Hey, 80mm may be the Goldilocks scope!

Is an 80mm, richest field refractor really the Goldilocks scope?  Not too large, not too small – just right! If my four hours of observing last night is any indicator, the answer is “yes!”

I’ve owned two smaller scopes I thought were terrific – an Astro-tech 66 and a 60mm Televue. I really didn’t like parting with either, but priorities change and while I got some good milage out of them, I didn’t use them that often. Why? Certainly not for lack of portability because they are as portable as it gets. And the quality on both were stunning. And they always delivered more than I expected.  But, in the end for me using them was more a stunt – more an attempt to prove to myself how much I could do with how little. For someone else – especially someone who travels frequently – the portability may turn these two scopes into something much more practical than a stunt. But I rarely travel beyond my neighbor’s yard. My idea of portability is being able to move 10-feet to avoid a tree that’s blocking my view.   And I don’t really need  the quick-look capability of “grab and go” when the scope in my observatory can be operational in two minutes flat and the 15-inch in less than five minutes.

So when I say portable what I really mean is my aging muscles should be ab;e to easily pick up the scope and tripod and move them 30-feet without any heavy breathing. In fact, I should be able to carry the scope, tripod, eyepieces, and my folding observing seat all on one trip. With the 80mm on a Voyager mount that’s possible – though I admit, it was certainly easier with the 60mm sitting on its Bogen tripod. OK, maybe it would be more sensible to make two trips sometimes But what I’m buying on the used market may fill that bill – along with what I have on hand now and what I learned from using a similar-sized scope last night.

Let’s start with the new – to me -scope. It’s known as a SV80S Stellarvue. It’s apochromatic triplet object was made by Lomo, a Russian firm, and is legendary within the circle of small refractor fanatics. (I’m an apprentice member of that circle.)  Here are the highlights from Stellarvue’s Web site where they still offer a limited number of these for $1,795 new. (What I   ssume is the Chinese version – probably as good – sells for $600 less. I’m getting one that’s four years old and uses the Lomo objective and I’m paying $1,000 – far more than I ever thought I would dream of paying for an 80mm scope. Oh – those highlights are:

• 80mm f-6 480 mm apochromatic triplet
• Fully multicoated objective for both visual and ccd use
• Stellarvue’s exclusive easy one touch cnc clamshell mounting ring with Vixen rail
• Genuine Feather Touch 2″ dual speed focuser with compression ring 1.25″ adapter.
• Retracting dew shield
• Instrument White high temperature powder-coating
• C7 side reinforced airline carry on case included (shown with optional accessories)
• Each one is triple tested including a star test by Vic Maris

Oh – it’s about 16-inches long and 7-8 pounds with diagonal and finder – though I’m not at all sure I’ll use a finder on it. More on on that later.

Sounds great. And while mine will come with the original – smaller – case, I can purchase the cae pictured here for it and that is a key to portability because of the great selection of eyepieces and accessories you can include.  So I’ll invest another $70 and get this case just to nake  the whole observing set-up more portable.

But is it really necessary to go to this extreme quality? honestly, I have my doubts.   I mean I know color will not be an issue with this scope and the two-speed focuser is very helpful with any scope this fast where focus is more critical than with slow scopes.  But will this outperform a Short Tube 80, the uniquitous little Orion that can do wonders and can be bought used for one tenth the price? Yes – absolutely. But how about a higher grade scope like Celestron’s Onyx 80? I have one, was planning to sell it, and that’s what I was using last night. The Onyx is one slick little scope and its optical performance is very nice. I’m going to hold on to it long enough so I can do some side-by-side testing. I hope the Stellarvue will have the edge, but at more than three times the cost of the Onyx it should.  Yes, as you pay more the cost per unit of improvement goes up – I don’t expect to see anything but a slight improvement – but I hope I’ll see that. And there’s something more involved – the scope has a sprt of history/personality but around its Lomo lens. And there’s ac ertain satisfaction inknowing that you are using the best,therefore if you are failing to see something you expect to see, theproblem is either you or atmospheric conditions. You’ve pretty much eliminated your equipment as a potential source of problem.

I decided to use the Onyx last night because it was handy and because I wanted to see just how much I could expect from an 80mm scope, since I’ve been using either 60, 100, or 120mm lately. Here’s Celstron’s talking points on the slick little Onyx (no longer in production):

Onyx 80EDF – General Features

• Premium 80 mm refractor
• Celestron’s Starbright XLT high transmission coatings
• Celestron combines a Fluorite based, low dispersion glass with high density crown glass for virtually color-free images across the visible spectrum
• 2″ Crayford style focuser minimizes image shift
• Rotatable focuser for easy framing of objects for photography
• Extendable lens shade reduces glare and protects lens from moisture
• Built-in sighting scope to help accurately locate objects
• Integrated dovetail compatible with Celestron Computerized “GoTo”
• Aluminum case for convenient storage and protection

The one worth siglling out here is this one:

• Built-in sighting scope to help accurately locate objects

This is a big mistake. It;s not a “sighting scope” at all – just apeep hole and as far as I can tell it does no good at all.  However, it is removable (one screw) and I’ve put a Rigel finder on there in its place. I also mounted a laser there. But I didn’t have either of these on it last night. Instead I simply used a 24mm Panoptic. (A 24mm Hyperion or 32mm Plossl would give the same field.) The result is a true field of view of about 3.2 degrees which is typical of the field for large astronomy binoculars. In fact many give even smaller fields.  I found the combination of the large field, plus 80mm of light-gathering power in the objective , makes it very easy to find everything from planets and bright stars, to very faint, low-surface brightness deep sky objects like  M33. What’s more, once you find them it’s a simple matter to boost the power. (I had tried a bargain-priced, 30mm eyepiece with an 82 degree apparent field of view. Works fine and delivers almost  five degrees true field. But I find it a bother going from this eyepiece – which is a 2-inch- to higher-powered 1.25 inch eyepieces. Hmmm. . . if I were using all Hyperions that wouldn’t be an issue. Anyway – little stuff like that can put me off sometimes. I don’t like fumbling with small parts and set screws in the dark anymore than I have to. )

But this is “richest field” aspect is really one of the most impressive things about using an 80mm scope with a short focal ratio thus making the scope its own finder. I found deep sky objects in particular easier to track down with this scope than with  the typical finder, whether it be a Rigel, red dot,  or 8×50 optical finder. The key, of course, is the light grasp. Another key is being able to sit comfortably behind the scope, as opposed to using a Dob where you sit at the side. Sitting behind this scope I found I very quickly developed a pretty accurate sense of where it was pointing – a sort of shoot-from-the hip type of thing. I don’t know how to teach it or even explain it, but it just feels natural. Look at where your target is and while looking, point the scope. I think your eye-brain work to deliver a solution if you get out of the way!  If your off a little, start a systematic sweep and you should soon pick up your target – assuming, of course, you have some idea what your target should look like!

I reported on my eveniong targets earlier in this post. The most astonishing thing there for me was a very clean split of the triple, Iota Cassiopeia – not bad for an 80mm!  This morning my frist targets with the same set up included M42, M50, the Christmas Tree Cluster,  M1, plus M35.  With M35 I could also see NGC 2158, which looked a tad like M1, only smaller, though of course they are much different objects. NGC 2158 is really a star cluster much more distant than M35. Seen together the two open clusters provide a wonderful sense of depth of field.

Castor, an easy triple star, split at 72X and was much better at 100X. I also looked at Saturn, rising in the east below Leo, and was able to see Titan and one other moon.  The Leo Triplet of galaxies, M65, M66 and NGC3628, was so simple to sweep up! I just pointed the shope at Chertan, one of the stars in the triangle that marks Leo’s haunches, then slowly swept south and a tad east. Bingo – it took about 15 seconds I think. A more challenging pair were the galaxies M81 and M82. But I just remembered that, as I think Sue French once wrote, “the Great Bear has ear mites.” So I pointed the scope in the direction of his ears and prowled around. Took longer this time, but boy do these two pop in this little scope at that power. What’s more, crank up the pwoer a bit and you can easily see that M81 is a spiral and M82 is a “cigar” with dark diagonal cloud cutting through it.

So why am I seeing the short-focal length 80mm as the Godilocks of scopes? To summarize:

1. Portability.

2. At low power you don’t need a finder because the field is both wide and bright, a great combination.

3. While it should be obvious that larger scopes will reveal more, you can get the essential astronomy experience – the feel for a galaxy, nebula, or star cluster – with an 80mm – certainly exhaust the Messier catalog and much more, as well as split many of the best double stars and do casual viewing of planets and Moon.

And one last point on the portability front – it is short enough so that a reasonable size and weight tripod and mount, such as you have with the Astro Tech Voyager, will work.  Longer scopes on this mount can put you awfully close to the ground when you’re trying to look up. With the 80mm there are no acrobatics – and no acrobatics trying to orient your eye to a finder either, since you aren’t using one!

 

 

Establishing an 80mm baseline

I’m purchasing a legendary Stellarvue  80mm , f-6, 480 mm apochromatic triplet with Lomo objective – used, of course – and I took advantage of clear skies and no visitors tonight to establish a sort of baseline of what to expect from a good 80mm scope under good conditions, since I hope the Stellarvue will be a keeper. I plan to use it in my instruction as the primary refractor – a great starting point with its wide fields – and I plan to use it any time I want to observe any where other than the observatory.  Stellarvue makes a nice case for it that can hold all sorts of eyepieces and other goodies and combined with the Voyager, this should be real easy to transport. The question is, will it deliver enough to satisfy me.

Well, given that I can be quite happy using the 60mm televue APO – which has now been traded in partial payment for a Televue  Genesis – I think the answer is yes.  But I plan to be more dependendent upon this than I was on the TV60. I used it on a whim from time to time. The 80mm should get more use. So, I took the Celestron Onyx , which at 80mm and F6.25 is very close to the same thing, though there should be a significant gap in quality. (I’ll believe this last when I see it. ) The Onyx was really quite impressive. It’s biggest accomplishment came at the end of a two-and-a-half hour observing session when I checked out Iota Cassiopeia. Seeing two stars there is fairly easy, though the companion is quite close (7.2″) and about four magnitudes fainter than the primary. What really pleased me, though, was I could see the second companion – with dark skies between it and the primary – and it is just 2.3″ away and at magnitude 7 is better than two magnitudes fainter than the primary.

I used a 7mm Nagler and a Televue 2X barlow which gave me about 142X. I could have cranked the power up a bit more, but I was really captivated by what I could see with this combo.

I also tested the scope on M15 and M2 which were fairly low at about 45 degrees and 35 degrees. In any event, I could not resolve stars in either globular, even at 200X – though in both cases there was some hint at the clusters starting to resolve.

I looked at M110 and found it visible, but a challenge. However, M33 just popped. I simply used the 24mm Panoptic and swept down from M31 and there it was.  So that was very satisfying in terms of a low surface brightness object.

Bottom line – I think the new plan is going to work fine. I think I can have a lot of fun with this 80mm and while I can be happy with using nothing but it, I think it will make a great scout for the 10-inch Dob when I take them both on expeditions.

Now I wonder just how much better the Stellarvue is than the Onyx? Can’t wait to do a side-by-side.

Great meteors, great skies, and Big Dog clusters!

Well, seven of us are pretty tired, but quite happy with the Leonid show as viewed from the Allens Pond Wildlife Sanctuary parking lot  this morning (Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2009) .  The beauty of the Allens Pond site are the 360-degree unobstructed  horizons and wonderfully dark skies – especially at 3 am.

The weather cooperated with the wind and temperatures reasonably mild for this time of year.  At different times we had some clouds drift through,  but always had plenty of clear sky as well.  I would guess we had between five and ten meteors that rated an involuntary “wow!” All together, counting all observers, we saw between 25 and 50  meteors – but I wasn’t counting, so I can’t be sure – and I personally missed a lot that others saw.  You do have to be constantly looking up and it has to be in the right place – so there’s a lot of luck involved.  Paul seemed to corral the  most. Others present included Joe, Karen, Sybil,  two folks I don’t know, and myself.

And yes, we did get to see Saturn, Mars, some star clusters and galaxies – but most observing was with the naked eye, not the telescopes. One bonus was using binoculars to look at the trails left by some of the brighter meteors. These stay visible for many seconds and you can see the upper level winds twisting them like something live.

For me, however, the meteor shower was just part of the story. I got to Allens Pond shortly after 1 am. It was kind of shocking to see how much traffic there was in that location at that hour and at this time of year. Three cars were direclty behind me as I passed Horseneck Beach and they all turned off towards Gooseberry. There were another dozen at East Beach and it actually looked like some folks were out of their cars looking for meteors. I had a different agenda.  I wanted to find a handful of clusters I had never seen – or don’t remember seeing – that are all too far south to be easily viewed from my yard.  I think of them as the Dog Clusters because they are all – well, clustered  – around Canis Major.

Click image for larger version.

(Click this link to download a printable, black on white version of this chart -  dogclusters.)

I was using 12X36 Canon IS binoculars and my 60mm Televue scope.  I parked my little Fuma chair near the car ( it served as a nice wind break and gave me a false sense of security) and settled in. (Yes, as I get older I get somewhat concerned about being in isolated spots like this alone at 1 am.)  Absolutely beautiful night. Nearly completely clear at this point and great winter Milky Way with Big Dog in full glory over Buzzards Bay, yapping at the hare and  nipping mighty hunter’s heels.   (And yes, you Latin scholars may scold me for identifying  three stars near the bottom left as the “pups” because they are part of the constellation “Puppis” which really means the “poop” of a ship. Well, I like pups better than poop, and this way I remember them better

First on my list was M41,  the “Little Beehive,” which is pretty much naked eye and very easy in binoculars – just aim at Sirius, then drop down a tad so thi sbrilliant star is at the top of your field and the Little Beehive should start to come into view at the bottom of your field.   Very nice and apt name – especially since the real Beehive should be visible as well and you can check one against the other as I did. The big Beehive still wins, but  the Little Beehive was impressive and will always be on my list to chek whenever visible.

M41 also serves as a starting point for finding the next pair of clusters, a pair I really love.  They are on a line with it that roughly parallels a line fromthe Biog Dog’s eye (Sirius)  to his nose. Sweep eastward a couple of fields and there are a wonderful pair of clusters M47 and M46 – but only M47 is like to “pop” out at you. It’s much brighter. I really like this pair, though,  because M47 is at  about 1700 ly and M46 at 5,000 – and they look it. M46 is  much fainter – gives that “dust of snow” impression in good binoculars, or a small scope -  and  it conveys  a real sense of place – it’s like  taking a cluster like its companion M47 and moving it outward.

It’s easy enugh to find th egeneral region of M59, but a little hard to identify because it blend sin witht he Milky Way. To get in the right neighborhood just mentally draw aline connecting Sirius and Procyon.  (The chart indicates the general direction, but Procyon is out of the picture.)  To know how far to go use the length between the Big Dog’s  eye and nose  as a guide.This is around five degrees (roughly a binocular field) and M50 is almost 10 degrees from Sirius.

M93, the last of this small circle of clusters, is very  easy if you can find the three stars I call “the pups.” The middle of these stars – which in small scopes is a nice double, incidentally – is your guide. M93 just north of it and a tad to the west.

I find these very quickly and looked at them in the TV60, but I had meteors on my mind and didn’t really take the time to study them in depth. I’ll leave that for another night and larger telescope.

Ahhh sixty millimeters and solitude!

Sometimes it’s just feels betters than others – this morning was one of those times.

I’m talking about solitude. There’s a rough line between solitude and loneliness, a sort of no-man’s-land where it’s not good, but not bad. Loneliness is bad. But if you can make it across that line, you discover the wonder of solitude, and that’s where – through no particular effort of mine – I found myself this morning.

It was cool – 34 degrees – and it was clear, with a few high, thin clouds – and there was a pretty powerful Moon washing out large chunks of sky and making my backyard seem more like twilight than 4 am. I frequently retreat to the Observatory on such mornings – it has a feeling of security. but I’m discovering I feel just as  secure iu the open on the Observing Deck. So that’s where I went this morning, quickly attaching the Televue 60 mm scope to the large Universal Astronomics T-Mount.  This is much more mount than is needed for this scope, but it moves oh-so-smoothly and it means i can pull up a comfortable chair, sit in one place, and still reach about one third of the sky before I have to move the chair. And that’s what I did.

And almost immediately an incredibly deep serenity settled around me.  I had a few observing goals in mind – and as I was settling down I sought out Saturn, which is now chasing Leo up the eastern sky. But I didn’t linger. It was still low and the atmosphere was making it dance. Higher up, Mars was still flirting with the Beehive and was much steadier. It’s disc is still very small – it’s abut 100 million miles away right now – and I didn’t expect to see anything on it, but I was wrong. Using the 2.5 Nagler (144X) I actually could make out the features in the same gross way that you might look at a very blurry map of the Earth and be able to discern the continent of Africa. It looked like a faded red marble with some olive-green splotches and a hint of a polar cap on the north end. We never see Mars well – but right now it’s disc is only about 8.5 seconds of arc across. That’s roughly one third as large as it can get,  about one fifth of what Jupiter is right now, and about 1/200th the apparent diameter of the Moon. Mars will offer the best viewing this time around in February 2010 – but it still will be quite far awayand its disc will only get to be about 14-seconds in diamter.  On it’s closest approach, the Mars disc can be 24 seconds in diameter, but that happens rarely.

Right now the real fun of Mars is seeing it – 10 light minutes away – in the same field of view with the  Northern and Southern donkeys that bracket the Beehive cluster whose stars some 600 light years away.  I won’t belabor this. I was looking at it the other morning as well. But it’s one of those sites that illustrates so well how what we see tells us very little about what we are looking at.  That is, there are few or no clues here that Mars is 600 trillion times closer to us than the stars of the Beehive, but that’s  a valaid rough estimate.  Such thoughts meant more to me this morning because of the sense of solitude – they penetrated a little deeper because I was  not reaching hard for them. I was sitting, relaxed, sipping tea and letting them reach me.

After a while I turned to a new sector of the sky, the Northwest, and did a futile search for Kemble’s Cascade. Actually, I may have found it, but I’m not sure – the moonlight was really washing out this area of sky and I had no chart with me, so I let it drop in favor of marveling at the stars around Mirfak. Why don’t people rave about this “cluster?” I hardly ever see it mentioned. I thought of this a couple years ago when Comet Holmes was passing through it. What a wonderfully star-rich region. I put Mirfak to one edge of the field and with the 24mm Panoptic (15X, 4.5° fov) quickly counted more than 60 stars – and this with  the moon not that far away! If nothing else, this makes a great binocular field, but in the 60mm it was perfect.

Here’s how it shows up in  Starry Nights Pro with the field flipped the way my 60mm refractor flips it, horizontally.

Click for larger image - Starry Nights Pro screen shot.

(Hmmm . . . Burnham’s Celestial handbook does mention it and says about 120 stars here have been identified as all moving in the sam egeneral direction and presumed to be part of a cluster – but it still has no name.)

Also perfect was nearby M34. This is a long-time favorite because the brighter stars are in a pattern that always reminds me of a Klingon battle cruiser.  Really.  And again, even with the Moon, they looked great, especially with the 5mm at 72X. This is another object  I need to return to when there’s no interference from the Moon.

By this time I had been observing for more than an hour and my tea was getting cold, but I had a few more things in mind. I checked out Rigel very carefully, looking for its companion. I could not see it, though I did a few night ago, It was getting pretty low – about 22 degrees – so I was looking through alot of atmosphere. However, I did find W Orionis, the carbon star, very quickly – in less than 30 seconds, really, using the new technique of searching from the shield rather than the belt. Jumped rioght out at me – and looked redder than I remember. Maybe because I was less frustrated from searching too long

I also just sat back and marvelled at the impresison made by Rogel 800 light years away, and Sirius, just at eight light years away and much brighter.  What I saw was two bookends of modern American political history. Thel ight from Sirius started its journey about the time of the 2001 terrorists attack on America – an event that I’m sure will shape us for years.  Rigel, on the other hand, brought to mind the roots of our democracy – the signing of the Magna Carta.  All of what we might think of as modern history takes place in the span of time it took the light to travel from Rogel to me.

‘W’ tracked down and Algieba was simply beautiful!

Boy, the carbon star W Orionis gave me more trouble finding it – and this isn’t the first time – than anything in recent memory. I’m not sure why, but I was trying to get there by starting with the belt stars in Orion and it should have been easy. It wasn’t. I finally gave up and started instead with the shield stars and found it immediately. Lesson learned – I hope.

Was it worth it? No – not with a nearly full moon a short distance away – this was about 4:50 am. It certainly is red, but not as dramatic in the TV 60mm scope as the carbon star in Draco is in the 15-inch. Now, that could be a difference in the stars, a difference in sky conditions, or most likely the simple fact that the 15-inch gathers a lot more light and so does a better job of revealing color.  In any event, I’ll have to check it again when there’s no moon nearby. (Hmmm… I guess why I didn’t start with the shield stars were they were nearly impossible to see with the naked eye in the moonlight, but the belt stars, of course, were easy to see.)

That said, the color in Algieba (Gamma Leonis)  was wonderful – gold and green and superb at 144X in the 2.5mm Nagler. It was OK at 72X. At 40X it was a figure 8 – no clear break. Both of these stars are giants, one a Class K, the other a Class G. They appear spearated by  about 4 seconds of arc.

I checked out my old favorite, Mizar, as well. It was very nice at 40X, fine at 28X, and I could not split it at 15X. If i were showing it to someone, I’d choose 40X.

Also looked at Mars and the Beehive again, this time making sure to note the “asses.” Fun. The Beehive is actually surrounded – caught in a triangle  – of three fairly bright stars, two of which are the asses. What do donkeys have to do with Beehives? Nothing. But one traditional name for this cluster is “Praesepe” which means “The Manger.” Now the asses makes sense! Actually, the Latin names for these stars are Asellus Australis and Asellus Borealis which translates into “southern donkey colt” amd “northern donkey colt.”

More important, however, my vision of Mars near the Beehive played right into an essay on the “timescape” I was preparing for my class tomorrow. Now that it’s done, I need to figure out how it fits into the Prime Time mix.

 

The 60mm Universe – scope gets smaller, awe gets larger!

Well, you could never have convinced me, even just a few years ago, that I could have a very satisfying observing experience with nothing but a 60mm telescope  – especially when there’s  a full moon with perhaps 70 % cover of drifting cirrus/stratus clouds! But I just observed for over an hour last night. And I followed up with two hours this morning – moon still full, but no obvious clouds, just some high haze. It was wonder full.

Major thing learned? In a word – context!

I’ve frequently pushed context as important, which is why I want folks to look through binoculars or a smaller telescope at low power before stepping up to the 15-inch. But what I have never encountered before is the context that can be provided by moonlight. This first hit me last night when I turned the little scope on Jupiter and at 40X found I had a nice view of the planet, it’s four bright moons, and the leaves of a foreground tree! It was the tree, of course, that provided a unique context. Sure, we’ve all seen Jupiter with our naked eye near some foreground object -  a building, or mountain, or whatever.  It was the impact of seeing it magnified with the foreground object clearly lit by the moonlight that gave me the unique experience. And yes, the fact that I was using a small scope at low power with a correspondingly wide field of view certainly helped.

That experience was repeated this morning when I looked at  the Pleiades at 15X as the branches of a nearby cedar reached up to enwrap them.  Tennyson’s fireflies became tiny Christmas tree lights, tangled in the branches. Context?  Yes – the branches were about 40 feet away, the Pleiades about 400 light years! Nice thought to tickle your mind.

This is a simulation from Starry Nights Pro planetarium software - not a photo or drawing - but represents wel what I saw.

And  I had entirely forgotten about Mars and the Beehive. But near the end of the morning I turned the little scope towards Mars and here was a different sort of context, not aided by the moonlight, but not diminished by it either.  At 40X the planet revealed a small disc as it nibbled at the edges of the star cluster in which I quickly counted 60 stars visible under these conditions in this small scope. So now I had Mars, perhaps 10 light minutes away at that moment, playing dodge ball in a star cluster roughly 600 light years away. Nice!

All of which I think makes the point that you can not only have an essential astronomy experience with a small scope, but you can actually expand your experiences breaking new ground. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not recommending everyone switch to small scopes. And I’m not at all certain they’re a good idea for beginners. All I’m saying is that for me using a small scope offers some special advantages that move me closer to  my essential goal of experiencing the universe. Perhaps the key is it’s a machine that is of a size I can easily accept and incorporate as an extension of my eye. In any event, three hours of use were filled with several highlights, including, in chronological order:

• Splitting the Double Double in Lyra at 144X using a 2.5mm Nagler eyepiece. The split was clean and steady, which also says something about the seeing last night and got me off to a great start.
• Picking out the Ring Nebula – M57 – at 40X. Hard to believe this is larger than Jupiter in angular size, but I’ll leave careful examination for a darker night.
• Splitting Albireo – easy, of course, even at 15X, but real nice at 40X.
• Capturing the Coathanger cluster with plenty of room to spare using the 24mm Panoptic.
• Splitting Almach – Gamma Andromeda – at 40X. The gold of th =e brighter star has more orange in it than the gold of Albireo’s primary.
• Examining the full moon with plenty of space around it – again, the 9mm Nagler at 40X gave a real nice perspective,

And in the morning:

• Splitting Castor, high overhead, with a 5mm Nagler delivering 72X. The fainter of the two companions was, well, quite faint.
• Splitting Rigel about as well as I have ever seen it split in any scope – no kidding. This is a challenge star. Again, 5mm was used, as well as 2.5mm.
• Context came into play again, this time all in the sky, as I took a wide field view of the Great Orion Nebula. The 13mm (28X) gave such a view, yet enough power to split the Trapezium – charming!
• Mintaka split in the 24mm at 15X which gave a wonderful view of Orion’s Belt with plenty of breathing room around it.
• Fainter star clusters like M35 did not fare as well, diminished by both the small objective and the moonlight. I look forward to seeing them under dark skies, though.
• Only real frustration came in trying to track down W Orionis, a carbon star. I think I eventually did, but I need to go back and make my own charts so it isn’t such a challenge in the future.

Bottom line – wow! This was fun. Of course, being seated in a rolling office chair in the observatory while using the little scope on the massive (for it) Universal Astronomic T-Mount certainly helped!

The beauty of carbon stars

Bren and I were out a few nights ago and I pointed the 15-inch towards the carbon star, UX Draconis, to show her. There was a gasp as she looked in the eyepiece, a rare  reaction for Bren.  But then, carbon stars are rare and the 15-inch gathers enough light to really make these red gems stand out.

Given that reaction I decided a carbon star really has to be a must for public sessions, for nothing illustrates star color so well. Sadly, there are only a few of these and the brightest are barely in reach of the naked eye and show no color that way. They do show nice color with a small scope, but the bigger the scope, the more obvious the color.

I posted here about UX when I first saw it a year or so ago. Since then, I’ve found a better way to track it down – and learned of a neat little telescopic asterism, “The Little Queen,” that’s on the path I use to find UX.

My first step in fining this beautiful star is to simply draw a line through the “Guardians of the Pole” much as you do the “Pointers” in the Big Dipper.  The Guardians are the two easily visible stars inthe cup of the Little Dipper.  In any event,t his arrow points to Aldhibain, and I use that to then move along to Nodus 1 and finally to Chi Draconis.

Click image for larger chart.

With  Chi in the finder, it’s easy enough to shift a little west and latch on to “The Little Queen.” In a low power eyepiece it bears a strong resemblance to the “W” of Cassiopeia, the Queen. Here’s a chart showing the path from Chi to UX.

Click image for larger chart.

As you can see, you can star hop along three magnitude 5 stars, easily visible in the finder, to get from Chi to UX. Even in the finder it should look reddish, but as I said, the larger the scope the more dramatic the color.

Having located this, I learned there is another carbon star of about the same brightness in Orion and it’s actually much easier to find. I spotted “W Orionis” for the first time this morning and it fairly jumped out and bit me. It’s right off the end of Orion’s shield in the general direction of Mintaka, the western most belt star.  Here’s a chart.

Click image for larger chart.

I was using the 12omm Skywatcher and as near as I can tell it was as red in that scope as UX appears in that scope, so I trust it will appear even redder when I get a chance to look at it int he 15-inch. In any event, it will be a nice winter showpiece.

Having located this I decided to record afew notes on how I go about finding a couple of other popular objects in the winter sky, M1 (Crab Nebula) and “Eskimo” nebula in Gemni. Here’s the M1 finder.

Xeta Tauri is the fainter, more easterly, of the two stars that mark a horn tip of Taurus, Find it nd M1 will be in a very low power eyepiece. Click chart for larger version.

The Eskimo Nebula was right near Mars this morning, but, of course, that will change rapidly. Here’s my finder chart for it.

The key here is Wasat - find it and the Eskimo will bein the same finder field, though it will look simply like a faint - maybe a tad fuzzy - star. Click chart for larger image.

Alll charts inthis post have been slightly modified from screen shots of Starry Nights Pro software.

Pre-equinox morning – and I’m caught off guard!

Yeah, east is east and west is west and I sure as hell should know where, exactly, after living in this house for45 years, but I was still caught off guard by the autumal equinox sunrise this morning – well, a bit shy of the equinox, but as I photographed the sun through the trees it had risen a tad and I suspect was just about due east for all practical purposes -  and not where I expected it.

I guess my mind set is more magnetic – that is, magnetic north is about 16 degrees west of true north – so that would make magnetic east about 16 degrees north of true east and while I knew that east was actually a bit south of the magnetic setting, just how much south caught me by surprise this morning.  Turned out if I stand near the door and look over my radio mast to  the southeast corner of the property, then I’m looking due east.  And as I look around thi smatches up nicely with where I see the north star – but I still wasn’t prepared for east being this far “south.”

Sun rising pretty much due east as seen from my upstairs deck on September 19, 2009.

Yesterday should have helped, but it didn’t. It was a beautiful morning on September 18, as well,  and we’ve had too few of those in the past several months, so I decided to watch the sunrise and note horizon landmarks fromthe eastern end of the yard, since the sun is just a couple degrees north of east now. First, I checked out Venus.

Venus from Driftway Observatory. The top of the tree comes pretty close to marking east for me. At this point Venus was about 23 degrees up and about as far south of east - 2.5 degrees - as the Sun will north of east 20 minutes later.

Trees block my view of sunrise from the Observatory area , so I went down to the River (East Branch)  just below us where we have a right of way. There I found two cow pasture cedars that formed a nice sighting device with my neighbors Pt. Jude sailboat and a tree on the eastern horizon about half a mile away.

And a few minutes after I took the above picture, the sun rose right over that distant tree.

That river view felt about right to me – but it didn’t seem in sync with what I see from my upper deck – though I trust the Sun is a good indicator 

A 3D Jupiter and an unexpected epiphany

Watching Jupiter get stripped of its four dancing, Galilean moons last night brought me one surprise even before the event started: With Europa overtaking and passing Ganymede there was a real sense of seeing the planet and its system of moons in three dimensions. That was a genuine rush – one of those feelings that nibbled at the edges of the ineffable – a sudden intuitive grasp  of the enormity of what I was seeing.

This particular route to that feeling was new to me. In astronomy the two-dimensional, flat view dominates because things are just too far away and we are usually looking at them with one eye anyways. Without binocular vision depth is an illusion at best – but still a very interesting illusion.  And I was looking with one eye – but a very good one – my 120mm Skywatcher refractor, which just got a rave review in the latest Sky and Telescope. The review was deserved. This is a terrific scope at any price, but for $1,500 it is fantastic. Add to that a 6mm Ethos eyepiece (150X) and ideal conditions for this relatively rare event – each of the four moons was out of sight at the same time – and all the ingredients were there for a great observing session.

My evening didn’t start that way. I hadn’t intended to observe. I had a full day the next day and I’ve seen the moon’s do their things before – though never all at once – and I was just plain tired. The timing – from near midnight to 3 am was roughly the time when I am usually getting my 4 hours of sleep.  But I went to bed at 9:30, woke up at 10, having had just enough sleep to take the edge off my exhaustion. So I grabbed the 60mm and it’s eyepiece case and headed for the observing deck to see if Jupiter was over my trees. It turned out to be peaking through them – right through the notch between the trees that is due south and so I could see it with the 120mm in the observatory. Great.   I went back, got some tea and my Ipod (nothing like a little musical accompaniment), and came out again to settle into some serious observing.

Skies were both clear and steady – an unusual combination. (When Jupiter was in the trees later I took a quick look at the Double Double in Lyra  and was rewarded by two perfectly split pairs with hard-edged, round stars. Charming – and a sure indicator of steady seeing!) The moon was drowning out any faint stars, so naked eye visibility just bordered on 4th magnitude. I like to experience that from time to time. Gives me a sense of what folks usually see in a light-polluted suburb and I know that’s a lot of the folks I’d like to help learn the night sky. So seeing what they see is handy.

I watched from the observatory until about 11:15. At that point I knew the trees on the west side of my gap were going to cover up Jupiter soon, so I moved out to the observing deck with the Televue 60mm to watch Io and Europa vanish. The view with this scope wasn’t as good, of course, but I could crank it all the way up to 240X with a 2.5mm Nagler and so could easily watch the action. Turned out the observing deck gave me a little more time with my gap in the trees than the Observatory did, but not enough. I was looking for the 11:43 pm occultation of Io and by 11:30 I knew I had to move again, this time to a comofrtable spot outside the observing deck – no problem with the 60mm on its lightweight tripod.  I set up, settled down, and saw the occultation start – I checked my Ipod. Yep – 11:43.  But I had lost the slip of paper where I had written down the time of the next event – the start of Europa’s transit.

Turned out this was 11:58 pm -but  I had in my head it was to be 10 minutes earlier.  Still, I kept watching and waiting and eventually Europa was lost in what seemed to me the light-colored equatorial region of Jupiter. I could not see any trace of it. Meanwhile, Ganymede was making a steady march towards the same general area. But I knew that event was roughly an hour away, so I decided to put the 60mm away and hope the trees had moved enough to allow me to use the 120mm scope in the Observatory.  No luck on that score, which is why I went prowling around Lyra looking for the Double-Double and a few other favorites.  Jupiter remained just out of reach during the time Ganymede was starting its transit. I could see it as I stood at the telescope. The little finder scope on top of the 120mm could “see” Jupiter, but the large scope itself was still being just blocked by the trees and what I saw was a grossly distorted image. Talk about close . . . but no matter. It was beautiful night and I was thoroughly immeersed in it despite the little hassles with trees.  By the time Jupiter popped into the vision of the large scope it was 1 am and Ganymede was gone. (It had started the transit 17 minutes earlier.)

But I had wanted to use the improved resolving power of the large scope to see if I could detect the transiting moons. I couldn’t. What I did see immediately was the sharp black dot of  Europa’s shadow. It was unmistakable, having entered the planet’s disc at 12:56 am.  Also hard to miss, however, were the high stratus clouds covering maybe 60% of the sky and drfiting towards Jupiter.  But I enjoyed looking for detail on Jupiter for another 15 minutes – and watching the progress of Europa’s shadow – and, of course, seeing Jupiter in that rare – moonless – condition.  Eventually the clouds gave me permission to call it a night and get some sleep. Not before, however, I had an opportunoty to reflect on the incredible size/distance examples I had  before me.

Afterall, here was our own, brilliant, 13-day moon glaring just 5 degrees away from Jupiter – about half a fist as I measure the sky. Now the moon is about 3,476 kilometers in diameter. Europa – at 3,120 km a bit smaller, and Ganymede at 5,268km signifcantly larger. Yet, in my telescope I felt good that I could easily tell Ganymede was larger than Europa and both showed discs so tiny that to the casual viewer they looked more like stars than solid bodies. And that, of course, drives home the incredible distance difference. Light takes little more than a second to reach us from our moon. From the moons of Jupiter it was taking more like 30 minutes, the exact time depending on the exact distance of the moment which I don’t know – but one second versus 30 minutes is a ratio of 1,800-to-1. Hmmm . . . and our moon appears to occupy about 30 arc minutes in our sky – that’s 1800 arc seconds – so if we put our moon out at Jupiter it would appear to be labout an arc second in diameter and even Ganymede would be half again that large – 1.5 arc seconds.  Oh, I know this is crude figuring – but I also know it’s in the ball park and is the sort of thing that gives me an appreciation of the larger reality. (Ganymede is actually 1.7 arc seconds when Jupiter is closest to us – Ilooked it up

OK – enough with the left-brained stuff!  In  the final analysis that larger reality – the ineffable feeling – is what I treasure about this evening’s observing  and it doesn’t come out of the numbers. It comes out of being there. It comes out of having the numbers and such in your head somewhere while your senses  deliver the visual experience of the great fan dance that;’s taking place unimaginably far away, and is being carried out by objects whose size and make-up also escape anything I can experience directly – and all with predictable precision. Awesome.

Of winks and ghosts and one brilliant Perseid

I never expected this to be a good Perseid year, but I did at least get in one solid hour of very enjoyable Perseid watching. The score?

1 wink

3 ghosts

2 Perseids in full bloom

1 Wrong Way Corrigan

1 brilliant Perseid that rushed in between the clouds  – a real  curtain dropper that brought an appreciative “wow” from my lips.

I had awoken from a sound sleep at 2 am wondering why.  One glance out the window told me. My clear sky alarm clock in my head must have gone off.  Sure, I get up at 2 am many mornings, but in this case I had gone to bed under cloudy skies and I was so solidly asleep that at first I thought something was wrong with the air conditioner because I couldn’t hear it. It seemed to take forever to drag myself to a level of consciousness where I could hear it and reassure myself nothing was worng – except now I was wide awake.  That, for me, means I had been solidly asleep. And I have to admit, when I looked up at the quarter moon the first thought that went through my mind was – “real nice moon – I’ll meander out to the observatory.” It wasn’t until five minutes later when I checked the “Clear Sky Clock” on my computer – and saw that the second night of the Perseids would be a total washout -  that it really occured to me that right then I had a window of opportunity to see some Perseids and it probably was my only one for this year. Net result? By 2:20 am I had a sweatshirt on, my tea and binoculars were in hand, and I also had two pillows to make the upstairs deck a bit more comfortable for flat-on-your-back meteor watching.

As I surveyed the sky I was pleased to see stars to fourth magnitude – and as I checked with binoculars in key areas I found the transparency was great – the problem was, of course, that pesky last quarter moon. It was high in the southeast and washing over the radiant point for the Perseids, as well as everything else.  That’s when it dawned on me that what I was likely to see were “winks” and “ghosts” of meteors and not the usual bright streaks.  And the first three fit this bill. Two were ghosts. I’m pretty sure my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me. I saw them – but they must have been right near the level of visibility – just faint flashes. The third was a kind of brilliant wink right over head between Perseus and and the “W” of Cassiopeia.  Very near the radiant point. Meteors are not the same intensity throughout. Some of them have several spurts of brilliance along a trail that in total is much dimmer – and most have one brilliant point in a longer trail. So in the case of the “wink” I was seeing the brilliant point, but not the trail that lead up to it. That would have been too faint. Or maybe it was coming straight toward me? Or maybe a little of both?

Then I got a couple of real nice ones that looked like what you think a meteor should look like. One went through the Northern Cross and another was over by Aldebaran, pretty low in the southeast. That came when I was checking on the Pleiades, the Hyades, Aldebaran and Mars with with my 12X36 IS binoculars. (OK – I admit – I kept a pretty good watch for meteors, but I also did some binocular touring, so I could have missed some. But even in these conditions it’s fun to check on bright clusters like the Pleiades and Hyades. It’s also fun to know that a few hundred billion stars in the form of the Andromeda Galaxy are high overhead and looking down on you and you can look back!  All of this was easy to see in the binoculars, as was Mu Draconis, a favorite binocular double that was just above my maple tree to the northwest. )

There were a few clouds around, especially to the north and along the eastern horizon, but most of the sky was really transparent  – a 5 on a scale of 1-to-5 – and while I did check on the moons of Jupiter over in the southwest a couple of times, for the most part I kept a steady watch in the sweep of sky that goes from Capella in the east to Vega in the west and down to the “guardians” of the pole, hanging below Polaris. (No I could not make out any of the fourth magnitude stars in the Little Dipper, but I could identify stars of magnitude 3.5 and a few fainter, so I suspect my limit was right around magnitude 4. I also suspect that had there been no moon – and if my horizon were less obstructed than it is from the upper deck -  then in these skies I would have been averaging 15-30 Perseids an hour. Given that the shower doesn’t peak until roughly mid day today, that’s about right.  It’s also a very firm reminder that  in astronomy you have to seize your window of opportunity when it appears. It’s easy to get it in your head that the Perseids come every year and so there will always be another chance. There will, of course, but given the fickleness of weather, your personal schedule, and the very predictable interference of the moon, seeing a good “shower” is a rare event. So I grab what I can when I can – and frankly, it was just darned nice to  be out in the cool night air and enjoying this peaceful interlude. It ended nicely as well.

About 3:15 am the clouds were building in the north and west and even in the east Venus had put in appearance, but was very red which meant it was shining through some haze. To the north a solid bank of overcast was reaching for Polaris. To the west, scattered high clouds were obscuring parts of the Summer Triangle. But I still had a window  – a wide rectangle between Perseus and Polaris. “Wouldn’t it be nice,” I thought, “if a brilliant fireball choose this moment to put in an appearance in that clear rectangle?” And bingo – there it was! Not quite a fireball, but it rivalled Jupiter in brilliance. I would put it at magnitude  -2 and while I continued to look for another minute or two, I was certain that was the finale on my 2009 and Perseid meteor “shower” experience. And real nice curtain dropper it was!

Oh  -  I forgot the “Worng Way Corrigan.”  That was a stray meteor that didn’t belong to the shower – it was in Andromeda and moving towards, rather than away from, the Perseid radiant point – but it was a very respectable meteor, just going the wrong way. Instead of heading for California, it was heading for Ireland – and I suspect both it and Corrigan knew what they were doing, but it’s more fun to think of them as confused.