Beautiful morning for doubles

Very enjoyable couple of hours with the dawn stars and small scopes!

I started out with the Orion 80 ED which I took out to the observing deck which was pure ice. It had rained, then frozen. Walking gingerly, I slid the scope on its mount and scattered around some old pieces of carpet I keep handy for just this reason. I really wanted to give the 80 ED a good workout on the UniStar mount and both mount and scope did fine.

My first target was familiar Mizar. This is normally no challenge, but at 4:30 am it was close to directly overhead and that would be difficult for the mount - or I thought it would. Balance issues, knob tension - that sort of thing. It wasn't. I saw Mizar's companion as having quite an oprange tinge, btw, something I haven;t noticed before. I was using the Hyperion 8-24 zoom and it split easily at all settings - 25X-to-75X.

So I switched to Polaris. No problem. Seeing was good and Polaris split easily at 75X. Once I knew where the faint companion was, I found I could still see it all the way down to 25X, but I wouldn't expect someone to do that without knowing in advance exactly what to look for. It was a microdot at the 4 o'clock position at that power!

(Go out tonight, of course, and it won't be at 4 o'clock. You could make a watch out of these twi, telling time by their relationship - but, of course, that too would change, not only minute by minute, but day by day. Still, it's as good an illustration as any that Polaris is not at the pole - and even if it were, it would turn and so its companion would change its apparent position throughout the night as they both revolved arund the true pole. )

OK - time to see really what can be done. I switched to the double-double, now just climbing above my tree line to the east, Wow! Now that was a pleasure. I needed the 3.5mm Hyperion to do this. They didn't split for me at 75X - but at 171X they were charming with a nice slice of dark sky between each. The southern pair, running east/west, was easiest with the western-most star the brightest. The pair oriented roughly north/south was more difficult, with the southern-most star the brightest. (Starry Nights confirms this, listing them as 4.56, 5.34 and 4.65, 6.06 respectively.)

It's strange. I can't explain it, but I am only now coming to appreciate how clean the star images are with this little refractor. I hate to say it, but I think I have too often been sloppy with my focusing, perhaps because I assumed the star images would be pretty much like what I'm used to in a Newtonian or Schmidt-Cassegrain. Not so, of course, as every refractor owner knows.

Given that sucess with the double-double I went to Saturn, using the same eyepiece. Good steady image, but the Cassini division still escapes me. Some hint of it was all I could claim. Did see two moons - Titan and Rhea.

Oh - I also looked at Vega at extreme high power to challenege both eyepiece and scope. No probblem. No false color , except a little blue in the diffraction rings on one side when Vega drifted near the edge of the fov. Otherwise, a perfect Airy disc! I am getting attracted to these small refractors.

I then went and got the 66AT and walked down the strett a quarter mile in search of Venus and Jupiter. They were low in the southeast - by now it was 6:30 am - and were about 8 degrees apart by my esitmate. Jupiter, the lower of the two, was quickly getting gobbled up by the dawn. I used the zoom eyepice and could see two moons on one side, with possibly a third. Also thought I glimpsed the fourth on the other side. But the issue here was simply the dawn. (And the dawn won - there wer two moons to one side and two to the other, so I totally missed the two on the sunward side.) The scope performed fine, Venus - much brighter and higher, showed a nearly round disc.