Mixing, Matching, Rediscovering Joy of Observing

[Skylook123]

I had a bit of discovery last night that I'd like to share.

I got started in this adventure almost two decades ago, and over the years, for what seemed to be logical reasons, came into possesion of four telescopes. From the beginning I've been interested in DSO detail. So my main instrument is an 18" Teeter's Telescope truss dobsonian. But my favorite passtime is outreach, so my other major tool is an Atlas EQ-G mount with a 10" Meade SCT. For 14 years I've been storing a highly modified Meade 10" Starfinder dob for my grandkids, and over the last year they've shown that they are ready and eager for it so it travels to Colorado Springs in a couple of weeks. That leaves the orphan, a 90mm ShortTube refractor I bought when I was traveling a lot to a Pacific island and has been sitting in the garage unused for 10 years.

Last Christmas Eve we got an opportunity to take some special sunset photos: the sun setting behind the telescopes of the Kitt Peak National Observatory, photographed from 60 miles away part way up the road to Mount Lemmon. Spur of the moment, I decided to take the 90mm for a no fuss setup, not for imaging. When we got to the site, my wife Susan decided to try to take video with her little Canon Power Shot, holding the camera at the eyepiece. Bottom line, I grabbed some stills from the video and one was Solar Astronomy Picture of the Day for December 27. Since then, I've been intrigued by the use of that 90mm as a fat telephoto lens. I bought an Orion Steady Pix to hold the camera at the eyepiece, and recently bought the Orion Solar System Imager. It wIll take a bit of fooling around to learn that tool! Anyway, the old clunky frankenmount became an annoyance, so I bought a small length of Vixen dovetail to mount the ShortTube on the Atlas. Just a wee bit overmounted.

Last weekend I signed up to support the our club's presence at the Tucson Festival of Books. Because there was a chance it would be a moderate walk to the setup spot on the Univ. of Arizona Mall, and the frankenmount I'd cobbled together for the 90mm is not really suitable for public use, I chose to mate the 90mm to the Atlas for the first time, using an airline two wheeler to lug the mount head and tripod and battery. Awesome public response; three of us with solar scopes showed a nicely active sun to about a hundred people in a couple of hours (in all, the club was there for two full days), I had a full aperture glass filter that showed the sun nicely yellow with some great sunspot groups, another observer used a newtonian with Baader filter to show the same thing in a bluish tint, and our third member used a PST for the ooh aah work. So, I started to think about the Solar System Imager. I've been playing with it off and on ever since, both with the 90mm and the SCT. LOTS to learn. But, this weekend, got some nice practice video of the full moon with transitioning clouds. The downside is that this device acts like a 5mm eyepiece, WAY overkill for sun and moon. Tried some Saturn with the 90mm, but not enough contrast in the moon glare to record, so far anyway. Need to play around a lot, maybe using it in the 10" SCT for planets, 90mm for sun and moon. The only way to get a full solar/lunar image, though, even in the 90mm, will be with a mosaic; Just too small FOV. But the mount can use EQMOD, a freeware utility I helped beta test six years ago for satellite tracking, that will also autoguide a mosaic. Then just grab some single frames and use Registax to build a picture. But, that's a journey down the road.

So, last night I went back to ground zero with the 90mm and the Atlas to try for some Saturn video. Because the Vixen dovetail attaches with only one bolt, it can't be perfectly aligned to the optical axis so cone error is endemic. After dark I used the Atlas for a three star alignment; the SynScan software uses this method to correct cone error. Then came the magic.

The Saturn work was a bust. Lots to learn about setting up the imager. But, spur of the moment, I started seeing what I could see under the full moon. I could not overpower this OTA. With a 9mm Nagler eyepiece, every star was pinpoint and the field of view was beautiful. The full moon was wiping out the majority of stars in the M35 through M38 group, but what was there was crisp and precise. I went over to Mizar/Alcor, and the Alcor double was splt nice and clean and the star group was gorgeous. I went over to Regulus, and had to strain a bit to catch the blue secondary star, because the Moon was pretty close. I easily got the eyes of the Owl Cluster (NGC457), but much of the rest of the body was lost in a thin haze and moon glow. Then I added a variable barlow at 2.5X, and no loss of crispness despite the thin haze. Same at 3X. Significantly more power per inch than I've been able to drive my other scopes at this low altitude and desert dusty air.

I've gotten focused over the years with more aperture and concentration on DSOs, not their environment. What began last night as a simple exercise to learn how to use the imager quickly became a thrilling ride around the sky. Stars! I remember stars! Other than the occasional cluster, my main two telescopes, used as I use them, don't lend themselves to context, just detail on specific objects. But the beautiful, and colorful, pinpoints of light all around in this refractor awakened old memories of the sky. Unfortunately, I could only get the huge, bright moon in the camera; no image of Saturn appeared. But I didn't care, just had a lot of enjoyment ranging around the sky. I've left this little guy alone far too long. Looks like some happy diversions ahead!

[DarkerSky]

A super experience Jim. Like you I've been aperture-focused for pretty much all my time in astronomy. I never tire of it - quite the opposite, it's always a real buzz to pull out those inticate details from DSOs - but I'm seriously thinking of getting myself a small refractor to give a different perspective.

I get my images by sketching. The idea of sketching some widefields through a low power refractor definitely has some appeal

Hope you have many more inspirational nights with your 90mm

[Skylook123]

Spot on comments. I helped a friend two years ago, with a 4.5" newtonian, on his first night out. We went to The Ring nebula, and I'd forgotten the context in which it sits. So pretty in that rich field!

Don't get me wrong; I'm still a faint fuzzy junky, but this experience surely recharges the batteries. What a thrill again to see the sky, not just an object in the sky. I may invest in a dual dovetail to mount the 90mm side by side with the 10", just to sneak an occasional peak at where my target lives, not just how it looks.

Different horses for different courses.