Ryszard - enthusiasm plus!

I'm still wrestling with the best way to go about this public education business. I think the year-round class is working. But then I run into people such as Ryszard who are eager to learn now and wondering when the next class starts and I'm not even sure I want todo anext class. I may suggest he just plunge right in,in independent study mode,

Last night was not highly structured. It as meant as an introductory session - get acquainted, with ine another and the universe. We had dark skies and reasonable temperatures and we observed for about two and a half hours. Two things stood out in my mind about Ryszard:

1. He has unbounded enthusiasm and a million questions - that's good.

2. He doesn't need to be taught to look. Too many people new to telescopes and the night sky take an approach that both seems timid and a reflection of our "been-there-done-that" mindset as a society. That is, they glance in the scope for 15-30 seconds and then are ready for something else. That's not observing. Ryszard sat down at the scope for 10- minutes or more, entranced witht he view and quickly learning how ot move it to keep pace with the spinning earth.

Ryszard seemed eager to learn more, so here's my follow-up email to him covering some of the basics and what we did last night. (WIll this interest someone else? Possibly. But I'm logging this mainly for my own reference.)

Good morning Ryszard:

Good to meet you! I enjoyed our session last night. It's fun to be with someone who is so enthusiastic to learn!

Before you buy a telescope, I suggest you get a couple of small things that will make your study with me - assuming you want to continue to do this - easier and more productive:

1. A 3-ring binder. I will send you stuff, either as attachments or email, that you should print out and keep. Most of this is my own original writing that I hope will eventually find its way into a book, so please treat it as confidential, copywritten material. Start with this email.

2. A red flashlight that gives an even light that is easy to read, write, and draw by. These are kind of hard to find and most flashlights give an uneven light. However, the local Walmart usually has one in their sporting goods section made by "Garrity."It's an LED aluminum flashlight with two lens covers, a blue lens and a red lens. That is the flashlight you were using last night - the small one I handed you to look for your glasses. That gives plenty of light for our purposes. We're not looking for the brightest. We're looking for something small, easy to use, that gives an even light.

3. When you come out, bring your flashlight and if you have some binoculars - I suspect you do - bring them as well. As you saw with the Pleiades, binoculars can show you a lot more stars - you saw six with your naked eye and about 50 with the binoculars in that light cluster. You were using 8X423 binoculars last night - nothing special. The key is in the "42" - it means the objective lens is 42mm in diameter and that gathers a lot more light than your eye alone. You want something for astronomy between 35 and 50 and between 7X and 10X - now more powerful. You want them easy to be able to handhold steadily. The second number is the diameter of the lens in millimeters- and larger is better, but ignore the real big ones. As I say, you want to be bale to hold them steady and no one can hold the large ones steady - they have to be put on special mounts .

4. Bring a notepad with you so you can make notes of what you see and draw sketches - even if you;re no good at drawing, what we draw in astronomy most of the time is real simple.

OK - enough of that for now - here are somethings I hope you remember from last night:

1. You can see a lot with a small telescope. Bigger is better, but not always necessary. You got a good look at a distant galaxy and at Saturn with the tiny, 66mm telescope. The size you buy for yourself should depend on how you plan to store and use it.

2. The right telescope for you - for anyone - is the one you use the most. Too often people get large, expensive telescopes that after there first couple of times of using them they gather dust in a closet. Make it s on yourself. You wnat something that is light enough for you to carry around the yard and that sets up quickly so you spend your time observing. It needs to be steady. POWER doe snot matter. Any telescope can deliver any power, BUT MOST OF THE TIME WE USE 200X or less - on all the telescopes. The reason is the atmosphere is seldom steady enough to take more. When you see an ad for a telescope that stresses how powerful it is, ignore it. Those scopes are sold to people who don;t know what they're buying by people who just want to make money.

3. If you want to enjoy the clear nights the most, learn about what you are observing before you go out and observe it carefully taking notes and making drawings - making notes and drawings help you to focus and see more details. YOU WILL NEVER SEE OBJECTS THAT LOOK LIKE THEIR PICTURES that you see in magazines and books and on the Web. Those pictures are made with time exposure, or space telescope. They gather a lot more light and see a lot more detail. But for me, no photograph can be as good as the actual experience of being there and seeing things for yourself. As you may have guessed, I'm a great believer in experience. You learn by doing. Yes, books are important. But too often astronomy is taught completely out of a book. People learn, then they forget. But when you have had the experience of actually seeing something for yourself, I think you learn things you will never forget.

Finally, let's review what you saw last night for your notebook.

1. We started with how to use the two pointer stars in the Big Dipper to find the North Star, Polaris. Knowing how to find this is a critical first step to making sense of the night sky. All other stars and planets seem to rotate around it as the Earth turns eastward.

2. We then went to the Pleiades, a small cluster of young, blue stars that is about 400 light years from us and has perhaps 400-500 members. You used binoculars and the 66mm telescope. (For the record, that telescope is small, but of high quality. It's brand name is Astro-tech, it's a refractor, and it's model is AT66. ) You were using an eyepiece that gave you a wide enough field of view to show the entire cluster. If we had looked at it in the big - 15-inch Obsession telescope - it would not have been as pretty because th e big telescope only would show you a small part of it at a time. The little telescope showed you the entire cluster and some surrounding sky. It also flipped the image horizontally, resulting in a mirror image of the object. The Pleiades is also known as "M45"

2. You looked at the Hyades, a cluster we can see with our naked eye because it is just 153 light years away. Like the Pleiades, it is known as an "open cluster." Open clusters are groups of "young" stars that are born together and are still hnging out together.

3. You used the same small telescope to look at M31, the Great Andromeda Galaxy. It is the nearest large galaxy to us and contains at least 300 billion stars. You looked at it with low and medium powers. again, if we had used the large telescope we would have only see part of it. To get the whole thing we need to use a smaller telescope that gives a wide field of view. We discussed the difference between a million and a billion - 11 days to count a million pennies, 32 years to count a billion pennies. Remember that - numbers are easy to say, but very hard to grasp. A billion is huge. M31 is 2.5 million light years away. A light year is the distance light travels in a year - light can go around the Earth 7 times in a second. It goes 5 trillion miles in a year.

4. We then used the 15-inch telescope to look at M42, the Orion Nebula. We were using low power still so that the whole nebula would fit in the field of view. In the center of the nebula we saw four stars, known as the ":Trapezium.: These four stars are very young. They were born from the cloud of gas and dust that is the Orion Nebula - the rest of what you were seeing. This is about 1400 light years from us. In the class we will be studying this nebula next month. I will send you that information when I prepare it for the class. You can see this nebula is Orion's sword is a small hazy patch. With binoculars it starts to look more like the real thing. The big telescope makes it look very interesting. You could see it in the small telescope, but it looks better in the large one. This is the type of object where the size of the telescope really counts because it is a relatives faint, extended object.

5. Finally, we looked at three double stars. One you discovered for yourself. Congratulations! IIt takes a careful observer to notice the companion of Polaris, even in the large telescope. (You can see this companion in the small telescope, but it is much harder to see. So this is another area where the big telescope has an advantage.) This is a true binary star. The class has been studying double stars this month and this and the other two I showed you are some of the ones we have been looking at.

The second double star we looked at is known by various names - but usually we call it Gamma Aries. Gamma is the third letter in the Greek alphabet and this star is called Gamma Aries because it is the third brightest star in the constellation of Aries. I showed you Alpha and Beta and Gamma Aries with the laser - three stars that were fairly close together. It also has an Arabic name, but I never remember all these names. This was the star that was made of two Suns, very close together and of almost equal brightness. it's also known as the "Ram's eyes."

The third double star we looked at was Almach, also known as Gamma Andromeda because it's the third brightest star in the constellation of Andromeda. This was the blue and gold one - or blue and yellow. Everyone sees star colors a little differently - but the color are real and have a scientific basis. Colors show us the temperature of stars, V Blue stars - like a blue flame - are hotter than yellow stars and frequently younger. You looked at Almach in the 15-inch and also in an 80 mm refractor, the other small telescope. (The 15-inch is a reflector and it uses two mirrors, so the image is flipped horizontally and vertically. That's why the two stars looked one way in the reflector and another way in the smaller refractor which was using just one mirror.

Finally you looked at Saturn, the most beautiful of the planets. We didn't see it well because it was so low in the sky, but as I recall, you found the view quite exciting even though we were using pretty low power and a very small telescope the 66mm. We can see it better on good nights when it is high in the sky and with a larger telescope - but not much better.

Look up all these objects in Google for more information about them - M45 Pleiades, M31 Andromeda, M42 Orion Nebula, Polaris, Almach, Gamma Aries.

You asked about books and telescopes. I will send you more information in another email.

Hope this helps. Look forward to observing with you again.