Birds in flight - right through the Engagement Ring!

There was a full moon rising over my right shoulder, but I wanted to see if the 100ED could actually work on the parallelogram mount and in straight-through mode.

It can. I had put the 30mm ClearVue in, so I had just 30X and a field of view of about three degrees. With Polaris in the center of the field, it looked a bit like this chart from Starry Night. The "Engagement Ring" is that broken circlet of stars to the right - more stars would be visible normally, but remember, there's a full moon rising. But the "Engagement Ring" is one of those asterisms that us kinda a stretch. Still, it' sfun, especially when . . .

. . . a flock of birds - geese? ducks? cormorants? - flies right through your field of view! Now that's a shocker? I saw the head of a "V" and perhaps 4-6 birds. It all happened gast - about the same speed it take a distant jet to go through your field, which has also happened, before, but very rarely. Now it's a well-known fact that birds migrate at night. They pick them up on radar and many have reported seeing them against the full moon. If I wasn't half deaf I probablyw ould have heard these - assuming they were geese.

What was curious to me, however, was these were flying north-to-south which doesn't fit a migratory pattern at this time of year, so I assume this was the sort of local hope I see in daylight from time to time. I just never expected to see it in my telescope with it's tiny field of view - satellites, yes. They're common. Meteors -yep, seen them quite often as well. Airplanes - rarely. Birds - never until last night.

I suspect the key was the moon. Being out on a full moon is relatively rare for me, unless I have a planet I want to see, or some double stars. Last night it was very windy, so seeing was poor, so I wasn't unting double stars or planets. I was really just testing the scope on this mount. But that full rising over my shoulder is what provided the bright light that the birds reflected and my scope picked up.

It added a spark of fun to what is already a pretty heady experience - something I had been working on ages ago and have just rediscovered. How neat it is to sit back in the rotating beach chair, and look straight up the telescope tube - no diagonal! And how much neater it is to do this with BOTH eyes open. I'm becoming convinced that this beats observing with large binoculars. I know all the arguments for two eyes, but I have two problems with binoculars -

1. They tend to give sloppy views - not the pristine ones you get from a high quality refractor. Hey., they're cheap and very short focus instruments - with few exceptions. And besides, even if they are long focus, I worry about them getting out of optical alignment fairly easy, assuming they;r ein alignment when you get them.

2. You use both eyes.

Now, of course that second point is the whole point. It's perfectly natural to use both eyes, isn't it? But who says they both have to be looking THROUGH a telescope. What if you use both eyes and only one is looking through the telescope - and that, a very nice refractor like the ED 100? (I explored this in depth - with some picture simulations - almost exactly a year ago - in this post. )

Well, for me the results are fascinating. One eye sees the telescope tube, the finder, the mount, trees, fence - all my surroundings. Very natural - but very dark, of course. The other lays over that familiar scene the universe. I found this especially mind-catching when my subject was the Orion Nebula, or the Pleiades. Wow! It's a kind of a weird, 3D effect.

Sure you can get this looking down through a diagonal - but then you're looking down. You're not taking in the sky in these two dimensions. And when you look down you're not really getting the context of what you're looking at with the scope. But look up and you can see, for example, Sirius to the left as your right eye focuses on the clsoe-up view of M42.

Oh, I'll stop trying to explain it. The effect may where off - may just be a novelty. And sometimes, of course, you want to close that other eye so you can focus purely on what the scope is delivering. But I still see this as one side benefit to looking straight through. The other benefit - the real reasonf or doing it - is even harder to explain. I just like looking up. It seems like that's what you should be doing with a telescope - not looking down, as you do when using a diagonal, and not looking into the side of a tube as you do with a reflector. Both those views tend to isolate you from your context. Of course looking up is a pain-in-the-neck - literally - unless you do it the way I do it - sprawled in a supportive beach chair.

All ingredients here are key - a decent refractor, relatively low power (under 100) , a sturdy tripod or pier, a comfortable beach chair, a good parallelogram mount, and looking straight through. As i say - I wrote about this before. But I got sidetracked. I'm coming back to it. And I'm finding that the real key to enjoying it is to use the Hyperion 24-8mm zoom so you don't have to fumble with eyepieces which can be a pain when the scope is pointing up and critically balanced. (I explored using a zoom this way last year, as well - but that was with the Vixen zoom - I like the Hyperion a bit better. )I tried the zoom last night as well - but only the 80ED in this position. Got me thinking - boy, this could be pretty nice with an F5 scope. Only I can't afford an APO F5 - wonder how that Orion ST120 would be? Good reviews. And I don' really want this for the moon and planets . . . hmmm. . . . now if I sell . . .

Yes, it was at this time last year I was last exploring this. Maybe I just get these hare-brained ideas around Easter?

Addendum: I tried the business of using both eyes in daylight - again. The problem is, while the brain allows you to see both images at once, they are not both in focus at once - you have to choose one other. I think this more obvious in daylight because at night you are getting relatively weak visual signals - and the one from the telescope may be particularly sparse when it comes to its information content. So it's easier to see them both at once - or feel like you;re seeing the m both at once.