Just got in from another session of my Unitron 142 Herschel-400 survey.
Tonight was perhaps the spookiest observing run I have ever made: My observing site is 5400 up in a county park in the mountains between Los Angeles and California's Great Valley. I have never seen a light dome from a wildfire before, but this evening, on the drive up and back, the sky over the ten-thousand-acre Hughes fire was distinctly campfire-orange. The area where I observed is just as combustible, and so is several thousand square miles of nearby wilderness. Knock on wood, and hope the wood gets wet soon.
Air temperature at the site got down to freezing, and so did my fingers. When I tweaked the focuser or adjusted the slow motions, I sometimes had to use my red flashlight to be sure I was actually touching the controls -- I couldn't feel them. That was my cue to get in the car and warm up for a while. I have been using a rechargeable electric hand-warmer about the size of a coin purse for a quick finger-thaw. It gets quite toasty, and warms up fast, so I don't have to leave it on and run down the battery. I have an electric car -- a Chevrolet Bolt -- which is also nice for warmup, because when you turn on the heat it is there instantly, with no need shiver while the engine thaws out. I do have gloves and mittens, but it is difficult to push the buttons on my PiFinder while wearing them, and even in warm gloves, isolated individual fingers do get chilly.
I started the H-400 survey with Unitron's equatorial mounting but have switched to a more modern altazimuth, largely to get experience with the PiFinder, which only works with altazimuth mountings. It works very well indeed: Often the time from entering an NGC number at the keyboard to having the object centered in the field was less than thirty seconds. The display shows how far and in what direction one must slew to get to the target, and it updates fast enough that hand-slewing was usually enough to find the object, so slow motions were only necessary for centering and tracking. That didn't always happen, sometimes I had to scan a little bit, but the PiFinder's errors appeared to be systematic -- tonight, the object was often a bit left and a bit up from where the PiFinder claimed it ought to be. I shall have to investigate further to see if I can minimize these occasional errors.
I won't cite my entire observing list, but I logged twenty-one H-400 objects plus a quick glance at M41 in an hour and a half, and that includes warmup time and time to set up and take down the telescope. Highlight of the H-400 stuff was NGC 3115 in Sextans, which lived up to its name as the Spindle Galaxy -- in the Unitron at a magnification of 48 it showed elongated and pointy with a compact bright center -- a quite nice view for only 75 mm of aperture.
I have twenty-four objects left in my survey, and they are all far enough east and north that I can probably put off looking for them till warmer weather. In the meantime, I wish you all clear sky, warm hands, and a non-combustible environment.
-- Jay Freeman
