Grabbed and went . . . three times ;-)

January 31- February 1 - Does that sound obscene to you? I hope not. What I grabbed was my telescope and eyepieces and where I went was to the observing deck to take advantage of some not really predicted clear skies. Essentially what I did was to assure myself that my recent infatuation with small, high quality refractors is based on real results.

I got out from 6:30 to 7:30 with at least half the sky clear at any given moment. I grabbed the Orion 80ED and plopped it on the pier on the deck using the Unistar manual mount. Quick, easy, and very flexible. Seeing, however, was average or below average. I couldn't split Rigel, for example, but Castor was beautiful, as was Gamma Aries. ( I can never remember its proper name.) Checked out Almach again - wanted to see how the 80ED did on all these stars compared to the AT66. Better, but not much to choose between. I figured it would certainly do better on M31, but before I could concentrate on the scene high clouds gave a yellow cast to the image.

I did put the 1.25-inch diagonal in, instead of the 2-inch Antares diagonal. Didn't see a performance difference and I can get by fine with the 40mm Plossl as a sort of "finder" (it gives about a 4-degree fov) and the 13mm and 5mm Hyperion's - the 3.5mm is really too much for this scope, except on exceptional nights. The 8mm Hyperion is "in the mail." Can't wait. Should get it by the middle of next week. Will have the Cube then as well. Anyway - smaller diagonal saves about a pound.

Went in and settled down to watch the much hyped debate between Hillary and Obama. They were both on good behavior - no fireworks. At least none before I noticed the skies had cleared again. So I went out about 8:45 on a slightly different mission. I was beginning to wonder if my visual memories of various short and cheap refractors were wrong, Maybe they did better than I recalled. So this time I put a 100mm F5 Celestron on the mount. Nope. My memory was correct. No pristine star images. Sirius was all fireworks. That's a tough test, I know, but while kids would get a kick out of all the dancing colors I wanted to see a steady disc, but didn't. So after fooling around with other targets a I put the 80ED back on the mount. Much more satisfying. Mind you, seeing was bad and Sirius still wouldn't behave well. But I did see a disc and diffraction rings and I saw only a little false color.

I spent another hour or so just touring and enjoying the crisp views. Pleiades were wonderful. M42 with the 5mm (120x) looked three-dimensional - really nice. Didn't try the 3.5.

I did take a look for Comet Holmes using the 40mm and found it - but it is just the faintest hazy patch. I casually searched for its core and couldn't find anything I could say was the nucleus. Came in about 10:30 as clouds once more seemed to be filling the sky.

Up at 4:30 am and damned if it isn't clear again. This was certainly not on the program. Well great. This time I didn't "grab and go" because I knew the 5-inch NexStar was in hibernate mode in the observatory. So all I grabbed was the eyepiece case and by 4:44 am I was off on the third part of my reality check. I wanted to see if the images I recalled from the SCT were as i recalled them - nice, but hardly what I was seeing in the refractors. And that was the case.

The 5-inch is well-collimated right now , but seeing conditions were at best average. My first thought was to give Alkaloups a go - the triple that I was confused by the other night, but with a second try could not split with the 66mm. Well, I couldn't split it with the 5-inch either - but that could be seeing conditions. I tried the 5mm - 250X - and just got sloppy images. That's not the fault of the scope - too much power for these seeing conditions.

I switched to M13. Here the view was certainly better than what I had seen the other morning in the 66mm. The 5mm was really too much again, but the 13mm was terrific and I suspect that the soon-to-come 8mm would be ideal. I also tried a 10mm Plossl. Terrible. And a 25mm Plossl with 2X Barlow wasn't much better. No - the Hyperions are worth the extra dollars. With the 13mm I just like the way it framed the cluster. But what also came through here was the trade-off between aperture and optical design. The 5-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain gatehred more light and had better resolution than the 66mm. It had roughly twice the resolution and nearly four times the light-gathering area. That's significant and it showed on M13.

I gave the Double-Double a shot. No luck. Again, I would attribute this to conditions. I decided to try M51, Ooops. No where in sight. I looked at the Little Dipper - all seven stars could be seen easily so no problem with twilight. The "go to" just missed, big. I tried M81 - same thing. I was no where's near the target. OK, what about Mizar. Aha! Now I know where they got the name "NexStar." The "go to" was putting me on the "next star" in the Dipper's handle, not Mizar ;-) Ouch. Sorry. So I scrolled over to Mizar, sipped my tea, and enjoyed the view. With the 13mm it was very nice. But again, the stars were not pristine little circles. So i just meditated a bit, enjoying those twin suns, and thinking about the Mizarians with their super telescope looking back at us and seeing Earth at just about the time that sliced bread was introduced. "Wonder Bread," they called it. Hey, it's still around. Everyone thought it would be a failure, of course, because everyone knew that if you sliced bread it went stale faster. Boy - those Mizarians would be puzzled by this, i bet.

Seriously. What I should have done is a side-by-side comparison, but I was too lazy and I didn't think the weather would hold. So while my tests this night weren't conclusive - at least as far as the 5-inch SCT is concerned - they did seem to indicate that my memories are correct and my infatuation with the pristine images from the little refractors is based in reality. I have, btw, seen very nice images in a SCT. I remember the night - well, the morning - clearly. I remember turning the 8-inch LX-90 on the double double and being able to pour on the power so I saw perfect Airy discs and diffractions rings around all four stars. It was beautiful. It was faqntastic. And it was rare. That was two years ago - almost three - and I haven't had another night quite that good since!

So that begs another question. To what degree are the images I'm enjoying in the refractors caused by the quality of the optics and the simpler optical design - and to what extent are they caused by the size of the objective lens. Bigger is better - but bigger is also more easily impacted adversely by poor seeing. So maybe you simply get more nights where the 66mm refractor can strut itself then you do where a 200mm SCT can perform at its best?