AT66 takes on Izar, Saturn, a kissing double and the moon

I'm cold and happy - happy to have spent an hour and half, bathed in moonlight, and searching out double stars and stuff in the morning skies. And happy to be in, my frozen feet sitting on one of those bean bags you can heat in the microwave, checking my observations and making this report.

And I'm happy to say the little Astronomical Technologies 66mm "apochromatic" is doing a great job, as is the newly modified AZ-3 mount. In fact, a lot of the joy came this morning from my minimalist approach. I continue to be blown away by just how much you can see with a refractor this small. With the right eyepieces and mount it delivers 90% of the impact you usually get from viewing the Moon, Saturn, and select double stars with a much larger scope. And it's easy to leave standing, ready to go, and carry it in and out in one hand, mount and all. In fact, I made a single trip to the observing deck at 3:30 am, carrying the mount with scope on it, my eyepiece fanny pack, a cup of tea, two books, a notepad, flashlight, handwarmers . . . well, you get the idea.

But there's something very human about the scale of this little scope that appeals to me on another level beyond its performance. Don't get me wrong. We're talking small, but we're not talking cheap. When I add up everything I was using this morning, it comes to around $800 - maybe a bit more if I count the observing stool, and I consider that an absolutely critical piece of equipment. (It continues to amaze me how hard it is to get people to sit down at a telescope. They all seem to think they can see anything and everything with just a glance.) But $800 is what you pay for a premium refratcor of this size - a true "apochromatic." I still doubt this deserves that label, but it's a great scope for less than half the price of a tru "apo."

So what was I looking at - well, to begin with skies were clear, but the moon is just a couple days past full and was high in the western sky drowning out all but the brightest stars. I generally consider night vision not critical when the moon is this bright, but the initial stage sof dark adaption still pay huge dividends. When i first went out I couldn't even see Saturn, which was very close to the moon. Fifteen minutes later it was easy, as were the main stars of Corpna Borealis and Herculis. As I stepped onto the observing deck I had a beautiful view of Capella, anchoring the northwest horizon straight ahead me, while to my right, brilliant Vega was anchoring the northeast - yellow and blue on the corners!

It was also 18 degrees and surprisingly there was enough of a western wind to reach me despite the shelter of trees and fence that surround the observing deck. For some reason the cold got to me from the start - that is, I felt like I was barely able to keep it at bay for the entire observing session. Usually I feel this way only in the last 15 minutes before I go in.

But back to targets - I had made a modest list of "spring" doubles to pursue in Bootes and neighboring constellations, but the combination of moonlight, no adequate finder, and no table or easy light for charts, all truncated these ambitions. I went straight to Izar. It was high overhead and at magnitude 2.5 could easily be spotted despite the moonlight. I'm sure I've been here before, but I have no memory of it. Using the 8mm setting on the zoom I htought I could spot the companion among the diffraction rings. I went to the 3.5mm - more than double the power, and was able to cleanly split it, What I saw was an orange primary star with a blue companion. The seeing was poor and this was a reasonable challenge for the little scope under these conditions.

When I checked the comments in "Turn Left at Orion," however, I began to wonder if I was looking at the right star. The scope has no finder - I just point it and use a low power eyepiece with a 4-degree fov to get me in the right ballpark. But the authors described Izar this way:"Izar's reddish-orange fifth magnitude companion star lies 7 arc seconds due north of the second magnitude yellow primary star." OK - I won't quibble with "yellow" for the primary but the "7 arc seconds" is a mistake. On the next page they say 3 arc seconds and that's in line with the 2.9 arc second gap that Sissy Haas reports - and with what I saw. But the companion "reddish-orange?" Well, don't believe everything you read. I saw it as blue. Sissy Haas, in "Double Stars for Small Telescopes", describes Izar as "a brilliant amber-yellow star with a deep blue spur on its edge; both stars are vivid in glorious contrast." That report comes from using 120X on a 60mm refractor - a good match for my 114X on a 66mm, though I got a cleam split, not a "spur on its edge.". Smyth, a famous double star observer, described it as "Pale orange;sea green."

OK - observers disagree on color. That's normal. I only get nervous when I see a star as blue and someone else says it's "reddish-oraqnge." That's a big gap. I like "Turn Left at Orion," but I can't buy that description. And the orange and blue I saw, it turns out, are in line with the spectral types which are K and O.

Enough. My other doubles all looked too difficult to search out under these conditions. (OK, here's where a "go to" mount would come in handy if it's display wasn't killed by the cold. ) I could easily spot an old favorite, Cor Caroli, but it was directly overhead and while I took a stab at sighting it, lying down on a cold deck to do this sapped my enthusiasm for the project.

BTW - looking high up like I did for Izar and Cor Caroli used to create fatal problems with the AZ-3 mount. This is an inexpensive mount, good for small scopes, with slow motion controls that are very useful. But it's altitude bearing simply doesn't hold when you point it at anything much above 50 degrees. You can tighten a couple of nuts to make it hold, but you have to make these so tight that it's next to impossible to move the scope except with the slowmotion controls. That's unaccpetable. I saw online where others had added a counterweight to solve this problem. Great idea, however not wanting someone to machine such a system for me - and not at all handy with metal working - I solved the problem with off the shelf stuff from the local hardware store, plus a 2.5 pound weight from a sporting goods store. A simple strip of metal, a 5-inch bolt, a few washers and wing nuts, and I had an effective counterweight system for around $10. Now you can use fairly light tension on those nuts, even when the scope is pointed vertical, and all behaves as it should. Of course why the mount doesn't come with such a counterweight is beyond me.

Abandoning Cor Caroli, I went directly to Saturn, which was a bit less than 5 degrees from the moon's glare. My first impression was at 50X you get 80% of the "wow factor" of seeing Saturn. Yes, larger scopes are better, but Saturn and the Moon -I'll get there in a minute - are the objects that tend to blow the socks off beginners - and they still wow me. When I went to the 3.5 mm Hyperion and thus 114X it was even better - I would say 90% of the wow fatcor is there. This year the Cassini division is difficult to see in any scope, so I didn't see it. And I didn't pick up the shadow of the planet on the rings. But I did see two moons, Titan on one side and Rhea on the other. In my dreams I saw three other moons and jotted down the supposed positions in a quick, schematic sketch, Nope. When I came in and checked the positions on the computer I saw I was wrong. But Titan is obvious and Rhea wasn't real difficult and I did have them sketched correctly.

I spent longer than normal interludes sipping hit tea, and enjoyign the sight of the woods, river, and distance houses in moonlight. Occasionally the wood deck would crack in the cold, going off like a rifle shot - and my neighbor seems to have some loose stuff in his yard that bangs aorund inthe wind. But in general it was esxxtremly peaceful and the friendly stars - the bright ones like Arcturus, Spica, and Antares all reminded me of warmer nights and took the chill off the ambiance, if not my body ;-)

One of those familiar summer sights - the double double in Lyra - was rising in the east. It was only about 35-degrees above the horizon, but I found a clear gap in the trees and took a look. This is simple to find because the pair forms a triangle with Vega and another star and all fit comfortably within the 40mm eyepiece's 4-degree field. At first I couldn't split it at all, but I realized I was using the 8-mm setting on the zoom, not the 3.5mm I intended to use. Going to the more powerful eyepiece, I was able to get a split of sorts. That is, the southern most pair with the slightly larger gap were "kissing" as Sissy Haas puts it, and the other pair formed a figure 8 - on its side, from my perspective. Nice - but I bet when it gets higher and the air is steadier I can split it with this little scope. Keep in mind that MOST of the time I have looked at these stars with my 15-inch Obsession I can NOT split them. I did split them with the 80-mm a couple mornings ago, however, which says something about how much poor seeing impacts the larger scopes - and maybe they tend to gather too much light for this task and I probably don't have the collimation tweaked to perfection. . . living and learning, still!

Screwing a dark filter onto the 3.5mm, I repositioned the scope to view the moon. "Positioned" is the word. The easiest thing to do with this kind of scope is to leave it lined up roughly between two of the tripod legs so you have plenty of room for your stool - then you pick up the scope, tripod and all, and move it to a new position to view an object in another section of the sky.

As with Saturn, the Moon just blows me away, even in this small scope. No, it isn't quite up to what you see in the 15-inch with the binoviewers. That's like flying over the Moon in ahelicopter. But it's darned good. In this case I was looking at Mare Crissium, split down the middle by the terminator, and the Marsh of Sleep to its west, one of my favorite areas to explore. Thei string of large craters going north - Cleomedes, Geminus, and especially Messala, were really nice under this lighting. This sunset view of the moon is differnt than seeing the same area during sunrise, though that's the view depeicted in most pictures and books. It's amazing what changing the diretcion of the lighting does - makes for a whole new exsperience of the same territory.

But I can't say I did any serious lunar observing. I had no charts, I had no plan. I just had alittle fun touring about before the cold drove me back to the house at 5 am.

I don't expect miracles from a 66mm scope and neither should you. But the past month I have fallen into a pattern, driven at first by computer problems with larger scopes. I've been using a 5-inch in the observatory, then I got the 66mm and its initial performance made me want to give the Orion 80ED another try. The bottom line is you can have fun with all these scopes and the typical 8-inch and less typical 15-inch ones as well - and each has a niche where it really shines. For the 15-inch it hunting faint fuzzies. I'll give some of them a try tonight with the 80mm and 66mm - and while I don't expect much, i think even here theymight have an advanatge on selected objects that are large and have relatively low surface brightness, such as M33 - but we'll see.