Last night I dragged out the old 7.8″ Konus telescope while it was still daylight. I had just received my laser collumnator (or collimator) from the Santa-like UPS man, who shows up at my door now and then with fun new books and toys.

After figuring out how to turn on the gizmo (the collumnator, not the telescope), I proceeded to nearly burn my eye out with the attendant laser-beam. Seems the mirrors in the telescope do indeed reflect light – even laser light! I lept away from the ramshackle raygun and regrouped…

Screwdriver in hand, I timidly snuck up to the death-ray emitting Newtonian while waving my hand randomly at the scope’s hinter-regions keen on finding the tell-tale baleful red dot. Finding the errant beam, I circumnavigated it to involve myself with the screwdriver and the collumnating screws on the secondary mirror. After some requisite grunting, tounge-biting and toe-stubbing, I wrestled the spidery secondary into proper alignment. I only dropped the screwdriver down into the telescope once!

I then hefted the contraption, sans laser-beam, into the back yard; being careful of the various birch, spruce, pine, maple, crab, apple, cherry and redbud trees comprising the sylvan paradise of my fifth-of-an-acre suburban back yard. After emptying the leaves from the long-suffering Konus, I set it up in a relatively untreed patch of yard.

After a quick polar-alignment of the telescope mount, my next order of business was to calibrate the setting circles. I rushed through the forest into the library to grab all three volumes of Burnham’s Celestial Handbook off of my astronomy bookshelf, and carted them back out to the telescope. Volume three showed me the co-ordinates of two of the stars in the Big Dipper (Ursa Major), which I used to adjust my aforementioned circles. Having done this twice(!!) before, the calibration was a snap. Finally, I slewed (did slew?) the telescope tube around to Jupiter, which was marching toward the western horizon, and oogled its attendant moons and pastel clould-bands. For the first(!!) time ever, I successfully engaged the clock-drive on my telescope mount, and was giddy as a new father when Jupiter stayed darned-near smack in the middle of the field of view for several minutes. I settled back with my mostly-recovered eye and contemplated a night of seriously rewarding observing.

Shortly after my self-congratulatory surge of astronomical haughtiness, my friend Jay arrived, having earlier expressed an interest in stargazing. Often I do my stargazing and telescope machinations with my friend and neighbor Joe, but Joe was under different skies this week having gone to Rio, Brazil (where I think he should keep a lookout for the Magellanic clouds).

The first object on the agenda was M31, the Andromeda galaxy. I have many times found Andromeda both with and without a telescope whenever I’ve been under dark skies. My suburban Chicago home is not a dark sky locale, though, so there was no chance of seeing it without the telescope. The problem was that Andromeda was far in the eastern sky, and I’d aligned my telescope with the western stars of Ursa Major. So, I had to flip the telescope tube around the equatorial mount (a meridian flip), and point it in the general area between Cassiopeia and Andromeda. This threw my setting circles off which meant spending twenty minutes trying to re-calibrate on the stars of Cassiopeia. At this point, Burnham’s failed me since it doesn’t include a pictorial map of each constellation (though it did have one for Ursa Major). So, Jay and I went back into the library to find “Field Guide to the Stars…” which does have star maps.

Four books, one red flashlight, two novices, one humid and light-polluted atmosphere, and a telescope with an attitude. This is not a recipee for easy success. After prowling around the glowing eastern sky for several minutes, M31 did not catch my eye and Jay to his credit didn’t tap his foot impatiently *too* loudly (probably thanks to the grass underfoot).

Giving up on M31, we turned to M13 in Hercules. Now, Hercules has an arrangement of stars much like a square. So Jay and I found a convenient square of stars, looked at the Field Guide chart, and manhandled the reflector to point in the direction of the star cluster we sought. About an hour later, we still hadn’t found the globular. This was highly frustrating to your’s truly because I have found M13 by star-hopping many times. Jay, by this time, was dubious about my credentials as an amature astronemer. In my defense, I declaimed that I could talk endlessly about cosmology, stellar spectra and lifecycles, general relativity, nucleosynthesis, emission and absorption nebulae and galactic struture. However, I have the constellation recognition and navigation skills of your average second-year Cub Scout. To wit: the constellation Pegasus has a rather more prominent square of stars than does Hercules. Pegasus, however, does not have a globular star cluster anywhere near the corresponding location in Hercules. Yes, we lost Hercules. Pegasus does at least have some nice open clusters, which provided some inicidental entertainment to offset the growing frustration.

After it dawned on me that I was perusing the wrong patch of night, I shoved my long-suffering scope toward the real Hercules, and found M13 in a matter of moments. Finally, I was able to show Jay the powder-puff mass of stars which I had been talking up for a couple of hours.

From M13 we hopped quickly to M57, the Ring Nebula in Lyra. I prattled on about exploding stars and white dwarfs, but the most impressive thing was seeing the lovely gaseous doughnut in the sky.

By this time, it was after 11:00 PM, which was a bit past Jay’s accusomed bed-time. I bid Jay a frinedly “adieu”, and retired myself to curl up with my star-maps until I fell asleep.

Two things became obvious to me after the night’s (mis)adventures. First, I need a copy of Norton’s Star Atlas to optimally replace my Field Guide and Burnhams to better facilitate identifying the co-ordinates and configuration of the stars. Second, I have a lot to learn about star-hopping and developing skills for the easy and quick use of setting circles.

I could forego all of this by using a computerized GoTo mount; but what fun would that be? And how much less would be my appreciation had I not practiced the more manual alternative myself.

Many thanks to Jay for sharing and helping.

Wednesday, August 16th, 2006 @ 12:05 pm Idle Thoughts
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