I find I tend to get drawn into M42 and ignore a lot of the other neat stuff in Orion, so last night (2/11/10) I went out early to look for some double stars – no luck – 70 percent clouds – though the stuff over Orion was thin. Looked again around 8:30 pm and it was still at least 50% clouds, but Orion was entirely in the clear. So I hunted down some stars I’ve previously ignored, starting with Iota Orionis and its companion double ∑747. Both showed easily in the 8-inch, LX50 with a 24mm Panoptic.
(BTW – this is a real neat SCT I picked up for $300 complete with working mount, equatorial wedge, tripod, and several extras. I think part of the reason for the price was the mirror was starting to develop some unidentified lifeforms. These looked scary, but I saw them once before on an LX90 I then owned and when I sent that scope back to Meade for motor repair, it also returned with a clean primary mirror. Can’t be magic – so I figured there must be some way to clean them and if I had to I could break the scope into parts, sell the parts, and make my money back and then some. But that was before I thought about contacting Pete to see if he had some suggestions – he sure did! He not only showed me how to do it, but did the job. That was great because up until then I had never even dared remove the correction plate from a SCT! These things look more scary than they are. Hey Pete – thanks again – terrific views!)
Anyway, back to Iota. Sissy Haas, in her book “double stars for small telescopes” calls this a “pair with fantastic contrast.” I wasn’t that overwhelmed, though I did like it. Double stars take a while to grow on me. But I sketched the field, moving up to a 13mm Nagler. With that I could put Iota and companion in the center of the field and ∑747 still appeared at one edge. At 4.7 and 5.5 these two white stars were the brightest in the field besides Iota and so widely split I would not have thought of them as double if I hadn’t read about them in advance. This is one of those fields I’d like to study with a much smaller scope like the 50mm refractor that should arrive in a week or so – hmmm. . . or that $45, 76mm baby DOB from Celestron which may arrive this weekend – I think it would be much more appealing. But its good to get to know this way. What was most interesting was when I got inside later and checked a Sue French piece in “Celestial Sampler” on other stuff around M42, I found she identified Iota as a triple! She said there was a third star to the ESE of the primary – split by 50 seconds and at 9.7 the faintest of the three. I checked my drawing and sure enough – I had put a faint dot at just the right point. So I saw it – but honestly, I would never have associated it with Iota – it was just one more star in a fairly rich field. But that will make Iota a real challenge for the small scopes.
My second project was the quadruple star, Lambda, in what I think of as Orion’s head. The problem here was quite different. I had screwed up when filling out my double star logging form and put down the wrong position angle for each component. I didn’t notice at first because the first component had a PA close to the mistaken value. So I identified it and because I had the separations down correctly, I figured out the other two as it began to dawn on me that I had the wrong position angle data. When I got in the house and checked my drawings against the correct data in the Haas book I had recorded all four stars correctly. Again, these were no challenge for the 8-inch but for me would be more interesting in a small scope.
I’ll come back to these over and over again. My goal, always, is to make objects into familiar old friends. I don’t keep lists, but I do try to build a relationship with objects that look fresh to me each time I see them in part because I use different telescopes, but also because different nights bring different conditions and, of course, I’m different each time – but how can you exhaust the awe that’s inherent in every astronomical object?
And in that spirit I checked out the Trapezium, of course – just four stars this night, though I saw the E and maybe the F star a few nights ago with this scope. Both seeing and transparency were a notch below average on this night. Still, I was able to get a hint of the faint nebulosity that completes the M42 loop and shows so well in images.
I had log sheets for three more Orion doubles to check out, but the clouds were now moving in on Orion. But this was one more example of how good it can be on a less than perfect night – the kind I used to not bother to observe on!
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Morning and clear again[/b][/size]
I seldom sleep more than 4 hours at a time – not a choice, just the way things are – and so I was up at 4 and out again at 4:30 and this time there were only 10 percent clouds. No plan. I have hot tea and I like to meditate each morning and if it’s clear, I do so at the telescope. In this case I quickly locked onto M3, high overhead, and with a 13mm Nagler enjoyed the view. This isn’t what some would call meditation. Heck, it isn’t what I would call meditation. It’s really quiet contemplation. Has some meditative components and some observing components. Sometimes my eyes are closed. Sometimes they’re open. Always I’m at peace and when I think my thoughts are directed to the star city in front of me. Yes, it’s cold – I guess about 25 degrees – but I’m in my tiny (6-foot) observatory which with its dome and slit limits the amount of sky to which I radiate heat.
Oh – I checked on Porrima. Do you know Porrima? I don’t. Geeeeeesh! Half a century of amateur astronomy and I’m still the last kid on the block to discover these things. I don’t know how many nights I’ve used Porrima as a starting point for finding my way into the Virgo galaxy cluster. I’ve even read stuff in which the writer refers to it as “beautiful Porrima.” Beautiful? That should have been a clue, but it wasn’t. I should have checked it on Jim Kaler’s web site. Kaler is my star guru. I love his books. But as I said, I’ve used it as a stepping stone when hunting much bigger game – galaxies. Then just recently I learned why everyone loves Porrima. 😳
As Kaler succinctly puts it: Porrima is “one of the finest double stars in the sky.”
And it certainly sounds like it! Two very close, magnitude 3.5 stars. How close? I found this information on the separation and position angle – which is getting wider – in a post on Cloudy Nights:
From the 6th catalog of orbits:
2008 PA 41.3, Sep 0.924
2009 30.7, 1.168
2010 23.7, 1.389
2011 18.5, 1.591
2012 14.4, 1.777
So it’s somewhere around 1.4 arc seconds now. Yeah! But on this morning it still looked like an egg-shaped blob to me. Now mind you, the collimation is fairly good on this scope, but I really should take the time to fine tune it. I don’t think that’s the problem. The seeing is a 2 out of 5 – not good. But boy this whets my appetite. I do want to split this star. This sentence from Kaler [url]http://stars.astro.illinois.edu/sow/porrima.html[/url]certainly sums up the fascination from a technical perspective: “Thirty-eight light years away, the stars average 43 Astronomical Units from each other, about the distance between the Sun and Pluto, the orbital eccentricity taking them between 81 and 5 AU.” So this spring will be the time to go for it.
But I was in the middle of M3 where a mere two stars close together is child’s play. Here we have half a million stars jammed in a sphere 33,000 light years away. That’s meditation material!
When I leave M3 it still seems dark enough – though it’s after 5 and the Sun rises in about 90 minutes – to see what I can see in the Virgo cluster. I’ve been using small refractors a lot lately and I’m interested in seeing what an 8-inch scope does with these familiar galaxies, so I simply plunge right in.The Telrad allows me to quickly climb up the three stars that form an arc starting with Porrima, then take a sharp right and go up a tad . . . look in the eyepiece – I’m using a 24mm Panoptic again – and bingo! Two bright galaxies side by side making a triangle with a fairly bright star – and when I look more closely it’s more like a long, thin diamond, for opposite the star is another, much fainter and smaller galaxy. Looks like the beginning of Markarian’s Chain. I sketch it quickly, then look around a bit. Find another galaxy . . . but already the sky is getting light and when I finish up at 5:45 am it is way too bright for galaxy hunting and my hands are getting cold. I think those first two galaxies are M84 and M86, but I’m not positive until i check my sketching against an online photo. There’s a helpful one here:[url]http://observing.skyhound.com/archives/apr/M_86_01.gif[/url]
The morning’s observing has left me with a dilemma, though. I really like having the LX50 in the observatory. I like using the equatorial wedge, I like the slow motion controls. And I like the RA motor. (I don’t like the auto focus – removed it – but that’s not the issue here.) The issue is space. My dome is just 6-feet in diameter. I have a pier in the center. Put the LX50 with wedge on that pier and it’s fairly high. Too high most of the time for my office chair I like to use, but OK for an observing chair. However, if I’m high on that observing chair I have to get off it in order to take notes on the counter top which is under a very, very low ceiling/roof. (Think of my observatory as a doghouse with the top lopped off and a dome plopped over part of it and you’ll get the idea. It’s very functional for one person. OK for two – very crowded with three. I envy Pete’s set up where he can seat about 11 people around the scope. When I have even a few folks out to observe I use the deck, not the observatory.
But I bumped my head enough times in this observing session – and bumped the scope enough times – to think that maybe the LX50 has to find a home on the deck, or in the yard. What really works for me in this small building is a T-Mount from Universal Astronomics. That will take a small refractor, or an 8-inch SCT and because of all the ways it can move, allow me plenty of space to operate and to do so without ever leaving my comfortable office chair. That breathing space, I think, outweighs the advantages of electronic tracking and slow-motion knobs on the LX50.
And if you’re thinking “why not an LX90” or other go to scope, it’s a good question. I built the observatory with my LX200 in mind – that was around 1991 when the LX200 was so new the manual I got from Meade was out of a copier – they hadn’t printed the real manuals yet! But that scope is long gone,and so is the LX90 – in fact, so is anything with a computer on it. I know folks love “go to” and I have no beef with them at all – but I don’t. Purely personal preference that depends in part on why you;re observing at all. i really like star hopping and a couple years ago sold all my electronic equipment – go to scopes and a very nice deep-sky video set up – and went back to visual observing and pushing scopes around. Now I’m backtracking just a bit with the recent purchase of an LX10 and and LX50 on equatorial wedges. I want to use them a while. See if I like them. It fun to try to think rational thoughts and make plans, but in the end the only thing that matters to me is took at my own behavior. From a rational standpoint one scope may make more sense than another – but I ask myself a simple question: What do I use? So I’ll drop these wedge-mounted Meades into the mix and if they get used, they stay. If they don’t, they’ll be sold to someone who will use them.
But for the moment, I’m putting the T-mount back in the observatory. It’s more flexible, more comfortable to use, and suits me fine. I do well over half my observing in the open where the LX scopes will get plenty of opportunity to strut their stuff – and I’m anxious to see how those in the little “star hopper” program I’ve started like them.
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