Telescope Reviews: Less is more, sometimes

As a suburban astronomer (my "dark sky" site is a mere 39 miles north of Times Square and at elevation 300 feet), I view DSOs in an 8" SCT and I'm limited to the brighter galaxies, clusters and planetaries, all at the margin of visibility. On a very good night the Milky Way is just barely visible, and light and particulate pollution and atmospheric extinction makes viewing near the horizon impossible. In the summer, humidity inhibits transparency and coats everything in dew. The Mallincam has become a routine viewing tool to make an evening enjoyable.

On kind of a lark, my wife and I arranged a quick trip to Vail, Colorado where we ski in the winter, and I brought my Stellarview Nighthawk 80 mm f/6 scope and an Astrotech Voyager mount. After dinner last night we drove out to Camp Hale on US 24 between Minturn and Leadville. This is a large valley where the 10th Mountain Division trained during WWII. Needless to say, no lights, no light domes from anywhere and at 9,200 feet, not much atmosphere. Minimal humidity and no dew, even with the temperature dropping into the high 40's by midnight.

There wasn't a single cloud in the sky. Once astronomical twilight came to an end, about 10 pm, the Milky Way blazed in all its glory from horizon to horizon. With binoculars it was easy to pick out many open and globular clusters. Finding DSO's was easy using a laser and the Pocket Sky Atlas. I used a 2" 30 mm 80-degree eyepiece (16x) as my "scouting" ocular. M13 was resolved to stars with a 9mm Nagler T6 (53x), looking much more impressive than at home in the 8" SCT. In Scorpius and Sagittarius, M4, M6, M7, M69, M70, M54 and M28 were easily seen. M8 was much better in the 3" than at home in th 8", with wisps of nebulosity clearly evident. Nebulosity surrounding M8 was also easy to see. M17 and M16 were both impressive and M11 was a gorgeous collection of pinpoint stars.

On the other side of the sky, M81 and M82 were easy, with some detail in M81. For the first time, I saw M101, a ghostly blob but clearly there. But the glory of glories was M51. Although the spiral arms weren't visible, the body of the galaxy had a bright core surrounded by a distinct patch of variable brightness, with the core and body of NGC5195 also visible and the lane between them quite evident. Averted vision helped a lot for M101 and M51, but remember, this was a 3" scope!

Of course M57 and M27 were viewed, and it was nice to see Albireo without all that shaking that comes from the heat plumes of civilization. We used 10x50 Nikons mounted on a monopod to meander around the Milky Way, picking out open and globular clusters and dust bands and even got a view of NGC7000. At about 11:15 pm, Jupiter popped over the distant mountains, with two sharply defined equatorial bands and the 4 Galilean moons looking like tiny pearls. At home, this low in the sky it usually looks like a fuzzy ping pong ball.

Now I've got to figure out a way to get a bigger scope onto the plane for the next trip!

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C5 Orange Tube SCT, CPC 800 XLT SCT
Orion 127 Mak, StellarVue Nighthawk
Coronado Maxscope 40, Lunt 60mm H-alpha double-stack
5 1/4" f/5.2 home-built Newtonian
Denk II Binos
Giro 2/Tech2000 Giro Driver/Tech2000 QuickDraw Pier
Mallincam Color Hyper Plus
A zillion eyepieces and some more mounts
Mason & Hamlin BB 2140 mm (grand piano)
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