Tiny Clanger

QUICK ! https://stargazerslounge.com/topic/368241-sky-watcher-heritage-150p-flextube-dobsonian-telescope/?tab=comments#comment-4002569 Heather

I bought the 150 heritage as my first 'scope and am very happy with it. The decider for me over a solid tube dob. was the storage and ease of getting it out into the garden. The 150 is not too unwieldy or heavy to be very easily moved. Ideally it does need a small sturdy table , box or similar to stand it on though. Whatever you buy, once you get involved in the hobby you will inevitably want to buy better eyepieces, finders, filters and various bits and pieces, none of which are cheap, so reserving some of your budget for those might be prudent

I was obliged to visit my friends in Arizona in the summer, as I was teaching at the time and couldn't take a month's holiday any time but August . When we got pulled over for speeding* the cop inspected my passport and said ... Why on earth would you come here at this time of year ? The year before, my friends who are originally from Yorkshire UK had actually , literally, fried an egg on the pavement ... Not quite that hot when I was there, but opening the house door or the car door to the outside was exactly like opening an oven door. Except it was ... a dry heat 😀 * Ahem,"Honest officer , the rental car speedometer sticks ..." I got let off because as they spoke to me, the cop's radio squawked a request from an officer in trouble with a bar punch-op , so my cop was in a hurry to get there to help.

I have friends who moved to the USA years ago , and I visited them when they lived in Scottsdale Az . I recall seeing a t-shirt which pictured two vultures perched on a longhorn cow skull : one vulture was saying to the other : "Yeah, but it's a dry heat ..." 😀

I don't know how that little tray is attached to your tripod, if it's as flimsy a set of little fold up brackets posing as spreaders as on the elderly version of an EQ1 the Celesrton 114 I inherited has, I'd not trust them to take a couple of kilos of water .... if there are holes in the tray for EPs to stand on, I'd tie the cord higher up somewhere round the centre, drop it through one of the EP holes as close as possible to the centre line, then tie the weight on so it hangs as low as you can, even touching the ground, you want the centre of gravity as low as possible . Also the shorter the tripod legs can be, the steadier the scope will be. Trouble with that is you probably need to sit down to use it, and (in my little garden anyway ) your surroundings may then block too much of the view.

Oh, and your mount is an EQ isn't it ? In which case when polar aligned (even approximately) and set to your latitude it should let you track with just one adjustment to keep on top of.

🙃😀 Yep, mak and 8mm last night at 187x, remarkably tho' the dust storm light patch showed itself on the mak with a 17mm plossl , only 88x ! Old photographers trick (yes, I am an old photographer ... ) if a tripod is wobbly, try hanging a bag of bricks/rocks/tins of beans/whatever off the centre , it can be surprisingly effective. I don't imagine your 'scope tripod has a convenient centre point like the column of a photo tripod, but you should be able to bodge something up. Rotating the 'scope in the rings, hmm , not a think I need to contend with ! I'll have a guess and say is it like tilting your head ? The primary obviously is the same however you turn it, and the secondary just relays that to the EP, but you are changing the angle of your view compared to the ground .... now I've confused myself ... someone will be along with more spatial awareness and a proper answer later I'm sure ! 🙃

By coincidence, I've been sorting out some stuff to pass on to another teacher , one of the folders is photo related, and in it is my original 'here's 'one I made earlier' to give the small folk an idea of what they might get. This test run 'sun picture' later featured in a display (hence the drawing pin holes in the corners of the blue card !) This was done with exposure to sunlight , objects laid on the paper , processed with just fixer, no dev. or stop bath , and washed under the tap. It's done OK as I reckon it is at least 20 years old ! Not a very good photo I'm afraid , lit by one lamp, and propped up against the laptop screen .

I'll get around to taking & posting a photo of the 150+dew shield when I can take it outdoors without drowning ... All it is is a sheet of foam slightly longer than the circumference of the 'scope, with some velcro glued on (hot melt glue gun worked fine, to my surprise ... I thought it would melt the foam !) The protruding part I made as deep as I could given the lack of rigidity of the foam, and initially I only put velcro at the tube end, so if it was too long and intruded into the view (vignetting in photographer speak) I could just cut a strip off to shorten it . It didn't. I was using the 127 mak for Mars last night, I bought it specifically for planet & moon watching, it has a focal length of 1500mm vs the heritages 750mm but obviously a smaller aperture. I had the 8mm BST starguider in it (giving a view like the 8mm with 2x barlow in the heritage) Last night adding the 2x barlow in the mak was pushing conditions too much. The mak is on an alt/az (one of these https://www.firstlightoptics.com/skywatcher-mounts/sky-watcher-az5-deluxe-alt-azimuth-mount.html) atop a hefty Manfrotto photo tripod I've owned for years. I'd initially thought I might get away with using the mak on the heavy duty pan/tilt head I use with that tripod for photography, but the lack of slow motion controls made it too difficult. So more money evaporated from my savings and appeared in FLO's account ! With the alt/az slo mo cables it wasn't hard to get in the rhythm of twiddling the control as Mars was on the point of exiting left (mirror image , right way up but L/R swapped : I wasn't aware of how my reflexes had adjusted to Newtonian view until everything was suddenly , weirdly, the right way up ... ) It helped that the apparent path of Mars' orbit when I was watching only needed frequent adjustment in the horizontal , so only one control to twiddle. I spent so much time watching Mars as it's true what everyone says , you really do get random moments of better clarity when you can suddenly see more detail. I can't quite get over having viewed something on Mars a while back which was, on the next day, identified by folk on here with more idea than me as a dust storm . That was on Nov.19th with a 17mm skywatcher basic plossl in the mak, as the BST was too much for the seeing by the way , so within your grasp with an 8mm BST in your 'scope when you get one. Don't imagine I'm neglecting the dob though, it's just that the planets are up there for viewing at the moment. Heather

I should say the image is not B/W though if you don't use dev., depending on the paper/fixer combo it is shades of violet or brown. I used to do 'shadow pictures' with a class of children, it meant I could get across the meaning of transparent/translucent/opaque in a memorable way and get some unusual bits of art to stick on the calendars my school insisted the sprogs made to take home at the end of this term, along with a home made card (which was usually shedding half a ton of glitter each ... )

Yes, briefly exposed photo paper (used 'properly' under an enlarger etc) has a latent image which needs bringing out with developer, but long exposed the same paper has a visible image, so just a tray of fixer will do. Black & white photo paper is not very sensitive to red light as well, so you could use a dim red lamp to unload/load/process it.

An ad. slogan might be : "Just dob and go !" We had clear skies for a few hours around here last night too : I've sort of got in the habit of making my final view of the night the Pleiades , a beautiful sight and an easy consolation prize if other intended targets elude me. I managed to snatch a brief look at them just before light cloud drove me indoors. Heather

I believe it to be a word, but then I agree with Humpty Dumpty about words 😀 as long as they get your meaning across. However, I don't think you need feel embarrassed about setting up in public , as the public won't see you in that lovely dark ... I've made foam dew shields for my 'scopes , partly because being from a photo background a 'lens hood' seems a natural addition , partly because I had plenty of foam left over from the stuff I ordered to make a shroud for the heritage 150 , partly because a dew shield can't hurt, but might help, and partly because I just enjoy tinkering with stuff. My initial efforts were made from a cheap, bright blue camping mat ( also sometimes sold as yoga mats) which is closed cell foam maybe 6mm thick , it was fine for dew shields but too thick to slide inside the heritage tube and had to be taken off between uses, so I bought some sober black 3mm closed cell foam which works well, and looks rather classier ! The 3mm foam is sufficiently rigid to make decent dew shields, including a dinky one for the 6x30 RACI which has never had a dew problem yet . The 150 heritage has stayed dew free too, but the 127 mak with a big lump of glass at the front is a dew magnet, and despite the shield it has had me curtailing sessions with it a few times. If it gets annoying, I do have an extension cable and an old hairdryer ... Keeping the eyepieces warm will keep the dew off them, I used to use pockets , but on getting a slightly nicer EP or two I decided better to have a less biscuit crumb and tissue fragment place for them than my pockets, so recycled some of the camping mat foam dew shield to make internal dividers for a little padded pouch I use on a belt I put on over whatever jacket. I stole the idea from some wildly expensive 'bum bag' style waist packs I saw which are sold specifically for EPs 😀 Mine cost nothing being a ramshackle aggregation of stuff I already had . PS, it was clear,and I spent over an hour just looking at Mars. Mare Cimmerium and Syrtis Minor quite clear, but couldn't see the S.polar ice cap, which I've read has shrunk since the summer. Then some patchy cloud, so I came in for a bit.

I think there are probably only two ways to be sure about this for visual astronomy, unfortunately the quicker way is off limits at the moment, i.e. going to a club meet and talking to others who can look through your 'scope , and let you look through theirs, and can give an experienced opinion on both your 'scope and the 'seeing' conditions right then and there. The other way is to just keep observing and hope for really good seeing one night , to show you a steady view and find the limits of the 'scope. On which note, I'm off outside to see if it's still clear ! Heather

A true, succinct, and very Zen statement which could usefully be on every new telescope, just under the bit about not looking at the Sun ...

It always seems to me a failure of modern life that (apart from Outdoorsy people, farmers and gardeners) so many of us are separated and insulated from the seasons. That disconnect must account for some of the astonishment people show to things like Neolithic grave passages being aligned to the winter solstice... as if those stone age folk didn't have an intimate connection with , and understanding of, the apparent path of the Sun. Much easier to use an online tool than drag some big rocks around and stand them on end in the correct places though ! 😀

Yep, I'd kept an eye on the BBC weather forecast online, which suggested patchy cloud all tonight, so parked the 'scope outside as twilight began and by 17:30 it was fairly clear. Naked eye showed the duo a fraction above the shed roof and playing hide and seek between some tree branches (not my tree ... ) Managed to see both at once in my finderscope , then a quick shufty through the not yet properly cooled 'scope managed a wobbly view of Saturn & moons before I lost both . With a very low probability of rain, I've left the telescope outside with a cover over it while I come in to cook and eat, hoping to spend some time studying Mars later. Fingers crossed !

Snow blindness is a well known hazard for winter outdoors folk , especially those at high altitude where more UV gets through the atmosphere. Sort of sunburn of the cornea , unpleasant but I think temporary. Hence alpinist's expensive goggles . As hazards go, in the UK right now with utter gloomy grey skies and globally warmed temperatures, it's way down the list of probabilities, but many years ago a walk home on lying snow under a full moon was so memorably, coldly lit that even my somewhat wine addled brain was impressed .

Nice report, I'm pleased you had a gap in the clouds over there... we did too, but annoyingly it came in the daytime , and the grey curtains rolled inexorably in as the Sun set . I think those of us beginners who start with non go-to set ups probably get more out of using our modest 'scopes because we can't simply dial something in, have a quick look at it, then move on : we have to navigate our way and learn the sky, and once we manage to actually locate something we feel a sense of achievement as well as wanting to spend some time studying what we found to make the effort worthwhile. Patience and experience are, I suspect, the best upgrades available after the best one (dark skies), so wise to take time getting used to handling the gear you have and getting the best possible out of it . I've kept a hand-scribbled log book with notes on what I saw at specific dates and times, and included any details of how the kit fell short of what I'd like , what went wrong, or how new stuff functioned. I write it up as soon as I come indoors, and it makes interesting reading to reflect on : back in July when I started keeping it (after a few days of simply getting the hang of using the 'scope and eyepieces and mount in the dark) most of what I recorded is about the kit, but as that became second nature the equipment info part has reduced and the 'what I saw' record has expanded. I suppose it's like learning to drive : to begin with it's all about the right pedal to push and gear to be in, get the hang of those then a whole different learning curve needs negotiating ... By the way, I'll second Mizar as an easy target to go for , even I knew where to find it ! https://earthsky.org/brightest-stars/mizar-and-alcor-the-horse-and-rider , it features in my most recent log entry , which was 1-2am on the night of 30th November/!st December, and was the only thing that wasn't drowned out by the searchlight - like Moon ! Since then, no chance of seeing anything but the underside of clouds .

I have used stellarium ocular view to check I am looking at the right configuration of stars a few times by using my rubbish smartphone camera, but approaching the problem from the opposite direction.. 1) on stellarium do ocular view of target (with night view enabled so everything is red , dont want to risk messing up light adaptation) 2) take a photo of the screen , showing the ocular view 3) take 'phone out to 'scope, compare EP view to snap on phone . Works for me ! Heather

If you check 'clear outside' ,the forecast includes an attempt to predict the dew point, hour by hour , the relevant row is 4 up from the bottom of the day's extended info. https://clearoutside.com

I'm switching the computer off now , it's the only safe thing for the bank balance !

All of the above Except for the bit about squandering money, I'm having no trouble, see the thread about the Nikon TC ...

I blame the clouds, but doubt visa would accept that as an excuse ...

In case you would like photographic confirmation, here's the back end of my 150 heritage , and my stunt double :