie’s shot shows off the nucleus, the bulge of the The-Day-The-Earth-Stood-Still flying saucer, and the equatorial dust lane.  Zooming in even hints at irregularity in the dust-lane. NGC 4562 is easy to see. All that in a mere 25 minute of exposure.

M53

M53 is OK, it really is. But it definitely plays second fiddle to M3. Its main problem is it’s a little small. Resolution is not at all difficult, though, as I found with my urban 6-inch: “Round with a grainy, diffuse core. As I continue to stare…I’m surprised to see stars popping out at the edges.”

That must have been a way above average night. On the night me and Charity were given, the 5-inch MCT required 200x and some averted imagination to pull some stars out of the soup. They were impossible to hold steady and winked in and out like far-distant fireworks.

Charity’s rendition of M53 is pretty pleasing. 22 minutes shows a fine spray of stars and even shows color in them. But you know what? In some ways I prefer her 4-minute exposure. Almost as many stars, and a more even background.

NGC 5053

Lurking near M53 is its little-buddy glob, NGC 5053.  It really is Gilligan to the Skipper of M53. It is loose, very loose, looking much more like an open cluster than a globular (a quick glance at its color-magnitude diagram, however, shows it to be a glob). It is not easy for any telescope in the city—I wasn’t always successful with it even with my 12-inch, Old Betsy.

I think my NexStar 11 GPS did very well to show a few of its stars and the vague general haze that forms the flattened body of the cluster. But it wasn’t much, no not much at all. In the ETX 125PE? Was it there or was it not there at all? I had a tough time deciding. Switching eyepieces, doing lots of looking, and using every visual trick in the book—averted vision, jiggle the scope, etc.—made me decide I’d seen some hint of this toughie.

What’s tough for my aged eyes isn’t at all difficult for young lady Suzie. Her 17 minutes of exposure gave The Blah-blah-blah Cluster (my nickname for it) form and substance. Lots of teeny stars. It made me wonder if a darker sky and a longer exposure could have made it look a little like a glob, as shots from good skies do.

And so, the hour grew late—as your aged Uncle reckons such things now—the dew began to fall ever more heavily, and it was time to wrap up my birthday evening backyard deep sky tour.  Soon, Charity was safely in her case, and I was again ensconced on the couch with the felines watching Project Mercury videos on YouTube to the tune of cold 807s for me and mucho catnip for them.

Postscript… RIP Charity?

The “Tresses” chapter in The Urban Astronomer’s Guide goes on to seven more objects beyond NGC 5053. Why aren’t they here? Because Charity and I did not get to observe them. Just as we finished with NGC 5053, disaster struck. I hit the mode key to select the next DSO…and nothing happened. I mashed it again…and hieroglyphics appeared briefly on the Autostar display before it went blank. I cycled the power, and it was clear the Autostar was booting, just no display.

Next morning, I opened up the HC cleaned the ribbon cable connection with Deoxit, reseated it, etc. No joy. It appears the display is gone. I am examining my options. I could pay a lot of money for a used Autostar on eBay that might last a while or might not. Buying a new Autostar/Audiostar is out of the question.

As you may have heard, Meade has gone out of business along with Orion. There’ve been no official announcements, but it’s clear these companies, at least under their current owner, are GONE PECANS. Even if they weren’t gone, the Autostar, like a lot of other Meade items, has been unavailable for quite some time. Sure, I could defork Charity’s OTA and put her on another mount… but it just wouldn’t be the same.

Miss Charity Hope Valentine 2004 - 2024.

What will I do? What will I do? For now, nothing. I’ll hang back and see if the Meade situation resolves itself somehow. In the meantime, the role of uber-portable goto scope (mostly all I use) will be taken on by a 6-inch f/5 SkyWatcher Newtonian. It hurts my heart to think about the end of observing with Miss Valentine, but however things turn out, we sure had a wonderful 20 years together.

 

 

Muchachos, I make no secret of the fact I miss the go-go days of Baby Boomer astronomy. Which was at its height from the 1980s through the oughts or a little past that, maybe almost to the time of the plague. Like many of you then, I was almost as interested and obsessed about THE GEAR as I was about actually using it on the sky.

There were times in the decades I lived downtown at the original and storied Chaos Manor South that collecting and dreaming about new Astrostuff was almost my sole focus in the hobby. It was often all I could do night-by-night. I was lucky to get out to a dark site once a month, and what I could see from my oak-enshrouded backyard was limited to say the least.

How things have changed. It seems I am back to observing with telescopes rather than collecting them. And that is observing in a relaxed fashion. When you have a decent—if not perfect—suburban backyard as I do at the new Chaos Manor South, you don’t feel as pressured to go pedal-to-the metal every time you are out under the night sky.

But that’s not the only reason. Post pandemic, it’s no secret there’s less of that astrostuff to buy (Taken a stroll through the astromag ad pages lately?) and what there is is more expensive and often backordered. There have been some interesting advances over the last few years, nevertheless, like the rise of the smartscope and black boxes like ZWO’s ASIAIR, both of which make astro-imaging into a new ballgame. But we no longer wait breathlessly for the next ginormous Meade technicolor catalog extravaganza. That sort of amateur astronomy appears to be in the rearview mirror.

There’s also the ME factor. As in, I am a different me than I was when I retired in 2013. When we left ol’ Chaos Manor South, all, it seemed, would go on as it had the past two decades. I’d just transfer the contents of the Massive Equipment Vault to the new manse. Then, shockingly, your Old Uncle began to realize he was tired. Tired of ALL THE STUFF. Now that I could use telescopes, it seemed I was more interested in doing that than worrying about what, if anything, might come next. And, so, I began to thin the telescope herd…

Tanya the Rescue Scope

Those of y’all who know me or who are regular readers, are aware the waters ran a lot deeper than that. That the changes retirement brought to my outlook were much more profound. But, nevertheless, the result was I wanted less stuff, sold much, and don’t use half of what I retain. “But what do ya still use Unk, what you do ya use, huh?”

That’s a good question, Skeeter. I could go on about the lovely APOs I still have, and the beautiful Losmandy mount, yadda, yadda, yadda. That would be whistling past the graveyard, though. The only time any of that gets pulled out is when I need it for a Sky & Telescope assignment. I don’t choose to use it because I want to use it.

What do I use first and foremost? A pair of 15x70 binoculars I bought from the late (that is hard to believe) Bill Burgess twenty-one years ago. If there’s a more versatile pair of glasses than 15x70s (or so), I don’t know what it is. They offer good aperture, but also enough magnification to keep compromised suburban skies on the dark side. Also, they are still handholdable—if a slight pain for extended use. I have numerous pairs of binoculars, from exquisite 35mms all the way up to 100mm giants. None get used other than the 15x70s. The Burgess binoculars are what I will and do use.

When I want or need to use a telescope? If I’m lazy and/or need wide fields, the scope I grab ‘n go with is one I would have laughed at 20 years ago. I am talking about Tanya, the Rescue Telescope. She is a 4.5-inch Celestron Newtonian with a focal ratio of f/5.2 and a spherical mirror. She is perched on an alt-az fork on a spindly extruded aluminum tripod, the kind I used to preach against those decades ago. Why would your Old Uncle use a Department Store telescope? Why would I allow one in my presence?

That is simple. When I want to see something, whether a planet, or a deep sky object, or the latest comet, or whatever I use Tanya because she works. The way I want a scope to work. She sits in my radio shack/workshop of the telescopes, the Batcave, near the door and is ready to go at a moment’s notice. Oh, she takes a little while to acclimate, but by the time I’ve rounded-up a box of 1.25-inch eyepieces she is ready to run. When I am done, or if the sky clouds over, or hour grows late (that is now 10pm) I can pick her up in one hand, tripod and all, and waltz her back inside.

“But Unk, ain’t the images pitiful?” No, they ain’t. Yes, there is a limit to the resolution of a 4.5-inch spherical mirror. At f/5.2 one approaches ½ wave of error. But guess what, campers? At 100x and lower her images are just fine. The Moon is beautiful and sharp, I can see the Great Red Spot, and Saturn is the detailed wonder he always has been. She will even go beyond, a little beyond, 100x without complaint. More than that and the trouble is more with her little mount than her mirror.

Miss Valentine

All that’s just OK; the sort of looking I do now…admiring and wondering over the Double or ET clusters or just the Pleiads...doesn’t require more magnification or a big mirror or a fine pedigree. Anyhoo, the ground truth is the same as with the Burgesses, she is what I will use and, so, is what I do use.

Of course, there are times when I want more. Specifically, a goto telescope so I don’t have to spend my night squinting up at the hazy suburban sky with a red dot finder when I am hunting subtler prey (which for me now is DSOs like M82, not some dadgum PGC).  And one with a little more focal length to make achieving higher magnification easier. As with the Burgess binocs, more magnification makes the field darker and improves contrast. What spells relief? 5-inches at f/15 on a goto mount. That of course is my old girlfriend, the one you’ve so often read about in these pages, Miss Charity Hope Valentine, an ETX-125PE.

I used to make fun of Charity’s sometimes varying goto accuracy. Now? I don’t care if she puts something on the edge of the field instead of smack in the middle (which she often does anyway).  I am no longer obsessed by such things. Her optics are sharp, dead sharp, and she has enough aperture to make most of the deep sky objects I visit, the bright and prominent ones, “acceptable.” Which is enough for me now, it seems. At any rate, as with the binoculars and Tanya, when I want more telescope, Charity is what I will use.

Are “telescope years” like dog years or more like human years? I ain’t sure. One thing I am sure of is that Charity is almost 20 years old now. There is the chance she will let out the Magic Smoke some night. I’ve taken care of her and done any repairs she’s needed. But it could happen. If it did, her replacement would be a six-inch f/5 SkyWatcher Newtonian on a goto mount. The optics are good, the goto is accurate, and it is controlled from a smartphone, something I find handy in my old age as I get lazier and lazier. Right now, the SkyWatcher gets out under the stars when I need goto, but a little more field than what the f/15 Miss Valentine can offer. 

How about eyepieces? Oh, I haven't got rid of any of them. No need to; they don't take up much room and most do get into a focuser occasionally. The same old crew is still here, ranging from time-honored Vixen Plössls to high-toned Televue Ethoses. If I needed more, I wouldn't hesitate to still buy oculars, but I seem to have what I need. Since the telescopes I use are 1.25-inch only, naturally the 2-inchers don't get pulled out often. Luckily, the Ethoses and Explore Scientific eyepieces I own are all 1.25-inch capable. "Come on, Unk. Which ones do ya use?" OK, I'll fess up. That's most often the 1.25-inchers in the old Orion eyepiece box. Those Vixen Plössls, some Expanse Wide Fields, and that wonderful König I bought at a long-ago star party.

Dang! Almost back where I started!

Imaging? I have probably said enough about how I do that recently to make you tired of hearing about it. What I use is my ZWO S50 SeeStar. She takes pictures that please me and allows me to image the deep sky frequently—if I had to drag out the Losmandy mount, a laptop, an SBIG CCD cam, and all the rest of the yadda-yadda-yadda, it’s likely I might do astrophotography once or twice a year, which is pretty much what my recent output had been. Since I got the SeeStar, Suzie, however, astrophotos have been pouring out of my iPhone.  But, again with that much sought after ground truth:  She is what I will use and, so, is what I do use. 

Staying on the topic of what I will use, but switching gears a mite to astro-software, there have been changes aplenty there as well, muchachos. Yes, sometimes I just grab the Sky & Telescope Jumbo Pocket Sky Atlas and use that to plot my journey. But I find I see more if I generate an observing list with software. And my aging eyes do find it easier to decipher a chart on a smartphone or laptop screen than on dew-laden paper. So, yeah, I still use an observing planner, if not the sophisticated sort I once did.

Back in the glorious Day, when I was decidedly more ambitious than I am now, I’d use huge and powerful planning programs like SkyTools or Deep Sky Planner to generate my object lists. Those are two wonderful pieces of software and I recommend them highly if you are more hardcore than latter-day Unk.  Now? The lists I can generate with the SkySafari app on my iPhone are more than good enough. Click “observe,” create a new list, and start populating it with objects, all with a few touches of the iPhone screen. No, it ain’t got the power of DSP or SkyTools, but—soundin’ like that proverbial broken record—it is what I will to use and is mostly all I do use.

I don’t just use SkySafari for list-making, either. I use it for almost everything astronomical ‘round here. As y’all may know, I’ve at least tried just about every piece of astronomy software from Sky Travel (Commodore 64) onward that has come down the ol’ pike. All the biggies. And I’ve loved many of them and found many of them indispensable for our pursuit. Now, though, SkySafari does what I need, does it well, and is beautiful.

I do love me some SkySafari!

Of course, there are times when I don’t want to squint at a phone. I want the more expansive screen real estate of a laptop/desktop. When that’s been the case for moi, I’ve mostly used the shareware (do they still call it that?) program Stellarium. It isn’t quite SkySafari, but close. I do still use Cartes du Ciel with my astronomy students, since it does some things in ways I prefer for the classroom. Honestly, though?  What I’ve really wanted is SkySafari on a laptop.

When I finally got tired of dumb old Winders and got myself a MacBook Air M2, I thought, “Well, dang, now I can get the Mac version of SkySafari!” Alas, the Mac page at the maker’s, Simulation Curriculum’s, site was gone. The program was still apparently available in the app store but had not been updated in years. What the—?  I temporarily gave up the idea of SkySafari on a laptop and loaded up the Mac flavor of Stellarium.

Then, recently, I decided to do some research about SkySafari on the Mac. The gist of it? Seemed as how the old Mac SkySafari was dead. As dead as the Intel Macintoshes. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t have SkySafari for my Mac, it ‘peared. Many iOS apps now run jus’ fine on the new Macs, the Silicon Macs (machines with an Apple M1 processor or better). Was it possible I could run SkySafari Pro on my Apple Computer, my M2? ‘Deed it was.

For less than 20 bucks I could download SkySafari Pro from the Mac app store. Which I did. After it installed? SHAZAM! There was my favorite astroware on a big(ger) screen and looking pretty—awful pretty! I haven’t had a lot of time to play with it yet but suffice it to say it seems to work great on the Mac, looks beautiful, and, not surprisingly, seems to have every feature of the iPhone app (which is what it really is, after all).

Anyhoo, there you have it. That short list is the astronomy tools I use, binoculars, a couple of smallish telescopes, my iPhone, and a laptop once in a while. But I’m keeping on trucking, onward and upward as they say, whoever “they” are.

And what’s onward from here? This installment was supposed to cover my reobservation of the objects in Coma from my book, The Urban Astronomer’s Guide. The “Tresses of Berenice” chapter, that is. Urania had other ideas, keeping her sky veiled down here in the Swamp night after night. Coma is sinking now, and I hope I get a shot at it before the Gulf storms begin spinning up. Yay or nay, though, I’ll be back here next month with more of my down-home astro-foolishness...

Excelsior.

 

 

Suzie's M13

Summertime, summertime, sum-sum-summertime!  You know it is here, Muchachos. No, not officially; the Solstice ain’t arrived just yet. BUT… Memorial Day is in the rearview mirror and M13, the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules, is climbing higher night by night.  Even given this fricking-fracking Daylight Savings Time, it is now out of the horizon murk by mid evening and the tail-end of astronomical twilight. So, time for your ol’ Uncle to get after it.

“After what, Unk? Wut you talkin’ ‘bout now? Too much Yell last night? Did you bump your head gettin’ outa bed? What?” Simple, Skeeter:  my yearly quest to image that greatest of all Northern Hemisphere globular star clusters, Messier 13. That is a long-running astronomy ritual with your old Uncle. Like my annual Christmas Eve observation of M42. Weather ‘n stuff conspired to make me miss the Big Glob last annum, and I wasn’t gonna let that happen again this year; I’d get started as soon as possible, like RIGHT AWAY.

The only question was “How would I get M13?”  The last decade, the answer has been “As easily as possible.” Yeah, some years I’d drag out big mount, SCT, computer, and CCD and go whole hog, but those years became fewer as I hit my mid-60s. Mucho fewer. And soon enough, the days of setting up my SBIG CCD on a C11 were gone forever. As the years roll on, and the gear seems to get heavier and the spring and summer nights ever hotter, I've looked for ways to corral ol’ Herc (or whatever) without busting a gut or being a sweat-drenched wreck at the end of the run.

The first Quick and Dirty approach I took to M13 was video, deep sky video. As y’all know, during the years of The Herschel Project, I was all about video. So, it seemed a natural to go after M13 that-a-way. No guiding. I could even use an alt-azimuth mounted scope. The original Stellacam (analog black and white video and <10-second exposures) did a credible job.

The Mallincam Xtreme that followed it was better still with less noise and longer exposures. But while I didn’t have to worry about guide scopes and polar alignments, that was still a load of gear:  scope, mount, camera, cables, monitor, digital video recorder, etc. There was also no denying the results didn’t look that great. Oh, the videos looked pretty good, and the still frames from them were acceptable. But attractive? Not really.  I looked for that much wished-for and sought-after Better Way.

At about this time, quite a few refugees from the analog deep sky video scene began experimenting with a similar imaging mode. This was short-exposure imaging with digital cameras. CCD cams, DSLRs, you name it. The idea was to take a bunch of short—as in 10 - 15 seconds or so—exposures and stack them together in the usual way. I was rather skeptical of the idea, thinking that at a minimum 2 – 3-minute subs were required for a decent image.

However, I had a camera suitable for experimentation—my ZWO ASI 120mc color planetary camera. While I could have used an alt-azimuth scope for my testing, I chose to put the OTA on an equatorial. I figured that would eliminate noise and other trouble from field rotation and would give the short-sub idea its best chance at success.

And away we went. The C8-on-a-GEM setup was a slight pain, but not too bad. Soon my old Ultima 8 OTA, Celeste, was riding on the CG5 with the li’l ZWO cam on the rear cell. Other than that, I had a laptop set up on the deck running the amazingly versatile FireCapture software, which is just as much at home saving single exposure frames of a deep sky object as it is planetary .avi files.

The result? The camera’s chip is a tiny one as is normal with planetary style and guide cameras, but with the C8 reduced to around 700mm it wasn’t bad at all, and suitable for small-medium deep sky objects like M13, or M57 where I began. I could tell from the images coming in that I could stack and process the Ring into something looking pretty nice. Yes, the images were noisy despite the dark frames FireCapture applied, but that was due to the uncooled nature of the camera and warm Possum Swamp spring nights and not any limitations of the short-sub method.

M13? Easy as fallin’ off a log. As you can see in the image here, M13 with the 120mc is considerably better than the inset longer exposure (1-minute subs) of my stacked Meade DSI image from many a Moon ago. I was pleased. But I put the ZWO away and never came back to it for the deep sky. Instead, I took to doing my yearly M13 with an 80mm APO and a DSLR. That was easy to do, but f/6 80mm plus DSLR frame size produced a rather miniscule M13. In retrospect, I could have gotten better images with my ZWO and the little refractor.

That has been the story the last several years. Me using a small, short refractor and a DSLR to do the Great One. Was I satisfied with the images? No. As above, M13 was just too small, and the 80 APO and DSLR were not well-suited for the suburban environment. That’s where my Yearly M13 came to rest for a while, but that was then, ladies and gentlemen. This is now.

What is different now when it comes to taking decent deep sky images easy-peasy? Do I even have to tell you? It is the coming of the smart telescope.  I’ve talked about my little ZWO scope frequently here—I am very fond of her. She's not perfect. Some of the images are better than others, I’ve observed, and it’s not always clear why. Oh, no doubt you could achieve more consistency as far as perfect stars in every shot by downloading individual sub-frames and stacking ‘em yourself. I choose not to do that because I am rather lazy these days and find the stacked .jpgs Suzie delivers to my phone almost always more than acceptable.

Anyhoo, about a week and a half ago, I carried Suze into the backyard. Yes, it was a little early in M13 season and the glob was still a bit low mid-evening, but this is Possum Swamp we are talkin’ about. It can easily be cloudy for weeks and weeks. Easily. Plus, I had already decided M13 would be the subject of this installment of the blog (in part to impel me to get out of the air conditioning and get a few snapshots, at least). Out into the back 40 we went. One look at the sky told me I’d be lucky to get anything, and that our time under the stars would be limited.  Oh, and at 8pm it wasn’t anywhere close to being dark enough to shoot anything. I might, might be able to begin shooting at nine o’clock. 

When I thought it was dark enough to begin, I trotted out, turned Suze on, connected to her with the iPhone, and used the manual altitude slewing buttons (a recent addition to the app) to raise the girl’s little OTA out of parked position. The reason for that was so I could install a dew shield I’d purchased. Not because of dew, though. The scope’s built-in dew heater has always kept that at bay, but I wanted to block some of the ambient light that inevitably intrudes into a suburban backyard. I thought images would look better with minimal processing without the gradients the neighbors’ yard lights inevitably cause.

Which dew shield? Where do you get such a thing for the SeeStar? Take a stroll through the eBay. You’ll find a surprising number of sellers offering dew shields and other plastic 3D-printed SeeStar accessories. I got mine from an outfit called “West Coast Astro.” On the plus side, it is reasonably attractive and works fine. On the minus side? I couldn’t use it the first night after I received it; it wouldn’t fit the SeeStar. I had to do some sanding of the barrel. Not a lot, just a little and then it was fine. On the plus side again? The seller included a bag of Haribo gummies in the box—just like Adrian of Adrian’s Digital Basement often receives in his Mail Call packages… so I was placated.

Me turning on the Suze, connecting to her with iPhone, and installing the dew shield was the extent of my night under the stars. How do I feel about that? I’m not sure. There is certainly something to be said about a calm and peaceful night under the shimmering stars of spring. Instead, I spent the balance of the evening on the couch in the den with Tommy, Chaos Manor South’s resident black cat, watching the aforementioned Adrian’s Digital Basement to the accompaniment of cold 807s (me) and ‘nip (Tom). It was relaxing, yeah, but decidedly lacking that “romance of an evening under the stars.”

On the other hand…  An imaging run done the conventional way is usually spent staring at a laptop screen rather than the stars. What I shoulda done, I guess, was grab the Burgess 16x70 binoculars and do a little bino tour while Suzie did her thing. Next time, perhaps. And I will admit that even purely visual observing ain’t always a picnic. Heat. Bugs. More heat. Dew. Sweat. And, when I was a young’un, the sneaking suspicion THE VISITORS might pounce on me as I stared into my Ramsden. In other words, some, not all, but some, spring/summer visual observing runs are better to relive in fond memory than to experience.

Anyway, next up for this here blog will be some visual. FINALLY, and about time, I reckon. “Wait Unk, what about the pitchers?!” Not too much to say about them. As you can see, Suze did fine, hell, you can even pick out little and dim IC 4617. I’d say her results were better, at least somewhat, than those the ZWO planet-cam produced with an SCT. They are certainly preferable to the eensy-weensy M13s that came out of the 80mm/DSLR combo. So ended the evening of My Yearly M13. With more success, I think, than it has in quite a while.

Postscript:

This past week I got Suzie out for a longer go at the Bigun. 15 minutes does produce decent images with the SeeStar but doubling that to 30 minutes makes the shots look a little smoother and more finished. Half an hour is what I aim for when I am granted clear skies for that long. When M13 was done, I shot M92, too, which also looked right nice.

Before shutting down, I devoted a couple of minutes to The Turtle, NGC 6210. As I’d feared, it was pretty small in a 50mm f/5, so I cut things short and shut ‘er down. In retrospect, I should have given Suzie more time on the nebula. It’s possible that in a longer exposure, I could have picked up a trace of the two ansae, the nebulous extensions on either side of the disk. I didn’t, so all I got was a little green ball. Next time, maybe.

And that, muchachos, is one of the things that has kept me in this business nearly 60 years down the line. There is always that Next Night to look forward to...

 

 

 

 

Eclipse morning at Chaos Manor South.

The eclipse it came, and the eclipse it went, muchachos. This is your Old Uncle's short account of what Miss Dorothy and I saw eclipse Monday. This was, by the way, also published in The Mobile Amateur Radio Club Weekly Newsletter in slightly different form. Thus, the ham radio references...

Ah, yes, THE GREAT AMERICAN ECLIPSE How did it play out down here in the Swamp? The night before as I sat on the couch with the felines watching a rerun of a (Bob Heil) Ham Nation episode on the YouTube, I wasn’t feeling overly excited. The weather forecast for Possum Swamp did not look good. No, not good at all:  Clouds, unrelenting clouds. Maybe rain. 

In fact, eclipse day forecasts had sounded lousy for weeks. Not much hope for us—nor for more than a few points west into the path of totality. That was OK; I’d long ago decided to sit this one out. In these latter days, I’m just not up for long drives and trying to find a $250-a-night room at the freaking Motel 6. Anyhoo, I planned to go to bed when I got tired, wake up when I felt like it Monday morning, prepare to teach my afternoon and evening classes at the university, and not spend much time worrying about eclipses.  

Not that I wouldn’t try to see SOMETHING. I had a secret weapon. A special sort of telescope, a ZWO SeeStar S50 smart telescope. Despite the somewhat corny name, this little device is making waves amongst those interested in such things for its ability to take pictures of things in the sky—Sun, Moon, galaxies, nebulae, star clusters—with amazing clarity and to do that cheaply and easily. That, a couple pairs of eclipse glasses for me and Miss Dorothy, and that would be it for our eclipse expedition to the backyard. 

As 11 came and went Monday a.m., I set the SeeStar up out back on a camera tripod, went into the radio shack, and fired up the IC-7610 transceiver. Alas, the bands were lousy. I may have worked a POTA park or two, but that was it. By the time I gave up and hit the big switch, it was after 12pm (the eclipse would begin at 12:34) and time to think about Mr. Sun, finally. Maybe. A glance out the shack door revealed good and bad. Still overcast, yeah. But… for the moment, mostly thin clouds. Shadows were being cast, and the cats were enjoying a little Sun in the sunroom. Worth a shot, I figgered.

What’s involved in taking pictures of the Sun with the SeeStar S50? Not much. Level the camera tripod. Put the scope on it. Push the power button. When the scope says, “Power on! Ready to connect!” Open the SeeStar app on your smartphone, click “connect,” click “Solar,” and the scope will unfold itself and tell you to attach the (included) solar filter. It then finds, centers, and tracks the Sun on its own. 

You don’t have to stay outside with the SeeStar; once you turn on the scope, you can retire inside with your smartphone. In the SeeStar’s normal “station” mode, it communicates with your smartphone through your home network. It also has considerable built-in memory and is, yeah, a smart little telescope.

Inside, sitting on the couch with Miss D, the scope was delivering a live view of the Sun on my phone. You can just watch that. Or you can take still photos the scope will send to your phone. Or you can take videos and time-lapse sequences that are stored in the telescope’s onboard memory for later retrieval. I had intended to do a time-lapse of the whole eclipse, but it looked like the clouds would make that futile. 

Just before eclipse time, though, there was a little more clearing. Oh, it was obvious we were still looking through a layer of clouds, but the Sun was brighter and suddenly I could see a missing chunk that signaled the Great American Eclipse had begun.

I went outside occasionally and looked up at Sol with eclipse glasses but could definitely see more on the iPhone. Not that we were seeing much. A little here, a little there. Just enough to tempt and tantalize. I did take some stills and a short video (posted on the W4IAX Facebook page), but they were really not much. Better than nothing? Sure. More than I’d expected to get? Definitely.

The national eclipse QSO party? The local eclipse net conducted by WX4MOB?  Just never got around to either in the process of constantly staring at clouds on my phone and hoping for brief clearing so I could get an image at the maximum of this deep partial (for us) eclipse. Dorothy and I didn’t get to see that, though. 25 minutes before eclipse maximum, it wasn’t just cloudy, it was CLOUDY. I popped outside to see what I could see:  NUTTIN’ HONEY. Wait. Was that a drop of rain? Yes. I shut down the SeeStar, hauled her inside, and…  THE END. Time to get ready to go to work at the university. 

 

NGC 2903

“A whosit in a whatsit?! Unk, did you break out yet another bottle o’ the Rebel Yell?!”  Not at all, muchachos, not at all. Well, maybe I did, but that title up above is no whiskey-soaked mystery wrapped in an enigma. A “SeeStar” is ZWO’s little robotic “smartscope” that’s on everybody’s lips, mind, and Facebook feeds of late. “Lion’s Den” refers to a chapter in a book that’s near and dear to your Old Uncle’s withered little heart. Namely, The Urban Astronomer’s Guide. Of all the books I’ve written over the years, I reckon it is still the one I like best and am most proud of.

In particular, “Lion’s Den” is the chapter in the book (I often call it “the City Lights book” since its genesis was a series of articles by that name in my old SkyWatch newsletter) concerning Leo the lion and his innumerable galaxies. What I thought I’d do this time was turn the SeeStar loose on those Leo galaxies and see how the little telescope would fare under varying conditions from a typically light polluted suburban backyard.

And light polluted the backyard of Chaos Manor South is. Oh, nothing like the back forty of the original Chaos Manor South downtown. Here, we are on the edge of the suburban/country transition zone. It’s not that bad. On a really good night I suspect you can pick out 5^th magnitude stars at zenith. The trouble is getting a good night, especially in the spring when humidity in the air scatters light pollution, making it worse. I didn’t give a hoot ‘n holler. I’d take what I could get and find out what the ZWO could pull out of the hazy soup.

In particular, I wanted to see what the SeeStar can do more as an “EAA” (“Electronically Assisted Astronomy”) system than the more serious instrument some are using it for. Talented workers are doing flat-out amazing stuff with the little ZWO. You know, the people who append information to their images like, “Ten hours exposure with the SeeStar, processed in PixInsight.”

I ain’t got no PixInsight software. It costs danged near as much as the SeeStar itself. If I had it, I wouldn’t know how to use it, anyway. Hell, I barely know how to work “levels” in Photoshop. What I am interested in is what comes out of the scope and goes straight to my phone. I don’t want to stack, and I don’t want to process—well other than maybe adjust brightness and contrast and maybe do some cropping.

Leo Trio

What I want, really, is the same sort of thing I got out of my old Mallincam Xtreme. Images that deliver details in deep sky objects—including galaxies—in less than perfect skies. Easily. The Mallincam was amazing in even halfway decent conditions, but I found it somewhat challenged by the bright sky background of suburbia—if I wanted still images in addition to videos, anyhow. Still pictures taken from Mallincam video were difficult to make into much. They were analog NTSC frames converted to digital stills, and while they could look OK, they were almost always just slightly ugly and lacking in resolution.

Now, none of that is meant to talk down Rock Mallin’s wonderful cameras. They really are flat-out amazing. During the vaunted Herschel Project, they brought home bushel baskets of PGC galaxies and quasars in addition every one of Willie and Lina Herschel’s thousands of deep sky objects. But… "right tool for right job,” no?

My brief foray with the SeeStar had already shown me it was capable of better on the more prominent objects. And not by me downloading fits frames from the scope and stacking and processing them with fancy software, but just by letting the telescope do the work. And me at most doing some minor processing of the .jpgs the SeeStar sends to the phone. That is where I am at right now for many things, campers: “No fuss, no muss.”

It ain’t just the difficulty involved in making OK-looking still pictures from Mallincam videos, either. The other drawback to the Mallincam Xtreme, you see, is the setup it requires. In addition to telescope and mount, I need a computer to control the camera, a separate DVR to record the video, an analog display for the camera, power supplies, cables, video switcher, etc., etc. I just don’t have as much patience for that sort of thing in these latter days as I used to. Oh, I’ll still do it, or do similar for conventional DSLR astrophotography, but it’s obvious I won’t do it very often.

My routine with the SeeStar couldn’t be more different:  Plunk down my old Manfrotto tripod in the backyard. Eyeball level with a circular bubble level. Mount SeeStar on tripod. Turn on SeeStar. When the little gal says (she talks), “Power on! Ready to connect!” I can head back in the house, plunk myself down on the couch in front of the TV with the felines, tell the scope to go to the target of my choosing, open some cold 807s and some catnip, and let the SeeStar do the work.

Do I miss fiddling with a telescope and computer in the cold or skeeters to take pictures? Not one bit. Now, visual observing is still something I like. A lot. But that is a whole ‘nother kettle o’ fish. Here, we are talking getting nice pictures of the deep sky from suburban skies in a fashion that encourages me to do so more than once in a blue Moon.

NGC 3190 Group

So it was just a little while ago that Miss Suzie, the SeeStar (all my telescopes tell me their names), and I worked up our courage and tiptoed into the Lion’s Den. We began without much Moon in the sky, but realized we’d have to contend with Luna before we’d covered all the copious Leo galaxies we meant to essay. The weather? Not so bad. We’ve had some early spring storms already, but a decent number of clear and even cool evenings.

Let’s go. If you’ve a mind to glom onto a copy of The Urban Astronomer’s Guide and follow along, that won’t hurt my feelins none, but if not, if you rummage through those old issues of SkyWatch, you can find the Leo article “Lion’s Den” germinated from…

Having, as above, set Suzie up on her tripod and returned inside, I opened the SeeStar app, turned on the little scope’s dew heater (it was a rather humid evening just before the change to DST), and accessed the SeeStar app’s built-in star atlas. Oh, I probably could have found my quarry under “Tonight’s Best” on the main page, but I chose to use the nice atlas. I searched on “M65,” and when the app located the galaxy, I told it to center M65 on the star atlas screen.

M65 was up first since, just as in the Urban book, I thought I’d begin with Leo’s showpiece, the Leo Trio, M65, M66, and NGC 3628. The idea was to try to frame the shot so as to include all three in one image. I did that by moving the image format frame the atlas displays until all three galaxies were within its border. Possible, but just barely. I mashed “goto” on the iPhone’s screen and off Suzie went.

After Suze did some various calibration stuff in addition to gotoing, and finally stopped, I could see despite the short exposures of the preview mode that the little scope’s pointing (via platesolving) was right on. There were two obvious dim smudges on the right side of the frame, and maybe the barest hint of one on the left side. The stars in the field looked purty sharp to me, but I engaged autofocus anyhow. The scope took a minute or so to deal with that, and when done I had to admit them stars did look a mite smaller. OK. Off to the races. I touched the “go” button and Suzie began accumulating and stacking 10-second exposures.

While the telescope was doing her thing, I thought I’d refresh my memory as to what I’d thought of the Leo Trio on that long-ago evening when I did the observing for Urban Astronomer. As for M65 and M66:

These galaxies, and especially M66, are fairly impressive in the C11. No core noted for M65, it’s an oval smudge of light. M66 is brighter but looks much the same. The real attraction under these skies is that both can be seen in the same field of a 22mm Panoptic eyepiece at 127x.

The third member of the Trio, NGC 3628, which I cautioned my readers was best left for an especially dry and dark spring night, if possible, wasn’t much, even with a an 11-inch SCT:

The third member of the Leo Trio is substantially harder to see than either M65 or M66 in the C11. It’s a dim smudge that fades in and out as the seeing changes. Some hint of its strong elongation…

M105 and friends...

Doesn’t sound like much, does it? Keep in mind, though, these views (which would have been pretty much identical in my largest scope, a 12.5-inch Newtonian) were from a site only a few miles from the center of a city of a quarter of a million people. I could have seen more from farther out, in the suburbs, of course, but not that much more. By the time I’d finished reading up on the Trio, Suze had accumulated about half an hour’s combined exposure, and I had a look at the iPhone.

I’ll let you be the judge (picture above), but it’s clear we are in a whole other dimension here. M65 and M66 aren’t just elongated somethings-or-others without cores. They are detailed, both their outer regions and their centers. No, Unk don’t know pea-turkey about processing, and has overexposed the nuclei, but yeah, detail there. Otherwise? Damn…you don’t have to guess at spiral detail. It slaps you in the face. The “hard” member of the Trio, NGC 3628? It could have used a little more exposure but still looks purty awesome with that dark lane and the distinctive flaring ansae of its disk.

Yes, your Uncle is something of a Luddite, has a hard time wrapping his mind around technology—especially involving smartphones—and is easily impressed. But, yeah, just damn. It simply astounds me I was able to see the Leo Trio like that from my suburban yard. In a few minutes. With a 50mm f/5 telescope. Without me having to do much of anything.

After The Good Ones, the Leo Trio, I traveled the constellation stick figure, beginning with the Sickle, the Lion’s mane, and the galaxies I called <ahem> “Mane Lice” in the book. The first of which was with a sprite I didn’t find exactly overwhelming in the eyepiece, NGC 2903:

Visible but not starkly apparent in the C11. Its large disk tends to wink in and out of view as I switch between averted and direct vision. Averted vision seems to show a tiny nucleus at 127x, but I’m not sure on this.

After Suzie had devoted half an hour to this one, I picked up the phone and had a look. Again, the difference between what I could see in the simple picture and my visual description couldn’t have been starker. In fact, that difference was more apparent here than with the Leo Trio, since NGC 2903 was higher in altitude and well out of the light dome to the east (Greater Possum Swamp).

The bright, small nucleus I’d guessed at all those long years ago was there, but it was accompanied by a bar and by spiral arms that practically knocked my eyes out. Which is not to dismiss visual observing from city or suburbs or anywhere else. That is a special experience, but you can only expect to see so much visually in galaxies, even if your skies are perfect and your scope large.

Lest I make all this seem like magic, it was not at all immune from your silly Old Uncle’s fumbling and bumbling. Take the Leo Trio image. The one shown here is actually one I took a week or two later. The original? It looked good enough, but the bottom half was hurt by a strong light-pollution gradient. Why? “Oh, yeah… Shoulda turned the carport light off, I reckon.” My initial attempt on NGC 2903 failed completely. Why? Forgot to turn on the telescope’s dew heater. So, some things never do change in Uncle Rod Land.

Continuing on down the sickle, getting close to Algieba, we land on the NGC 3190 group of galaxies. There is a bit of confustication here. The brightest galaxy in the group is sometimes identified as NGC 3190, and sometimes as NGC 3189 with the whole group of galaxies being referred to as “the NGC 3190 Group.” Be that as it may be in the sometimes-baffling world of deep sky object nomenclature, I was quite taken by prominent little 3190 and its nearby neighbor, NGC 3193, in my old 12.5-inch Newtonian, “Old Betsy” from my downtown backyard:

This little pair is a real surprise. NGC 3190 is bright, definitely elongated, and shows a small, stellar core. It really “looks like a galaxy” and not just another smudge. NGC 3193 in the same field, is a typical round elliptical, a fuzzy ball… A third galaxy, NGC 3185, should also be present…but I’ve never seen it from light-polluted home.

Looking at the final pic Suzie Q kindly sent to my phone (if you like, you can watch each 10-second exposure come in and be added to the stack and see your subject getting better and better), my visual description with the C11 was pretty right-on. While bright 3190 does offer some detail, especially in its inner region, it’s basically that typical small galaxy with a bright elongated core. 3193? I pretty much nailed it:  bright core set in haze. What’s notable is what I couldn’t see but Miss S. could.

This group actually has a name, “The Leo Quartet.” Galaxy three, NGC 3185, is fairly prominent in my image, but isn’t that interesting. Elongated core, oval haze. The fourth member, which I didn’t mention at all—because I didn't see it in the C11—is NGC 3187.  It could have used more exposure, but when I really cranked up “levels” in Photoshop and made the picture look ugly, I could begin to see its weird bent ends. It’s one of those really barred spirals that look like a pair of connected hockey sticks.

Done with those Mane Lice, we move to the Tummy fleas and M105 and company. I’m not sure how many of you look at this little group of three galaxies regularly, but they deserve your time and are especially rewarding if your skies ain’t perfect:

This trio was quite a treat… M105 is bright and round with a stellar nucleus. NGC 3384 looks larger and dimmer than M105 and shows some elongation.  NGC 3385 is smaller and dimmer and a little difficult in the 12.5-inch scope—it was dim enough that I couldn’t be sure exactly what its shape was and whether or not it displayed a core.

NGC 3521

Not bad, no, not bad at all. This group was one of the first things I looked at with my 12-inch, Betsy, when she was new in the autumn of 1994, and I was thrilled she’d turn up all three fuzzies in my icky backyard sky.

How did 50mm Suzie stack up against 300mm Betsy? In a mere 15-minute exposure (the night was getting a little old and I was ‘bout ready to tell Suze to shut down)? M105 and NGC 3384 are just as I saw them in Bets, if, naturally, better defined. “Bright cores set in haze.” NGC 3385 is more interesting. It’s easy to see in the picture, and, YES, shows off one of its spiral arms. This nice galaxy needed more exposure, and twenty lashes with a wet noodle for Unk for not giving it more, but, yeah, looks way better than just another faint-fuzzie.

A mere degree and a quarter to the southwest is the somewhat far-flung (40’ apart) pair of bright galaxies, M95 and M96. “Bright,” of course, is a relative thing when talking galaxies, and both are fairly large and in the magnitude 9 neighborhood, making them a little dicey in the city at times. Anyhoo, my look at ‘em with my 8-inch f/5 Konus (Synta optics, natch) from the public schools’ suburban Environmental Studies Center where I often observed revealed…

Conditions are not good and getting worse as the night wears on… M96 is large and fairly prominent. It is obviously elongated and shows a stellar core. M95 is considerably harder and requires averted vision at times, but I can see it is elongated and also that it doesn’t possess an obvious nuclear region.

So, I really didn’t see much. In the final image that popped onto my iPhone screen “No nuclear region”?! Both show impressive details. M96's bar is prominent and lovely. M95? The SeeStar shows a lot going on there, including a bright nucleus, bars coming off that nucleus, a “ring of stars” feature, and tenuous spiral arms. In addition to the two nice galaxies, I noticed a roundish fuzzy in the frame and checked Stellarium. The little guy turned out to be PGC 32119, a 14th magnitude galaxy. Good show, Suze, my girl!

I ended my visit to the Lion’s Den with what I called “Hindquarter Ticks,” but that was really kind of a stretch, since the destination, NGC 3521, is considerably removed from the Lion’s triangular rear end, being located some 18 degrees southwest of Denebola. NGC 3521 is sometimes known as the “Bubble Galaxy,” but which I christened “Sunflower Junior” because of the clumpy appearance of its disk. It is a nice one to end on:

On this not-so-good night, I was surprised to find NGC 3521 without much of a struggle. At 220x in the C11, it is large, obviously elongated with a stellar core, and its disk seems to occasionally give up fleeting hints of detail, as if a multitude of spiral arms is just on the edge of detection.

In the Suzie Girl? As you can see…the patchy nature of the disk is on display. However, my experience is that in images as opposed to visual, the galaxy looks a little less like M63's twin and more like a normal intermediate inclination spiral. 

I didn’t end here, actually. One of the things I did in The Urban Astronomer’s Guide is end every chapter with a double or multiple star. I love double stars and am glad I did that. The choice for Lion’s Den was obviously Algieba, which I likened to yellow cat’s eyes winking in the darkness in a low power eyepiece as seeing changed.

Alas, I got distracted and let the sequence run on too long. 10 or 20 seconds would have been appropriate. Two minutes? The comes was buried in the glare of the primary star. Oh, well. I had a pretty portrait of golden Algieba, anyway.

Journey to the Seventh Planet

I still wasn’t quite done. Hanging in the west, about to get too low to fool with was one of my lifelong obsessions. Georgium Sidus, The Mysterious Seventh Planet, Uranus. On a whim, I told Suze to go there and let her accumulate 6-minutes of exposure. Imagine my surprise the next morning when a little zooming, sharpening, and comparing with the Stellarium software’s display showed I had imaged this far-away world’s two large moons, Titania and Oberon. That was something I’ve never done before or even tried to do before. And it just increased by appreciation of Suzie as that most elusive of things, the Good Little Telescope.

Algieba in the can. One for the Road imaged. And the night a big success—given my modest goals—it was time to close down. What that involve? Clicking on the picture of the SeeStar in the app and sliding the shutdown thingie to shut-her-down. By the time I got outside, Suze had folded herself up, turned off her dew heater, and killed main power. I grabbed her and her tripod in one go, took her inside, put her on charge, and settled back on the couch where I had spent the evening. Time for a mite more TV-watching with Thomas Aquinas, Chaos Manor South’s resident black cat.

That wasn’t all. I was pretty darned happy about what The Suze and I had accomplished (the above actually recounts three separate nights under the sky) in pretty short order. Suzie was enjoying a nice shot of 5-volt current, so I thought I’d allow myself a touch of the ‘Yell as my reward. Not that I’d felt like I’d done much. The scope did most of the work. And you know what? At this stage of the game I am just OK with that, muchachos.

Up Next:  The Big Eclipse. If it’s clear. Hope it is. Don’t want to jinx myself.