Telescope Reviews: Oops! A confession

Back in my college years, I worked summers as a surveyor for a crusty old civil engineer in rural northern Kentucky. That part of Kentucky had been settled for a very long time, and it had been parceled out and surveyed by metes and bounds long before anyone had conceived of or employed the township and range method used when the country west of the 100th meridian later opened to settlement. For many of our surveys, we used a fine old brass compass rather than a transit, because a transit would have been too accurate and our results never would have matched the original metes and bounds. Often, old survey boundaries were defined by quaint and not very precise wordings like "Beginning at a chestnut tree by a fence," or "...thence 250 feet along the south bank of Sloan Creek," or "finally North 25 degrees East for 43 rods to a corner marked by a large rock..." The old engineer loved those metes and bounds. When we'd express concerns about finding such an old corner, he'd just laugh and say, "Hell, you can always find a large rock in Kentucky."

So it was last night. I set up the Questar in the driveway (not where I customarliy observe) for a couple of hours to try out my new 16mm and 32mm Brandons. After polar aligning, I swung over to Sirius to calibrate my RA circle and then checked out Saturn and a few Messier objects. The problem was, my celestial coordinates were off a considerable bit. The scope kept drifting off target, and I had to make frequent corrections to keep objects centered in the field of view. I thought perhaps the RA circle had been nudged and slipped, so I sought Sirius again to recalibrate, but Sirius had already set behind my roofline. I re-calibrated on Betelgeuse instead and then went back to my list of Messiers. Still off. After a few minutes of that little back-and-forth dance, I decided to check my polar alignment and discovered that, in the pre-darkness, I had originally aligned on some nameless (to me) star about five degrees from Polaris. I recall that Ursa Major wasn't visible yet, and that I had sort-of guessed where true north and Polaris lay.

To paraphrase the old engineer, "Hell, you can always find a star in the heavens."

Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) once offered this description of a political appointee whom he held in low esteem: "Ordinarily he is insane, but he has lucid moments when he is only stupid." Last night, Heine could have been talking about me.

Anyway, both new eyepieces performed admirably and the view of the Beehive was particularly lovely viewed through the 32mm.

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Questar 3.5 standard - pyrex and BB coatings
Powerguide II
12mm, 16mm, 24mm and 32mm Brandons
modified Bogen 3030 w/ homebuilt wedge
other odds and ends...
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"Nothing exists but atoms and empty space. Everything else is opinion."
Titus Lucretius Carus 99-55 B.C.