Enjoying The Night Sky By Any Way We Can

[Skylook123]

The past few days were an interesting comparison of unaided gazing at the sky, live video in moderate aperture, and observing with an eyepiece in a large aperture telescope.

The first two types of observing were performed at TIMPA on Saturday, September 3. I came out because my wife's friend said she would be there with a new scope and wanted some help. I had worked with her at our last club star party at Brandi Fenton, showing her how to set it up and read the manual(!), but the scope was a gift from her son from out of town and he was wanting her to get familiar with it so he could use it when he visited. It was mid-afternoon, and while we got it set up, then taken down and stowed, it was really not a content-filled education. She joined TAAA and said she'd be at TIMPA, the weather looked to be pretty good, so I decided to go and practice for our Catalina State Park event on September 24. We leave tomorrow for Ohio, and won't get back until the day before CSP, and I needed practice since I haven't really exercised the video for the last several months after heart surgery.

Paula was a no-show, but the sky was gorgeous. I was dragging my feet through the setup of the 10" SCT (full dark and still not finished!) when Dennis McMacken came over and said there were a number of new club member observers attending without scopes, so would I care to do a constellation tour. Don't ask me twice!  We gathered near Gila Monster observatory, and I think we had about 8 or more interested people. This time I did the tour starting from the known mileposts, and went through the cultural features along the way. Polaris became the core of the Navajo family constellation, Big Dipper becoming the Hindu Elephant of Creation, Thuban in Draco being the Egyptian pole star and implications of Earth wobble, the meaning and comparison of the Ecliptic versus the Zodiac (Zodiacos Kyklos, the cycle of the sun through living things), and lots of other Native American, North African, and Celtic meanings in the star patterns and Milky Way (from Cassiopeia, the Akimel O'odham spider, and her web down to Sagittarius to capture wayward children). A whole lot more enjoyable than lugging and setting up equipment. Gazing at the sky and even making up one's own tales can be a very relaxing, and uplifting, way to spend time with the cosmos.

I got back to my setup and it went fast. I spent the time at first learning how to finely adjust exposure times on globular clusters to pull out the true color of the red giants in the population. M4 and M22 were great for that. Then I spent the next couple of hours popping up to align on Vega and pull in the awesome living color of The Ring Nebula, playing with exposure times and zoom. There was a bit of upper seeing turbulence as the outer red segment would snap in fairly large, then ease off. I was trying with zero gain to ease the cooling impact (-20C Peltier in the camera), and it worked well, easily bringing out the double white dwarves at the center. The nebula's white dwarf was near center, while the other one in the field was on the inner margin of the O-III section.

Then I went over to the Dumbbell, M27. Because of the much larger image size, it takes a longer integration time but I upped the gain to 3 and it reduced the image time by half (27 seconds) and gve a much crisper outline of the apple core. I just left The Ring and The Dumbell at the end, and used them to show some folks what live video could do.

On Friday, Susan had started reminding me that I haven't used my 18" f/5 much now that I do video for outreach, and how much easier it is to work with. Actually, it's been over three years; the only use it's gotten is my grandson using it at the Grand Canyon Star Party. First, I bought a small compressor pump to refill the wheelbarrow handle tires, flat after years of no real work. Then, on Sunday afternoon I started to assemble the old friend, trying to remember how to build and collimate the thing. I finished up on Monday night, and the collimation was almost dead on. The Digital Setting Circle box's battery was still fresh, Telrad ready to go, so what the heck, I rolled it down the driveway to the cul-de-sac and see if I could remember the drill. Quick alignment on Schedar in Cassiopeia and Antares, but first I tried Saturn. The Telrad was off and dead center was M19 at 130X. WOW. Then I asked for M4. Dead center, WOW II. What the heck, try M22. Dead center. Where has this been all my recent life? Well, the video is more like 320X and 1 arcminute  FOV, not 130X, 3/4 degree FOV with the Panoptic eyepiece. And, of course, the eyeball rod cells don't let the true color in from the globs, but still, it was my eyeball in the eyepiece, not a camera with layers of magic. So then came M17 (the Swan/Omega), M8 (The Lagoon - great at the smaller power, and the cluster flowing into the nebula was gorgeous), and object after object from memory. Each one an old friend. Saturn, though, was sure tiny after double power 640X in the live video. I could have changed eyepieces to 290X, but I was having too much fun with the lower power.  And all of these objects in less than an hour, with the scope stowed in the garage.

What a couple of great nights, reminding me of the gifts that each way we look at the cosmos brings us. Truth be told, I love it all. The sky overhead showing us where we are, the live video and true color awakening the wonders there are to teach and show, and the direct involvement with looking right at the object in view. It's ALL good.  And after both nights out, my blood pressure had dropped almost 15 points.  A health benefit, again.