Heritage 150p First-Light-By-Proxy: An Odd Night's Observing!

[Captain Scarlet]

I've been in SW Ireland since March, and my neighbour has been looking after where I live SW of London. As a gesture of thanks for his efforts, a couple of weeks ago I sent him unannounced a Heritage 150p, as he has expressed an interest in my astro shenanigans in the past.

Last Monday I had to go back to London for a week or so after an unexpected terribly sad family event. But I did get to have a strange night's observing, followed by an afternoon.

Wednesday I think I was out on my patio near midnight with my LZOS 105mm refractor on Skytee2, cruising through Ursa Major as I recall, and I could hear he was using his scope the other side of the 8 foot brick wall between our patios. then I heard him whisper-shout a faint "Magnus?". What ensued was me guiding him around the sky, shouting as quietly as we could over the wall.

I think I started him out on too difficult a very first ever target, Epsilon Lyrae. His 12-year-old daughter (it was really her present) was operating the iphone and instructing him as to what he should be seeing. They hadn't been able to line up their RDF properly, so their navigation was a little difficult. But they eventually did find the Double-Double, but couldn't quite split the pairs. They were just aware that one of the doubles was not a point. To be fair, even with my 4" using similar maginfication I couldn't quite split one of them either.

I then directed them to Mizar/Alcor. They were using a SW LET 25mm eyepiece (30x) and again trying to find it without a finder or RDF. Nonetheless they found it quite quickly, and I found it so gratifying when I heard over the wall "Ah, found it. Oh. Oh. Oh my goodness, Oh God that's lovely! Sophia [his 12-year-old], come and look at this!".

I arranged for the next afternoon to go round and see how well it was collimated "out of the box" (not very well, as it turned out), and to see if we could find "daytime Venus". Around 1pm, I went round, collimated it, it was quite a bit out, and hunted around for Venus, 29 degrees or so away from the Sun. Having resaerached where it should be using the app "Sky Guide" (which I really like) he found Venus quite quickly through 10x50 bins, and eventually I found it in the scope. He was amazed a planet was so visible when you found it yet so not-noticeable, in total broad full-sunshine (30 degrees C !!!!!). I swapped in my DeLite 18.2 instead of his SW 25mm LET, and there really wasn't that much difference! I'd given him also my 9mm  and 25mmm LETs that came new with my mak180. Those LETs are a very good improvement over the regular OEM SW eyepieces.

So, all in all, I recruited one, very likely two, to this game of ours, and had a very memorable evening and afternoon. To offset the otherwise sad reason for my week's return to London.

M

Edited June 26, 2020 by Captain Magenta

[RobertI]

Well done on creating some new converts, I'm sure your enthusiasm helped. Sorry to hear about your bad news. 

[Stu]

Lovely story, and a generous gift Magnus. Glad you found a positive on your sad trip.

[Chris]

Great to hear about your kindness paying off! Thanks for sharing the story and sorry about the bad news.