Flat tires, one star alignments, and daylight stars
February 2 -morning - First, here's how a flat-tire can enhance your observing experience . . .
When I got to a local restaurant yesterday at noon I noticed one rear tire was dangerously flat, the other quite soft. After lunch I drove about a quarter mile to a Goodyear tire repair place. An hour or so later I was $57 poorer, but the nail had been removed from one tire and the rim cleaned and smoothed of rust so the other now made a tight seal with it - and a significant part of that bill was the $15 I spent on a pair of gloves that actually work at the telescope. They are not real warm, but as I wandered around waiting for my tire to be fixed I spotted them on a display stand. See - no flat tire, n new gloves
These gloves are supposed to be real flexible so mechanics can wear them while making repairs. I tried them on. Seemed like a good idea. I could even write with them on. This morning I wore them for two hours at the telescope in 38-degree weather. My hands did not get cold, I never took them off, and I did everything from taking notes to punching in coordinates on the hand controller with the gloves on. Well, actually I took them off when I had to stretch a wayward rubber eye cup over one of the Hyperion eyepieces. Bottom line - they're the best glove solution I have found. I don't know what they're called, but you can find them at Goodyear and they come - unfortunately - in the Goodyear colors with the Goodyear name blazoned on them - guess auto-oriented folks like to show brand loyalty. ;-)
Anyway - I like a solution to cold hands that doesn't require $2 worth of handwarmers for each observing session. Might sound like silly penny-pinching given all the money I've invested in telescope gear, but for some reason it really bothers me. I'll still use the handwarmers - but I'll use them less often now that I have these gloves.
OK, back in the cosmos, I finally got around to trying a "one-star" alignment with the Celestron NexStar 5 mount. (I was using the At66 refractor on it.) To my surprise it is very simple and works nicely - with one big caveat: Keep your action centered in one general area of the sky. I choose to align on Vega, so Ipointed at it,c entered it, pressed the alignment button and was done. Then over the next two hours I went to M57, M13, M92, Albireo, the Double Double, Saturn, Vega, the Double Double again, Cor Caroli, Albireo, and back to Vega. In all instances - except two - the "go to" placed the target well inside the 52 minute field of the 5mm Hyperion. The two it missed on were Saturn and Cor Caroli. In both those cases the scope had to slew nearly 180 degrees. What was interesting, as you can see from the list, is that while these actions missed the target - and by a wide margin to the point of uselessness - the "go to" came back perfectly from these erroneous positions to find targets that were within about 30 degrees of my starting point.
I don't know how far afield I might have gone with success - this wasn't a planned test so much as I was content to look at targets in that one area of sky. I was as much interested in what the AT66 could do with some of these targets as I was in what the "go to" could accomplish with just a one-star alignment.
This isn't just a stunt. Behind it all is the KISS principle. A friend last night gave me the typical amateur lament - "I know we've had several clear nights, but I was too tired to go out." Understood. I've felt that way many times myself. But I think the real point is not about being too tired to observe - it's about being too tired to drag out and set up the telescope. And that's why the best answer to the question "what telescope should I buy" remains this: The one you will use the most. And that frequently is not the biggest - it's the simplest. (ie. KISS- Keep It Simple Stupid.)
Now simple these days also means "go to" - but doing a two or three-star alignment with a typical "go to" scope can take 10 minutes and seem tedious. Add to that making a couple trips from house to yard and setting stuff up in some order and you've spent 15-20 minutes and haven't seen anything yet, except your alignment stars. I think the thought of that is what keeps folks in the house at night.
With what I was using this morning I could walk out of the house with everything in one trip and do a one-star alignment and be observing in three-to five minutes, tops. I also have found that while I may be tired when i go out, once I'm out there in the night air and observing, I stay out much longer than I thought I might.
So how does the AT66 do on the objects I observed this morning? Just fine on most. The disappointment was the Ring Nebula, M57. This is small, faint, and wonderful object in a larger telescope. With the AT66 the most power I could use to advantage was 80 and ay that point I could detect a little central darkness, but mostly what I saw was what looked like a fairly large and blurry star. This certainly would not impress a beginner - and it didn't impress me.
But M13 and M92 were both wonderful. The Double Double struggled with poor seeing conditons. With Albireo I had great fun doing another small experiment. I wondered how long I could see it in the growing twilight. The answer was right up past sunrise - for the primary. I lost the secondary star about five minutes before sunrise. (Keep in mind at this time of year and day, Albireo was only 45 degrees up in the eastern sky, so it was getting quite a bit of competition from the Sun.
A few minutes after sunrise when I looked in the scope I did not see Albireo at first. But this is a lot like looking for Venus in daylight with your naked eye. You have to look and look and then "pop" it's there, so obvious you can't imagine why you had difficulty seeing it.
So - knowing it was fading quickly in the glare, I did a last "go to" - this time back to Vega. That was 90 minutes ago. I'm going to take a stroll down to the observatory now. Be interesting to see if in this light I can see Vega - and if, indeed, the tracking has been good enough to hold it in view. Nope - either I can't see it in this light, or the tracking wasn't good enough. Not sure. But no Vaga.
In total, though,t his was another good observing morning and I also have been corresponding with Gary Kopff at Argo-Navis and he helped me work through the problems with that computer. Turns out it will not work on its internal batteries now, but it does work on the external battery I usually use -so the 15-inch should be back in business. I've been using it manually, but the go to - and especially the tracking - are better, especially for visitors.