Telescope Reviews: Woo-hooo!

We've had fairly hot weather in Central Texas recently. It's made for wonderfully clear skies just about every night, and I'd been looking forward to my usual Friday night observing session all week. Unfortunately, about two days ago patchwork thunderstorms began whipping across my area and, although the amount of rain to fall on any one spot has been modest at best, that guaranteed horizon-to-horizon vista has proven ephemeral.

You'd expect the rains to at least cool things down a bit in welcome recompense for blotting at the perfect skies, but since actual precipitation has been fleeting and the skies mostly-clear enough to let in a good bit of sunlight, it's had the opposite effect of holding in the heat: Thursday hit 106° with 99% humidity. That's hot, especially for someone miserly like myself who relies upon natural ventilation rather than air conditioning.

So in the evenings I've taken to sitting underneath my ceiling fan in a light T-shirt and boxer shorts. Around dusk I doublechecked the sky from my balcony's southeastern vista and, while there weren't any brooding stormclouds to be seen, an impenetrable haze was rolling in from that direction and had already eaten up a third of the sky, coupled with blotches of wispy cloud having their way with the clearer bits overhead. Ahh, maybe that's what I get for restricting my observing to the weekends.

Sitting in my living room, drinking in the evening's slow cooldown, I was checking out Cloudy Nights when I suddenly noticed that the sky behind my monitor looked - well, if not dark in the suburban skyglow, at least not-so-white as earlier. (I have no idea how Russell Croman managed from the neighborhood right behind my apartment...) I pounced from my keyboard mid-post and sprang to the balcony - sure enough, while the horizon was washed out up to about thirty degrees, overhead looked crystalline. I nearly truncated my post-in-progress with a got-to-run message, thought the better of it, finished the post up, and posted that Woo-hoooo! bit here instead.

I hastily made toward my car, already loaded up with gear for just this occasion, and was nearly jogging out the door when I realised that I'd, erm, forgotten my pants. Never accuse me of not being absent-minded. A quick dash-and-back later and I was enroute to my nearby dark-sky-site.

Of course, dark is a relative term, but after moving to this apartment last autumn - the furthest out-from-the-city rental housing I could find - I did a bit of exploration, mapped the area, and found a series of progressively darker observing spots ranging from five minutes to three hours' drive from my door. My nearby convenience spot is actual pretty decent for the suburbs: on a good night it can reach all the way to a naked-eye magnitude five. I swing around a farm-to-market road to a large park across from the outermost fringes of suburban development, winding along its roundabout drive to the furthest soccer field sheltered from visible lights within two concentric bands of wooded terrain.

So I made it there within five minutes door-to-door, parked my car, and proceeded to carry all my gear out to the center of the soccer field where I'd have good vistas down to within five degrees of the horizon. This has been a good spot - close, convenient, dark all the way around, only a single run-in with a security patrol - but every time I've trotted across that field the grass has been damp. I assumed that I've always arrived shortly after the fields were watered for the evening, and this night seemed no different in that regard... That's part of the reason why I'm reticent to buy my Dob before I have a decent waterproof blanket to lay across the grass underneath it: lawn chairs, an aluminium tripod, and a hard-cased borrowed 'scope do just fine, but I'm unsure about a wooden base. Maybe I should just find a better spot to set up - somewhere paved, perhaps? - where moisture isn't such an issue and I needn't worry about washing a mucky blanket nor my own clothes, should I decide to plop down on the ground.

I haven't unpacked my eyeglasses yet but I note that the sky's still glowing pretty brightly to the east as I'm setting up my binocular chair. So I face the chair west, plop my hastily-grabbed DeepMap 600, planisphere, and notebook on the borrowed 'scope's case, and begin to wonder why I didn't grab my eyepiece case in the second run from my car. I make my way back with growing trepidation and, after a quick search of the trunk, passenger seat, and back seat, I realise that I'd pulled the case from my car for quick reference to my Antares SWA on a Cloudy Nights eyepiece thread. I grit my teeth, accept that I can't do much with neither my eyeglasses, binoculars, eyepieces, nor red light, glance back across the dark field toward the invisible spot where my gear lay half-unpacked, weigh the odds of anyone finding it in such a remote location this time of night against the proximity of my apartment, and decide to leave it there for a short jaunt back to my apartment. Fifteen minutes later I'm back at the field, eyepiece case in hand, ready to drink in this sky!

Since I posted a here-I-go! message to Cloudy Nights, I've decided to experiment with recording my observations this time around. This'll be my first time to really log a session; I usually prefer to keep things very open-ended and freeform, taking pictures with my mind and losing myself in the moment. I'm borrowing, as usual, my girlfriend's ETX-60, which seems to spend as much time at my apartment as it does her house. It's actually a pretty good arrangement - she's never bought any accessories for it, but I have a whole closetful of equipment I've picked up over the past year in anticipation of buying my first 'scope with the 'third paycheck' I expected to cycle through this May - erm, back before I lost my job and decided to go into business for myself. Anyway, as ridiculous as Naglers may seem on a $100 toy, they make a nice working partnership and, alongside the various 'scope upgrades I've given her as holiday gifts over the past couple of years, it's a fairly enjoyable rig. So all my observations tonight will be done using a 5mm T6 Nagler on a Meade ETX-60; a 1.1° TFOV at 70x spread across a sumptuous 82° AFOV.

Slipping on my eyeglasses and reclining in the lawn chair, I scan the overall vista. Clear horizon-to-horizon and - Wow! Scorpius is a gorgeous bright spectacle stretched above the treeline to my left. Lots of shimmering stars - Antares sparkles - so the seeing's probably fairly abysmal tonight, but fortunately that really won't affect my instrument nor the types of observations I'll be doing. Meteor! And there's the Milky Way, fairly obvious if not surreal, arching up and overhead toward the brighter half of the sky. It's about as bright as the horizon's cityglow. Glancing over toward Polaris - oh, man, it's not just my dark adaptation, the skies are pretty washed out. I can only see three stars in Ursa Minor, so I estimate somewhere between magnitude three and magnitude four limiting naked-eye visibility. It's about one a.m. CDT at this point, so that'd be July ninth.

So, what to observe? Still reclining in my very comfortable chair, I drink in the spread of constellations. There's Arcturus in Boötes - it always looks like a fish to me - over the horizon nearly dead ahead, just north of my westerly view, mostly visible with the dimmer of the two middle 'body' stars barely at the limit of naked-eye direct visibility, although it pops right back with averted vision. I don't even know what this star is called - it's the one directly across from Epsilon Boötes - and it's not marked on any of my charts, which is a shame because that'd be a real easy way to pin down my limiting magnitude. Continiuing onward, there's Corona Borealis, and with my naked eyes I can directly pick out 5 stars and suspect a sixth with averted vision. Skipping past Hercules down to Serpens Caput, I can only see four stars in what I consider the 'head'. I've never been very clear on where Serpens Caput ends and Ophiucus begins, and all my charts are pretty vague on that matter, too. Oh well - leaning back, there's Vega in Lyra right up at zenith; the whole constellation's visible up there where there's a lot less skyglow with which to contend.

On to setting up the 'scope! I'm determined to go fully manual with my own Dob, and in fact that's almost exclusively how I've ever used this ETX-60, but the last time I borrowed it a couple of weeks ago I tried out the AutoStar for really the first time on my own and it was quite handy. For viewing lots of objects in short order, definitely, but the main draw for me was the ease of smoothly slewing the 'scope around - trying to use the ETX as a manual alt-azimuth rig can be an exercise in patience, sticktion-jumping back-and-forth trying to get an object centered in the FOV while not loosening the clutches so much that the scope drops under its own weight. Plus that tracking is really nice - I've already decided that an equatorial platform will be my first big post-scope purchase (and those Round Table Platforms are so affordable!). So - whip out the tripod, set the scope atop, thread in the bolts (a bit of braille hole-finding in the dark...), plug in the handset - level, north, power, here we go!

Part of the reason we've so seldom used the AutoStar - this can't be much more than about the fourth such instance since Kim bought the 'scope on closeout from Store of Knowledge - is that she considers it a big hassle to deal with. I'm not of like opinion after trying it out during last month's Venus/Mercury/Saturn show - once you learn the secret buttons to bypass all the rambling warning and instruction screens, it's pretty quick and easy. So, easy align, it's asking me to center Arcturus, and - umm, wait. Forgot to put in the eyepiece. Okay, zip-pop-pull-crack-plop-thunk-gently set the Nagler into place, there's Arcturus in the finder, there it is in the eyep - nope, wait, totally black. Aha! Lens cap! Dang, I wish I had somewhere besides the stool to set down my eyeglasses and this Autostar handse - oh yeah, the eyepiece tray! Set, zip, pull, pop - hope that clicking-on didn't jiggle the tripod leg too much for the in-progress alignment - move the glasses and handset, unscrew the lens cap, screw on the dew sheild, toss the cap into the case. Ah, here we go, Arcturus is in the field of view, slew - no, slower - slew to the center, check. Now it's looking for Antares. Wow, those are a lot closer than the two stars it usually chooses for easy align. It's taking me a really long time to find Antares in the eyepiece - I must've jiggled the scope a bit attaching the eyepiece tray and swapping on the dew shield. I briefly consider switching out the eyepiece for my 10mm Antares SWA, but - nope, wait, there's my bright orange star. Center, enter, here we go!

Yeah, like I said, I sometimes absent-mindedly get ahead of myself... Well, since I'm recording an observing report and since I have the AutoStar anyway, I may as well do like I said and see what this little inexpensive 60mm refractor can pull down, rapid-fire.

First stop: Scorpius. M80's a tight dim puffball; M4's more of a loose wispy cottonball. M19 looks almost like a pinkyprint smudge touched the FOV. M62 is a smaller wispy dot. M6 - beauty! Open clusters are this rig's forte. I can totally see the butterfly shape; it fills the central third-to-half of my field of view. My notes say like sparkling gems on a tacky sweatshirt, but I think a more apt description would be like a spilled loose handful of rhinestones. These are ideal targets for this instrument, so on to M7. WOW! I started off-target, then swung over it like a huge foreground object panning into visibility. It fills the entire field of view with stars...

Okay, next: Over to Boötes, quickly before it sets. M3's a smallish dim splotch about as bright as its adjacent star. I can't find NGC5466. Oh well, not much to see here...

Back to Serpens Caput - I'm moving away from Sagittarius because it's so dense with targets that I'd never sleep. M101 - zilch, nothing. If this keeps up I might regret my choice of direction. M5 - ah, here we go. It's kind of a modest-sized blurry spot but still a well-defined fading orb. Squinting my eyes, I rate its integrated brightness as maybe 2/3 that of its 'companion' star - taking in the whole apparent luminous region for each object, they're a good match for each other. Studying it closely, I can almost make out a hint granularity. It's a difficult call, though - I can't say whether direct or averted vision do a better job of picking out real or imagined texture.

Moving along to Corona Borealis. M13 appears similar to M5, but wider and looser. No noticeable granularity, but a similar impression. M92 is smaller, dimmer, tighter, with maybe a hint of asymmetry? That's odd.

Well, I see lightning along the horizon and things are getting wet. My body's growing fatigued, too, so maybe that's a sign to begin wrapping things up. But first, Lyra. Weird - I'm only seeing two stars in Epsilon Lyrae, but I could swear I remember splitting all four with this 'scope previously. Hrmm, maybe I was mistaken. M57. Oh. My. So cool! With direct vision the immediate impression is of a dim out-of-focus star. In fact, if I didn't know to look for it here, I imagine I might scan right past it without pause - the ring is only suspected with direct vision. But glancing away - wow! The ring's immediately obvious with averted vision. Like a tiny Cheerio in the sky...

I wonder if all this moisture's just a local dew-layer induced by the water already on the grass? My eyepiece isn't dewed up, and the dew shield's doing its job, but the scope itself, my eyeglasses (untouched since I started using the 'scope), the hard case, my chart, planisphere, field guide, and notebook - they're all damp. Time to start packing up before those storms assert their presence more directly.

Five minutes later, everything's packed and nothing's forgotten - I made certain of that. I've never forgotten anything before, but I think my haste, coupled with the distraction of trying to taking notes for a change, left me conspicuously more absentminded than usual. Overall - I don't think I enjoyed this observing session quite as much as I usually do. The notetaking - first off, the eastern skyglow behind me lit up my notebook's white pages well enough that I worked without a red light, although I still needed it to read my charts, and I could definitely sense the reflected brightness negatively impacting my dark adaptation every time I looked away. The notetaking gave my observations welcome scrutiny but it was a distraction, and as much as I enjoyed recording the details and following a sort of observing plan, I enjoy sitting at the eyepiece or gazing up at the heavens without interruption more. Conversely, today, writing this report, brought me considerably more pleasure than I usually carry over to the next day from the night before. It's a curious sort of tradeoff.

Maybe I can experiment a bit and find a happy medium. I think a slower-paced, less objective-intent observing style with just myself and an unguided Dob might go a long way towards that end. The Autostar's handy, but too short-attention-span for my tastes. Still, got to love that tracking!

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imber stellarum 10x50 binoculars

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friends of the austin planetarium