Uncle Rod's Astro Blog

I’ll fess up right from the get- go, muchachos... No, I didn’t get a telescope into the backyard this month. I am old and lazy and, frankly, there weren’t many even partially clear nights in June. This week? This week brings ARRL Field Day and y’all know Unk is gonna be up to ears in that. I have been ruminating about amateur astronomy, though. A day rarely goes by that I don’t. My ruminations at the moment? Which telescopes are best for boomers? What’s a practical scope as we watch our 60s recede in the rearview mirror?

If you’re a young sprout, you can punch out rat-cheer. But you might want to hang around. You’ll be faced with this question almost before you know it. And having a nice, portable scope is something not to be sneezed at at any age.

Before we get to useful telescopes for the over-the-hill gang, though, there’s a question you might have: “Should I get rid of the scope herd I have?” That mostly depends on the nature of the herd you have and your circumstances. A 30-inch Dobbie you haven’t used since the 2019 Almost Heaven Star Party? Let it go. I know you love it, and it holds some wonderful memories, but doesn’t it deserve to be used?

You might say, “But Unk I’ve got a nice observatory for the Dobbie (or the C14). It is no trouble for me to use it, and I still like to. Sometimes.” Maybe so, coach, maybe so. But can I clue you in to something on the not-so-pleasant side? You ain’t gonna be here forever and neither am I.  Final exam time isn’t quite here, but spring semester midterm has come and gone. You don’t want to leave a lot of STUFF for your spouse, or partner, or children, or relatives to deal with when you exit stage left. At the very least make firm arrangements as to what happens to your gear when you’re gone, and make sure your family knows what the arrangements are. 

Hokay, that outa the way, let’s talk telescopes…

Newtonians

Us kids' dream scope in 1966...

And by “Newtonians,” I’m talking about German equatorial (GEM) mounted reflectors, and particularly those of focal radios of at least f/6. Yeah, I know Dobs are Newts, but they deserve their own category here. Bottom line? Most of us who still own the 60s-style scopes of our youth haven’t used them in years and probably should get rid of them. Those of 8-inches and above aperture, certainly, and those of 6-inches and under, probably.

Moi? I was lucky enough to have one of the more legendary telescopes of that distant age, a Criterion RV-6 Dynascope 6-inch, fall into my hands some years ago. It was a very fine telescope. The DYN-O-MATIC drive still worked like a charm, and the optics were every bit as good as I remembered them being.

I used the RV-6 some. Hell, I even did a little public outreach with it. But, Jeez Louise! That pedestal! It was even worse than the one on my Palomar Junior when it came to getting it into the backyard. I mean clumsy and downright dangerous. In my salad days as a star-struck kid, I damaged myself (and Mama’s prized mahogany coffee table) more than once trying to get the Pal out of the house. Despite its damned pedestal, the RV-6 was a lovely telescope and worked oh-so-well—it was a downright marvel on the planets. How long had I drooled over the Criterion ads in Sky & Scope? Give that up now? No way!

One summer I was visiting my friend and former Editor, Kelly Beatty, and his wonderful wife in Boston when I spied a real monster in Kelly’s garage. An Edmund Scientific 8-inch GEM reflector. How I dreamed about owning one as a young teen. And Kelly scored one back in the day! Man on man! Just looking at that huge mount and OTA, though... I didn’t ask if he still used it; I hoped so, but it would be way beyond me now.

Which got me to thinking (always a dangerous thing)… I decided the RV-6 needed to go to a new home. I knew I wasn’t going to use her. Frequently—or maybe ever again. And a Good Telescope doesn’t deserve that fate. But just to make sure, I set her up in the back forty. Beyond the pain of moving that fricking-fracking pedestal outdoors (with the GEM head on it, since it’s not easy to detach), I soon recalled what a pain a GEM-Newt can be to use. The eyepiece always seems to wind up in a lousy position for viewing. Sure, if your scope, like the Criterion, has tube rings, you can rotate the OTA to put the eyepiece in a better position. But that invariably causes you to lose that hard-won faint fuzzy.

So, my RV-6 went to a younger person who used her, and, I hope, continues to use her. How about a more modern 6-inch or larger GEM Newt on a more modern mount, though? The same things apply: GEM Newts are large and not fun to move and not fun to use. Let them go… 

CATs

SCTs and Maks are supposedly the perfect compact telescopes. But are they really? For those of us who’ve crested the hill, if not yet gone over it? Maybe. If…you set 8-inches as the aperture limit and eschew fork mounts. Oh, a fork 8-inch isn’t terrible, but I find a GEM the size of a Celestron Advanced VX or maybe a Losmandy GM8 makes for a telescope I’ll use more often.  I loved and used forks for years, and an 8-inch fork-scope is still useable for me but, one that became less desirable years ago.

If you’ve got an C8 or Meade on a goto fork that can be used in alt-AZ mode, you may be good for a while. But putting even an 8-inch on a wedge? I can still do it but don’t want to. Why? Forks are OK, not great, for imaging—or visual use. Once you move to the northern (or southern) polar area or close to it, that old bugaboo of poor eyepiece placement rears its ugly head again.

Oh, Bertha, how I still miss you!

A larger SCT? Fuhgeddaboutit. I sure did love my NexStar 11 GPS, Big Bertha, but hefting that big gal onto a tripod? It was becoming difficult over a dozen years ago. Oh, I still hauled her down to Chiefland and occasionally into the backyard, but it was becoming a task I dreaded. One afternoon I nearly did serious damage to myself and the scope while trying to get her down the front steps of the old Chaos Manor South. As I recounted last month, I deforked the girl and put her on a Celestron CGEM in hopes of using her a while longer. It worked, but only for a short while. Bigger CATs like 14-16-20-inches? No way in the world. Those are for younguns with permanent observatories.

How about MCTs, Maks? Since most are in apertures of 7-inches or smaller, they are a definite possibility. The good ones can produce exquisite images of the deep sky as well as the Solar System. Do be aware, though, that one on a goto fork mount, even a 5-inch like my own Charity Hope Valentine, an ETX-125, is not much less of a hassle than a fork 8-inch SCT.

In my opinion (and you know what they say about opinions), a practical choice for a Boomer who wants a CAT they will use is a C5 or C6 if’n you want an SCT. A Mak? A Celestron C90, old or new, ain’t bad and neither are the 4 – 5-inch class MCTs from China.

How you gonna mount that CAT?  Maybe on an undriven alt-AZ mount like the SkyWatcher AZ-4, or a “custom” alt-AZ, or some kinda big video tripod? Not for me. The high magnification nature of CATs larger than the C90 makes them much better on a tracking mount. There are quite a few smaller goto alt-AZ mounts available from Celestron, SkyWatcher, Ioptron, and others. A C90 or C5 on a goto mount might be a sweet little setup and just the thing to get you into the backyard if you are one of us Reluctant Astronomers.  

Don’t like that consarned goto; you still want to STARPHOP? There are some smaller manual GEMs still around, and since you ain’t likely wanting to make 6-hour exposures with your C5, one could make for a nice, portable package. The Celestron Omni CG-4 is a good candidate. I would get the optional RA drive, though, since tracking with a manual slow-motion control is a recipe for THE SHAKES with lighter GEMs

Dobsonian Mounted Newtonians

Is a Dobsonian telescope the perfect Boomer rig? In some ways, yes—as long as you keep that gull-dern aperture down. If you’re content to stay at 8-inches or smaller and are in reasonable health and physical shape, a Dobsonian just might be IT. Even if you think you need to keep it down to 6-inches, 150mm will show you plenty of wonders. Remember, when we were kids, a 6-inch was a large and powerful telescope we dreamed about.

Which brand to get? I don’t know that it matters much. I haven’t heard of any real punk smaller Dobs in a long time. It is true one of their prime purveyors, Orion Telescope & Binocular Center is gone with the wind, and that is a shame, but remember, they didn’t make the scopes, they only sold them. SkyWatcher has plenty of models and plenty of dealers offer them. So does GSO (their scopes are sold by Apertura and several other concerns).

But you might say, “Unk, I gotta have more than 8-inches.” Be careful. While there are truss tube scopes available in less-than-monster sizes, in 10-12-15-inches, you may find having to disassemble/assemble the telescope for set up deters you from using it frequently. You might also discover the mirror box alone is a lot heavier than you thought it would be.

How about SkyWatcher’s FlexTube Dobs with collapsible OTAs? Being smaller helps some, but they ain’t much lighter than a solid tube scope. Yes, there are dodges like wheels and wheelbarrow handles that make getting larger Dobsonians, Flextube or truss tube, where you want ‘em easier… but… come on. You know if you can’t just plunk the scope down and be observing in five minutes , you ain’t gonna use it.

Stick with 8-inches. Hey, don’t look at me with those puppy dog “Why don’t you do as you say, Unk?” eyes. Yeah, I know I’ve still got my 10-inch GSO solid-tube Dobbie, Zelda.  But I probably shouldn’t. Last time I got her out, I nearly had a little accident with her. She’s not quite too much, yet, but she is becoming too much. I think I shall reserve her for use at the yearly Deep South Star Gaze (which I’m excited to relate, may be held at its former home, the Feliciana Retreat Center, again) in the future. 

Refractors

Unk's Pretty Little Patriot...

Yes, a Dobbie can be a good telescope for a Boomer. But not one without some problems. Chief among them being their need to acclimatize to outdoor temperatures before they deliver their best images. Which takes a half hour at least. You gotta ask yourself, pilgrim, “Does that really fit in with the way little old me observes now?” What if there were a telescope that didn’t require any cooldown, and didn’t require much of anything in the way of maintenance?

That’s, of course, a refractor, campers. But which refractor? How big? APO or achromat? Let us address size first. 6-inches? Probably not. The 6ers most of us will want to or be able to afford are import achromats, and while they may be well made, they will almost always be on the heavy side. How do I know? My own 6-inch achromat, Big Ethel, stymied me the last time I tried to get her on a mount. I just couldn’t get the telescope in the saddle and wound up cutting myself on the dovetail bracket before, yep, giving up. Now, I have some ideas as how to get the big girl onto her mount safely and hope to do so soon, but I counsel against a refractor of this size unless you are in much better shape than your broken down Uncle.

The next click down, a 5-inch, can be very manageable. Weight and bulk don’t scale linearly with aperture, and many 5-inch refractors are much easier to handle despite “only” being an inch smaller. My own 5-inch SkyWatcher f/7 APO is light and easy to set up and does well on an AVX mount. But what do you lose compared to, say, an 8-inch Dobbie by going 5-inch refractor? Not much. In fact, in side by side tests (at a dark site) my 5-inch compares very favorably to a C8. If you want to observe the deep sky from suburbia with a refractor, a 5-inch class telescope is my recommendation.

A 5-inch still seems too large and maybe too expensive? Can you go even smaller? Sure. A 4-inch can show tons of deep sky wonders from suburban skies. I did a large amount of the observing for The Urban Astronomer’s Guide with a 4-inch Palomar Junior Newtonian from the city. The 4-inch refractor doesn’t have to be an APO, either. I’ve seen a lot of cool stuff from the backyard with Miss Dorothy’s fast Explore Scientific 4-inch achromat.

Even smaller than that, say 80mm? A dedicated and practiced observer can see mucho cool stuff with a Short Tube 80. However, going smaller in aperture than 100mm is where outstanding optical quality becomes important. My 80mm William Optic fluorite APO can beat the Palomar Junior, being able, for example, to resolve, or at least begin to resolve, several Messier globular clusters my Pal has trouble with. There's no denying an APO can present a superior image in any aperture. However, you may find an achromat might suit you just fine. And on most objects, there isn't much difference. Many of the folks who looked through 6-inch Big Ethel at star parties commented on what a nice APO she was. Neither Ethel nor I corrected them. 

Smaller still? Well, I sure did like the 66mm SD scopes popular some years ago, but at less than 80mm, we begin to enter grab ‘n go territory. Telescopes where ease of use and setup are their most important characteristics.  The tradeoff? 60 or 70mm is small for the deep sky and small for the planets and even a little small for Luna. My own grab ‘n go of choice? An f/5 Celestron 4-inch Newt, Tanya. Yes, she takes a little while to acclimatize, but when I’m using her I’m not after high magnification or high resolution and can be observing with her in minutes.

The New Breed

Them dern smartscopes take better pictures than Unk can!

That new breed is, as you might have guessed, smartscopes. The little robotic telescopes that allow you to take amazingly good images of the deep sky while you watch TV in the den. I won’t belabor the subject, since I’ve certainly said a lot about it the past couple of annums. I’ll simply say smartscopes have become not just my primary, but my only astrophotography tools. I just don’t have the gumption to spend hours at a laptop in the bug-infested environs of a dark site.

Smartscope minuses? You just don’t lose the visual experience; you lose the joy of being out under a starry sky. Also, they are not well-suited for imaging the Moon and planets. That carping aside, smartscopes have allowed me to continue taking pictures of the night sky frequently, and not just shooting my yearly snapshots of M13. I am all for the little widgets and believe they are the biggest thing to hit our avocation since goto.

And I sure have gone on this morning, ain’t I? Before I say “vaya con dios” (the legend on the Prude Ranch sign you see as you are leaving), here’s my Boomer scope lineup:

Special occasions/events, Zelda, the 10-inch GSO Dob or Mrs. Peel, a Celestron Edge 800 SCT (often on the AVX mount, but sometimes on a Losmandy GM-811).

“Serious observing” (whatever that is), 5-inch SkyWatcher APO, usually on the AVX mount.

Grab ‘n go, 80mm Skywatcher f/11 achromat on an altazimuth AZ-4 mount. OR…maybe more frequently lately, Tanya, the 4-inch Newtonian on her little alt-AZ fork.

Even more informal grab ‘n go, the C90 on the AZ-4 or my well-loved and oft-used Burgess 15x70 binoculars.

Picture takin? Smartscopes, Smartscopes, Smartscopes. Game over. End of story. Zip up your fly. 

Up next? I haven’t forgotten my vow to set up the 6-inch refractor and the GM-811, but I ain’t gonna do it on one of these “partly cloudy, scattered thunderstorms, poor transparency” nights! I do hope to have a look at the Moon (at least) through Ethel before July is in the rearview mirror.