Telescope Reviews: From the Editors Desk: A tale of two astronomers

I really enjoyed this post, mostly because it didn't go the
way I expected it to, and because it got me thinking. What
makes a difference in finding objects in the sky? Even for
veterans, what is it that prompts that next big leap in
observing for some? Is there a level of equipment, or of
skill or of opportunity or in finding a mentor?

I've been observing on and off since my twenties, and I've
had many stagnant periods where I was observing alone,
looking for but not finding new objects, and regularly
cycling through the same sights in the sky. Each time,
something different provided the breakthrough that renewed
my interest and expanded my skills and the list of objects
I could find.

Without going back too far, in the early 90's I had an 8"
Newtonian with an average mirror and a dreadfully heavy pier
mount. Even with a lighter tripod made from PVC, it was a
pain to do more than set it up outside in my apartment's
parking lot. I had a huge star atlas to go with it, the
kind my university kept in their observatory, but it only
went down to 8th magnitude and try as I might, I couldn't
find half of the obvious Messiers using a Telerad and a
25mm eyepiece. Either objects were too dim to see in the
Telerad or I'd get lost in all the stars my 25mm would show,
unable to find patterns.

Opportunity stepped in. I moved to Vicksburg, MS and bought
a portable Coulter 8" Dob, that I could throw in the car
and cart to the supremely dark skies in rural Louisiana.
For several years, nebulas and clusters were easy to find -
the skies were so dark, I'd just point the scope at the
fuzzy spot in the sky and see what turned up. The mirror
quality was even worse than my first scope, but the skies
were giving me a free ride.

Then I moved to Atlanta and the scopes gradually went back
to the basement - finding things dimmer than the planets
became hard work. But a couple of years ago, I decided to
cash in an investment (and split it with my wife), and with
my share, bought a 127 Mak-Cass from Orion. This scope took
months of research online - a lot of it here, at CN, and
a lot with guides like the Backyard Astronomer's handbook.
I agonized over whether I would find the optics good enough
or the aperture disappointing compared to my 8"s, but the
actual equipment features that opened new doors for me were
the "add-ons":
- for the first time, I was using a rock-solid, yet portable
tripod. No more backlash, no more tweaking the scope ahead
so that it would fall back roughly where I wanted it. It
went where I pointed and stayed there. Steady magnification
made it easy to find dim objects.
- the tracking motors let me keep what I found and even
slew around in a repeatable way. No more zooming past some
faint fuzzy and being unable to find it again.
- a 9x50 finder gave me a whole new window on the sky. Now
I had a chance to find dim objects even under Atlanta skies.

In my first year, I found at least a dozen objects I'd
searched for fruitlessly with more objective and darker sky.
But the biggest benefit came with the vastly improved
optics of the Mak. Stars were now dots instead of sparkles.
Mars had detail. In that first year, I found Uranus and
Neptune in one night.

And that prompted me to take the next step: getting better
maps of what I was looking at. Each view held maybe dozens
of stars, only one or two of which were in my atlas. I found
a couple of great guides that went down below 13th mag.
(my limit), and started finding things like the Dumbbell,
the Eskimo, the Coathanger and more galaxies and cool
multiple stars than I knew were out there.

Finally, I took the step of making my Newtonian's optics
at least as good as the Mak's. I ordered a good quality
mirror set and began to modify my 20+ year old Newt into
a 21st century telescope, shortening it, replacing
components and building a Dob mount for it. That project
took over a year, and I read three books on telescope
making, Suiter's book on aligning optics, learned what
tradeoffs you make with secondary mirror size and why a
mirror fan matters. I invented ways to line up the physical
and optical axes of an uneven, out-of-round tube. It was
a long learning curve, but worth it.

Not only have I started seeing features in objects I've
looked at for 30 years that I've never seen that clearly
before, I now have a feel for what I'm seeing, in terms
of the combination of seeing conditions and the readiness
of my scope to observe. I've spent a whole evening looking
through the Seven Sisters, seeing patterns of faint stars
I'd never noticed. The Moon is again one of my favorite
targets, providing me with endless detail instead of just
a few easy to spot craters or rilles. I've started setting
myself projects, to find things I've always wanted to see,
or things that are astronomically interesting, and although
I'd like to take another step up to a 12" or 16" truss Dob,
I keep thinking about how portable my present scopes are,
and how much there still is to do with them.

I joined the Atlanta Astronomy Club this year, after leaving
a job that required regular night shifts. Now I'm out
observing with others, looking through other scopes, seeing
other people's favorite objects (I didn't know there was
another double-double in Lyra, with better color..).

Each change is different: equipment, opportunity, skill,
companions, but each opened up a new way to see the same
sky on different levels. I think that when I started as
an astronomer, my concepts of the sky and the universe
were like the atlases of the 60's and 70's, with maybe a
few thousand undistinguished stars to see and a few galaxies
of interest beyond. As the 90's passed and Hubble started
showing what was out beyond our amateur scopes, that picture
got a little more crowded, but it was still mostly pretty
pictures, not the stuff I was seeing each night.

But somewhere in the past five years or so, there's been a
change in my thinking. Maybe it's better equipment, letting
me look at patches of the sky with absolutely nothing
remarkable about them, and seeing doubles, or tiny star
patterns, or just looking at all the faint stars I can
see. Maybe it's better guides, so that I now know that there
are umpteen planetaries out there, and more clusters of
galaxies than I can find guides to. Now I go out, and I
know that whether I can see it or not, there's something
up there, in the space between the bright stars, and with
patience and a little work and luck I might be priviliged
to see it this night.

Tom