Uncle Rod's Astro Blog

2017 wasn’t a very active year for me in astronomy. The freaking weather, if nothing else, saw to that. The Deep South Spring Scrimmage, for example, one of two star parties I still attend each year without fail, was clearly in for a rain-out and I didn’t even bother to register. That event’s fall edition, the just-finished Deep South Star Gaze, yielded only one good night out of the four I signed up for. Sigh.

But that doesn’t mean I didn’t do any telescoping. What I did do this year was mostly imaging from the backyard. That can be fun, but I have to admit the actual picture-taking part of it just ain’t that engaging. After set up is done and the mount is guiding and the camera exposing, my astrophotography consists of me sitting inside watching TV while telescope and computer do their thing on their own.

As fall segued into winter, however, the skies improved (somewhat), and I found myself in a nice clear pre-Christmas stretch. What to do? I was tired of worrying about cameras and computers for the moment. I was longing for some of that old one-on-one relationship with the cosmos that’s what got me interested in this crazy game in the first place.

To that end, what went into the backyard the other night was my consummately visual scope, Zelda, a 10-inch GSO solid tube Dobsonian reflector who came to stay with me a couple of years ago.

There are no computers involved with Miss Z. The closest things she has to electronics are her primary mirror cooling fan and her illuminated zero power aiming device, a Rigel Quick Finder. Also into the backyard went the folding aluminum camp table I use as an observing table, and my case of favored eyepieces. Setup took all of five minutes and I was done.

Well, I was nearlydone, except for star charts. As I tell my undergraduate astronomy students, “You can’t find the stars’ homes without a map!” Did I say “no computers”? I did, but only ON the telescope. My Android tablet running Sky Safari Pro went on the observing table next to the eyepiece box. I could have used one of my print sky atlases, like Sky & Telescope’s Pocket Sky Atlas (or the new Jumbo edition, which I love). And I often do that when the yen for simple visual astronomy takes me. But you know what? In some ways, Sky Safari is simpler to use in the field than a book.

Want to find some object? No paging through an atlas, no trying to remember exactly which constellation NGC umptysquat lies in. Just click a little magnifying glass icon, type the DSO's name/designation, and the target will soon be centered on the screen under a Telrad reticle. Given my (somewhat) aging eyes, I also find SkySafari’s screen more legible than the pages of a book illuminated by a dim red LED flashlight.

On a recent cold (for me) Tuesday evening, the TV was showing nothing but reruns—when did the rascals come up with this "mid-season hiatus" nonsense? That was OK. In the backyard, the curtain was rising on the great sky show. I was excited at that prospect. Maybe more excited than I’d been about astronomy all year.

Excited, yes, but also unsure, as in being unsure exactly what to look at. While I am a big proponent of observing lists—usually if you go out to observe without one you won’t see much of anything at all—I hadn’t made one this time. Lazy? Maybe a little. Just wanting to recreate those spontaneous nights under the stars I experienced as a youngun? Perhaps that too. But I still needed some I idea where to point Zelda after I’d had a nice, long look at the sinking Ring Nebula, M57.

Sky Safari sure proved its worth here. I haven’t used the program much since I bought the Pro version some months back—I’d been tied to a laptop and using Stellarium during my picture taking. However, I dimly remembered SkySafari has pre-made observing lists…

I clicked the search icon, and, sure enough, there were those lists displayed before me. Including, thank goodness, “Tonight’s best.” I began running through ‘em starting with the wonderful starball that is M15. When I applied 200x to it in the somewhat hazy (and growing hazier) sky, the Pegasus globular broke into a horde of minute suns.

And so it went till my feet began to grow cold and the haze began to devolve into clouds some time later. I had plenty of fun. But I also had some epiphanies. “Rules” if you will, for observing the deep sky under suburban backyard skies.

Telescope: OK, so you wanna do some casual backyard visual observing, do you? Which scope? If you only have one, naturally that’s it. If you have a stable like some of us do, however, which one to use?

There is something to be said for a small telescope, especially a refractor, for casual backyard use. Especially for spur of the moment observing. I can have my 3-inch f/11 achromat or even my 4-inch f/10 achromat in the backyard and ready to rock in minutes. Since there is basically no cooldown required, I can have a quick look at M13 and be back inside for more Gotham after the commercial ends.

Casual observing, looking at the showpieces in an off-the-cuff sort of way, is great. But what if you want more? I, for example, have been thinking about running through the 600 objects in Orion’s (great) Deepmap 600 list. Some of these objects—in fact a of lot them—are a challenge for a small suburban refractor. At this point it's time to kick the aperture up a couple of notches.

What is the optimum aperture in the backyard for me for deeper deep sky observing? I’ve found that to be 10-inches. The horsepower gain over a three or four inch (or even an 8-inch) is considerable—don’t believe the old urban legend that says that more aperture doesn’t help in a light polluted suburban sky. A 10-inch solid tube (especially) Dobsonian is also very portable, if not in grab ‘n go fashion.

Equatorial or alt-azimuth mount? Either is fine with me, but my backyard observing does tend to be of a more casual nature than what I do at dark sites, and I usually don’t want to spend a lot of time fooling with a goto GEM. With a decent Dobsonian I don't miss tracking motors. Even my humble GSO “tracks” fine by hand at 300x. Its motions are smooth and easy, and even novices will soon get the hang of following objects with a scope like Zelda.

Yes, even a 10-inch Dobsonian can be a handful for some of us, especially as we grow older. If you’re observing in your backyard, however, you can minimize the amount of setting up and tearing down you have to do. If you have a reasonably secure yard, why not leave the telescope set up through stretches of clear weather? That’s what you'd do at a star party, so why not at home? A good cover like a Telegizmos one will keep your beloved telescope snug and safe from unexpected weather. Doing this is like having an observatory without the expense and hassle of actually putting up a dome or roll-off.

Eyepieces: Even if you’ve only been in our avocation for a short time, you’ve probably already begun to accumulate a box full of oculars. Which are good ones for the backyard?

As I've said many a time before, don’t scrimp on eyepieces. Buy the best you can afford. You'll be able to use them for the rest of your observing career. Good coatings and light transmission characteristics and build quality (a decent eye-cup is important if you have considerable ambient light to deal with in the backyard) are frankly even more important under the suburban sky than at a dark site.

Getting a good eyepiece does not mean you have to spend a mint. I love my TeleVue Ethos eyepieces, which I bought not long after they were released. But if I had to do it over again, I would likley not spend the money they command. As you know, I'm cheap and to my eyes the considerably less expensive Explore Scientific 100-degree eyepieces are every bit as good. And the even less expensive Meade 100s pleased me a lot when I reviewed them for Sky & Telescope not long ago.

Ethoses and other 80 - 100-degree jobs, are what your old Uncle favors? Yep. Especially if I'm using a Dobsonian without automated tracking. With a non-motorized telescope, keeping an object in view is much easier with a wide apparent field eyepiece. If you've got a wide field eyepiece, it's also sometimes possible to star hop using that eyepiece rather than a finder. That is particularly nice in areas like Virgo where there are few guide-stars visible in a 50mm finder. I can "eyepiece-hop" to those multitudinous galaxies.

A top of the line eyepiece may be wonderful, but that doesn’t mean it’s wonderful all the time, including in compromised suburban skies. I’ve had a 27mm TeleVue Panoptic for years and will never part with it. It’s a classic from a master of eyepiece design. However, in the backyard, I find a much humbler ocular, a 2-inch Bresser 25mm I won at a star party last year, trumps it. Slightly more apparent field, slightly darker field. Would I trade the 27 for one? No way. But the more expensive eyepiece isn’t always better.

Finding Objects: If you’re gonna see objects, you gotta find ‘em. The question is how to do that. Especially in the backyard where object finding is harder than anywhere else thanks to the bright skies and lack of stars to use as guideposts.

Certainly you can use goto. I’ve been a big proponent of automatic object locating since I realized goto was practical, affordable, and reliable over twenty years ago. Goto makes finding things in star poor suburban skies simple. One big benefit? If you know your goto mount places objects in the field without fail, you may be able to spy a very marginal DSO by scanning that field intensely. Not sure if the object is in the field or not? You’re tempted to move on after a little looking.

However, if, like me, a big part of backyard observing is “simple,” you may want to eschew batteries and cables and computers as I do with Zelda. What is effective for object locating in brighter skies? Not a zero power sight like Zelda’s Rigel Quick Finder, at least not by itself. There are not enough guide stars to allow you to pin an object down precisely without optical aid. That’s why I always use a 50mm finder in concert with the Rigel. I roughly position Zelda with the zero power sight, and then home in with the the finder scope and SkySafari.

What sort of 50mm finder? I prefer a right angle-correct image ("RACI") finder like the one Zelda came equipped with. The finder has a star diagonal which means I only have to shift my eye a short distance from the main scope eyepiece to view through the finder—very convenient and comfortable. The finder’s special built in star diagonal presents an image that is both right side up and mirror correct.

So, then you star hop. You look at your charts and draw imaginary lines and shapes to find your object: “M57 is halfway along a line between those two stars”…"M15 makes a shallow triangle with those bright stars" and so on and so forth. One tip? I find that if I can’t locate an object after several tries, it means I’m not just slightly off from its position in the sky, but way off. I further note it’s pretty easy to get out of practice with star hopping. If I haven’t done any in some months, it may take an evening or two to get back in the swim of things. Knowing that, I don’t get frustrated (“Why can’t I even find M37? I’m going back inside!”). I keep going and it all eventually comes flowing back.

Finally, don’t discount star hopping as fun in and of itself. Especially in suburban skies were the objects themselves don’t always look that great. The hunt is its own reward and sometimes that is enough.

Observing. You know all those observing tricks you’ve learned over the years? Or, if you’re a novice, the ones you’re reading about online or hearing from the old-timers at the club? They are very important for maximizing your viewing under compromised skies…

Averted vision: The light receptors toward the edge of the retina, the rods, are more sensitive than those near the center, the cones. So, if you’re observing an even marginally dim DSO, look “away” from it rather than directly at it to see the dimmest details.

Which eye? If you’re right handed, your right eye is likely the "dominant" one. If you’re left handed, vice-versa. Usually the dominant eye is better for deep sky observing, but experiment with the opposite eye as well.

Shake it! The eye-brain combo has an easier time registering moving objects, so sometimes a tap on the telescope tube will cause a challengingly dim DSO to appear as if by magic.

You can see a lot more if your eyes are as dark adapted as they can be. In the suburbs, what usually prevents that is not so much the general light pollution, but ambient light. Turn off nearby lights and shield your scope and yourself from those you can’t turn off.

Most amateur astronomers tend to use too little magnification on objects rather than too much. In the suburbs, more power darkens the background sky and increases contrast between it and the object of your desire.

Growing older. Alas, it happens to the best of us, even me. Being aware of the changes you’re experiencing or will experience will help you deal with them.

Your eyes’ corneas are probably beginning to yellow for starters. That can be good and bad. Bluer objects won’t be as bright, but if you, like me, are a fan of achromatic refractors, you’ll find the color purple has been much reduced. Your eyes now have built-in yellow filters and it’s as if your fast achromat has suddenly become an APO. Eventually, if you progress to cataracts, your eye doctor will say it’s time for the big fix, surgery. That will both return the stars to their accustomed brightness and turn your "APO" back into an achromat.

You may develop increased sensitivity to cold. I was pretty OK in this regard all through my 40s and well into my 50s. In my 60s, I find I get colder more quickly and can’t ignore that as easily as I once could. When my feet get cold, I know it’s time to quit. There is a big plus for backyard observing in this regard: When my feetsies get cold I can take a break inside and go back for more when I warm up.

Feeling creaky. Except for my (self-imposed) back problems, I’m pretty good here. The time will come for all of us, however, when it’s harder to contort the old bod to do things like look through straight-through finders. Luckily, there are work-arounds like the above-mentioned RACI finder. Did you know you can even get a right-angle adapter for a Telrad sight?

Weight can become a problem as we age. Make that will become a problem. That’s no reason to stop observing, however. Even if you have to drop down a couple of aperture notches, some telescope is better than no telescope. Also, modern designs like ultralight Dobs mean many of us are going to be able to carry on with at least as much horsepower as we used in middle age. The backyard is a big win here, since you can do things like wheel the scope out of and into a garage on a set of "wheely bars," etc., instead of having to carry the instrument to and from a vehicle.

Some of the older observers I know are beginning to go inactive due to a fear of falling in the dark. If you are in your 70s or 80s, there’s no doubt falls can be dangerous. In the backyard, however, you can do things like position small red lights on the ground to show the way, mark the scope and observing table with more red lights, and turn on white light when needed. In the backyard, you’re at least very familiar with your surroundings, too.

So, I've given up dark site observing? No. Not quite. I’ll go to a dark site when I’m chasing the dimmest of the dim, or want the best astrophotos I can get. But otherwise, it’s the friendly and comfortable back 40 for me these days.

Well, it wasn’t quitea white Christmas on the Gulf Coast, but, as you can see from the picture at left, taken a couple of weeks previously, we came close. Closer than in years, and years, and years. Maybe since the 1950s.

Anyway, what is Christmas without the Christmas Eve edition of the little old blog from Chaos Manor South? That has taken several forms over the eleven years we’ve been on the air here (hard to believe it’s been eleven freakin’ annums, true believers). Sometimes it’s been an epistle to Christmas Eve and its ghosts. Sometimes it’s been memories from my Christmases Long Past. Once in a while it’s been a short and sweet “Merry Christmas Everybody and Goodnight!” I thought this time might be a little different. Perhaps a recap of my astronomical year, something I’ve normally reserved for New Year’s.

Before we get to that, “MERRY CHRISTMAS CHARLIE BROWN!” And a wonderful night before Christmas, too. This one looks to be calm and uneventful here. Just me and the cats watching Netflix. Naturally, I put a telescope in the backyard, my 3-inch f/11 achromatic refractor, in hopes of getting my traditional Christmas Eve view of that most beautiful and numinous of all ornaments, M42. Shall we step out into the cold and have a look?..

“OK…what did I do with that darned red dot finder? Oh, yeah, I was using it with the Meade APO. Here it is…hope I remembered to turn the sucka off. Lucky Orion is in a sucker hole...looks like fog coming in. OK…smidge to the right and up.” And there it was, shining brightly through the suburban light pollution and lingering haze. Did M42 look as good as it does with a big scope at a dark site? It did to me. This was my first Christamas Eve look at the Great Nebula in a while, and I cannot help but think it’s a good omen for the coming year (fingers crossed, y’all)…

However, on this deep night the subject is 2017, not 2018.

Winter 2017

The year began with the end of my series on observing the Messier objects as we signed off with Messiers 107, 108, 109, and 110. Most of you seemed to enjoy the voyage through the Ms, which had been going on for most of 2016, but my title for this installment, “This is the End, My Friends” did upset a few of my faithful readers.

Given some of the changes I’d gone through over the previous two years, which I’d occasionally shared with you here, and my slowly decreasing output of blog articles, you were to be forgiven for thinking the title meant we were done, that the blog was finis. Not so—there weren’t to be quite as many updates in 2017 as in the past, but I still kept moving forward in my bumbling fashion.

As the cold months wore on and the skies grew ever cloudier, I turned to a new series, “The Novice Files.” The entries covered the basics of the sky globe, things like R.A. and declination, star and object names, object catalogs, etc. etc. Things that are familiar and obvious to most of us but puzzling for Joe and Jane Novice.

That was in part so I’d have something to write about. I sure wasn’t going to be doing many observing articles unless I could glom onto an x-ray telescope. I didn’t just do these articles to have fodder for the blog, though. I thought the subjects covered were pretty darned important for the newbies amongst us.

January also found me blogging about the latest and quite major update to the Stellarium program, which is literally the only planetarium software I use these days (other than the also great Cartes du Ciel occasionally). Yes, Stellarium is free, but it’s also so good, so pretty, so easy to use, and has so many wonderful features that the heavy hitters of commercial software, TheSky, Starry Night, and all the rest, sit unused on my hard drive. Couple Stellarium with the ASCOM scope control add-on, StellariumScope, and I am sitting in high cotton and don’t want for more.

As February came in and the sky began to get a little clearer, I found I needed some images for my magazine work and drug out my trusty Celestron Advanced VX mount. Why the VX? Why not my EQ6 or CGEM? The AVX had one big advantage: light weight. As you know if you’re a faithful reader, I injured my back in 2015 while washing the porch of our old Garden District Victorian home, and have suffered recurrent bouts of pain. Bad enough that the last thing I want to do is aggravate my back.

Light weight is good, but as I recounted in the blog entry, the VX is also surprisingly capable. With the telescopes I normally use for deep sky imaging in these latter days, f/7 5-inch and 80mm APO refractors, it works very well indeed, always delivering round stars. The VX has some cool modern features, too, like auto-alignment with Celestron’s Star Sense accessory.

Since I was doing imaging with the AVX, I thought I’d share some of the issues involving using the Chinese “clones” of the Vixen Great Polaris—like the AVX, the Explore Scientific Exos, the SkyWatcher HEQ5/Sirius, and others--in “Astrophotography with Inexpensive German Equatorial Mounts.”

I’ve always hated polar alignment, so when I found a way to polar align more easily and accurately than ever before using the Sharpcap software, my guide camera, and my guide scope, I just had to share that with you in “A New Way to Polar Align.” There is no doubt in my mind that the better polar alignment possible with Sharpcap is one of the things responsible for me being able to kick my astrophotography results up a notch.

Spring

Spring began to approach, and I found myself out in the backyard ever more frequently thanks to the slowly improving weather. So, I was back to fiddling with everybody’s favorite auto-guide program, PHD2. One of the recurring questions I get from new astrophotographers is, “Rod, what do I do about all those darned PHD brains settings?” I set out to answer that in “Getting Your PhD.”

Despite the time I was spending in that backyard—or maybe because of it—I found I had to bite the bullet and slow the blog down. In “Is This the End?” I broke the news to my faithful cadre of Sunday Morning aficionados that I just couldn’t keep up the weekly publication schedule I’d maintained for years. I hoped, I said, that I could eventually begin to get new articles out the door every week again, but cautioned that “once a month” was more likely—which has turned out to be accurate.

Looking over my output for late spring and summer, I’m actually amazed I published as often as I did. The weather down here was frightful. It was as cloudy as it has been in a long time, and that’s saying something given the nasty weather cycle we’ve been in for the last five years or so.

Summer

Despite Stormy Weather, I pressed on through a tropical summer. I even managed to get my traditional yearly image of M13 in July. From my backyard—I’ve grown weary of lugging a ton of gear out to my dark site. Despite the scudding clouds of a muggy night, one on which I felt like was observing from underwater, I was still able to bring home My Yearly M13 with my SkyWatcher 120mm APO and the reliable and dependable AVX.

Despite raindrops and mosquitoes, July actually turned out to be a good month for the blog, with several entries appearing. It seemed that with the pressure to publish turned off, I was having more fun writing the Astroblog than I’d had in a long while.

One of my favorite articles from this time was “To PEC or not to PEC?” wherein I not just explained the Periodic Error Correction feature of modern telescope mounts, but programmed PPEC into my VX, bringing its RMS error down to a very respectable (for a sub 1000-dollar GEM) 1” RMS or so.

The next July entry, “Good, Old EQ6” was an epistle to my much-loved Atlas GEM mount, which I’d owned for ten years by this time. It was also a goodbye to it. Unfortunately, back problems meant the handwriting was most assuredly on the wall for the EQ6—it was too heavy for me to lift safely anymore, and I’d just have to get rid of it. The article came from my backyard checkout of the mount prior to selling it. The Atlas performed so well that I almost decided not to let it go after all. Until I was removing the mount from the tripod and almost aggravated my back, wouldn’t you know it?

The final July article was in the same vein, and concerned my disposing of some more beloved gear beginning with my Celestron CGEM. The mount had been a great performer for me—don’t believe everything you read on Cloudy Nights—but, like the Atlas, it was just too freaking heavy and I had to sell it too. Which I did.

Perhaps even more sadly, I let go of my C11 for the same reason. If there’s an SCT I’ve loved best over the years, it’s probably Big Bertha, my NexStar 11 GPS. However, I decided leaving the OTA sitting in her case month and month after month wasn’t doing either of us any good. So it was that with a heavy heart I determined that the C11 would follow the CGEM and Atlas.

Don’t feel too sorry for your Uncle Rod, though. Having a small pile of cash before me allowed for the purchase of a new GEM, one a little lighter and easier to manage than the two Syntas had become. A brand spanking new Losmandy GM811G arrived in late August, which was chronicled in “A Losmandy GM811G Comes to Chaos Manor South.”

Fall

The summer weather was awfully punk, and the fall was most assuredly no better. Thanks mostly to that weather, I didn’t get to put in a lot of hours with the Losmandy. But what little I was able to do with this very pretty mount impressed me. I especially loved the full-color touch screen Gemini 2 hand control and the mount’s Ethernet connectivity.

September and October only featured a single entry apiece. One concerned the experience of using the GM811 for visual observing, and the other my (semi) return to video observing—prompted by the arrival of a wonderful box of video goodies from the legendary Orange County Telescope.

Winter

November? November only got one entry as well, a report on the Deep South Star Gaze for 2017. Alas, that much-looked-forward-to star party was a bust for me this year. Poor food, poor skies, and a couple of rather irritating episodes gave this piece its title, “You Can’t Win ‘em All.”

December looked like it would only be blessed with a single update too, this one—no way am I gonna skip the Christmas Eve blog. But the week before the holiday brought another article. With the pressure to take pictures for magazine articles off for the moment, I thought it would be nice to get out for some relaxing visual observing with my simple, non-electronic GSO 10-inch Dobsonian Zelda. It was and I frankly enjoyed that run more than I have any observing in a while. Sometimes the secret is “Minimize”…

…and so, Christmas approaches, me stirring from my semi-doze on the couch only long enough to click Netflix’s accursed “Are You Still Watching?” button. What more is left to say? Only “Have a great holiday, God bless us everyone, and here’s to a wonderful 2018”—old glass half full me (on my good days) has decided it IS gonna be a good one.

If you’ve been reading these little epistles for a while, you know I one of my uses for planetarium software—programs that create a graphic representation of the sky on your desktop—is to send my goto telescope mounts on their gotos. When I am imaging, anyway. It’s nice to be able to sit at the laptop with the camera control software running and send the scope to its next target with a mouse-click. No getting up and walking out to the scope (which is set up in the yard while I operate from the deck) to fool with the hand controller. But I do have another use for planetariums, one that’s just as important.

My other use for Cartes du Ciel, Stellarium, and the rest is for quick reference. I want to know what’s going be up at 8 p.m. Or I’m writing a magazine article and need to find out where faint fuzzy number one is located in regard to faint fuzzy number two. Sometimes I need the objects’s basic statistics: the spectral type of a particular star, the magnitude of a cluster, the Hubble type of a galaxy; you get the picture.

For most of my indoor use, I do not need a soft with ten zillion stars and galaxies in its database. I need a program that is, most of all, quick to launch. If a soft takes more than 15 – 20 seconds to start, I become annoyed. I just wanna see when Orion’s gonna be up good and high, and I don't want to wait all freaking day to find out. So what do I use?

Let’s turn the clock back, way back (well, relatively speaking) to the early 1990s. The first truly useful astronomy program I encountered is still one of the best for quick reference—or would be if you could get the DOS based SkyGlobe 3.6 to run on a post-Windows XP machine. Skyglobe was, above all, fast, blazingly fast, to load even on my old 486 (don’t ask, kids). I was still using it when my Toshiba satellite running XP finally gave up the ghost.

Details

After that? I foundered and floundered for a while. Cartes du Ciel is a wonderful program. It’s free, but nevertheless is still one of the greatest astro-softs to ever to be published. Problems with it? While it’s its GUI has gotten a little fancier over the years, it’s still pretty old fashioned in that regard. And the graphics, its depiction of the sky, are old school for sure. More Skyglobe than TheSky X. That last is not a huge problem for my use, but I still like a pretty display, I must admit. CdC is certainly quick to load, too, if not Skyglobe fast. In about 15 seconds max it is ready to roll on my middle of the road desktop.

I was happy with CdC for a long time. It was basically all I used day in and day out for everything, including for indoor reference, sending my Celestron mounts on gotos, and serving as a front end for EQMOD. I doubt I'll ever stop using Cartes. It simply does some things no other freeware soft does. Just because CdC is a good thing, however, that doesn't mean it is the only thing.

One day I discovered Stellarium. It was just so pretty. And was every bit as fast to load as Cartes du Ciel. Moreover, its drag-the-sky-with-the-mouse trope was so smooth and fast that it was love at first sight. The same went for most of the rest of its GUI. I loved Stellarium, and once hailed it as “the new Skyglobe.”

Alas, there’s this thing called “feature creep.” Stellarium has grown up, and, like a lot of us, in middle age it’s grown out, too. It has put on a few pounds virtually speaking. Even if I don’t turn on much of its extensive (and amazing) feature set, the current release has me tapping my fingers as it loads up—it now takes as long as 30-seconds (like many programs, it’s faster if you’ve recently run it). That may not sound long for you, but it's an eternity for your impatient Uncle Rod when he’s got a hot observing idea or an inspiration as to a target to add to an observing article.

Then, I happened to read a post on everybody’s fave astro-BBS, Cloudy Nights. A post about a program I hadn’t heard about in a long time, KStars. If you, like me, once fooled around with Linux, even for a little while, the program's name is probably familiar. It was one of the (few) serious astronomy apps for that operating system when I was going through my Linux phase. Reading the post on CN, I was surprised to learn the program is not only still around, it is still being developed. There is now a version for, believe it or not, Windows 10. Huh! From running it on Linux (under the K desktop, natch) I remembered it as small and fast and thought I’d give the Win version a try.

External resources

Installing KStars is simplicity itself; simply download it (here), and double click the install file when Windows (or Linux or OSX) finishes. Installation is automatic with no unzipping or anything like that required.

Installation complete, I clicked on the program’s icon (which I had to send to the desktop manually; it wasn’t placed there automatically) and got out my stopwatch. In less than 10-seconds the program was up and prompting me to begin set up. Which was also painless. About all KStars needed to know from me was my location. You can enter latitude and longitude manually, or just click on a city from KStars long list. After that, all that remains is the additional files window.

Like most modern programs, KStar offers an extensive set of supplemental object catalogs and image files. You can have millions of stars and deep sky objects if you wish. Me? I didn’t wish. In the interest of keeping the program small and quick, I only downloaded one additional item, thumbnail type images of the NGC objects for display in the information window that can be displayed for deep sky objects. If you should change your mind about additional files, it’s easy to run the installation wizard again later and add or remove files as desired.

What was my first impression of KStars? “Pretty enough. The display ain’t as attractive as Stellarium’s but looks more modern than that of Cartes du Ciel.” Experimentally clicking and dragging the sky around to change my view yielded good results. It was every bit as smooth as this function is in Stellarium. I did note dimmer stars and DSOs are erased during a drag—presumably to speed things up (Stellarium doesn’t do that).

Like other planetarium programs, the next step is to turn on/off features you want or don’t want. With KStars, that mostly involved turning on the constellation lines and setting up labels and their densities (numbers) for constellations, stars, and deep sky objects. When I had the program looking he way I like, I did a little playing around to get the lay of the land.

Hyperlinks

First thing, I picked a DSO, good, old M81, and clicked on it. I wanted to see what sort of data KStars would yield about targets. To do that, right click on an object and select “details” from the menu that appears. What I got is shown above, which is not much. The galaxy’s Hubble type isn’t even given. All there is is magnitude, position, size, and alternate designations. That’s the bad. The good is that clicking the "links" and “advanced” tabs brings up hyperlinks to web pages concerning the object, and to resources like NED, the NASA Extragalactic database. Unfortunately, I was disappointed to find that many of the web page hyperlinks in the details window are dead links. Moreover, even if the URLs all worked, I would like a little more info on objects in the program itself. Both Stellarium and Cartes du Ciel do much better here.

One of the things I do most frequently when writing about deep sky objects, is, as previously mentioned, describe their positions in terms of their distance from another object in angular degrees and position angle with regard to that other object, “M78 is 2-degrees 30’ northeast of Alnitak.” Alas, while you can engage an angular separation mode that measures the separation of two objects when you draw a line between the two with the mouse, KStars only gives separation, not position angle as well like most other programs do.

At first, I thought that was it for KStars. Knowing both separation and position angle is important for me. Then, I discovered KStars’ astronomical calculator. One of the many functions it performs is determining the separation and angle of two objects. It’s easy to select objects from a list, and a push of a button then gives both angular distance andposition angle. Frankly, I found this easier (and more precise) than using a mouse.

The calculator

Otherwise, what’s the program like? Oh, it’s fairly basic stuff. It has some built-in pictures for the more prominent objects displayed on the charts. Various reticles (like a Telrad) can be overlaid on the maps. A red night vision mode can be engaged. Unlike Stellarium, you can print charts (if not very good looking ones). There’s even telescope control. Alas, that’s via INDI, not ASCOM. I don’t know that I’ll fooling around with that, but I don’t really intend to use KStars on the observing field, anyway.

So, to sum up? It’s a useable program for just about anything. Is there a reason or reasons to use KStars instead of the big two freeware planetariums? Yes. If you, like me, need fast. Or you need small. Or maybe hardware constraints dictate you need both, you could do worse.

Much as I miss good old Skyglobe, I must admit humble KStars just blows its doors off. And that's good. But. Will I use it? How much will I use it. That remains to be seen. I like KStars, but I’ll admit it’s gonna be hard to make myself stop using those old reliables CdC and Stellarium. Stay tuned.

I’m busy with a new book (and maybe a revised edition of an old one), writing for Sky & Telescope with some regularity, and don’t have a lot of time for the old blog right now. However, I couldn’t let Christmas pass without at least a short post.

What’s been going on here astronomy-wise? Clouds, that’s what. But in the days leading up to THE BIG DAY, I did get a few nights good enough to warrant dragging my 10-inch Dobbie, Zelda, into the backyard. Admittedly, she hasn’t been used much in the last year, and I was curious to see what I thought about her three-and-a-half years down the line.

Why did Zelda, a basic solid-tube Zhumell (GSO made) Dobsonian, come to stay with me in 2015 (can it really have been that long)? Mostly to replace my hallowed truss tube reflector, Old Betsy, who was destined to go to a new owner in the winter of that year. Betsy had become too much for me to handle thanks to a back injury I’d sustained. One afternoon, out of curiosity, I booted up her computer, a Sky Commander DSC rig, and the last date in it indicated she hadn’t been used in well over a year and a half.

So, Betsy had to go, but I still wanted a little aperture for the visual deep sky, and set about hunting for something more suited to my new realities (which in addition to my reduced ability to lift heavy telescopes included a fairly decent backyard for routine observing). I had an 8-inch Dob, but that just wasn’t enough for some of my backyard observing. Obviously 12-inches (and up) was too much. That left a 10-inch aperture solid tube Dobsonian.

Why a solid tube? In apertures under 12-inches, I find one to be easier to lug around than a truss tube job. It's a pain to have to disassemble a truss tube's tube. Even if you can leave it in one piece, it's still easier (for me) to manage a solid tube in the process of getting it out into the yard.

Anyhow, after I settled on a 10-inch Dob, a solid tube Dob, the questions became: “What sort of solid tube Dobsonian and from whom?” The first question was easy to answer. I didn’t think I’d be chasing Herschel 2500, PGC, and UGC galaxies from my back 40. I’d be after the relatively bright stuff. Stuff I could locate with fair ease even in my compromised skies with a 50mm RACI (right angle/correct image) finder and a zero power Rigel Quick Finder site. No goto or even digital setting circles required.

That left the question of where to buy. Which was a little more difficult. Orion, of course, was (and is) a big player in the solid tube Dobsonian game. They had some nice ones back in 2015; especially their goto/tracking models. As above, though, I didn’t want goto and tracking. Their standard (from Synta) Dobs were a little more expensive than the competition, and didn’t offer the features of the other widely available (at the time) brand, GSO. Since I preferred GSO, that also eliminated the Syntas Synta sells themselves under their SkyWatcher brand.

The GSO Dobs, which are still available (sometimes even from Orion) had some features I really liked. While not everybody agrees, I loved the smooth, easy Lazy Susan bearing on the azimuth axis. The knobs that adjust altitude tension were far better, I thought, than the silly spring tension system the Syntas from SkyWatcher and Orion had.

Another huge factor was the GSO accessory lineup: an excellent 2-inch two-speed Crayford focuser, a 50mm RACI finder, a pair of eyepieces including a decent 2-inch 30mm wide-field, an eyepiece rack, a cooling fan for the OTA, and a laser collimator.

OK, ya’ll…I’ll fess up. Thebiggest selling point for your penny-pinching old Uncle Rod? In mid-2015 you could get a 10-inch shipped to you for less than 500 bucks (yes). That was made possible by a big and now gone scope retailer, telescopes.com (Orion now owns that domain name), a subsidiary of the enormous Hayneedle operation. Not only did the 10-inch Zhumell-branded GSO go for a great price, they had it on my front porch in two days.

From the time Zelda arrived, she was a comfortable scope for me. She remains set up in the sun room. When it’s time to observe, I separate OTA from base—the OTA will stand safely on its own vertically—get the mount into the backyard with the aid of a nice carrying handle, return for the OTA, carry it across the deck and down three steps, and I am done. There’s also the fact that I can leave the telescope set up in my secure backyard for days at a time if I get a good, clear stretch. All I have to do to begin observing is remove her Telegizmos cover.

It doesn’t do much good to be able to get a telescope into the backyard in a hurry if it takes a long time to acclimate to outdoor temperatures so it can deliver its best images. The built-in battery-powered cooling fan turned out to be less of a mere gimmick than I thought it would. It really helps get the telescope acclimatized and ready to observe in as short a time as possible. I generally run the fan the entire time I’m observing, and have never noticed any sort of vibration even at high power.

Such were my thoughts on this year’s Christmas Eve as I waited for dark. Zelda had been set up for three days while I used her to test a product for an upcoming Sky & TelescopeTest Report. That was done. Tonight, it would be strictly fun observing including my traditional Christmas Eve look at M42. Alas, it would be about an hour before the Great Nebula was well placed for observing. What could I look at till then? How about the little comet that’s caught everybody’s attention, C46/P Wirtanen?

The visitor is currently passing through Auriga, and while the constellation wasn’t very high up—it was just above the roof of the house—I couldn’t wait for it to get much higher. A full Moon would shortly be on the rise, and would no doubt extinguish the comet. A quick look at my fave astronomy/planetarium program, Stellarium, showed me where the sprite lay: just north of and midway along a line drawn between Capella and Menkalian (Beta Aurigae).

I began hunting around with a 27mm ocular, but kept coming up empty. Hmm. The sky was bright to the east where the Charioteer was hovering. That is, in fact, the most light-polluted area of my sky. How do you deal with a bright sky background? One way is by increasing magnification, spreading out the sky glow. In went my vaunted Happy Hand Grenade, a 16mm 100-degree eyepiece once sold by TMB, Zhumell, and others.

A little slewing and a little staring soon turned up a something. Which eventually morphed, as I concentrated and used averted vision, into a little more than that. There didn’t seem to be a star-like nucleus, but there was a subtle central concentration and brightening. The coma wasn’t round; it was distinctly oval. I almost convinced myself I could see a hint of a tail.

After admiring the comet—such as it was—for a fair amount of time, it was time for target two. What’s one of the best objects for urban and suburban observers other than open clusters? Small and medium-sized planetary nebulae. Riding high was one I hadn’t visited in quite some time, NGC 7662, the Blue Snowball.

At magnitude 8.5 and a size of 37”, the Snowball is just about perfect for a suburban sky watcher. Certainly, it was not a challenge for Zelda. Well, not after I foundit, anyway. While NGC 7662 was good and high, in my somewhat hazy skies its area was somewhat star-poor. Nevertheless, after consulting Stellarium, the object was in the field of the Happy Hand Grenade in short order.

At 78x, NGC 7662 looks a lot Jupiter shining through clouds. A large, slightly oval, slightly dim, slightly soft-edged disk. And that is about it—well, other than that, as its name suggests, the nebula is slightly (very slightly on this night) blue-tinged.

Is the above all there is to see of the Blue Snowball? Not quite. Inserting my 4.7mm 82-degree Explore Scientific eyepiece and adding an OIII filter to that brought out subtle hints of detail. It was clear the nebula isn’t just the bright and featureless disk it appears to be at low powers. At high power, it shows subtle darker and brighter patches near its center, hints of the inner ring visible in long exposure images.

What else did I notice on this night? How good Zelda’s primary mirror is. Say what you will; the Chinese telescope factories have their game down. Their optics are almost universally good and consistent, and have allowed many of us to own telescopes better than we ever thought we would.

Blue Snowball essayed, it was M42 time. I was not to be skunked this Christmas Eve as I had been the last couple of years, but it was a pretty near thing. High clouds were beginning to roll across the sky in advance of a front that will trouble us over the next week or so. For now, however, the sky was holding and I was granted my first good look at the nebula this year.

How was it? The haze was undeniable, but there was still so much to see. Not just the huge “wings” of nebulosity, but the fascinating stars of the Trapezium and the many other tiny and brilliant suns scattered across the cloud. Soon, I wasn’t just seeing the nebula with my eyes, but with my mind.

I began recalling views of Christmases past stretching all the way back to Christmas vacation 1966 and my first look at this incredible wonder. I haven’t seen the nebula everyChristmas Eve. Sometimes clouds have intervened, and sometimes other things have kept my eye from a telescope, but to me it will always be the ornament of ornaments.

Nebula admired, and memories reviewed, it was time to ring down the curtain on this observing run and another Christmas Eve. I covered the scope, and was soon inside, relaxing with the cats and wondering whether I needed to watch It’s a Wonderful Lifeone more time.

Merry Christmas, everybody! I enjoyed bringing a new blog article to you after a long recess. So much so that I plan on doing more as summer comes in (especially if summer somehow, someway brings clear skies with it!). What else is there to say? Dicken’s still says it best:

“It was always said of him [Scrooge], that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!"

Seems like it was just Christmas 2018 a little while ago, and not so long before that it was Christmas 2017. At your old Uncle’s slightly advanced age, the years have begun to come thick and fast, muchachos. It’s almost unbelievable, when I think about it, how long the 10 days from the beginning of Christmas vacation to Christmas seemed when I was a little nipper. One reward, I suppose? Long-ago Christmases don’t seem so far away anymore.

Enough of that. While I hope to crank the blog back up in the coming year, that is not happening just yet. Nevertheless, I thought those of you who used to enjoy my little epistles would like an update on my doings in 2019.

2019 began rather momentously for me with two book contracts. One for the long awaited second edition of Choosing and Using a New CAT. And one for a new volume on backyard deep sky observing for the BBC. My preliminary title for which is From City Lights to Deep Space--we’ll see what the publisher chooses to call it when it comes out next year. January also brought another Sky & Telescope assignment, a Test Report on Lumicon’s new and (much) improved OIII filters.

It seemed as if my astronomy game was on a definite upswing after a year, 2018, when I hadn’t done much observing for a variety of reasons. I didn’t go to many star parties that year, either. After a momentous season in 2016 when I traveled far and wide, speaking, teaching, and observing at star parties north, south, east, and west, air travel had finally gotten to me. I decided it was time to ring the curtain down on my speaking engagements. A friend and I began calling 2016 “Uncle Rod’s Farewell Tour.” It wasn’t till January 2019 that I realized just how inauspicious that description would turn out to be.

So, anyhow, I found myself on the roof of our suburban home on January the 9th of this year adjusting a new HF radio antenna. I was home alone, and normally don’t do that sort of thing without Miss Dorothy around in case I need assistance. But I was bored and wanted to get the work done. UP I went.

While I might not quite be over the hill, I am older now, and about halfway through the evolution I began to feel a little shaky up on the top of the house. I said to myself, “You know, this is really stupid. Get down and call one of your ham buddies to come help you.” I descended. And if I’d left it at that, all would have been well. Alas, I began thinking, “Everybody’s at work. Might not be able to get somebody to help me for a few days. Left some tools up there. Better get ‘em down.” Up I went without incident.

The spot I needed to be on the roof was adjacent to the deck, so I (foolishly) placed the extension ladder on that deck instead of the ground. I knew the ladder would be less likely to slip on the ground, but, heck, I’d gotten away with it numerous times. Not this time. I retrieved the tools and just as I put my weight on a rung down it went, landing on the deck about 14-feet below. I landed on top of the aluminum ladder.

Was I out for a while? I believe so, but everything was hazy then and now. What I do remember clearly was realizing I’d really gone and done it, that I’d really put my foot in it thistime. Next thought was I’d better get my cell phone out of my pocket and call Dorothy or maybe 911. No can do, Rap. It was obvious when I tried to move my right arm that it was badly broken, that my upper arm was badly broken. Naturally my iPhone was in my right pocket. So, there I lay vaguely hoping Miss D. would be home soon. I recall being cold at first, but then just kind of being out of it and feeling faintly, fuzzily comfortable.

And there I was for some time. How long? The paramedics thought at least half an hour if not longer had passed. Finally, I heard Miss D. get out of her car in the carport and came somewhat to my senses, “Dorothy, HALP!HALP!” Dorothy took one look at me aghast and wanted to know what she could do to help me, “Just call 911!” In a thankfully short period of time, several EMTs were standing over me—there’s a firehouse just a mile or two from us. What do I remember most? The Chief EMT got out his HT radio and called the University Medical Center. His words scared me a little, even in my out of it state: “Look I don’t give a (expletive deleted) if you’re full. You’re the trauma center and we’re bringing him there!”

Next thing I knew, I was in an ambulance with the siren screaming. Mostly what I remember from that trip is how cold I was. When the EMTs asked me if I were hurting, and I answered truthfully, “No, I’m just so (expletive deleted) cold!” They covered me with an electric blanket, and began giving me blood (which I later learned is unusual during an ambulance ride unless you are in pretty bad shape).

The ER, surgery, and the recovery room at the hospital are hazy at best. I began to come back to myself when I was finally moved to my (large, modern) room at the University of South Alabama’s hospital. What was my status? The surgeon didn’t sugar coat it. I’d suffered a compound fracture of my upper right arm, I’d lost a large amount of blood, broken several ribs, sustained serious kidney damage, had nearly lost my right ear, and was pretty much a mass of bruises and swelling. He further remarked, “You know, Rod, you were in pretty good shape for a 65-year-old man. If you hadn’t been…well, you likely wouldn’t still be here.” It seemed the physical fitness kick I’d been on for the previous couple of years had served a purpose other than my vanity.

So much for the accident. The next couple of months saw me go from hobbling around the house, to getting about with a cane, to being able to drive again, to getting back to work teaching at the University, to spending blessed Monday nights at Heroes, again. Astronomy-wise, things were for sure at all-stop. It was just a darned good thing I’d done the observing for my S&T Test Report before the accident. I was able to get my copy to my Editor, Sean Walker, who was very understanding, almost on time despite everything.

My eventual recovery was largely due to the efforts of Dorothy and a couple of good friends—you know who you are—who kept me on the straight and narrow and gave untold moral support.

As I began to at least be able to get around—I was not my old self and still am not—two thoughts entered my mind: those two book manuscripts. I’d done little on the backyard observing book and nothing on the second edition of New CATs. I knew I had to get to work even if I didn’t feel like it.

The backyard deep sky book actually went fairlyeasily. I have logbook after logbook filled with urban and suburban deep sky observations going back over 30 years. All I had to do was pick some good ones of objects suited for observers in the British Isles and, well, put my butt in the chair and write. Once I got into the groove, it wasn’t bad, and with the aid of ace proof reader Dorothy, the MS went out right on time.

Now, however, I had the CAT book to do. Once I started going over my original text, I realized I had a lot of work ahead of me. The telescope buying guide chapter would have to be almost entirely rewritten. So would the chapter on imaging. Things have changed so much in the eleven years since the book came out. Not just in that Celestron and Meade have almost totally revamped their lineups. The cameras we use for imaging and the way we use them have changed every bit as much or more. When I wrote the original book, a big topic, for example, was modified webcams. That seems like ancient history now.

And so, I started the long slog through chapters four and eleven. When they were done, I had a look at the rest of the book. It was obvious there was plenty of work to be done on everything else as well. Changing the two big chapters inevitably changed things in plenty of places in the rest of the book. And there were also lots of problems with my original prose that needed to be fixed. An additional decade of astronomy writing had done a lot to improve my skills. Also, many of the photos in the book would have to be replaced, and I’d need to get with Celestron and Meade and secure images of their current models.

About halfway through, I began to despair. One of the lingering aftereffects of my accident, and one that still plagues me occasionally, is difficulty concentrating and a sometimes-short attention span. However, I persevered and the new CAT book actually went out the door a month ahead of schedule. Dorothy was again a huge help with the MS, and I’m sorry for what I put her through. That difficulty concentrating meant I’d forget what I’d said and how I’d said it a few paragraphs earlier and make mistakes. Thanks are also due to the good folk at Celestron and Meade who graciously furnished me with the pictures I needed.

In all this time, about eight months, I had done exactly no observing with a telescope. I will admit I wasn’t anxious to do any, either. I felt—and still feel—the cold more intensely than before. I have a metal plate in my right upper arm, too, and when it’s cold I can find myself in considerable pain. Combine that with a somewhat nagging fear of falling in the dark and reduced endurance, and I just didn’t want to spend any time at the eyepiece. Nevertheless, I accepted an assignment from Sky & Telescopeto do a review of Meade’s LX85 ACF Schmidt Cassegrain.

Maybe I just needed a deadline hanging over my head to get me outside with a scope. That did the trick, anyway, and I was soon out back happily observing and even doing long exposure imaging with the pretty Meade SCT and goto mount. I was not just happy with the resulting Test Report; I was happy I’d got out in the dark with a telescope and done something.

And that brings us to the now. Where do I stand with astronomy as the year fades? I’m continuing my teaching at the university, and have even been able to get the students out with their telescopes a few times. And I have a beautiful Losmandy GM811G that’s gone unused (or even powered on) for well over a year. I’m hoping that as spring comes in, at least, I’ll be hitting the backyard regularly. I actually have an observing program in mind that I might bring to you here: a (simpler) successor to the vaunted Herschel Project.

As for those pesky wire antennas crossing over the house at W4NNF? They are gone. Replaced by a Hustler 6BTV vertical antenna for 80 – 10. It has a tilt base and I can stand with my feet planted firmly on the ground should I need to work on it. I have learned my lesson in that regard, at least.

Be all that as it may, merry Christmas to you, my friends, and thanks to those who’ve mentioned how much they used to love this blog and how much they miss it.

Oh, almost forgot. How about my yearly Christmas Even ritual? My Christmas Eve look at M42? The sky wasn't looking good all Christmas Eve day. In fact, we were mostly socked in until late afternoon. But then it began to clear. Oh, there was high cirrus in the sky prophesying bad weather to come, but while not perfect, it looked as if I might even so get a look at that grandest of all Christmas ornaments. Crossing my fingers, I maneuvered my 80mm f/11 SkyWatcher achromatic refractor on its alt-az mount onto the deck. Not only is the scope easy for me to move out in my current state, it's easy to move back in if the weather does not cooperate. It's not a bad little telescope, either.

At 8 pm the hunter had risen far enough to fool with, and--there it was--the Great Orion Nebula shining bravely in the haze and suburban light pollution. The best I've ever seen it? Not hardly. But beautiful still, and, I hope, an omen signaling a better year for your old Uncle.

Aw for—! Meade’s at it again! Muchachos, it’s barely been six years since we last had to visitthis subject: the failing fortunes of America’s beloved former telescope giant, Meade Instruments. Last time, things went bust shortly after the company moved its production to Mexico. The familiar faces who made Meade a name were gone, and the company was soon bought by a Chinese corporation, Ningbo Sunny, who was never much more than a cipher. Now, we fans of Old Blue learn she’s sinking again. Ningbo has declared bankruptcy and is looking for a buyer.

You can read more about the story here, and a Google search will quickly turn up further details. The short skinny, though? U.S. telescope dealer Orion (who is, need I say, not the same Orion Tim Giesler started, just like Meade ain’t the Meade John Diebel started and Celestron ain’t the Celestron Tom Johnson started) filed a 180-million dollar anti-trust lawsuit asserting Meade/Ningbo Sunny colluded with other Chinese manufacturers to set prices (we assume that “other” is Synta). Meade is in the process of selling itself under court supervision.

None of which surprises me much. I’ve long been aware relationships between Chinese corporations are almost invariably incestuous sorts of things. And I’ve long speculated that Synta and Ningbo Sunny might actually be the same entity.

What happens next? Does Orion buy Meade? I wouldn’t be surprised. How about Celestron? The FTC has never looked favorably upon a Meade - Celestron merger or buyout, and I would guess they’d look even more unfavorably on it now due to the Synta factor. But how did we get here, anyway? How did two once great telescope companies go right down the drain?

Celestron’s story is relatively simple. The company was started as Celestron Pacific by California electronics engineer and amateur telescope maker Tom Johnson. In 1970, he expanded Celestron’s sales efforts, which had been focused on small colleges and schools, to amateur astronomers. Celestron quickly put hordes of famous Newtonian telescope makers like Cave, Optical Craftsmen, and Criterion in the grave. Despite competition from Meade beginning in 1980, Celestron dominated the serious telescope market. Until two things happened.

First, Tom Johnson decided to sell his company and enjoy life. The buyer was the Swiss holding company Diethelm. The problem was that Diethelm didn’t know much about telescopes—nor did most of the people at the company care—and just wanted to take money out of Celestron. Celestron did make money during Comet Halley, but they wore out their workforce and their machine tools and equipment in the process, and the hangover was nasty. Though Meade had a similarly difficult time during Halley, they were again under the leadership of their founder, John Diebel, who, like Johnson, had begun the company on his kitchen table. Under his guidance Meade began to dominate Celestron as the 1990s came in.

Celestron was chronically undercapitalized by this time and had a hard time coming out with an answer to Meade’s computerized LX200 telescope, a telescope that pointed at sky objects reliably and automatically. The irony is that Celestron had introduced the first goto SCT, the Compustar in the 80s. Unfortunately, it was expensive and fussy. Meade ruled the roost through the 1990s and just went from strength to strength, following the LX200 with the ETX, the LX90, and the LX200 GPS.

Things didn’t change for the better for Celestron until they were free of Diethelm. In the process of freeing themselves, they briefly became an employee owned company, but, again, there wasn’t enough capital. In what we at first thought heralded disaster, they were bought by notorious telescope importer Tasco. Those of us who came up in the 60s and 70s have some pretty unfavorable memories of Tasco’s cheap department store scopes, but there is more to that story than you may imagine. You can read the rest of the story right here. Bottom line was that Tasco’s capital allowed Celestron to develop an outstanding line of goto telescope, the NexStars, which showed the company could again be competition for and even a threat to Meade.

At first, however, it looked like we’d be down to one scope company after all, Meade. Tasco declared bankruptcy (that had nothing to do with Celestron, which was the only money-making part of the company) and Meade attempted to buy Celestron. The FTC said “no,” optical giant Synta stepped in, and, frankly, it was downhill all the way for Meade from there.

Meade’s problems didn’t just concern the resurgence of Celestron. A couple of their actions had contributed. First, the company went public. Certainly, that sounded reasonable when the company was on top of the world, and certainly Mr. Diebel deserved to profit handsomely for his long hard years of work. But Meade wasn’t quite as stable as they appeared to be, and going public just made things dicier. A blow came when most Walmarts stopped selling Christmas Telescopes not long after a major dealer of the things, Discovery Channel Stores, went under. Meade’s numbers were good, but a lot of those numbers were due to the department store end of the business that really wasn’t that profitable anyway. Take away the el cheapo part of the equation and things began to look a lot bleaker for the blue team.

One other misstep, I’ve been told, was the company’s dalliance with an optical communications company. All those ETX 125’s with metal rear cells you’ve seen surplused out were built for this failed endeavor. A company with deep roots and resources like a GE can afford a few disasters. A company built on the shifting sands of a niche market? Not so much.

And so, production halted at Meade’s big factory site in Irvine (not far from Ducks Stadium) and the facility was soon on the chopping block. Meade still operates from a nearby location, but the once grandiose home/factory of the world’s largest and most successful telescope company is no more. The top-line amateur scopes began to be produced in Mexico and everything else came from Ningbo-Sunny or one of their “friends” in China.

And there things have sat. Read the piece linked in the first paragraph, Pore Old Blue, if you want more details on the circumstances at the time of the Meade's sale (including a couple of utterly disastrous product introductions). Following the Chinese buyout, from what I could see, Meade continued on pretty with business as usual—if at a level that appeared to place them a distant second to Celestron for the first time in a long while. The big, splashy everybody-will-want-one Meade product introductions, and that crazy, wonderful old full-color glossy print catalog were but fading memories, but Meade was still producing good telescopes.

I found that out when I got my hands on my first new Meade in a long time, the company’s new LX80 GEM. Admittedly, some things did spell t-r-o-u-b-l-e for me. Like a shipping container that was made out of what appeared to be recycled Kleenex, and a manual that was not only incomplete, but which was merely a half-hearted rewrite of decade old LX75 instructions. However, everything worked. I was quite impressed by the Meade answer to the Celestron AVX—I thought the Meade was actually superior in some ways. Certainly, the Meade ACF 8-inch SCT presented wonderful images (you can read my LX85 Test Report in the January 2020 Sky & Telescope). My thought as I was shipping the gear back to Meade? “I’m impressed. They done good! Things are looking up for Old Blue!” Alas, shortly thereafter the outcome of the Orion lawsuit became known.

What do I think will happen next? If you’re a Meade fan, I wouldn’t worry too much. The name has value, and the products still sell. Someone, Orion or whomever, will buy the company and continue to market most/some of the telescopes, I would guess. What makes me really sad is not the fate of this incarnation of a once great company. It’s that two famous and outstanding American telescope companies are now but fading memories gone these many years.

So, that’s it for this time, Muchahos. When will the next one appear? When the mood strikes your old uncle, but most assuredly before February runs out. If you’d like the blog updated more frequently, tell me. Comment here, on the thread I’ll put in the Cloudy Nights “Astro Art, Books, Websites, and Other Media” forum, or by email or on Facebook. And please spread the word to former Uncle Rod fans who may have lost the thread.

Uncle Rod News! The long-awaited (well, one or two people asked about it) second edition of Choosing and Using a New CAT, my vaunted SCT book, is due to be published in April. It has been completely updated and much has been rewritten. I think you are gonna like it.

Yep, better late than never, I suppose—I got it done anyway. Finally.

The whosit and the whatsit?! What in the aitch-e-c-k is your silly old Uncle Rod talking about now? My yearly M13, muchachos. As those of y’all who’ve been here a while know, I have two astronomical traditions I’ve stuck with through thick and thin: Every Christmas Eve I view M42, and some time over the course of a year I take a picture of M13, the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules.

In recent times, catching M42 on Christmas Eve has been dicey. The weather has been increasingly crazy over the last decade or so, and we are now as likely to have thunderstorms, or hail, or snow on Christmas Eve as we are to have clear skies down here in Mobile, Alabama (for you blog old timers, that’s “Possum Swamp.”). Now, M13, that is easier. It’s in the sky for an awful long while over the course of a year. All I have to do is work up the gumption to get out with a telescope and a camera and give it a go.

Which didn’t happen this past year until September for reasons you can read about here. Yeah, 2019 had been one heck of a year, but I still intended to get at least a snapshot of the old grandpappy glob before the annum ran out. If I needed any additional impetus to get a scope into the backyard, that was provided by a Sky & Telescope Test Report assignment; this time on Meade’s new medium-weight German equatorial mount the LX85.

I’d been curious about the LX85 for the last couple of years, but hadn’t heard much about it. Which seemed strange. While the mount’s predecessor, the LXD75, hadn’t been perfect, it had plenty of fans. Many of whom I thought would flock to Meade’s new GEM after years of the company not offering a mount in the LXD75/Advanced VX class. Had all the LXD75 users jumped ship for the Celestron Advanced VX? Was there now too much competition in the sub-1000-dollar mount arena for Meade to stir up much interest? Was there something wrongwith the LX85?

I was excited when two big boxes arrived from Meade—I always am when new gear is at my door. But I was feeling a mite skittish. It’s been no secret the current iteration of Meade has had its ups and downs quality-wise. Would a good-quality mount for this modest price (the 85 is currently about 700 bucks at many retailers) be too much to ask?

Those two boxes were duly manhandled into my usual staging area, the Sun Room, in short order, and I dug in. One contained the mount and its tripod and the other a Meade 8-inch ACF Schmidt Cassegrain OTA. While the Test Report had originally been intended just to address the mount, my editor, Sean Walker, and I put our heads together and decided a review that included the SCT OTA normally shipped with the mount might be of interest to y’all.

Anyhow, the first thing that struck me? I’ve seen recycled cardboard, but the box the mount came in was recycled to the point where it seemed ready to crumble. Everything was in one piece, but just barely.

Out of that box came a tripod not much different from the usual Chinese 2-inch diameter steel tripods we’ve become accustomed to since most of our gear began to come from the Far East. There was also a tripod spreader (an oddly curved affair). And there was the mount head of course, a really pretty mount head finished a gleaming white. Finally, there was a white, oddly shaped octagonal counterweight of about 13-pounds, a CD containing Meade’s Autostar Suite software, and a distressingly thin but sufficient (barely) instruction manual.

Well, alrighty then! Let’s get this puppy on the tripod. There were no surprises there. Everything went together pretty much like an LXD75 or an AVX or a CG5. The white-tubed OTA went on the Vixen style saddle without a hitch. Sure looked pretty, I had to admit. Next step? An indoor fake alignment. I like to power a mount up indoors, enter correct date/time/location, and send it on gotos to objects. I can generally tell everything is basically well if the scope is pointing in roughly the correct directions. At this point, alas, Murphy threw a monkey wrench into the works. No matter how I searched through the boxes and packing materials, all of which I was careful to preserve, no power cord did I find.

I was irritated, but figured it wasn’t a big deal. I had numerous spare DC power cords in my inventory here including some from Meade; I’d just fetch one of those. I did, plugged it into a jumpstart battery pack and into the scope. No dice. The mount’s power connector was slightly different from those on older Meade mounts. The cable I had just wouldn’t make a good connection.

A call to Meade got their AC/DC power supply on its way to me, but I’m still not sure what the problem was. Is the DC power cord an extra option (that would seem strange) or was it just omitted from the box by mistake? When the power supply arrived a few days later, I proceeded to give the mount that indoor fake-align checkout. The LX85 seemed to work as it should. Next up? The good, old backyard.

While we’d been enjoying a surprisingly dry fall, naturally the arrival of the LX85 brought considerable clouds and rain. When we finally hit a clear (but substantially hazy) spell, I figured time was a-wasting and got the mount and the ACF OTA set up in the back forty despite the presence of a fat old Moon in the east. The results? Read my Test Report, but I was satisfied enough with the LX85 that I didn’t hesitate to set up for a photo run on the next evening.

On that night, the first thing on the agenda was an accurate polar alignment. Which I accomplished with the wonderful software, Sharpcap. Sharpcap is an imaging program that is as capable of taking long exposure deep sky shots as it is planetary closeups. What I was interested in on this night, however, was its polar alignment tool, which makes dead-on polar alignment a snap.

I’d mounted my 50mm guide scope and QHY guide camera on the scope. With Sharpcap’s polar alignment tool running, the program used the guide camera to display plenty of stars in the vicinity of the North Celestial Pole, and gave onscreen prompts as to how I needed to move the LX85’s altitude and azimuth adjusters to get the mount’s RA axis pointed right at the pole. In just a few minutes I was only arc-seconds away from a perfect polar alignment. If you are serious about astrophotography, an exact polar alignment is a big help and maybe even a necessity. Do yourself a favor and check out Sharpcap.

Polar and then goto aligned with a Canon DSLR on the rear cell, I sent the scope to M13 and got to work. I brought up that wonderful program, PHD2 guiding, selected a guide star in the field of M13 (I’d only had to move the mount slightly with the AudioStar to center the cluster when the goto completed). I picked a star and let ‘er rip. I didn’t want to waste time fiddling with PHD’s many settings—who knew when those blasted clouds might return?—so I just stuck with ones that worked with my Celestron Advanced VX.

That was just fine. Without doing any tweaking, the auto-guiding was more than good enough to yield round stars in a 1-minute exposure. How about a longer shot? Maybe 5-minutes? The mount was behaving OK, but I was skeptical—an SCT sure brings a lot of focal length to the table.

No prob. The shot isn’t perfect as you can see here. The haze and the Moon alone saw to that. The stars are good and round, though. Also, while I’ve certainly taken much better pictures of the Great Glob, this one is kinda special. It was my first astrophoto after a long layoff, not just from picture taking, but from observing of any kind. It was nice to get back in the saddle. And I had also completed my yearly quest for an M13 shot of some kind.

As I said in another recent blog entry, my feeling as I was shipping the Meade gear back to California was “Man, things sure are looking up for ol’ Meade. They really are still in the game.” Ironically, it was only a few days later that I learned Meade had declared bankruptcy yet again. I hope Meade pulls through, and if they do, that they see fit to continue the LX85.

Since y’all responded so positively to my question here and on Cloudy Nights as to whether you’d like to see me bring the blog back on an at least semi-regular basis, that’s just what I’m a-gonna do. The next one is already in the works, and there may be a new observing series forthcoming shortly after that. Well, after it warms up down here in the currently frigid heart of Dixie, that is!

Now, when I say “astrovideo,” muchachos, I mean the real deal. The old-fashioned deal. A deep sky video camera putting out analog NTSC (or maybe Super VHS) video, not that newfangled “electronically enhanced astronomy” stuff you read about over on the Cloudy Nights bulletin board. If you’ve read my recent article on video deep sky observing (Sky & Telescope June 2020), you know I think good, ol’ analog video is the best place to start for somebody wanting to take that first step beyond “just looking.”

Why? One reason is, as I say in the above piece, a matter of money—something near and dear to your stingy old uncle’s heart as you know. The older technology allows you to get going and get some results and decide if video is for you for very little moola—the good folks at Orange County Telescope can get you going for less than three-hundred bucks with their Revolution Imager Kit. That includes a camera; a monitor; and all the cables, adapters, and more you need to get started. And you can indeed get some impressive images with the Revolution.

There’s also the fact that, nice as modern digital cameras, cameras that pipe digital video directly to a laptop computer, can be, there’s still a reason to use the old stuff beyond cost. In my experience, top of the line analog outfits like Mallincam’s Xtreme are still more sensitive than their digital counterparts. Period, game over, end-of-story, zip up your fly. If you’re after the dimmest of the dim, if you want to, like Unk Rod did one time, go hunting quasars, you still want analog gear.

As for the rest of the ins and outs of choosing and using video cams, go buy the latest issue of Sky & ‘Scope if you don’t already subscribe to the best astronomy magazine there has ever been. The subject for today is what your silly old Uncle had to do to get his video mojo working again after a long, long layoff from deep sky picture taking with a Mallincam.

How long a layoff? To be honest with y’all, I hadn’t much used a video camera at the telescope since I tied the bow on the Herschel Project‘round about 2013. Why not? Several reasons. For one thing, the go-go days of the Project, which involved dragging out lots of gear anytime I wanted to observe, had kinda burned me out on the video. That and some major life changes that began about that time encouraged me to simplify. As 2015 came in, you were much more likely to see me peering into the eyepiece of my simple (but fun) Zhumell Dobbiethan you were to see me staring at a video screen.

Even on those rare occasions when I got the yen to do a little imaging, I didn't use video. Astrophotography of late for me has been, “Set up Losmandy GM811 in backyard, attach DSLR to APO, get PHD tracking, go inside and watch TV while the exposure is in progress.” Oh, sometimes I’ve got a little wistful about those long, long nights on distant and dark observing fields sending the C11 to frighteningly distant Herschel galaxies with SkyTools 3. Wistful, perhaps, but not wistful enough to make me want to recreate the experience.

There things remained until I accepted an assignment to do a beginner's video observing article for Sky & Telescope. I decided that if I was gong to write an introductory sort of video piece for the magazine, I really should get out and do some new video observing; not just recount my experiences from years gone by. But would my Mallincam Xtreme still work after not having been used since the summer of 2014, the year after the Project wrapped up? And where had I stored all the video gear?

It didn’t take much rooting around in the sunroom closet to find the little picnic-cooler-cum-case Mallincam shipped their Xtremes in in days of yore. Looked like everything was there; all else I’d need would be a display screen and a video recorder (so I could capture sequences for later processing on a PC).

Actually, I found both my displays. The oldest being a portable DVD player (with a video input) I used both for observing the deep sky and for watchin’ movies on long ago AEGIS destroyer sea-trials. The other was the cool LCD display that came in the Revolution Imager kit. I decided to try both because I was curious to see if both, like the camera, still worked after sitting for years.

I also turned up both my mini-DVRs, one from Orion (Telescope and Binocular Center), and one from Orange County Telescope. Same-same as with the display. I charged up the batteries of both video recorders I could give both (which save video sequences to SD cards) a checkout in the backyard.

The only remaining question was “Which telescope?” I decided to stick with one of my tried and true astrovideo rigs. Alas, it couldn’t be “Big Bertha,” the C11—she was sold long ago. It couldn’t be the Ultima 8/CG5, “Celeste,” either, as she and her mount also went to new owners some years back. What I still had, however, was Mrs. Emma Peel, my Celestron Edge 800 SCT OTA and her Advanced VX mount. While the scope and mount hadn’t been used at the height of the Herschel Project, they had been in service toward the end of my Julie-Julia inspired questto view those thousands of deep sky objects.

Finally, I was relieved to recall that despite selling more than a few SCT accessories, I’d held onto my Meade f/3.3 SCT focal reducer, and that it was in its accustomed place in my accessory box (a big Plano tackle box, actually, y’all). A 3.3. – 4 focal reducer is a must-have item if you’re going to use an analog video camera with a relatively small sensor chip with an f/10 SCT.

All that remained was to get everything set up in the backyard on a reasonably clear night—something that has become all too rare in these latter days…

OK, the VX/Edge 800 were out in the backyard and the video display and DVR were set up on the table on the deck. And… that was about it. Well, there was also the laptop computer. I planned to use it mainly to operate the camera with the Mallincam camera control software, however. In the service of my “simpler” mantra, I’d send the telescope to objects with her NexStar hand control. The amazing thing was that I’d somehow remembered how to hook all this stuff up: video cables, computer-camera connection, power supplies, and the old analog cable TV switch I use to send video either to the DVR or the display (the Mallincam doesn’t have quite enough drive to do both at once).

After set-up, there was, of course, alignment. Polar alignment first. I needed the laptop for that as well as for camera control. Since I wanted as little star trailing as possible in 30-second plus exposures, I used my QHY guide camera and that wonderful program, Sharpcap, to do an exact polar alignment of the Advanced VX mount. To tell the truth, it would really have been good enough just to do the NexStar hand control’s built in AllStar alignment, but, you know what? Sharpcap isn’t just far more accurate; it’s easier.

Next up was goto aligning the mount using my Celestron StarSense alignment camera. As with the Xtreme and other gear, I frankly wasn’t sure it would still function after years of sitting, but it most assuredly did. And with the same alacrity as always. Turn on the mount, mash a couple of buttons on the HC, the StarSense slews the mount to a couple of star fields, plate solves, slews to a couple more, plate solves again, and you are done and have a goto alignment as good as what you could have done manually.

Unlike the StarSense camera and video gear, I had used the Advanced VX mount once in a while over the last several years. Still, I found I had to manually input date and time into the hand control—the little battery inside the mount that keeps the clock current was dead as a doornail. Once all this virus stuff is in the rearview mirror, I’ll hie myself to WallyWorld and get a replacement button battery.

Mount still worked, StarSense still worked. How about the Mallincam, which had been on the shelf longer than anything else? I sent Mrs. Peel to bright Vega for focusing, plugged the camera into a 12-volt DC source, turned on the display, and crossed my fingers. I also did considerable fumbling with the Mallincam control software on the laptop before I recalled exactly how to run the thing. But when I finally accessed a couple of my few remaining braincells with that information, I got the camera set to 1-second exposures and was gratified to see a big blue blob on the screen—Vega. In just a few minutes I had Alpha Lyrae focused to a pinpoint.

Being near on to Messier 57, the Ring Nebula, that was an obvious first target. How would it look in a sky that seemed to be getting hazier by the minute? In my mind I probably knew how the Ring should look on onscreen. But after not having used video for so long, it was still amazing to be reminded of its power. Not only was the ring pretty, showing off pretty greens and subtle reds, its elongated shape was obvious. As was detail in the nebulosity. And, that bane of visual observers, the central star, was just as easy as pie. In my suburban backyard. Under a hazy, light-pollution-scattering sky. With “only” an 8-inch telescope.

After that? I did a tour of all the old late-fall/early winter faves. The Horse’s Nose globular star cluster, M15 in Pegasus, was an amazing ball of tiny suns. Gemini’s M35 was a wonder of an open cluster, and was made an even prettier view when I slewed the scope off center a bit to bring its distant companion cluster, NGC 2158, into the frame. At first 2158 was merely a blob, but with a little fiddling with exposure and contrast and other camera controls, it resolved into a cloud of minute stars.

What did I find most challenging about this inaugural “new” video run? It wasn’t really setting everything up. That was easy enough with a hiccup or three. What was most challenging was learning how to operate the Mallincam again. When people used to ask me how easy the camera was to operate, I’d tell ‘em it was easy enough to get decent results from night one, but that getting the most out of it required practice, and that I found learning to really make the Xtreme perform was analogous to learning the guitar.

The showpiece objects were pretty and all, but how about a challenge before I wrapped up the evening? Over in Orion, Zeta was peeping above the trees, and with it the great Flame (aka “Tank Tracks”) Nebula. On 99% of suburban nights, trying to observe NGC 2024 is a guaranteed FAIL visually with an 8-inch telescope. What would the video camera see? Despite deteriorating conditions, the Mallincam returned a respectable vista of the nebula—naturally the real-time video looks far better than this single frame grab. What do they always say about the Flame, though? If it is prominent, LOOK FOR THE HORSEHEAD!

And so, I did. I just couldn’t resist despite the worsening sky. Did my horse-hunt succeed? It did, if in a fashion that wasn’t much to write home about. IC434, the bright nebula background of the dark horse’s head, B33, wasn’t overly difficult, but it took some fiddling with the controls to deliver the Nasty Nag herself. She still wasn’t much, and I didn’t bother to record her, but she was there, which frankly amazed and amazes me. I saw the Horsehead Nebula! From my backyard!

What’s next for me and video? I’ll no doubt get the Mallincam back out soon—probably should have got it out to observe Comet Atlas, but I didn’t. But what I’d also like to do is get the little Revolution Imager out of mothballs and see what it will do. I know it’s capable of astounding results given its wee price. When I do that, you will hear about it here.

What will (probably) come next in the Astro Blog, though, is a new Herschel Project. No, nothing like the real Herschel Project. A kinder, gentler sort of Herschel Project. The focus this time will be on seeing how easily the Herschel 400 can be done (visually) from a suburban backyard—with a 6-inch telescope. When will that happen? I hope to have the first installment for y’all in May. See you then! Stay safe and stay AT HOME.

“Return? Where did your Losmandy GM811G go, Unk?” It didn’t go nowhere muchachos—including onto an observing field or even into the backyard for almost two years.

I received the mount in the latter part of 2017, was able to use it one night and part of another at the somewhat misbegotten 2017 Deep South Star Gaze, and employed it to help me with my Sky & Telescope Test Report on Meade’s 115mm APO (June 2018). That was pretty much it other than a few casual observing runs in the backyard that winter of 2017-18. Over most of 2018, truly lousy weather and the return of some lingering back problems discouraged me from using anything heavier than my Advanced VX, and often not even that. Then, in January of 2019, I was involved in the accidentthat sidelined me from observing with anything—even an 80mm refractor on an AZ-4 mount—for the better part of a year.

In the natural order of things, cursed 2019 finally marched off and 2020 took, its place. The new year has found my physical (and mental) condition improved, though I’m certainly not completely back to my old self. However, I’m improved enough to do a little observing from the backyard if not yet at star parties or other dark sites.

As we talked about last time, I recently got my Advanced VX and C8 into the backyard for a little video work, and in the course of doing so discovered the mount’s real time clock battery was dead as the proverbial doornail. Which got me to thinking the RTC battery in the GM811’s Gemini 2 computer was probably dead too. I decided the next clear stretch we got I would get the Losmandy outside and see if she needed a new battery.

What would I put on the Losmandy, though, campers? I was thinking that might be my beloved 6-inch refractor, Big Ethel. I had been planning on using her to do some Herschel 400 observing, and figgered it was high time I got started on that.

Anyhow, I began rounding up the pieces and parts of the Losmandy last Wednesday afternoon. The tripod, the excellent LW tripod that even broken down old me can carry around with ease, was in the sunroom closet. Also lurking there was the mount head itself in a big, plastic Tupperware-style container. And I knew the HC and some accessories were in an aluminum case labeled “Losmandy,” natch. The counterweight was sitting on the floor of said closet. “OK got everything, right? Wait…where is the Gemini 2 computer? And the cables to connect it to the mount?”

The Gemini 2 Computer.

I’ll admit I panicked for a minute—until one of my few remaining braincells fired and I recalled the Gemini 2 computer and associated cables were in a plastic pistol case I got from Academy. There wasn’t room in the aluminum tool attaché for the Gemini 2 as well as the hand control and power supply. A little hunting around and I finally laid my hands on it. First thing I did was get my label-maker and emblazon that case in big letters with “LOSMANDY GEMINI 2 COMPUTER.” After another spell of panic when opening that case didn’t reveal the mount’s dec and RA cables—they were under the foam of the lid of the case—I was all set for when the clouds were predicted to roll out on Thursday.

Yep, all was cool. Until I realized I no longer had the foggiest notion how to do a goto alignment with the Gemini. I went to the Gemini 2 Internet site and downloaded and printed a bunch of the documentation there. Biggest help of all, though, believe it or not, was your old Unk himself. I printed out the pages of this blog entrywherein I led y’all through the GM811 setup step by step. Sometimes my longwinded nature comes in handy, I reckon.

When Thursday afternoon began to die under a clear blue sky, I got the mount into the backyard starting with the LW (lightweight) tripod. As I remembered, it was light enough not to be a pain, not even in my somewhat pitiful current condition. Frankly, it’s easier to handle than a run-of-the-mill Chinese 2-inch steel legged tripod. Bolted the Gemini 2 computer onto that, and it was time for the only (somewhat) painful part of the process.

Next, natch, was the GM811 mount head. I won’t lie, it’s a bit of a handful. It’s lighter than a G11 head, since it utilizes the GM8 dec assembly (hence its name, GM811), but still heavier than the AVX to put it mildly. Still, it’s lots easier to handle than my old and long-sold Atlas and CGEM mounts and is capable of a 50-pound payload, including for imaging, something those old Synta mounts could not approach. I carried the head into the back 40 and up to the tripod in its container (which has nice handles) and got it onto the tripod with only a little whining and complaining.

The mount was assembled and pointing roughly north with the Gemini computer in place, the hand control connected, and the counterweight installed. Now to mount the six-inch refractor. I failed in doing that, friends

Pretty Hermione.

In the course of trying to get Ethel into the G11’s saddle, I nearly dropped her, cut myself on her dovetail, bled all over the tube, and gave it up as a bad business. In these latter days, I’ve learned one important thing: If you don’t think you can do something or are uncomfortable about doing it, STOP. It was obvious I was not going to get the big refractor on the mount, not on this day, so I dropped back a bit in aperture to my smaller and lighter refractor, the SkyWatcher 120mm APO, Hermione.

Pretty Hermione went on the mount without a hitch, and I had her well-balanced in just a couple of minutes. While I was doing that, I ruminated on my defeat at the hands of Ethel, and recalled I had developed a systemfor mounting her safely. A system I had ignored on this afternoon because I had forgotten it. I was actually pleased that in the somewhat befuddled mental state I still occasionally fall into, I had pulled that info out. While I was pretty sure I knew how to get Ethel in place, now, I decided to leave well enough alone and stick with Hermione for the GM811’s re-commissioning run.

After checking into a new 10-meter net we have going down here, the Lockdown Fun Net (28.420 on Thursdays at 23:59 UTC) and sharing a few yuks with the fellers, it was time to see what was up with the Losmandy. Would the battery be dead or near dead and cause problems? Would she work as well as she had in 2018? Would she work at all?

OK, rubber meets road time. I plugged in the Losmandy AC power supply, flipped the switch on the Gemini 2, and waited for the HC’s color touch screen to come to life. It did, which was reassuring, displaying “initializing.” That took a little bit, but I recalled that to be normal. Soon I was presented with the good, old opening menu. I chose “Cold Start,” and shortly was beginning my alignment. As you’ll know if you read the above-linked blog entry on the mount, my procedure is to line up on three – four stars west of the Meridian (at home I have my best view to the west), and one on the east side. I touched the align button and was presented with my first choice, Denebola. Wait. What? That part of Leo was still on the east side of the Local Meridian…could it be?

Yep, I backed out of the alignment and checked system time. It was off by nearly an hour. After almost three years the little button cell in the computer was still trying to keep time, but having a hard time of it. That was OK. I’d ordered batteries for both the Losmandy and Celestron RTCs (naturally the two mounts use different batteries), and those would arrive from Amazon on the morrow. For tonight, I’d just set the clock to the proper time and hope for the best.

Align screen on the hand control.

Time corrected, the HC’s alignment star choices became reasonable. I chose Pollux, Capella, Procyon, and Alkaid in the west, and Arcturus in the east and I was done. The first star needed a little slewing, but the rest fell into the field of my reticle eyepiece and only required minor adjustment. As I mention in the aforementioned article, I don’t do separate sky models in the east and west, just a western model with one eastern star added to it (I know that sounds odd; it did to me at first as well). That provides me with excellent goto accuracy in the hemisphere I’m working in, and acceptable accuracy in the opposite one in case I jaunt over to there.

Oh, by the way, I’d performed a precise polar alignment with Sharpcap before beginning. While there is a polar alignment helper in the Gemini 2 HC (a’ la AllStar), I have never tried it. Anyway, I doubt it would approach the accuracy of a Sharpcap alignment, which quickly gets you to within a few arc-seconds of the pole and is very easy to do. How sensitive is the Gemini 2 system to polar mis-alignment? Don’t ask me. I just do a Sharpcap alignment, even on visual nights.

“Hokay, let’s give her the acid test with a goto.” I was reasonably sure I’d be OK given the way the alignment stars had fallen into the field of the eyepiece, but you never know. “Hmm…let’s see; how about Messier 37?” I touched “goto” on the screen (I’d now had the sense to switch the color screen to night vision red), the motors whirred and purred—no weasels with tuberculosis sounds with this mount—and stopped. There was the beautiful open cluster centered in the 13mm Ethos. “Alrighty then; how about ‘harder’? M3 is still well on the east side of the Meridian.” The big spring glob was not quite centered, but almost. Swapped the 13mm eyepiece for the 8mm Ethos, and Hermione busted the thing into many tiny stars.

And so it went: M37, M3, M35, M36, M38, M51, M82, and, finally, just to remind myself how good Hermione is, Venus, who presented a color free little crescent. Almost all were pretty despite the presence of a fattening Moon riding high and considerable haze. Well, with the exception of M51. I could pick out the Whirlpool Galaxy with averted vision, but just barely.

As I was wrapping up, I began to believe it might be a good idea to revise my somewhat sanguine take on what I am calling “The New Herschel Project.” My original aim was to essay the 400 with Big Ethel, the 6-inch. Five years ago, that would have been more than possible from my backyard. Now? I’m not so sure.

Mrs. Emma Peel.

It’s not that light pollution is worse. There are few streetlights in our subdivision, Hickory Ridge, and the general sky brightness is, I’d say, no worse than it was when we moved out here. Most of the area’s growth is now on the other side of Mobile Bay, in Baldwin County. No, the problem is the weather. Weather patterns have definitely changed no matter what personal beliefs you might hold about climate change. Clear nights are fewer and hazier. And, strangely, on still, hazy nights seeing, which used to be outstanding down here on evenings like that, just ain’t as good as it once was.

So, here’s the plan: The New Herschel Project, which will, like the Big Enchilada, be visual plus video, will at least begin with an 8-inch, Mrs. Emma Peel, my Celestron Edge 800. If she starts knocking them off with ease visually, I will drop down to Big Ethel, perhaps. Video cameras? In tune with the kinder/gentler – simpler nature of the New Project, I intend to stick with the Revolution Imager, the Mallincam Micro, and, if either has trouble, the Mallincam Junior.

The plan for the Friday morning following the mount’s successful revival was to get my laptop squared away. The mount is most versatile and most pleasant to operate from a PC when you utilize the Gemini 2’s Ethernet connection (it will also do serial or USB). Unfortunately, the laptop I was using when I bought the Losmandy has long since gone to its reward. I’d have to spend some time configurating the new one, a nice Lenovo.

First thing, I downloaded Stellarium, Stellarium Scope, Sky Tools 3, the ASCOM platform, and the Gemini 2 Ascom driver. Installed all of that stuff. Next up was configuring the Ethernet connection—which I recalled was not a horrible experience, if not exactly fun. I’d been successful before, though, so I wasn’t skeered.

Okey-dokey…first step is assigning a static IP address to the Ethernet port on the laptop. I opened the network center in Win 10, went to the adapters window and… What? In the window was an icon for Wi-Fi, and an icon for Bluetooth. Where was the icon for “local area network”? I had a sinking feeling and began eyeballing the laptop’s connectors. HDMI? Sure. Several USB 3 receptacles? Yep. Ethernet? No. Nope. Nada.

What would I do, what would Ido? First thought was just to set up for USB. But I recalled how darned good Ethernet worked. I wouldn’t give up without a struggle. Could there be such a thing as a USB – Ethernet adapter? A trip to Amazon showed that indeed there was, and I got one on its way to me for less than 20 bucks.

Tonight, Friday night, I will be back in the backyard again at least briefly to check that the battery replacement for the Gemini 2 worked OK—the little button cells arrived right on schedule Friday morning. I’ll probably look at a few purty ones as well, and I will, I guess, switch out Hermione for Mrs. Peel. But next step on the road to the New Project is getting the computer squared away. We are expecting maybe four more clear nights, but the moon is waxing, and I expect it will be week after next before there's much chance of getting any Herschels in the can. You will learn about my success with that—or lack thereof—in the next installment.

Speaking of installments, how often will the blog be updatednow that it is, no foolin’, back? I don’t think you should expect “every Sunday” as in days of yore, but “a couple of times a month” sounds reasonable—though that will depend on the weather. It’s not like, given the Covid Lockdown and my still somewhat frail condition, that there will be any trips to big (or even small) star parties for me to report on anytime soon. I think we will be able to have some fun in the good, old backyard, however.

365 days. 400 objects. One astronomer and a less than perfect suburban backyard sky.

How far will it go? We can only wait. And wait. And wait...

The New Herschel Project. Coming soon to a computer terminal near you!

Putting the Losmandy GM811 back in service had been remarkably trouble-free—especially considering my increasingly fumble-fingered and forgetful nature—so, I was on to the next step, Muchachos, getting a laptop computer connected to the mount. While the New Project's 400 objects wouldn't require the organization the Big Enchilada's 2500 demanded, even 400 meant I'd want a planning program running in the field. "What have I seen? What do I still need to see? What can I see tonight?"

While there was a fat, waxing Moon in the sky, she wouldn’t prevent me from testing the GM811/PC Ethernet connection--indoors, at least. Since I’d set the mount up for Ethernet before, that wouldn’t be a problem to get going, I thought. That’s what I get for thinking.

I am—as usual—getting ahead of myself. What about night two with the Losmandy I alluded to last time? I did get out the next evening following the replacement of the Gemini 2 computer’s battery (hardest part was getting the darned thing open so I could swap out the little button cell). Result? The new battery was fine; clock time was right on the money.

As I also mentioned I might do, I swapped out the refractor for my Edge 800, Emma Peel. Every goto was bang on, with me just leaving the 8mm Ethos eyepiece in the SCT for the duration; even at 175x everything was somewhere in the field. Well, what I could see was in the field. Luna was really interfering now. I did a few more slews, shut down, quitted the backyard for the den and TV, and the next morning tore down mount and scope.

Next up: wringing out the mount’s LAN connection. Why Ethernet in the first place? Well, no darned old USB - serial adapters to fiddle with. No restrictions on cable length. Most of all, in my experience from when I first began using the mount, Ethernet just works with the Gemini 2.

The object goto page of the web interface.

First thing was to download the instructions for setting up the interface from Gemini 2.com, instructions that largely concern assigning a static IP address to the computer’s Ethernet port. I remembered these directions fairly well from following them with my old Toshiba laptop: Easy enough. Quite detailed. Really too detailed. Yep, too detailed. The author doesn’t just explain the “how” of the setup, he explains the why for each step. Something this cat doesn’t really give a fig about.

After puzzling over pages of small type for more than a few minutes, I recalled that after I’d first received the GM811, I’d written up a simplified set of Ethernet instructions and posted them on the Cloudy Nights bulletin board in case some other new Gemini 2 user was as bumfuzzled by the instructions as Unk was. A search of the Cloudy Nights turned them up, I printed them out, and was ready to roll—or so your benighted old Uncle thought, anyhow.

Sat down to the nice, new Lenovo laptop in the dining room where it had been stationed during the weeks when I’d been teaching my university courses online. First thing was to open the Network and Sharing Center, go to “change adapter settings,” and right click on the LAN/Ethernet icon. Welp… There wasn’t no Ethernet icon. There was one for Wi-Fi and one for Bluetooth, and that was it. What the—?! As I wrote last time, a sneaking suspicion gripped your correspondent. I started examining the connectors on the lappie. USB 3? Yep, three of them. HDMI? Uh-huh. Ethernet? Nope.

A visit to Amazon revealed there was, as I’d speculated, such a thing as a USB3 to Ethernet adapter. As a matter of fact, that seemed to be a rather common item. I picked a mid-priced example, ordered it via Prime, and it was soon in my hands. I’m still bemused, though. Why no Ethernet port? Surely PC makers don’t think Ethernet is going the way of RS-232. Or do they?

Mallincam Junior, hand control, and receiver.

Whatever. Plugged the adapter into the Lenovo, and that blasted LAN icon showed right up. Connected my CAT cable between PC and mount, turned on Gemini, and went to work. Using my instructions, it was a matter of 10 short and easy steps and I was done. If you’ve got a Gemini 2 and are wrestling with the website instructions, shoot me an email at rodmollise@southalabama.edu and I will send you a copy of my simpleminded guide to Gemini 2 Ethernet configuration.

I was done, but was I done successfully? There are a couple of ways to connect to the mount with Ethernet. You can use the Gemini 2 ASCOM driver, which is much like the serial ASCOM drivers you are used to. That will work with any ASCOM compatible astronomy program—which is almost any astro-ware these days. Or you can use the Gemini 2 computer’s built-in web page. That allows you to connect to the mount using a web browser.

Since it was daytime and me and the GM811 were sitting in the sunroom instead of out under the stars, I didn’t think it was necessary to mess with planetarium programs and ASCOM. The web interface would show if all was well in a hurry. It did—well, as soon as I went to the Gemini 2 website and looked up what the user name/password the browser was asking me for should be (“admin,” no password).

Typing http://Gemini into Microsoft Edge (or whatever you use) allows you to do lots of stuff including slew to objects. All I wanted to do, however, was see that I was connected to the mount. I pushed the virtual HC slew buttons on one of the pages, the mount moved, and I was done. I’d get the ASCOM driver set up as soon as the old Moon got herself out of the way…

GREAT.

And as soon as a package of batteries including a CR2 cell arrived from Amazon. I told y’all the other day that the New H-Project will, like the Big Enchilada, include both visual and video observations. I further said that in the cheap-simple-easy spirit of the New Project (while I’lluse the somewhat upscale Losmandy mount, a Celestron AVX or a Meade LX85 would no doubt work just as well), I’ll probably limit the cameras to the Revolution imager and the Mallincam Junior.

A check of Junior showed he needed batteries for both his hand control (AAA) and hand control receiver (CR2)–Junior, you see, uses a little HC to set and initiate long exposures. A survey of the junkque drawer in the kitchen showed that there were no AAAs on hand, much less the CR2 required for the receiver. I might coulda got one of those CR2s at WallyWorld, but I’ve gone from trying to avoid the place pre-Covid to staying out of there period. Amazon, then. The batteries would arrive about the time Moon began to seriously wane, so I decided I’d start the Project with the Mallincam Junior in hopes of giving him a clean bill of health after the battery replacement.

I did hook Junior to my new laptop upon which I’d installed the Mallicam Junior Pro control software (which allows you to set everything exceptlong exposures). I wouldn’t be able to test the long exposure hand control, no, but I'd be able to see that the camera still functioned, and that the program was set up correctly. Fired everything up, started the software, selected the correct com port, and enabled the crosshair overlay, which appeared on the screen of my good old DVD player/monitor. So did the color bars when I enabled them. Looked like Junior was just fine despite not having been used in—get this—SIX YEARS!

Well, darn. The CR2 batteries finally arrived from Amazon on Thursday. Do you wanna guess what else arrived? Yep, clouds. Every night between Thursday and Tuesday showed up a disgusting red or yellow in my fave astro-weather-app, Scope Nights. Adding insult to injury? I discovered Publix sells CR2 batteries, so I coulda had one a week ago. Ah, well, such is the fate of this oft-bumbling astronomer.

I told y’all not to expect a new blog entry every Sunday, but it looks like you might get just that for a little while, anyhow. But don’t get used to it. As I mumbled the not long ago, I am thinking in these latter days “twice a month” sounds about right. However, twice a month it willbe, no foolin’, and when I have the material to bring you an article every Sunday for a while, every Sunday you shall have.

Plugeroo Department: If you are an imager and aren’t reading Amateur Astrophotography Magazine, why not? It’s evolved to the point where I can say it’s the best thing done on the subject in a long time—maybe ever. I should have mentioned it more often, but with the near-demise of this here blog over the last three years, I never got around to it. Well, the blog is back and I’m telling y'all to get to this magazine's website and get your hands on it. I am proud to say some of old Unk’s simpleminded articles on the subject have even appeared in this fine publication in the past (don’t let that stop you from reading it!)…

Plugeroo Part Deux

You asked for it! Nay, you demanded it! Well, one or two people may have mentioned something about it. I am talking about the forthcoming 2^nd Edition of Unk’s vaunted SCT book, Choosing and Using a New CAT. I recently recounted some of my work on it during my recovery from my accident last year--it was tough going due to your old Uncle's really dilapidated condition. But it all worked out. Overall, I am pleased indeed. It’s not often you get to go back and fix those nagging issues that have bothered you for the better part of a decade (like some of my prose, and those lousy black and white photos in the First Edition).

I can say without reservation this is a much better book than the First Edition, and if you like that, you should really, really like this one. What’s changed? Naturally, the buyer’s guide chapter was almost completely rewritten thanks to a decade of changes in the telescope market. Same with the imaging chapter. And a lot of my MESS has been cleaned up elsewhere in the book. Did the publisher do some things I don’t like? Sure. That’s the way the game is played. But, I’m happy with the results, no ifs, ands or buts.

“When,” you ask? Amazon got “mid-May” from the publisher, but here is the thing, y'all: Up until about two weeks ago I was still working with the production department making corrections. And there’s the Covid virus. So…I am doubtful about May. All I can say is "When I know, you will."

If you’ve been following the AstroBlog for a while, I don’t have to tell you who Charity Hope Valentine is. If you haven’t? She’s my little Meade ETX125PE Maksutov Cassegrain. More than a few ETX fanciers—yes, there are still some out there in addition to your old Uncle Rod—have asked me how 15-year-old Charity is doing. The answer has been, “I don’t know, muchachos, I don’t know.” She hadn’t been out of her case in a couple of years. Could be three. Possibly four. At his advanced age, Unk’s months and years tend to fly by and get all jumbled up together. 2016, for example, seems like just yesterday. Nay, just hours ago.

My little girlfriend has, on balance, always been a Good Telescope. I’ll be the first to say she can be a slightly neurotic handful like her namesake, but she usually cooperates with your old Uncle. Charity has starred in more than a few AstroBlog articles, and if you’d like to learn more about her, click here, here, and here. But the above pretty much sums up our relationship over the years.

Anyhow, it had been a while since I’d even thought much about the 5-inch Maksutov Cassegrain. But seeing as how I was looking around for something to do astronomy-wise with the New Herschel Project stopped in its tracks by clouds, I thought I’d get Charity out. I’d need to replace her battery, and would do any other maintenance she required. “Battery?” Yes, Charity is one of the last of the original breed of ETXes, the non-Ningbo Sunny ETXes if’n you know what I mean. She’s a PE, and she has an LNT.

“Wut?” The PE (Premier Edition) ETXes were different from earlier models in that they featured pretty—some would say garish—silk screened tubes and the aforementioned LNT finders. That stands for “Level North Technology.” A PE was like a GPS scope without the GPS. All you had to do was set the scope in a simple home position and turn it on. Charity and her sisters would then do a little dance, finding north and level, and would head to the first of two alignment stars, which you'd center. That was it. For it to be practical, of course, you had to have a real time clock battery to keep time/date current when the ETX was powered off.

The Girl Still has Her Good Looks

The system worked well. You didn’t even have to enter your position into the Autostar unless you moved at least 60-miles from your previous location. According to Meade, the LNT battery would be good for “five years.” That was awfully optimistic. One year or a bit more being as long as the scope’s 2032 button cell has ever lasted for me. That wouldn’t be so bad if Meade hadn’t made it so devilishly difficult to change the battery on the initial PEs. Not only is the battery down deep in the scope's red dot finder's guts, the finder uses a big plastic lens that's just begging to be snapped off in the process of replacing said battery.

Meade soon reworked the LNT finder, adding an easy (or at least easier) to access battery compartment and a lens for the red dot finder part of the LNT that would be less likely to be accidentally snapped off. Charity, however, is an original. Nevertheless, I’ve managed to keep Charity’s finder lens intact and battery changed out these 15 years.

At any rate, I recalled replacing Charity’s RTC battery required disassembling the LNT finder, unscrewing a pair of bolts (the finder alignment bolts), and removing two associated springs, one of which is insanely difficult to replace when you are done. Naturally, these springs want nothing better than to fly off and hide on the floor. But maybe I wouldn’t have to do anything about the 2032. Maybe after “just” a couple of years of disuse, the battery would still be good. I was doubtful, however, and hunted up one of the button cells in the kitchen junk drawer where such things reside.

I pulled Charity from her case. Despite the passage of all the long years, she’s maintained her girlish good looks. I’ve always tried to take good care of my friend; she’s deserved that in thanks for the years of joy she’s brought me. But would she wake up when I turned her o-n/o-f-f switch to o-n? After who knew how many trips around the Sun?

That big lens just begs to be snapped off.

I plugged in the Autostar, plugged up a jumpstart battery, flipped the switch and… Sweet Charity emitted the friendly beep that means, “Hi Rod! I missedyou!” and displayed the good, old “Welcome to A U T O S T A R” on her red LED screen. I was at least relieved she awoken without complaint. But how about that battery? I mashed "Mode" a few times to get to time and date and…uh-oh. “07 July 2016.” Had it really been that long since I’d (ahem) turned on Charity Hope Valentine? It didn’t seem possible, but maybe. The time was, no surprise, off by hours.

So, there’d have to be a battery swap. I still have Charity’s manual, of course, and reviewed the instructions on that task. OK, remove the top adjustment bolt. Check. Remove the side adjustment bolt. Check. Gently lift the top of the LNT housing (there’s a wire connecting top to bottom). Check. Don’t lose the two springs associated with the bolts you just removed. Well, the horizontal spring was no problem, but, as I had feared, the vertical, smaller spring went flying to the floor of Unk’s (radio) shack. He spent the next 15-minutes crawling around on said floor with a Maglite before turning up the frickin-frackin thing.

“Well, alrighty then,” Unk said (actually he said some colorful words in the course of locating the spring and replacing it during reassembly). Next step was removing and replacing the button cell itself, which was no problem, it being held in the typical spring-type battery holder. What wasa problem was reassembling the LNT. Lining up the vertical spring, passing the bolt through it, and tightening the bolt was not difficult; the other bolt and spring were where the problem lay and has always lain.

Alas, Meade’s instructions for replacing the horizontal spring were insane: “Tighten the vertical bolt until it is firm.” If you do that, there is very little space between the side of the bottom half of the LNT and the side of the top. You have to squeeze the spring between those sides, aligning it with the holes, and inserting and threading-in the horizonal bolt. It was clear that would never work. Not in a million years. What didwork was threading the vertical bolt in just a few threads. That left enough space between bottom side and the top side for me to squeeze the spring into place. I managed to use a solder tool to nudge it around to get the holes lined up, and got that hellish bolt screwed in.

Surgery begun...

Next on the agenda would be recalibrating my girl’s sensors—one of the two requirements following a battery change, the other being “drive training.” Sensor alignment would require the star Polaris. There was no doubt in my (once) military mind that this would not be a Herschel Project night—I’d disassembled Mrs. Peel and moved her back inside to wait for a better stretch of weather. But maybe I could at least get Charity dialed in on the North Star?

It turned out I’d have to wait a while before I could even get the girl into the backyard. We had the perfect storm from an observer’s point of view: waxing moon, cloudy skies night after night, and, finally, Tropical Storm Cristóbal hit the coast dumping torrential rain on Unk’s vaunted backyard.

Anyhow, last Thursday dawned to drier and slightly cooler weather, which is common in the wake of a tropical storm. It looked so nice, almost fall-like, that I began to wonder if I should squander the night on “just” a 5-inch MCT and eyepieces. Alas, as the day wore on, those darned old white, fluffy things began to scud across the sky. I could scarcely believe it. Actually, that’s wrong. The way the weather’s been the last couple of years, that’s exactly what I have come to expect. I decided to stick with Charity and delay placing even her in the backyard until close to sundown.

And…the clouds just kept pouring in, flowing from (strangely for here) northeast to southwest. I had little hope, but at about 9 pm clouds had skittered off to the extent I thought I might get something done. The sky was still hazy, though, very hazy. While I could make out the Dipper/Plough, only the two “end” bowl stars of Ursa Minor were apparent. Whatever. At least I’d get the Calibrate Sensors business completed.

This is how the sky looked--until Sundown.

What that does is inform the mount’s computer of the difference between true north and magnetic north for the scope's current location. There’s really not much to it for the user. I put Charity in her home position (rotated counterclockwise to her hard stop), locked the azimuth lock, and started the procedure. The scope points to true north as best it can given the readings from its built-in electronic compass; then you are instructed (by the Autostar) to center Polaris and press Enter. Our magnetic deviation is small here, so just a little slewing put the North Star in the crosshairs and I was finished.

Next up, I figured I’d better do some Drive Training, the purpose of which is to let the ETX computer know the magnitude of backlash in the mount's gears. That is vital for good goto pointing. After years of experience, what I’ve determined is it’s better, for some reason, to use a terrestrial object like a distant streetlight than a star. You’d think Polaris would be just the thing, but it doesn’t seem to be. Unfortunately, there's not a good terrestrial target visible from my backyard, so I just used Polaris, which worked OK.

As with Calibrate Sensors, there’s not much to Drive Training. The Autostar tells you to center your target, you do that and press “Enter,” it slews away from target target and tells you to re-center it (the Autostar even shows you which direction key to mash) and you do that and press Enter again. Repeat the procedure for both azimuth and altitude and you are done. In my experience, drive training needs to be accomplished periodically. So, when Charity begins missing targets, I immediately do a quick re-train.

Note, as with some other goto systems, certain targets are just hard for Charity's Autostar--mostly those directly or near directly overhead. Because of the construction of the ETX's fork, it's hard to access the focus knob when the scope is pointed near zenith, anyway. So, all things considered, as with big Dobs, it's best just to avoid Dobson's Hole with an ETX.

The sky really was looking yucky now. Not so much cloudy anymore as just very hazy. However, I thought if I could get an object or two in the can, so to speak, that would put me ahead of the game. I also wanted to see if Charity was still her old self after so long a layoff.

In her salad days.

Yes, the haze was bad, the seeing was bad, and clouds were still scudding through. But that is exactly what I used to call a “Sweet Charity night.” Her good contrast despite a rather sizable central obstruction (do NOT tell her I said that) gives her a leg up under conditions like these. I’ve often been surprised at what the girl can pull out of some fairly nasty conditions.

On this night? Not so much. Messier 3 looked OK—at 150x a fair number of stars were resolved around its periphery—but just OK. Not even really “fair.” “Well, let’s knock off one Herschel 400 object, anyhow. M82 oughta show something.”

Indeed, Ursa Major’s Cigar Galaxy did show something; just not much. When Charity stopped slewing and the weasels-with-tuberculosis sounds that accompany that stopped, I wondered if she’s missed the Cigar. However, a little bit of staring and reducing power to 75x showed a filmy somethingcentered in the field. A little more looking with averted vision turned up the galaxy. I could cross M82 off the list, but that’s all I could do. There were no dark lanes visible, and even the basic shape of this “disturbed” galaxy came and went.

Also, the bugs were biting. When I’d masked up and visited Publix the previous Tuesday, they didn’t have any of the replacement candles and repellent pads for the Off mosquito lantern I use to keep the biters at bay (much less Thermacell refills). So, I thought the best course was to throw the big switch, cover Miss Valentine, and perhaps devote one more night to her.

Friday was supposed to be better, but, like Thursday, while it started out clear and crisp and beautiful, as soon as darkness came the sky flooded with clouds. So that was that. I disassembled Miss Valentine and returned her to her case--I hope for a shorter stay than last time. I didn’t feel like I could devote any more of our increasingly few observing hours to my ETX girlfriend no matter how much I love her. Next up will be my Edge 800 and Mallincam and we’ll see if we can really knock off some New Herschel objects.

Nota Bene: Friends, while Charity was mostly in good shape after all that downtime, I noticed the insulation on her Autostar hand control cable is gone in several places. I’ll definitely need to replace it before our next outing. Unfortunately, a bit of googling hasn’t turned up a source for a good replacement. Can any of y’all help?

Book Plug Department

I’m gobsmacked at a new book that’s just crossed my desk, Thomas Fowler’s The View Through Your Telescope. It is subtitled And How to Make it Better. And that is just what it can do, muchachos. I haven’t had time to really dig into it yet, but I can tell you already this is just the sort of book a lot of us, and especially imagers (but not just imagers), have been looking for. It is somewhat technical in places, but that’s also just what many of us have been looking for. Go get it, muchachos. Expect a full review soon.

Following my re-checkout of my Losmandy GM811G mount after not having used it for way too long, it was time to get to work on the New Herschel Project, muchachos. But then thunder began to rumble. After several days, I threw in the towel and hauled the scope and my beloved Losmandy inside.

A week later, I thought I might finally get started on the New Project. The scope and camera to do that would be my Celestron Edge 800 SCT, Emma Peel, and the Mallincam Xtreme. Why not the Mallincam Junior Pro or Revolution Imager? The need to get some Herschels under my belt.

I’ve used the Xtreme recently (in the course of writing a Sky & Telescope article) and wouldn’t have to waste time re-familiarizing myself with the camera. I will certainly get to the other two video cameras, since many of you have asked about them. While I’ll turn to visual as well as often as possible, a video camera is usually better suited to the typically hazy suburban deep sky of Possum Swamp in late spring and early summer.

Initially, Thursday night looked fairly good. The Clear Sky Clock, Scope Nights, and the Weather Channel were agreeing it would be the first in a string of relatively passable evenings for observing. But then, despite the Weather Channel still forecasting “clear,” clouds began to fill the sky. I set up the Edge and the Celestron Advanced VX mount in the backyard anyway. What could happen?

Yes, I know I need to get back to the Losmandy mount and get squared away with the Ethernet interface and other software again, but I had a motive for setting up the smaller mount. I’d replaced the AVX mount’s Real Time Clock battery, and, as with the Losmandy, I wanted to make sure the AVX functioned properly after the change. I had little doubt it would be OK, but you never know. Also, frankly, the sky was looking worse than ever. The AVX is easier to lug in and out than the GM811, and I can convince myself to get it into the backyard even if the weather’s looking dicey.

Also, I would also be able to try something new with the AVX. Your benighted old Uncle Rod learned something. Celestron’s CWPIprogram (“Celestron – Planewave Instruments;” the program was developed in association with Planewave) now works with the Advanced VX mount—it was originally exclusive to the CGX models.

Now, no doubt most of y’all already knew that, but remember, when it comes to astronomy—and more than a few other things—2019 was a lost yearfor your Uncle. Anyhow, I’d heard a lot about CWPI. It’s sort of like a modern NexRemote, but with model building and star charting added, and I was anxious to try it with my AVX to see if it might fill the same role in the New Project that NexRemotefilled in the old.

So, the plan was, the plan was…get started with CPWI. I’d go for the gold with the program to include interfacing it to the Celestron StarSense alignment camera and my Wireless Wingman gamepad (yes, the same Wingman I used with NexRemote for so many years). If everything was hunky-dory, I might even try connecting SkyTools 3 to CPWI, which appeared to be possible, and start running the Herschel list.

“But Uncle Rod, don’t you know SkyTools4 is out?” I do, Skeezix. I even have a copy of the “Imaging” version, which I reviewed for the Second Edition of Choosing and Using a New CAT. But the imaging version is maybe a little bit of overkill for what I’d be doing, and I do not yet have a copy of SkyTools 4 Visual, so it would be good, old ST3, which saw me through the original Herschel Project.

Set up Thursday afternoon was OK, if not exactly a joy—it’s already awfully warm here. I knew if I waited till the cool of the evening, though, I might lose the will to mess with all the video gear and the computer, so I got on it. The AVX and the SCT are not too bad, and I was able to set everything up without incident. Well, only one. I started to pick up a heavy equipment case with my “bad” arm and it swiftly told me not to do that.

So, it finally got dark Thursday night just as Rod’s favorite 10-meter net (The Lockdown Fun Net, Thursdays, 1900L, 0000Z, 28.420 MHz) was wrapping up after a rollicking session that lasted far longer than usual…10-meters was “open” and we had W2s, W3s, W8s and more check-in for what is usually a local net here in Four Land. Walking out of the shack, I saw what I pretty much expected to see: brighter stars winking in and out as bands of clouds and haze began to move in on what had been a clear sky in the afternoon. Naturally.

Typical Possum Swamp spring sky.

The sky wasn’t good enough to even think about firing up the Mallincam, not even close. Nevertheless, I uncovered Mrs. Peel. If I couldn’t do anything else, I’d at least polar align the Advanced VX using Sharpcap and my QHY guide cam. While a dead-on polar alignment isn’t necessary for video, it can make the stars look better in 30 second exposures. Also, Sharpcap makes it easy, so “Why not?”

What was it like coming back to polar alignment on the Advanced VX from the Losmandy? Like most other Chinese mounts, the AVX uses bolts for altitude and azimuth adjustment. Good thing is these bolts at least have nice, large handles as compared to the old CG5. Polar aligning the AVX is more “twitchy,” but it wasn’t hard for me to get the error under 15-arc seconds. That done, I covered the scope up and went inside to watch the 100^thepisode of the exceedingly silly Ghost Adventures on cable TV.

Friday evening found me hoping for at least sucker holes as darkness arrived in Hickory Ridge. How’d it go? I guess you could say it was a classic Unk Rod evening. Oh, it started out promisingly enough. The sky wasn’t exactly clear, but most of it was OK. A check of date and time in the NexStar HC said ever’thing was cool with the RTC battery. The CPWIsoftware connected to the AVX through the hand controller without complaint. OK. Fine Business. Guess I’ll start an alignment, a StarSense alignment.

I mashed the appropriate button, but instead of starting the alignment, CPWI asked me if I wanted to calibrate the StarSense. I wasn’t sure if I did nor not. However, I hadn’t used it in a pretty good while and this was my first time to use it with CPWI, so I thought that might be a good idea. The program instructed me to slew to a bright star, and even highlighted some suggestions on the star chart. OK. Well, how about Arcturus. I clicked goto, and off the mount went.

Despite a very good polar alignment, when the mount stopped, the star was not in the field of the Mallincam. Alrighty then, I left the deck for the yard and peered through Mrs. Peel’s Rigel Quick Finder. The star was reasonably close, but no cigar. A degree or two away, mebbe. I’d just center it up and… Wait. How would I center it? You cannot use the HC with CPWI interfaced to the mount. “Oh, yeah, a joystick just like in the NexRemote days.” I’d thought that might be necessary, and had hauled out the old Wireless Wingman.

I went to the gamepad set up screen where I was told to press “start” on the Wingman. I did. Repeatedly. What happened? Nuttin’ honey. So, I spent the next half hour trying everything I could think of to make the software connect to that old game controller. Nothing worked. What would I do? I recalled I had a wired Xbox controller in the house. I went in and got it, plugged it into the USB hub, and the computer made its bing-bong noise and happily set it up.

OK. Let’s see what CPWI thinks of this one. It liked the Xbox controller just fine, picking it up immediately and sending me to a configuration screen. OK, I’ll just take this out to the scope and center that dad-blasted Arcturus. Sorry, Unk. The cord on the joystick was about 3-feet too short. Luckily, one of my few remaining braincells fired and I recalled I had a 6-foot USB extension cable. I even knew where it was. Fetched it, plugged it between Xbox controller and PC, and had enough slack to get my eye behind the Quick Finder. I centered that pesky star well enough that it was visible on the Mallincam display, and went back to the PC and did the fine centering with the Mallincam’s crosshair overlay and CPWI’s virtual HC.

The program seemed right happy then. Said it had done a plate solve and yadda-yadda-yadda, did I want to start an automatic StarSense alignment? I darned sure did after wasting so much time. Ha! Clouds were pouring in from the west now, impelling me to throw the Big Switch.

So, yeah, it was a prototypal Unk Rod evening. But as with most of those, I learned some stuff about CPWI—mostly how to navigate the new software—and now felt fairly comfortable with it. What next? Well, Saturday evening was slated to be about the same as Friday. If I could just get one freaking H-400 in the can, your old Uncle would be a happy camper.

The sky was clearing nicely late Friday afternoon, but then, as I was out for my evening stroll around Hickory Ridge, my phone beeped with a notification from the cotton-picking Weather Channel. The sky was pretty and blue, but this missive insisted there were severe thunderstorms just to the west. Nevertheless, I thought I’d be OK; it looked like the storms would slide past us to the northwest.

About half way through watching the latest episode of Harley Quinn’s show, I figgered I’d better check on the scope and all (I’d uncovered Mrs. Peel and had everything ready to go on the deck—computer, video display, etc.). One look at the sky, and I covered the scope up in a hurry and moved the rest of the stuff inside. It was just getting dark, but it was still light enough for Unk to see threatening clouds blowing in from the West. There was a strong breeze stirring and a feel in the air that portended “b-a-d weather coming.”

There was bad weather coming, culminating in a forebodingly early Tropical Storm, Cristobal, in advance of which, I naturally moved mount and telescope inside. The storm was minor in nature, but it did bring wind gusts of 30mph and dump about 6-inches of rain, so it was good Mrs. Peel was safe and snug inside.

Following the storm, the weather improved slowly. It wasn’t good enough for me to get Emma and the Xtreme out, but it was good enough for me to get my old friend, my ETX125, Charity Hope Valentine, out of her case and working again (which you read about last week). That night with Charity Hope Valentine became Night One of the New Project if just barely. I observed a grand total of exactly one object. After that, I sat and waited for better conditions, which it appeared might come the following Tuesday.

CPWI's initial display.

First task once the stars winked on Tuesday night was to see if I could really get CPWI pointing at objects and, just as importantly, interfaced to SkyTools 3. If either thing didn’t work well or reliably, I’d just go back to using the (StarSense) hand control with SkyTools and/or Stellarium. Both things had to work if CPWI were to be part of the New Herschel Project, if it were to be the new NexRemote.

Alrighty, then. I decided to start out with just an eyepiece. Leaving the Xtreme out of the picture initially would allow me to focus on CPWI. So, my good old 13mm Ethos went into the William Optics SCT diagonal I’d screwed onto (ahem) Emma’s rear. That would yield 154x, and despite the eyepiece’s large field would give CPWI’s pointing prowess a good test (I left the reducer off so the scope would be working at f/10).

Polar alignment complete and mount powered on, I started CPWIon the laptop and was presented by the display you see above. Next step was getting the mount talking to the software by choosing the connection type under the Connection menu on the left toolbar. There are three possibilities: Hand Controller, Wi-Fi, or USB. Most of us will use Hand Controller, which means you’ve got a Celestron serial cable (or a USB cable) plugged into the base of the HC. If you’ve got a Celestron Evolution scope or one of their wi-fi dongles on another Celestron rig, you’ll use “Wi-Fi.” Finally, Celestron’s CGX German mounts allow you to use a USB cable plugged directly into a USB port on the mount.

Select your alignment method.

Once successfully connected, you’ll be asked to verify time and location. I’d already done that during my previous CPWI outing, so it was on to telescope alignment. Next you’re presented with the goto alignment selection window. There are two main choices: CPWI alignment, where you add points to a model by centering stars; or an alignment done with the StarSense automatic alignment camera.

If you choose to do a “manual” alignment, a CPWIalignment, the program will select four points (stars) it believes are good alignment choices, and you’ll center and accept them much as you would with a hand control. The difference with CPWI is you can continue adding as many points to the sky model as desired.

Unk, lazy sort he is, naturally had the StarSense hooked to the mount. Since I’d calibrated it on a star on my previous night out with the software, all I had to do was start the normal StarSense four-star-field automatic alignment. That wasn’t much different than it would have been with the hand control except I could read what the camera was doing on the laptop screen instead of having to squint at a tiny hand control display. After about the same amount of time it would have taken the hand control, CPWI announced we were aligned.

If, unlike Unk, you have not already polar aligned the mount, you may do an AllStar Polar Alignment with the program following either type of goto alignment. Let me add that many of the usual hand control features like PPEC, parking, changing slew rates, etc. can be done with CPWI. Which is a good thing, since as mentioned earlier you cannot use your hand control at the same time you are using the program. It is in a “boot loader” mode and utterly unresponsive.

“Hokay. Let’s see if CPWI aligned anything.” Peering around the patio umbrella on the deck and up at the sky showed bright Arcturus riding high. I located the sparkler on CPWI’s star map, clicked on it, clicked “slew,” and the mount and Mrs. Peel headed for the star just as they would have done with Stellarium or any other program. Trotted out to the scope, and there was Arcturus sitting pretty in the field center.

Ready to begin a StarSense alignment.

How about a deep sky object? M3 was nearly at zenith, and I figgered that would be a good test of the program’s goto abilities—just about any goto system can have trouble with objects near straight overhead. Instead of locating the globular cluster on the map, I used the program’s search feature, which worked well, and soon had the scope heading to M3. When the AVX stopped, M3 was staring back at me in the eyepiece. It was a little off-center, however, so I nudged it to the middle of the 13mm.

How did I do that nudging? Well, I could have had the laptop set up next to the scope and used the program’s onscreen direction buttons, but that wouldn’t have been very convenient. Instead, I used the Xbox gamepad. It took a little fumbling to get it going again, but when I did, it worked just ducky for the rest of the evening. If you are going to be using CPWIwithout a StarSense, a gamepad is vital because you’ll be centering numerous stars to do your goto alignment. A wireless PC or Xbox gamepad would be best. Me? Since I’m mainly gonna be sitting at the PC and viewing images on a video screen, my wired controller is more than adequate.

I sent the scope to quite a few other targets, no problem. Well, other than most looked pretty putrid in the haze. All that remained now was to get SkyTools 3 running with CPWI, attach the Mallincam to the scope, and knock off some Herschels.

After using SkyTools with NexRemote for so many years, the concept of using it with CPWI was easy to understand: I’d connect SkyToolsto the scope through the program, not directly. The procedure for doing that is different than with NexRemote, but the result is the same. Instead of establishing a virtual port for SkyTools with NexRemote, what you do with this modern software is start up SkyTools’ Realtime (its goto module) and use the ASCOM Chooser to select “CPWI” as the telescope.

As with the Gamepad, it took a little of Unk’s patented fooling around to get it going, but once I did, SkyTools 3 worked faultlessly with CPWI. I’d click on an object on my SkyToolsobserving list, SkyTools would announce “Slewing telescope!” (in its sexy British-accented female voice), and we’d go to the object. That was all there was to it.

SkyTools 3 with "always on top" CPWI hand control.

Next? Knocking off some Herschels. Unfortunately, I’d burned most of the evening getting the Herschel Project software squared away. At this point in the late spring, it doesn’t get dark until nine—not even dark enough to do a polar alignment. And a look at my watch showed the time was now passing two. Part of me wanted to get the Xtreme on the scope anyway, but I demurred. I was hoping the next night would be at least as good as this one had been and pulled that cursed Big Switch.

Summing up? I am not feeling particularly charitable toward Celestron at the moment—you will find out why next week—but regarding this (free) software, I gotta say they done good. It is not perfect, but it certainly workable. Most of the improvements that are needed concern the star map (for example, why no constellation labels?). I do understand most of the program’s development, which has been slow, has had to be concerned with getting alignment and connectivity issues resolved. Anyhoo, now they need to spiff up the star map. Also, a little more gamepad functionality would be nice. As is, all you can do is move the telescope (fast or slow) with it.

At any rate, I am convinced CPWI and SkyTools 3 (or Deep Sky Planner, which I'll check out with CPWI next time) are what I will use initially for the New Herschel Project—when I use the Celestron mount, anyway. CPWI has got a feel a lot like good, old NexRemote. Enough of a feel that I’m not missing my favorite piece of astronomy software quite as much as I was, muchachos.

It’s a good thing this is a family friendly blog, muchachos, or that title above would have been a lot nastier. As most of y’all know, when it comes to SCTs I’ve always been a Celestron man. Have been for many a long year. Will that change? I don’t know, but I’m plenty put out at them right now. The way I feel at the moment, if I were to buy another SCT it would have a blue tube, or would at least be a used Celestron from before the Synta era.

Until now, the Celestron scopes I’ve owned have just kept on keeping on year after year after year with only the most minor of minor maintenance needed—like occasional cleaning of the inside surface of their corrector plates. So, imagine my surprise and anger when I discovered my beloved Edge 800, Mrs. Emma Peel,had a serious problem thanks to a mistake made at the factory and would require major maintenance after only seven years of ownership.

I’m not sure exactly when Emma’s problem began to make itself known, but I first noticed it many months back: a shiny inch-wide streak on the inside of the tube running from almost the corrector to almost the primary mirror. I assumed this was from dew that had condensed and slightly discolored the inside surface of the tube. I figured it would eventually disappear and wasn’t a big deal one way or the other.

Then, when I had the scope out the other day getting ready for the start of the New Herschel Project, I noticed the streak was still there and more prominent than ever. I got worried then. I was afraid that, rather than being a stain left by condensation, it might be lubricant from the exterior of the baffle tube or from the focuser that had liquified and run down the tube. That could be a problem, since if the tube got even somewhat hot, that lubricant might begin to vaporize and be deposited on corrector or—worse—primary mirror. I resolved to open Emma up and do some cleaning. I hadn’t cleaned the inside of her corrector since I bought the scope in the spring of 2013, so it was about time for that anyway.

Prepare a good, safe place to pull the corrector.

OK…so time to pull Emma’s corrector. Early one morning, I prepared a place as I always do with plenty of towels for cushioning in the event the lens gets away from me. I also put a folded towel under the corrector assembly so the tube pointed up a little so the corrector plate wouldn't be likely to fall out when the retaining ring was removed. I thought this would be pretty standard stuff. It would certainly not be the first time I’d torn an SCT down to parade rest. A colleague at the university once timed me to see how quickly I could get a corrector plate off and back on on one of the physics department’s scopes (a student had somehow managed to drop an eyepiece cap down the rear port). I set a personal record of seven minutes that time.

I intended to take my time on this one, though. It was somewhat new territory in at least one regard. In the past, Celestron scopes have used little shims around the periphery of the corrector to properly center it—the center position with regard to the primary may not be centered on the corrector mounting on the tube due to mechanical variances. These shims in the past have been little pieces of cork, or, more often, folded paper…pieces of Post-it notes in recent times.

When you put the scope back together, you naturally want to get the corrector properly re-centered in the interests of best optical performance. It was not that hard to use a pencil on the lip of the tube to mark where the shims went, but, yeah, the little pieces of paper deal was kinda fussy and silly. The Edges abandon that for nylon hex screws around the corrector periphery. They thread through the “ring” on the end of the tube, the corrector assembly, and adjust centering. I think it’s a pretty good system. If Celestron isn’t using this on all their tubes, they should be.

I had a standard Celestron OTA here for a review a while back, but li’l old me can’t remember if the nylon screws were used on it or not. Frankly, a lot of things that happened in the year or two before my accident in the late winter of 2019 are strangely fuzzy in my memory now. Go figure. Anyhow, maybe one of you, dear readers, can answer that question for me.

Mark the cetering screw you begin with so you don't lose track.

So, first order of business was backing out those screws half a turn using a 2mm hex wrench. If/when you follow in Unk’s footsteps, mark the first one you loosen so you don’t lose track. That done, the next step in Edge corrector pulling is the same as it ever was.

Firstly, remove the screws that hold the plastic retaining ring against the corrector. Unk put all them screws in a little paper bowl…small screws love to run away and hide on the floor of Unk’s radio shack, which is also his Workshop of the Telescopes. The plastic retaining ring is now accompanied by some foam-like gasket material. Guess that’s OK, though I don’t see much need.

Before proceeding, use a soft pencil or marker to mark the rotational position of the corrector. Celestron no longer engraves a serial number on the corrector periphery, so you can’t use that for indexing anymore. Retainer off and put in a safe place, I removed the scope’s Faststar secondary and put it in a safe place too. “Welp, now all I gotta do is pull the corrector out.”

Alas, Mr. Corrector didn’t want to budge. It’s not unusual for correctors to get “welded” to the corrector assembly by the passage of time. A little prying with a jeweler’s screwdriver always frees them, though. However, I could tell immediately that wouldn’t work this time. The feel told me the corrector was still firmly, and I do mean firmly, seated in place. What to do? What I always do in these situations. I stopped, trotted back to the house, made myself another cup of java on the fricking Keurig, and considered the situation.

Somewhat more awake, and equipped with my glasses, I took a second look at the corrector. “Oh, Celestron, you &%$*!!@ idiots!” My now clearer eyes revealed four spots of RTV where the corrector had been gluedin place. Why would they do such a thing? Search me. The Nylon screws and the retainer are more than enough to hold the lens in place. And surely, they are aware the corrector will have to be removed sooner rather than later for corrector cleaning or some other reason—like weird streaks of something on the tube interior. What were they thinking?

Once Unk calmed down a little, a boxcutter retrieved from the shack’s bench made short work of that dagnabbed RTV, and the corrector was off and placed in a safe spot. Your old uncle wasn’t quite fuming now. But he would shortly be fuming again in epic proportions. To the tune of one of his classic melt-downs.

Removing the retaining ring.

“Hokay, let’s get that funny-looking streak cleaned up.” I thought I’d probably better start gently with just a damp paper towel—damp with tap water. I scrubbed a little. “Funny. Doesn’t seem to be coming off. Seems to be…getting worse.” One look at the towel told the tale: It was black with stuff that seemed to have the consistency of lamp black—if you’re old enough to remember what that was. “What the—?!”

What was going on was all too obvious. The paint on the interior of the tube was coming off with gentle scrubbing. The streak hadn’t been some contaminant; it had been the paint failing. Why? Whoever ran the sprayer through the interior of the aluminum tubing to paint it black at the factory in the PRC hadn’t properly cleaned the aluminum first. A little googling later on the freaking Internet soon showed I am not the only person to have experienced this. And that those people I read about who’d reported the problem to Celestron all received the same response, “First we’ve heard of that problem.” Uh-huh.

When Unk recovered from a meltdown wherein he assumed the character of a small, emotionally disturbed child, it was time to consider what to do about Emma. Ship her to Celestron? Nope. Not only was I not exactly in the mood to deal with those suckers, I didn’t want to pay shipping—even if only one way if Celestron agreed to that. And with the Covid 19 virus still running rampant, who knew how long they'd hang onto the scope? I didn’t want to devise a shipping container, either (after years of ownership I didn’t thinkI needed to hang onto the box the OTA came in any longer). Finally, I didn’t want to subject my telescope to the tender mercies of UPS.

What I’d have to do was clean as much of the old paint off as possible and repaint the bad area.

First thing to do was mask and glove up and visit Home Depot. A few minutes turned up a small can of high-quality flat black paint. Latexpaint. I was loath to use some kind of oil paint with its associated fumes on the scope’s semi-sealed interior. Oh, and a good quality, small brush. Unless I wanted to pull the primary and do a really complete tear down, which I didn’t, brushing would be the only way. Even a small roller would be likely to generate tiny drops of paint and contaminate the primary.

The crux of the problem--after some gentle scrubbing.

The actual job was not as bad as I’d feared. I cleaned off as much paint as I could in the obviously affected area (my damp cloth easily got me down to bare metal). That done, I brushed on two light coats of paint. The result looked pretty good. Now, brushed-on paint will never be quite as even or pretty looking as a spray job, but maybe you don’t want it to be so even and pretty. A little texture can help reduce scattered light. One thing was sure: my paint was a lot blacker than what Celestron used, which was more like “medium gray.”

While the paint was drying, I did some more looking around the OTA. “Well…there’s another spot. Oh, and one over there too. It became obvious the entire tube interior had to be repainted. Which I did, exercising care not to get any paint on the primary mirror. It turned out rather well, I think. I’m just hoping I cleaned well enough in the worst spots to get the paint to adhere, and that in the other places the latex will act as a sealer. Time will tell, I reckon. Anyhow, I left the paint to dry overnight before proceeding to reassembly.

Painting done; I cleaned the interior surface of the corrector plate using my time-honored method; one I’ve been using for well over 30 years. What’s required is a box of Kleenex, the unscented and un-lotioned variety; a can of canned air; and a bottle of original (blue) Windex. While some folks worry that something in Windex might somehow harm the optical coatings on a corrector, that has certainly not been the case with any of the many, many telescopes I’ve used it on over the years. Remember, lens coatings are tough, anyway, very tough; they are entirely different from the coatings on first-surface mirrors.

Anyhoo, what I do is blow any dust off the lens’ surface using the canned air. Like Windex, canned air will not hurt your corrector. Do hold the can upright and keep it about 18-inches away. Next, I spritz a Kleenex with a little Windex and swab gently starting at the secondary mount and proceeding outwards, changing tissues every once in a while. Finally, I dry the corrector with fresh, clean tissues. To finish up, I use the canned air to get rid of any lint left by the Kleenex. Again, this method will not hurt your lens, and Windex does a better—far better—job than any lens cleaning fluid I’ve ever used.

Next morning, it was time to get poor Emma back together and off the operating table. No real surprises. The little studs Celestron places around the corrector periphery to engage the dust cap make it kind of a pain to get the retainer back on—you have to bend it gently and slip it into place. That done, retighten the centering screws by the amount you loosened them, replace the screws in the retainer (just snug only), and you are done.

As good as new? I hope so.

As you can see, the girl was back to being her usual photogenic self. And I was pretty sure she’d get a clean bill of health under the stars once I got some of those increasingly rare clear skies. While Tropical Storm Cristobal didn’t go straight over our heads, it came close enough to dump tons of rain.

The denouement, when the evil old clouds finally scudded off for a couple of evenings? I got Emma out for both visual and video observing (which you will read about next week) and she performed just as well as she ever has. She was even still in collimation. The paint job is holding up despite a couple of days under a Telegizmos cover in the heat and humidity of the backyard, so all is wellfor now and Unk has his fingers and toes crossed.

So, anyhow, what’s my takeaway? I’m still mad at Celestron. I didn’t go out and buy an Edge 800 the day they hit the streets, so this wasn’t a case of early adopter syndrome. And painting the interior of the tube should have been something they could have done successfully no matter what the design of the scope.

But that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. I plan to stop stewing about it and get out under the stars with Mrs. Peel as often as I can in the service of the New Herschel Project. That’s what our magnificent obsession is about, not worrying over the depredations of telescope companies.

Book Plug Department

This time, that plug is for my own book, the 2nd Edition of Choosing and Using a New CAT. I am as happy with this one as I am with anything I've written, and hope you will be too. It is now available from Amazon in both print and Kindle editions.

For the moment, I will not tackle the existential query, “Why, Rod? Why more Herschels? Why now?” Instead, I shall stick to explicating the rules of engagement.”

It was hot, humid, and hazy on the longest day of the year. Not a recipe for pleasant observing, muchachos, but your old Unk knew he needed to do something about those Herschels, and it’s rare of late for me to get a night that’s just hazy, as it looked like this one would be. So, when it finally got dark, I got myself outside, uncovered the scope, sat down at the laptop on the deck and got to work…

But, to backtrack for a minute, y'all, I mentioned “rules of engagement” up above (paraphrasing the Julie – Julia blogthat inspired the original Herschel Project). What are they? The New Herschel Project will be done from my backyard with 10-inch and smaller telescopes. Likely, the 8-inch Edge 800 will be the baseline instrument. However, I suspect Charity Hope Valentine, my ETX125, will get a shot when those dark(er) winter skies come 'round, and the 10-inch Dob, Zelda, will be in the backyard when I need a little visual horsepower. Just as with the big Project, I shall use video when appropriate and visual observing when appropriate. How long? I'll stick to what I said last time:

365 days. 400 objects. One astronomer and a less than perfect suburban backyard sky.

How far will it go?

The New Herschel Project. Now on a computer terminal near you!

To say I was a bit nervous about Emma following her surgery would be an understatement. Did I get her corrector centered properly? Would she still be in collimation? Time to find out. I lit-off the CPWI software, the New Project's "NexRemote," selected StarSense Auto as my alignment type, and hit the go button.

Just as with an alignment done with the StarSense auto-align camera’s normal hand control, the Advanced VX moved Emma to four different fields and plate solved on each. As I mentioned in the blog entry on CPWI not long ago, the only difference was that instead of having to squint at the tiny text on the hand control—even smaller than that of the standard NexStar Plus HC—I could read about what the StarSense and AVX were doing on the laptop screen in characters large enough not to challenge your old Uncle’s fading eyesight.

Unk's "observatory."

Directly—in about the same amount of time it would have taken to do the StarSense alignment with the HC—CPWI declared we was done. Since I’d had an at least brief opportunity to test the CWPI StarSense goto alignment accuracy some weeks back, I wasn’t overly concerned about that. On that night the program delivered results that seemed to be every bit as good as what the hand control would have produced.

I was curious to see if a star would be placed in the small field of the Mallincam Xtreme riding on Emma’s rear (ahem) cell. Even though I’d screwed a Meade f/3.3 reducer on the scope ahead of the camera, the Xtreme’s tiny CCD chip still produces a limited field. I had already started the Mallincam Xtreme control program and set the camera for “sense up” and an exposure of about 2-seconds, which is good for framing and focusing.

“Hmmm…how about that bright one over yonder?” I located Arcturus on the CPWI star map displayed before me on the computer’s screen, clicked on it, and hit the goto button. Emma immediately started making for the star at her top slewing speed. When the AVX’s weasels-with-tuberculosis motor sound stopped, there was Arcturus, way out of focus but nevertheless on the screen of the old portable DVD player I use as a Mallincam display. In the course of focusing the star, I could see diffraction rings and could tell I had—somewhat amazingly, I reckon—maintained collimation when I put Emma back together.

Well, alrighty then. Time to get to work on the New Herschel Project. No, the sky was not perfect—some clouds and a lot of haze—but it was better than it had been for weeks or would probably be for weeks more, so there was no time to waste. The camera was obviously ready to roll, and a quick test showed my little Orion StarShoot DVR was also good.

CPWI alignment choices.

So…was itan Uncle Rod night or not (if you’re a newbie here, that means a night of fumbling and bumbling)? It was not, muchachos, mostly not, anyhow. The closest thing to a serious hiccup was that the Orion imaging filter (a mild Deep Sky type filter) I’d experimentally screwed onto the Xtreme’s nosepiece didn’t really seem to help that much. It also gave the images you’ll see below a strong bluish cast. These types of filters work pretty well for DSLR imaging, but I believe I can achieve better results with the Mallincam in the backyard just by playing with its exposure, gain, color, and contrast controls.

I did run into a problem with SkyTools when I linked it to CPWI. Bringing up the Herschel 400 list would cause the program to crash. That only happened with that list and no others, strangely. I’ll have to do some troubleshooting soon, but it was easy enough just to enter object IDs from the list manually into CPWI rather than clicking on objects in SkyTools 3.

Finally, I don’t know what I was thinkin’ (probably “not much”), but instead of using the 2-inch visual back I normally employ with the Mallincam, I attached the camera to the Edge’s stock 1.25-inch back which is overly long and which resulted in some vignetting in the bright skies and a little more reduction than I like. But, hey, what can I say? It wouldn’t be an Uncle Rod night if it weren’t, well, an Uncle Rod night, right?

Anyhoo, below are the targets Emma and I checked off the list on this second evening. There’s no particular rhyme or reason to the order in which we observed them. It had more to do with what was in the clear at any given time than any overarching plan for the night.

M105 and company.

M105 (NGC 3379)

The ol’ Lion, Leo, was riding high, and Messier 105, a bright elliptical galaxy and one of the Ms in the Herschel list, was an obvious target. The question really wasn’t whether I’d get M105, but whether the camera would see the two dimmer companion galaxies, NGC 3384 and 3389. Verdict? The two bonus galaxies were there—if just barely (they are easier to see on the video than they are on this single frame grab below).

M61 (NGC 4303)

Next up was Virgo’s bright, near face-on spiral, M61. I’d have gone there anyway—it’s one of the showpieces of spring even from poor sites/skies—but I was doubly interested in this SAB island universe because of its recent supernova. Would it still be bright enough to detect in these skies (I hadn’t checked)? Yep, there it was among a few hot pixels, SN 2020jfo. That was cool. But what was just as cool was seeing M61 show off its spiral arms in the frankly horrible heavens.

M104 (NGC 4594)

Also in Virgo, is another Messier treat that is an aitch, M104, the justly famous Sombrero Galaxy. With the Virgin riding high, the galaxy cut through the nasty haze and light pollution with fair ease. The basic shape with “crown,” “brim,” and dust lane was more than obvious despite skies that were becoming ever more punk.

M107 (NGC 6171)

Ophiuchus’ M107 is certainly not its best globular star cluster, but this Shapley – Sawyer Class 10 (loosely concentrated) star ball is a Herschel and was out of the trees, so there went me and Mrs. Peel. I was a little concerned we might not see much…this is a loose cluster (which equals “dimmer”) and it was low in the sky. But, hey, I was using a MALLINCAM. Sure enough, there it was on the screen showing considerable resolution (especially in the video).

NGC 6369 The Little Ghost Nebula

The Little Ghost (planetary) Nebula is another of Ophiuchus huge trove of deep sky objects. It is also a Herschel, so it was what was next on the itinerary. It’s fairly dim and also small at about 28” across, so it’s not something that will put your dadgum eye out. It was not bad on this night, showing off it’s pink color and small ring shape, both of which things can be hard to make out in an eyepiece.

Pretty M61 and supernova.

NGC 6356

Also in the realm of the Serpent Bearer and not far from the Little Ghost is the magnitude 7.4 globular star cluster NGC 6356. I was pleasantly surprised by this little guy. Lots of stars were resolved by Mrs. Peel and the Xtreme.

NGC 6342

Another, dimmer, glob, NGC 6342, was close at hand, so it was our next stop. What me and Mrs. Peel saw was obviously a globular—there was quite a bit of resolution around its periphery—but it’s relatively small size for a glob (6’) and low altitude prevented us from getting a good look.

NGC 6235

This next glob is brighter than 6342, but it is looser and even smaller. There was obviously a scattering of very dim, very tiny stars onscreen, but more than that neither I nor Emma could say.

NGC 6287

Annnnd…NGC 6287 is another of Ophiuchus many globular clusters. It’s another dim one at about magnitude 10. It’s also small at 5’ across. Nevertheless, we saw a bunch of teeny weeny stars surrounding an obvious central condensation in this medium concentration (VII) star ball.

M108

Did you know Ursa Major’s justly famous galaxy M108 is a Herschel? Well it is. Alas, it's mostly famous for its proximity to M97, the Owl Nebula. M108, a near edge-on, is badly harmed by light pollution. Under dark skies, it can almost rival M82. In the suburbs, it is usually nothing more than a dim streak. On this night, even with the Mallincam, it wasn’t much more than that. Oh, there were a few spots of condensation, but, yeah, mostly, "dim smudge."

NGC 2985

This magnitude 10.1 Ursa Major Galaxy was just a round fuzzball on the screen. I didn’t expect much else. It’s close to face-on in its orientation to us (always tough), and it takes some dark skies to allow even a long exposure to pull out the arms of this active galaxy.

Good, old Sombrero.

NGC 2987

A magnitude 11.1 barred lenticular galaxy, NGC 2987 can show considerable detail under dark skies. On this night what was visible was a round nucleus and some hints of its bar.

NGC 3077

There wasn’t much to see in this mag 10.6 face-on irregular galaxy. But there never is, even in large telescopes. However, I was pleased to see that the galaxy appeared distinctly oval instead of being just a round fuzzball.

NGC 2976

This Sc spiral was visible—but only just. While it’s a strongly oval intermediated inclination spiral galaxy and shows plenty of splotchy detail in its disk under good conditions, on this night it was an easily passed over oval of subtle brightening in the field.

NGC 4041

In deep photos, this small (2.6’ across) face on Sc galaxy shows a welter of delicate arms. To my C8 and Mallincam, alas, it only showed a bright core and a very subtle disk of haze around that.

NGC 4036

NGC 4036 was at least slightly more interesting than the previous object. If only relatively so. It’s an edge on lenticular, and lenticular galaxies don’t have much—if any—detail to show. In my scope on this (had to admit) yucky night, this 4’ across object was obviously strongly elongated, but that was all I could say.

Little but cute ghost.

NGC 3945

Under good conditions, a deep sky video camera can show an image of this barred lenticular that doesn’t look much different from its Palomar Observatory Sky Survey plates—a bright round center embedded in a subtle haze with the same of the iris of a cat’s eye (seen here in a Herschel Project shot from dark skies). On this evening it was just a small bright spot in some very subtle and shapeless haze.

NGC 2742

This is a magnitude 12, multi-armed intermediate spiral galaxy. That’s what it is from dark skies, anyhow. On this evening I had to stare at the screen for quite a while to assure myself I was seeing anything.

NGC 5322

NGC 5322 is a large (6’ across) elliptical galaxy with a strong oval shape. Curiously, while I could make out its oval envelope, I could not easily detect the brighter center of this magnitude 11 sprite. Go figger, I always say.

And, with that Ursa Major fuzzie recorded, Urania closed down her sky, drawing a pall across it with a flood of thick, lightning-festooned clouds. I was satisfied, though. Well, as satisfied as I ever am when an observing run ends before I am ready to quit. I hadn’t covered a huge amount of territory, but I had at least scratched the surface of the friendly Herschel 400. And I’d been assured that my beloved telescope, Emma Peel, came through her recent travails in good shape. I covered Emma, brought the computer and other electronic gear inside, poured out some "sarsaparilla," and relaxed in the blessed cool of the den.

What’s next and when for the good, old AstroBlog? I cannot say when “next” will be, because that depends on the cooperation of the Possum Swamp summer sky. The Moon needs to get out of the way, too. And I don’t think I have anything else to bring to you at the moment other than the next installment of the New Project. But you never know what will enter my mind (such as it is). So, muchachos, I guess that means "I will see you when I see you."

Of course I’m talking about NEOWISE, C/2020 F3, muchachos, which has been hovering above the Northern Hemisphere’s northwestern horizon and shining at a respectable magnitude of 2. That’s down from its height, a somewhat amazing +.5 when it was in its morning apparition earlier in July and a definite naked eye object. Magnitude 2 is still darned good as comets go, however. And this week its altitude is increasing, meaning it's now possible for some of those with obstructed horizons to finally get a look at the visitor.

What’s the ground truth about this comet? It’s the best we’ve had in years—maybe since Hale Bopp departed the inner Solar System. But don’t fool yourself: Hale-Bopp wasn’t just a naked eye object; it was a naked eye object for a long, long time. And it wasn’t just bright; it was BRIGHT. At its height, it was visible in near daylight. This visitor, on the other hand, now requires binoculars to be seen if, like most of us, you are a denizen of suburbia. In fact, its position meant that even when it was at its brightest most observers needed optical aid to see much of it. If anything.

Wish I could have seen NEOWISE in its morning passage. I love morning comets—maybe because they remind me of my first one, long ago Ikeya-Seki. The stars just didn’t align for your old Uncle this time, though. As you might not be surprised to hear, it being July and me being down here in Possum Swamp, the weather, including the dawn weather, has been lousy. But there was more to it than that; your old uncle was too worried to be much in the mood to wake up at oh-dark-thirty for comet chasing.

“Worried about what?” I was potentially exposed to the COVID 19 virus. The details don’t matter. Well, except for the fact that everybody involved was masked and wearing gloves and the place where the exposure occurred was disinfected. Those things meant I wouldn’t get sick. But I wouldn’t know that for at least ten days.

Where are you little Panstarrs?

As soon as your aged correspondent and Miss Dorothy learned what had happened, we resolved to get tested. We managed that on the Wednesday following my exposure the previous Thursday evening, which was about right time-wise according to the experts. Luckily, there is a clinic right up the road from Hickory Ridge, a drive-in style setup: make an appointment, drive up to the facility, wait in your vehicle till called on your phone, drive into the large tent where the testing takes place.

All this happened fairly quickly considering the fact that our poor state is facing a huge spike in cases. About an hour after we arrived, one of the heroic nurses was at my car window taking my temperature and my blood oxygen level. The bad? I was running a modest fever. The good? My blood oxygen level was fine, which I was told is more important than your temperature. Soon, a nurse had a swab up my nose. Despite what you may have heard, that is uncomfortable but not painful. I liken it to the feeling you’d get as a kid when you accidentally inhaled some heavily chlorinated pool water.

Next? Back home at the New Manse, there was nothing to do but wait and see. The fever had been worrying, but I was pretty sure I had a mild sinus infection. At any rate, Miss D. had ordered one of those gun-like infrared thermometers and a pulse-oxy meter from Amazon. Both insisted I was fine. Blood oxygen in the high 90s and no more fever. Of course, your old Unk being the way he is, that didn’t help. Every morning I’d awaken with a slightly scratchy throat (from a night in the air conditioning) and would be sure I had IT.

We continued to be symptom free, and five days after we were tested the results came in: NEGATIVE. In a few more days, the two weeks of our self-quarantine were up and I was a free man. Well, free enough to at least journey to Publix at 7 a.m. once a week for groceries and to the comic book store on Wednesdays to clear my box. The whole thing had spooked me, and other than that I am sticking close to home. Let this be a cautionary tale: the only reason, I’m convinced, I wasn’t sickened and maybe worse (at my age I am definitely an “elevated risk” kinda guy) was the mask, the gloves, social distancing, and the disinfecting we did. I hope you also do these things, muchachos. If you are like most amateur astronomers and like me, you are not in the spring chicken demographic and do not want to play around with this stuff.

Be that as it may; the end of my quarantine also brought a temporary lifting of the early evening clouds—Neo had now moved into the evening sky. I was ready to tackle another comet in a long string of “my” comets. But how, exactly, would I do that?

The finished mount did look funky.

While I wouldn’t have a prayer of seeing anything close to Neo’s tail’s full extent of 15-degrees from suburbia, I needed to maximize my field of view in order to see as much of it as I could. I’ve got several short focal length refractors…but…one thing I’ve learned from my decades of comet chasing is that when it comes to to the hairy stars the magic word is “binoculars.”

Next question? Which binoculars? Over many years of (occasionally) serious observing, I’ve accumulated numerous pairs of glasses. I’ve never considered myself a real binocular fan, but, like cats, they’ve just come to me: everything from a sophisticated pair of 40mm roof prism binocs, to the everyday bread-and-butter 10x50s, to my big honkin’ Zhumell Tachyon 25x100s.

Yeah, 100mm binoculars, the “six-inch refractor” of the binocular game. We all want ‘em—or think we do. To make a long story short, about nine years ago I found you could buy a pair of Chinese 25x100s for about 250 bucks. Not only that; they were garnering a reputation for excellent optics. Only 250 for 4-inch binoculars? Yep. Naturally I ordered a pair and found them to be excellent optically and at least good mechanically (you can still buy the Tachyons, but the price is about double what it was a decade ago).

The thing about 100mm binoculars…well the things? They are great on the sky. Not only do they obviously gather a lot of light; they have enough power to make them more usable in compromised skies than, say, 7x binoculars. I’ve even resolved the rings of Saturn with ‘em with fair ease. That’s the good thing. The bad thing is that when you pass 70mms, binoculars’ weight increases exponentially. You might conceivably be able to hand-hold 80mm glasses for short periods. 100mms? Fuhgeddabout it. And a tripod, even a big, heavy video tripod, ain’t good enough. You need a genuine binocular mount.

And there are some very good binocular mounts out there. Like those sold by Oberwerk (nee Bigbinoculars.com). But they don’t come cheap, and you simply cannot compromise when it comes to 100mm binoculars. “Good enough” won’t do. The problem was that, as you well know, Unk is a stingy soul and was even before he retired. The solution came fairly quickly, though, in the form of the EZ Binocular Mount kit.

Out on the CAV field.

Now, I’m normally wary of stuff like this, having been burned a time or two on amateur astronomy and amateur radio garage-style kits. But this was different; the seller was Pete Peterson (of Buck’s Gears fame), and I knew he knew his stuff.

The assembly of the kit is a story in itself, which you can read about here—as you may know, Unk’s mechanical skills are somewhat lacking. I got it together successfully with the assistance of Miss Dorothy, but was still a little skeptical. Let’s face it; it looks funky. You’d never mistake it for anything but a kit. Ah, but when you mount those big glasses on it out in the dark, it’s a different story. The Peterson EZ binocular kit works better than any binocular mount I have ever used, big or small. If my backyard experiences weren’t enough to convince me, using the EZ on Comet Panstarrs back in 2013 sure did.

So, the Zhumells have gotten a lot of use over the nine years I’ve owned them? Not really. The problem is that even 25x binoculars need a dark sky to really strut their stuff. Oh, they can do alright in the typical compromised backyard…but given the fact that you have to set up the mount to use them at all, it’s really no more labor intensive to assemble a telescope. And much as I love binoculars, there’s simply no doubt a scope is a more versatile and better choice most of the time.

But not all the time. The exception is when a comet is in the sky. Again, there is nothing, muchachos, and I do mean nothing,that will give you a better look at a comet than big binos. Not only do you have a wide field and plenty of light gathering power, you get that 3D effect inherent in binoculars. There’s also the fact that it’s just more comfortable to use both eyes than one. So, I grabbed the Zhumells' case and started hunting for the EZ mount.

However, it was hot, muggy, buggy, and your Unk was feeling lazy. Of course, I still have the Peterson mount, but I haven’t used it since we moved out here to the suburbs, and knew it was in parts and pieces in several boxes that are located somewhere. I decided to cheat. I’ve got a big enough Manfrotto camera tripod, and since the comet would be close to the horizon, surely that would be good enough, wouldn’t it?

ALCON 2003

Luckily, your silly old uncle had the sense to try this idea out in the daytime. At first, it looked like it might work…the binoculars went on the tripod without a fuss and didn’t seem that shaky. The trouble came when I thought I’d try altitude adjustment. There was just no way I could move the glasses up or down in altitude safely. Even balanced as well as I could balance them, it was evident if I let off on the altitude tension on the tripod even a small amount too much, the Tachyons were likely to crash into the tripod and maybe bring the whole works down.

Well, alrighty then. No 100mm binoculars for NEOWISE. We have one of Explore Scientific’s 100mm short focal length achromatic refractors here. On the SkyWatcher AZ-4 alt-azimuth tripod it’s not much of a pain to set up, and it ought to perform well on the comet. But I found myself fixated on binoculars. As above, they really are the perfect instrument for comet viewing (and comet hunting…like many others, the late, great Comet Hyakutake was discovered with giant binoculars). And then the solution came to me: the good, old Burgess binoculars.

As y’all have probably divined, I am not the world’s biggest supporter of the Astronomical League. We can talk about that some Sunday perhaps, but for now I’ll just say that whatever my feelings about the AL, I had a great time speaking at the organization’s 2003 convention in Nashville. What went on at the Embassy Suites hotel all those years ago (seems like just yesterday to your aging correspondent)? Well, in addition to talks, dinners, even a little video observing in the parking lot, and the usual things found at conventions of all kinds, there were vendors—folks selling astrostuff.

Now, in those days, Unk was still very definitely an astronomy gear junkie. There was simply no way I’d go home without something new. But what? Well, there was Bill Burgess (who is still in the astronomy business and doing well, I hear) with his wares. Which included a pair of 15x70 binos he was offering for—get this—50 bucks. Trying them out in the dealer room, it was obvious they were well built and seemed good optically (the stars are, of course, the only true test for astronomy binoculars). At any rate, how could I go wrong for fifty bucks?

I couldn’t, as tests in the front yard of good, old Chaos Manor South (remember those hallowed halls, muchachos?) showed when Dorothy and I got home. The humble Burgesses soon became my go-to glasses. In addition to being high in quality and rugged, their strength was and is that they offer more light gathering power than the usual 10x50s, but in a package that is reasonably hand-holdable. Unlike 80s, I can use these 70s for extended periods effectively and without strain.

The legendary Burgess 15x70s.

So, the 70mms it would be. When night fell, finally (curse this DST) I hied myself out on the deck and faced my nice, low northwestern horizon. The stars of the dipper asterism were glimmering through the inevitable haze. I had loaded NEOWISE into Stellarium earlier that day and knew approximately where to look. “Little closer to the horizon…just a smidge west…little more…almost there…almost there…” And I saw…NUTTIN’ HONEY. Well, I saw the undersides of clouds.

There things remained for several days. Which was not all bad. While I waited for semi-clear conditions, the comet continued to rise higher above the horizon though it was dimming a bit. Finally, early last week, I got what I reckoned might be my last crack at NEOWISE what with a storm churning up in the Gulf of Mexico.

Out to the deck me and the Burgesses went again. Same routine: scan down from the bowl of the dipper while moving to the west. And there is it was. My lasting impression of this one? It was a perfect little comet in the Burgesses with a tiny head, some coma visible, and a cute little tail that extended farther than I thought it would in the nasty skies. A friend, a talented observer, managed to see the comet much better than I did from darker skies, and was able to glimpse the ion tail. Me? No way, but I was satisfied with what I’d seen. Which was admittedly better than what I saw of Comet Ikeya-Seki all those decades ago. Frankly, I’ve never seen a bad comet, y’all, and this was most assuredly a good one. Hope you saw her or get to see her before she is gone.

What next? Obviously, I need to proceed to night three of the New Herschel Project. But as you can probably tell from the above, the weather down here in the Swamp is unlikely to allow that anytime soon. So, it’s, as Rod’s Mama used to tell him frequently when he wanted something, a great, big “We’ll see.”

Yeah, muchachos, I know. I said not long ago that I hoped to put a new AstroBlog article on the air at least twice a month, but I barely managed one for August. What happened? The weather is what happened…or didn’t happen depending on your perspective. It’s been nothing but clouds and thunder boomers here. Well, except when there’s a full Moon of course. As I write, there are two tropical storms in the Gulf. So, no “My Yearly M13;” not yet anyhow. Instead let’s talk about the cotton-picking cellphones.

Now, your old Uncle, Luddite that he is, is not that big a fan of the danged pocket computers. I could, as I often say to the annoyance of everybody around me, go back to a black dial-phone hardwired into the wall. Happily. But I must admit they can be handy for some things--like astronomy. I’ve been involved in using smart phones and their ancestors, the PDAs, in stargazing for quite a while.

I got started not long after the turn of the century with something some of you may remember, Palm Pilots. If you’re young, or like your old Uncle occasionally a little short on brain cells, what the Palm was was a “PDA,” a Personal Digital Assistant. It did some of the things we do with smart phones these days: keep a calendar, manage contacts and appointments, make notes, stuff like that. But with no connectivity. Not only could you not make a phone call with one, in the early days of PDAs you couldn’t even connect to the Internet. Well, you could—sorta. Plug the Palm into a PC (via an RS232 cable) and it would update little news and weather apps; stuff like that. Sounds primitive 20 years later, but these things were actually amazingly useful.

And not just because of the built-in apps like the calendar and stuff. Soon there were third parties producing all manner of software to run on the Palm, just like with today’s iPhones and Androids. In a short time, there was a whole Palm industry producing serious software like word processors. And even hardware like keyboards. While it might seem a little strange to do word processing on a PDA, it worked thanks to the devices’ increasingly good screens. That was a life saver for me in the days when I was still riding destroyer sea-trials. I needed to do some writing on deadline, and couldn't bring a non-secure, non-government laptop with me. A PDA was no problem, however, and I was able to get my work done with my Palm and my (folding) keyboard.

And all that was just ducky, but what I was reallyinterested in, as y’all might expect, was the growing inventory of astronomy software for the Palm. Yep, there were quite a few astro apps, some quite powerful; especially the one I settled on for regular use: Planetarium for Palm. One of my fonder memories is of using my Palm IIIxe and my wee ETX60 (by means of an RS-232 cable from Palm to Autostar) to tour dozens of deep sky objects from the dark Smoky Mountains.

Astromist

Planetarium for Palm worked great on my original IIIxe, and even better on my “upgrade” PDA, the Palm Tungsten E2 which had—get this, campers—a color screen and the limited ability to use Wi-Fi with an add-on card! However, soon Planetarium for Palm had competition, a remarkable bit of programming called Astromist. Not only did it sport nearly 20,000 deep sky objects; it took full advantage of the Tungsten’s color screen. The Tungsten had the power and the features to show what hand held devices could (potentially) bring to astronomy.

Not that I needed to be convinced. I was so impressed by my Palm that I started a Yahoogroup just for the use of PDAs in astronomy, "PalmAstro." For a couple of years, it looked like the sky was the limit for the gadgets. Till it all came crashing down and Palm wound up belonging to freaking HP. What happened? Poor management on the part of the Palm execs was part of it, but mostly it was the coming of the smartphone, which made PDAs almost instantly obsolete.

Palm did sell some phones, but with very limited success. The cells they rolled out that still used the Palm O/S unfortunately used a version of it that made the phones incompatible with all the tons of good software that had been written over the years. That was pretty dumb and that was pretty much that for the company. To this day, HP occasionally releases a phone under the Palm name, but these Palms have nothing in common with the good, old PDAs.

While I kept the PalmAstro Yahoogroup on the air until Yahoo shut all its groups down earlier this year, there’d been little interest in it in a long time, including by moi. It was time to move on to something more capable than a PDA as cool as they were. Something with a still better display and Internet connectivity. What was that? Not the smart phone, not for Unk right away. iPhones just seemed stupid-expensive to me. How about a nice iPod instead?

While the early iPods did very little other than play music, the later ones were more like iPhones, just without the phone stuff. That was the iPod touch. It could do anything my Palm could do—calendars, contacts, etc.—but with a color touch screen, more memory, a faster processor, and built-in Internet connectivity. And, naturally, there was already plenty of astronomy software to take advantage of that pretty screen (most apps designed for the iPhone ran fine on the Touch), beginning with SkyVoyager, the ancestor of today’s SkySafari.

But, soon enough it was time to move from Pod to Phone. Not only to play telescopes, but because I found having one increasingly necessary given changes at work. I was now commuting to both Pascagoula and New Orleans to work on the NAVSSI system (a navigation suite of radars, computers, and other sensors) on the Navy’s LPD landing ships. I found an iPhone made my work much easier with its instant access to my colleagues with phone and email--not to mention all the other smart phone features we take for granted now. And, naturally, when SkySafari cranked up, I got started with that amazing software.

If you’d like to know more about SkySafari or my take on it, at least, watch for an upcoming Test Report on the app by me in Sky &Telescope. Suffice to say, however, that the program takes all the power of a desktop planetarium program, and stuffs it into your smart phone or tablet (including Android devices). For now, however, let’s switch gears slightly and talk about the otherhalf of the smartphone astronomy game: how you make your goto goto its gotos with your freaking telephone.

It took me a while to get friendly with the SkySafari's telescope control features. I got my first iPhone, an iPhone 4, loaded it up with SkySafari, looked at the app a time or two, and that was it--oh, used it once in a while to see how high up Jupiter or something was, but not much more than that. Why? Unk practiced a different sort of astronomy a decade ago. I was still ensconced at good, old Chaos Manor South, our huge old Victorian home in the city’s Garden District. There, there was very little chance to observe.

I could look at the Moon or a planet from the front yard, but that was about all and all it had been for the better part of a decade before that. Not so much because of light pollution, which I knew how to deal with, but because of the countless oak trees old and young. My backyard was so overgrown by the end of the 90s that I was limited to a few “windows” here and there—and God forbid you cut down a Garden District oak! So, Moon and planets it was, and I didn’t need all the deep sky objects and stars now packed into SkySafari to tour the Solar System. There also didn't seem to be much point in connecting the phone to one of my telescopes.

SkyQ Link plugged into CGEM port.

How about dark sites and star parties? When I did dark observing, I wanted heavy-hitter software like SkyTools or Deep Sky Planner or maybe The Sky X if I was in a planetarium kinda mood. Ten years ago, SkySafari was already pretty powerful, but not that powerful.

There things remained for quite some time. Until I heard Celestron was bringing Wi-Fi to their scopes and mounts. Not only that, but that the dongle they’d developed, SkyQ Link, would, they said, not just allow you to control a scope with your phone via Celestron’s SkyQ app, you could use the widget to connect your laptop running NexRemote to the mount wirelessly.

Now, that got my attention. Back in the go-go days of The Herschel Project, I invariably controlled the Advanced VX or the NexStar 11 GPS or the CGEM with NexRemote, which took the place of the hand controller. You didn’t even have to have the HC plugged in. And the SkyQ link would, I thought, make the NexRemote experience a whole lot better.

Eliminating a cable between PC and mount wasn’t just a matter of aesthetics. More than once, one of the zombie-like folks you’ll encounter at most star parties (you know, the people who set up a scope but never use it—instead they wander the field all night long) had tripped on and disconnected my NexRemotecable in their quest to determine, “WATCHA LOOKIN’ AT?” causing me to lose my goto alignment.

When the Link arrived, I was impressed. It looked professionally done, and the instructions for getting it set up were simple enough. Plug it into the mount, connect your PC’s or phone’s wireless to it, start the SkyQ app or NexRemote (along with a helper program for NexRemote), and you were good to go. First problem? It didn’t work with NexRemote. Period. End of story. Game over. Zip up your fly. OK, how about SkyQ? It refused to work with the Advanced VX, though it would work with the NexStar 11 GPS in alt-azimuth mode—in very limited fashion.

Now, normally when something like this happens, I just stuff the junk in question back in the box and return it. But I really, really wanted this thing to work. So I got in touch with Celestron. They readily admitted they knew their app would never, ever work with the Advanced VX or any other German equatorial mount (despite what their ads said). They did insist NexRemoteought to work. They offered me troubleshooting tips and promises about upgrades to the software used to allow NexRemote to access the Link. And they kept doing that, stringing me along, until it was too late to return the SkyQ Link. Oh, well. I stuffed it in a drawer and forgot about it.

And that was the end of wireless scope control for me for some time. Until, in fact, early 2017 when I was assigned to do the Sky & Telescope Test Report on Celestron’s new Evolution 9.25 SCT. There was a lot new about this telescope including a built-in rechargeable battery and a new-design fork mount among other things. Some of these things were good and some not so good, but what was really good was the scope’s main selling feature, built-in Wi-Fi.

Evolution 9.25

Not only could you point your telescope to sky object with your Apple or Android smart device, you could also do your Evolution’s goto alignment with the cell phone or tablet. The app Celestron paired with the scope, “Sky Portal,” was developed by Simulation Curriculum and was actually a basic version of SkySafari. Anyhoo, it offered various Celestron alt-azimuth alignment options including SkyAlign (pick any three bright stars to align on) and routines for German mounts too. Not only that…the alignment routines were now also included in SkySafari Pro. Sounded like the days when I’d need NexRemotewere drawing to a close.

If the Evolution worked as advertised. Some owners had complained about weak Wi-Fi signals with early Evos. Me? I found I could control the telescope just fine from 100 meters away on an open observing field. Naturally, in a backyard with lots of obstructions the range was shorter, but it worked more than well enough nevertheless. I still wasn’t sure I preferred a phone to a hardware HC—I missed the tactile feedback from actual buttons—but I was at least becoming a believer.

Part of the reason for that was my astronomy way of life had changed. Following my retirement, Miss Dorothy and I had moved from Chaos Manor South to the suburbs. I now had a nice, open backyard and skies that would show mag 5 stars at zenith on a good night. Since I could now look at the deep sky any time I wanted (when we had those increasingly rare clear skies), I found I was far less interested in doing pedal-to-the-metal observing from dark sites. Me getting older and less inclined to stay up late and to brave the heat or cold and the bugs also had something to do with it. At any rate, a phone with SkySafari running on it suddenly seemed to fit my lifestyle a lot better than a big laptop packed to the gills with astro-ware.

BUT… (there’s always that annoying “but”). I was perfectly happy with the telescopes and mounts I had. I really wasn’t interesting in dropping a couple of thousand bucks on a Celestron Evo 9.25 SCT; that was for sure. So, I did some research. The SkySafari folks and others offered Wi-Fi solutions of their own that would work with just about any telescope/mount. But these generic solutions didn’t give you the Celestron no-hand-control-required alignment capability. Which was when I began thinking about the SkyQ Link again and doing a little research.

What I turned up was the new dongle Celestron began selling at about the same time they rolled out the Evolution was little different from my old SkyQ Link. In fact, the electronics were exactly the same; the only changes were its slightly redesigned appearance and a new name, “SkyPortal Link.” With the Evolution on its way back to California and me rested up from all the observing I’d done with the 9.25, I decided to hunt up the widget and give it a try with SkyPortal and SkySafari.

Doing an AllStar alignment with the Evolution.

Luckily, your old Uncle thinks long and hard before throwing anything away. Even more lucky? The Link made it from Chaos Manor South to the new digs—and I even knew which box it was in (I’ll admit a couple of years down the road, I still hadn’t unpacked all the astro-junk). Out it came and into the Advanced VX it was plugged.

With the AVX set up and polar aligned I plugged the dongle into the hand control port, powered on the mount, and grabbed my trusty iPhone. I had some hopes, since the lights flashing on the dongle as it booted up looked correct—unlike with the SkyQ app. I had no trouble connecting with SkyPortal, either. But then came the acid test—goto alignment.

After all the drama I’d experienced with the Link previously, the denouement was almost boring. I centered four stars, two on each side of the Meridian, SkyPortal said I was aligned, and the Advanced VX went to anything I requested for the remainder of the evening, just like it always did. Any downers? Only that after not having used a touchscreen to center a star in a long time, I was back on square one with that.

And now? The events of the years since I tried out the Evolution have just led me more and more in the direction of smart phone astronomy. In 2019, I was laid up for months thanks to an accident I have still not fully recovered from. After I healed enough to want to do some observing, I found I was less likely than ever to traipse around to star parties and dark sites carrying a PC. Often it’s no goto at all…just me, my good old 10-inch Dobsonian, Zelda, and SkySafari in the friendly backyard.

2019 was bad for me, yeah, but 2020 has been just as much of a loser of a year in its own way. And for everybody thanks to the the Bad CORONA (as opposed to the good kind that comes in frosty bottles) among other disasters, tragedies, and constant confusion and mayhem. Now, there are no star parties to traipse to even if I were up to it physically and mentally. I'm moving everything except astrophotography to my phone and tablet, and am thinking about doing the same with that (which is made possible by some innovative products from ZWO and others).

I don’t know that I’m ready to get involved with a gadget that allows me to control my imaging sessions with a phone yet, but what say we kick it up a small notch anyhow? When it comes time for me to do my observing for my SkySafari Pro test report lets’ throw in a curveball. I am told the program now supports the Celestron StarSense alignment cam. How will that work out? We shall see just as soon as I get a clear night here.

Otherwise? Anything else I’ve got planned…the continuation of the New Herschel Project, My Yearly M13, getting a few pics of Mars…will have to wait until the stormy Gulf calms down. I will have something for y’all in September, but unless and until the weather improves, I cannot swear it will be much.

It will be a short one this time muchachos. But I’m posting this for a couple of reasons. I’ve had numerous enquiries about how Miss Dorothy and I fared in Hurricane Sally, which came ashore just to the east of us. Also, I’ve vowed that come what may I will post at least one new AstroBlog article every month. And I was hoping that might usually be two.

You didn’t get two in September for a very good reason: it was resolutely cloudy in the weeks leading up to Hurricane Sally—September is the big month of hurricane season, after all—and it has been resolutely cloudy since. It is threatening to clear up this week, no doubt due to the presence of a waxing Moon. Moon or no, I need to get a telescope into the backyard for a photo-shoot to accompany my next Sky & Telescope Test Report, so I may actually grab a camera and give M13 a try. As those of you who've hung out here for a while know, I try to image the grand Great Globular once a year no matter what.

Anyhow, what happened during the storm? Well, a couple of days before Sally hit, I had a premonition: this was gonna be another Elena. A what? Hurricane Elena struck Gautier, Mississippi back in 1985. Unk, a young, freshly-minted engineer with his first real job happened to be living in that little coastal town at the time. But that wasn’t the kicker.

The kicker was that my wife at the time and I had gone to bed Saturday night after hearing a weather report that assured us Elena would hit Apalachicola, Florida. Being late risers on Sunday who liked to read the New York Times over much coffee sans TV or radio, we didn’t give the storm any thought in the morning. Till the phone rang. It was one of my colleagues asking what the wife and I were gonna do. I replied, "I think she’s still reading the magazine section; I’m making more coffee.”

“No, I mean about the storm.”

“What storm? Elena? Why should we have to do anything?”

“You haven’t heard? Turn on the freaking TV. She’s going to come ashore at Gautier and go right over our heads!”

And so she did. And quite an experience it was; it’s the only time I’ve experienced the passage of the eye of a hurricane. Frightening? Yes. Strangely exhilarating? Also yes.

I had that ineffable feeling that Sally was gonna be a repeat, so to speak, and it became clear that was precisely what would happen. Sally’s track got pushed to the east past Louisiana, past Mississippi, and right to Alabama.

Ever since Elena, I’ve taken these things seriously even when I’m told I’ve got nothing to worry about. Most of our preparations were already complete by the time Sally drew a bead on the Alabama Gulf Coast. I’d made a run on Publix for bottled water and other stuff (pop-tarts, peanut butter, bacon; the usual survival supplies), and the 25kw whole house generator we’d had installed last year had coincidentally just been serviced and was ready to go. Only thing left to do was to tip-over my amateur radio HF vertical antenna. It has a tilt base for just such eventualities, so that was easy.

The evening before landfall was eerily calm, though looking up and seeing clouds literally dashing across the sky foretold there was something bad in the Gulf headed our way. I went to bed about midnight just as the bands of rain began to come thick and fast and winds began to gust up to 30 – 40 mph. I slept well but for a couple of times when I was awakened by the power going out, the generator coming on, and power being automatically transferred. But I was able to fall back asleep each time. Until about 5 am or somewhat before when it really began to blow and the power went off and stayed off.

Gotta tell y’all: your old Uncle really squealed about the price of the generator and its switchgear and their installation, but I sure was happy to have it on this morning. The winds howled—did they ever! —gusting up to, I’d guess, 85 at least, but we had TV, air-conditioning, the Keurig, the microwave, pretty much everything. The cable TV did go out after a while, but the fiber Internet never faltered and we found a good weather channel on the darned Roku.

The W4NNF shack and the 6-meter antenna.

When it was obvious the storm was passing, I went out front and had a look. It was still dark, with just our home, the house across from us, and a couple of others in the neighborhood lit up. There were a few big limbs down in front, but just a few.

Venturing out on the deck showed the backyard was about the same. The patio table was on its side but OK (I'd stashed the chairs in the radio shack the afternoon before). Oh, the driveway was covered in small limbs and leaves, and there were a few down at the back of the backyard, but nothing really major. Amazingly, my 6-meter antenna which was mounted on a cheap TV mast still stood. So did the 2-meter aerial on its TV mast. Alas, with one departing gust Sally knocked the 6-meter one down. Oh, well, I’d been meaning to replace the pitiful thing for a long time.

A trot around the neighborhood after the rain finally paused showed a few of my neighbors had lost trees. Those were invariably pines or palms, neither of which grace Unk's yard, thank goodness. Lot of limbs down, some older wooden fences had given up the ghost; that was about it.

The denouement? Power came back on at 7:30 am and stayed on. Part of the reason for that is our power lines are underground in this neighborhood, and the substation we are connected to also serves the local hospital, so getting it back working is a big priority with the power company.

Now, just across Mobile Bay where the eye had come ashore, the flooding and power loss and wind damage were terrible. Power was still off in some areas a week after the storm. Heck, some people in the city—like the downtown neighborhoods where good old Chaos Manor South still stands in all her glory—were without power for almost that long. So, all things considered, I’d say me and Miss Dorothy were pretty lucky.

So that’s it, campers. Sure, I feel sorry for the folks with severe damage and who were without power for a long time. But this is the first storm I’ve ever been able to ride out in comfort. It wasn’t that long ago that Dorothy and I and daughter Lizbeth were evacuating to Atlanta in the middle of the night or—after Katrina—living in her university office for days. So, I know how it is. But we down here are tough when it comes to these storms; they are just a part of life on the Gulf.

Astronomy? As above, I plan to get my yearly M13 taken before time begins to run out. Hercules is already beginning to get a little low. I ain’t gonna wimp out like I have a time or two in the past and use video, either. No, it will be a DSLR, flats, darks, all that good stuff.

Well, I might wimp out a little bit. C8? No. 5-inch APO? No. It will be my beloved f/7.5 80mm fluorite refractor, Veronica. Yes, I know a little more focal length would be nice here in the relatively bright suburbs, but I’m lazy and it is just so easy to get pretty pictures with Ronnie.

So, stay tuned. If I actually get the skies and haven’t totally forgot how to do deep sky imaging, I should be back here this coming Sunday or (more likely the one after). Until then, muchachos, until then…

My Yearly M13, like my Christmas Eve peek at M42, is a tradition I’ve maintained through the years—when I can, anyhow.

“What the heck is Unk goin’ on about now?” One of two astronomical things I’ve tried to do every year, muchachos, is get out and take a picture of Messier 13, the Great Globular in Hercules. Why? Well, it’s tradition. But even moreso, it ensures I’ll have to get behind a camera mounted on a telescope at least once per annum.

Now, I certainly try to and usually do get out and do astrophotography more than once a freaking year. But long stretches do often separate my sessions. The main reason for that being the weather. As I have oft-opined here, it seems to me imaging-worthy skies have been less common over the last 8 years or so than they used to be. I’d be the last to claim you can make any conclusions about weather trends from a mere 8 years of observations, but that is the way it seems to me.

One thing I do know for sure? In the first decade of this new century I had many mid-summer nights of imaging and observing fun down south in Florida at the Chiefland Astronomy Village. That good summer observing began to dry up around 2012, and Chiefland weather the rest of the year began to decline not long after. That is one of the reasons I have not been back to the fabled CAV in nearly five years. Even the still somewhat hardcore (well, a little) Uncle Rod can only stand so many nights holed up in a cotton-picking Quality Inn under cloudy skies. Unfortunately, it ain’t just Florida skies that now seem worse year-round; the same is true up here on the northern Gulf Coast in Possum Swamp.

Be that as it may be. Resolving to shoot M13 once a year, yeah, ensures I get out with a camera and a telescope at least once between late spring and early autumn. The last time I did some honest-to-God prime focus, long exposure, guided imaging? Wellllll...that was…I can’t exactly remember, y’all, but maybe not since last year's M13.

So it was that once bad old Hurricane Sally had become just an unpleasant memory, and the clouds that had followed in her wake had all flown off, I prepared to shoot my annual portrait of the big glob. Two weeks after the storm, we were enjoying a nice stretch of weather. Plenty of Sun and blue skies with highs in the upper 70s and lows at night in the 50s. While “50s” is a little cool for your aged Unk’s bones, I prefer being a chilled to having the sweat dripping off me and onto the laptop as I try to take deep sky pictures in my bumbling fashion.

So, as October came in, I would be getting out into the backyard with telescope and camera. But which telescope and whichcamera? As I said last time, I’m lazy in these latter days. What is a pretty much guaranteed way to get recognizable deep sky shots without much effort? Shoot them with a short – medium focal length 80mm APO (color free) refractor. My beloved 80mm William Optic Fluorite f/7.5, “Veronica Lodge,” would fill that bill.

Veronica is elegantly and sturdily built, but still light enough not to challenge my Celestron Advanced VX GEM mount, so that was what I would put her on. The only question in that regard? “Guided or unguided”? The sky Friday before last was clear, but man was it hazy. Haze scatters light, making the light pollution of my suburban backyard worse than it is on a clear and dry evening. That meant I’d probably limit my exposures to two minutes. Since I’d be doing a precise polar alignment, I probably could have gotten away with no guiding at all for 120-second shots. But since I’d have the guide camera with me to do a Sharpcap polar alignment, why not guide?

Scope, check. Mount, check. Camera? I thought that would be my old Canon Rebel. It’s dependable, I have an AC power supply for it, and as things are reckoned today, the 12-year-old camera has relatively large pixels. That ain’t a bad thing in the deep sky imaging game, campers, since “larger pixels” naturally means “more sensitive.”

All that remained was to decide on the software I’d be using. As always, I’d be controlling the Canon and acquiring images with Nebulosity. The program, by Craig Stark, author of the original PHD Guiding, will do anything I need it to do and more including acquiring, stacking, and processing DSLR images. While it was initially intended for use with Canon DSLRs, it also works with many astronomical CCD cameras.

I dunno about you, but when I’m imaging I do not like hanging out at the freaking telescope. I want to sit at the computer and run the show from there. I could have used Celestron’s CPWI program, the successor to NexRemote, which we talked about a couple of weeks back. That would have allowed me to control everything from the laptop including the goto alignment. I don’t have much experience with the program yet, though, and thought it best to keep things a mite simpler.

The new Cartes du Ciel beta.

Likely I’d be fussing with the other software, trying to remember what little I ever knew about it. So, instead of CPWI I thought I’d use a nice, friendly, simple planetarium program with an ASCOM driver. ASCOM would give me a little onscreen hand control useful for centering objects in the camera’s frame.

What I’ve used most over the last few years when it comes to PC planetariums is the excellent Stellarium. However, a sentimental favorite, Cartes du Ciel, was, I heard, in a new (beta) version, 4.3. That being the case, I thought I’d give the latest CdC a whirl. I’ve noted quite a bit of traffic on the program’s mailing list of late, so Cartes is obviously more than just still alive.

Guiding? I ain’t used anything but PHD2 since it came out. And I hadn’t used anything before that but the original PHD Guidingsince the dark ages when I was photographing the skies with my old self-guiding SBIG black and white astro-CCD. It would be PHD2 Guiding all the way. I had to get it going on a new laptop about a year ago, and was quite not sure I had all the settings correct—I hadn’t used it since then—but I figgered it wouldn’t much matter with short focal length Veronica.

Anything else? Well, I was darned sure glad I checked out Sharpcapthe day before my M13 expedition to make sure all was well with it. It turned out my subscription had expired. You see, I use the Pro version (the one with the polar alignment tool). It ain’t freeware, being offered on a yearly subscription basis. Seemed like I had just renewed the program for the very reasonable fee of 15 dollars a year, but, yes, another year had flown by. Anyhoo, it took but a few minutes to get a new subscription and a license in place. Glad I wasn’t blindsided by that in the dark backyard, though.

So, into that backyard I went, setting up in my usual fashion with the scope beside the deck and me and the laptop on the deck. It’s like an observatory for somebody who doesn’t want an observatory: I can leave the telescope set up in my secure backyard for as long as the weather stays nice. Sitting at the patio table under a big umbrella, I’m out of the dew and so is the PC. And I’m just steps from my den where I spend my time while the exposures are clicking off. Oh, I check things once in a while, but watching The Mandalorian on TV while drinking a…uh… “sarsaparilla” is a lot more fun than watching the PHD2 guide graph, friends.

While I hadn’t used Veronica in a long while, she went together smoothly: plunked her into the mount’s Vixen saddle, attached her tube extension to the focuser, put my (excellent) Hotech field flattener into that, and mounted the camera via a, natch, Canon format T-ring.

Nebulosity doing its thing.

Of course, that was only the beginning. The Orion 50mm guide scope had to be secured in Veronica’s finder shoe, the QHY guide-cam had to go into that, and a USB cable and an ST-4 cable had to be hooked up. Had to have dew heaters on both telescope objective and guide scope objective even in the autumn down here in the Swamp. They had to be connected to the DewBuster controller, and it had to be hooked to a power supply. Gotta rustle up the StarSense hand control and StarSense camera. Oh, need an AC power supply for the mount, and—well, y’all get the idea; even setting up “just” an 80mm refractor for imaging is a complex and rather lengthy task.

Whoooeee. I was close to sweating even in the cooling air as the stars winked on. Next order of bidness was polar alignment. I temporarily placed the laptop on a little tray-table next to the scope, plugged the guide scope into the computer’s USB port, and fired up Sharpcap.

How long does a Sharpcap polar alignment take? Maybe 10 minutes first time out. Five minutes or less after that. The process is simple. Set the mount in home position pointing north in declination with the counterweight down. Click in the Tools menu to start the polar alignment.

Sharpcap will expose a few frames and will shortly tell you to rotate 90 degrees in RA. That done, you’ll use the mount’s altitude and azimuth controls to point at the North Celestial pole with the aid of onscreen graphics and text directions (“Move up 12’…”). How accurate is it? Now that it takes refraction into account, I have faith that when it tells me I’m just seconds from the pole that’s just where I am. And my results indicate it is telling the truth. If you have a guide camera, Sharpcap is the obvious cure for the polar alignment blues.

Polar alignment done (the somewhat course altitude/azimuth controls on the AVX make the process more difficult on that mount than on my Losmandy—but it’s not bad), it was time to essay a goto alignment via the StarSense auto-align camera. I’ve never had a problem with the StarSense; it’s always produced an alignment as good as what I can do with the normal hand control. But there are a couple of gotchas to watch out for—one of which your hapless raconteurencountered on this very evening.

Full sized image.

The StarSense camera is furnished with two mounting brackets. One for Synta-style finder shoes and one for the peculiar and proprietary finder mounts Celestron uses on its Edge scopes (and maybe others these days). I’d last used the StarSense on my Edge, so I’d have to unbolt the camera from the Edge bracket and put it on the Synta mount on Veronica. I knew changing mounts would probably affect the camera’s aim and calibration and the accuracy of the goto alignment. But given the wide field of the 80mm, Ihoped I could squeak by.

‘Twas not to be muchachos. The StarSense did the goto alignment successfully as always, going to four star-fields and plate solving. When it was done, I sent the mount to Vega, which I thought would be a good target for rough focusing. Fired up Nebulosity, started clicking off focus frames and…no Vega did I see. Tried slewing around a little. Nope. No Vega. Sighted along the tube and did some more slewing. Nope, sorry, Charlie.

There was nothing for it. I’d just have to calibrate the StarSense. That is easy if you, unlike your silly Uncle, remember how to do that. Send the mount to a bright star (Vega in my case). Get the star in the field of an eyepiece or camera (I did that by replacing the StarSense with a red dot finder temporarily). Press Align, and use the hand control’s direction buttons to precisely center the star.

That sounds easy. And it is easy if you, unlike Rod, remember to press Align, notEnter. Pressing Enter sent the mount back to where it was in the beginning; where it thought the star oughta be. So, Unk got to start all over from the beginning after biting the bullet and digging out the StarSense manual.

Got ‘er done, and all should have been well. But wouldn’t you know it? Uncle Rod did some assuming, and you know what they say about that word. Once the calibration is done, the HC tells you you need to do another alignment. That’s easy, just press enter and it will be executed automatically. Silly old Rod, however, thought he should set the mount back to home position first—which you do not need to do. You will not be surprised to learn the AVX pointed the scope to the Earth for the first plate solve. Power down, start over from scratch one more time.

Zoomed in with a crop.

Well, alrighty then. All was finally well. Completed the goto re-alignment, requested Vega, and it appeared in the frame of the camera. I focused until it was as small as I could get it, and then attained fine focus using Nebulosity’s focus utility, which has you use an unsaturated, dimmer field star, adjusting until its displayed HFR (Half Flux Radius) number is as small as you can get it.

OK! We was rollin’ now. That’s what Unk thought, anyhow, but the gremlins weren’t quite done with his sorry self. Time to engage Cartes du Ciel. Started the program, connected the ASCOM driver to the mount, clicked M13, and then the slew button, and off we went for the globular. The mount was about halfway there when the computer went fitified with a blue screen of death. I don’t know I’ve ever had that happen with Windows 10, but it sure did happen on this evening.

Luckily, the mount continued to M13 unaffected, I restarted the computer, reconnected all the software, and the laptop was OK from then on. What was the problem? Despite the fact that I was using a beta version of Cartes, I’m guessing the culprit was actually the older ASCOM version I was running, 6.1. By the light of day, I investigated and found some people had had problems with that one. So, I updated to the current v6.5, even though I had had no further problems with Cartes for the remainder of the evening.

Cartes du Ciel? Other than that hiccup, it was wonderful. No, it does not have the pretty sky of Stellarium, but it makes up for that with the legibility of its display in the field, and has many more features for observers than Stellarium, despite me loving that program very much. Go out and get the new CdC; it is another winning version in a long string of winning versions.

The rest of the evening was frankly pedestrian in the extreme. I got PHD2 Guiding doing its thing without a hitch. While the seeing, never good, was degrading as time went by, my errors were just a little worse than 1” with PPEC not turned on. Well, till M13 began to get lower on the horizon after about an hour, and I began to approach 2”. Unfortunately, in October there ain’t much time before the glob begins to get low; especially if, like your fumbling Uncle, you waste at least half an hour before taking your first sub-frame. But the higher guide error toward the end of my sequence was not a problem. Again, an 80mm scope is veryforgiving. You almost have to work not to get round stars.

And...the clouds are back.

A sufficient, I thought, number of 120-second sub-frames in the can, I threw that accursed big switch. The bugs were beginning to bite, the humidity was spiking, the Roku was calling, and so was that sarsaparilla. Not a bad night once I got on track, I thought.

The denouement? Early Saturday evening, I shot a series of T-shirt flats using the sky at dusk as illumination. As I was doing so, I witnessed the darned old clouds begin to flow back in after giving me almost a week’s respite. Not just that...another big storm was shortly threatening the Gulf. So, I was glad I’d got out, full Moon or no (did I mention shortly after my imaging sequence began, a fat Moon began to rise in the east?). That done, I went through the usual processing steps with Neb: debayer both lights and flats. Stack lights and flats into single images and combine master flat and master light into one photo, process using Nebulosity, and do final touchup with Photoshop.

“But what about darks, Unk? You gotta shoot darks, doncha?” I did, Skeezix, but I did that as I was shooting the lights, automatically. I set the Canon Rebel to subtract a dark after every image. It takes twice as long to get through your sequence, but I find doing it that way yields better results. With an uncooled camera like a DSLR, it’s always best to shoot a dark immediately after the light so the sensor is at a similar temperature.

My results? Not so bad. While something like this would never appear in the magazine’s Gallery section (!), I’ve done worse on a hazy night in the suburbs with big Moon rising. Frankly, this year’s shot is at leastas good as what I got in 2019 with an LX85mount and a Meade 8-inch ACF under similar conditions (in late 2019; the blog article didn't appear till January 2020). But you know what? This exercise ain't about results, anyway; it’s about Unk getting his silly old self out under the night sky with a camera and getting back to work, muchachos.

The ASI120MC, Shorty Barlow, and Meade flip mirror.

This will be a somewhat short one this Sunday, muchachos, since there’s no need to re-cover ground I’ve covered extensively in the past, as in “How do I process Solar System images, Unk?” You can read all about that here. Or the long story of Uncle Rod and Mars, which you can get here. But I do want to tell you about my first expedition to the Angry Red Planet in quite some time.

Did I take a peek or two at Mars in 2018? Sure I did, but it wasn’t a very good year for the planet what with the dust storms and all. I’d been hearing, howsomeever, that this year’s apparition was turning out to be a Real Good one.

And….as I thankfully have frequently of late, one afternoon last week I felt the call of the backyard. “Time to get the C8 set up, I reckon.” What would I set up Mrs. Peel, my Celestron Edge 800, for, though? That was obvious. While we are now pulling away from the Red One, when Mars was at opposition on the 6^th of October, we were a mere 62 million kilometers from that mysterious world, we won’t be as close again for 15 more years, and the planet is still awfully big and bright.

15 years? That will make your old Unk…well, “15 years older,” and I question whether I’ll be up to getting even an 8-inch SCT into the backyard by then. Frankly, thanks to the injuries I suffered last year, it ain’t exactly a piece of cake for me to get the freaking Advanced VX set up now. That being the case, I figgered I’d better take advantage of this Mars opposition. And I will, y’all, I will. The image you see here will just be the beginning, I hope. As I was during the BIG opposition of 2003, I plan to be in the backyard taking my humble planetary snapshots almost every clear evening.

First step, then, was deciding on the camera to use. Well, that wasn’t much of a decision to make since I really only have one planetary camera these days. Planetary camera? Without going into a lot of detail which will be amply explained by the links above, what you want for taking pictures of the Solar System is a camera with a small sensor which is possessed of many pixels. And you want it to output .avi video. You’ll take as many frames as possible and reasonable and stack those into a finished still image.

Sky & Telescope's Mars Profiler helps you find your way across Mars.

For me, that is the good, old ZWO I purchased, oh, about a dozen years ago. Back then, I was searching for something to replace the mehcameras I was using on the planets at the time, the SAC7b, the Meade LPI, and a Celestron planet-cam. All were “just” converted webcams. All worked, but I wanted something with a little more speed (frame rate-wise) better build quality, and the ability to use with more modern software.

That’s when I began hearing about a new mainland Chinese company, ZWO optical. Looking at their offerings, I found they had a camera that appeared might do the job for me, the ZWO ASI120MC, a one-shot color job with a maximum resolution of 1280x 960 (all my other cameras hovered around 640x480). As above, when you’re imaging planets the idea is to take a lot of frames and stack them in the interest of reducing noise and catching moments of good seeing. The 120, ZWO said, was capable of up to 100 frames per second (fps) at lower resolutions and 20fps at max. That sounded right good to me, so I took a chance.

This was before ZWO, which is now one of the top CCD/CMOS astronomy camera vendors, hit the bigtime. When I ordered, they had no U.S. dealer; my little widget had to come all the way from the People’s Republic of China. Which it did in a surprisingly short time.

What was in the box when it appeared on the front porch of the legendary Chaos Manor South and your not-quite-so old Uncle got it into his hot little hands? Well, there was the substantial and, frankly, impressive camera itself. Metal, nicely finished in red. There was also a 1.25-inch nosepiece, a short USB cable, a CD with some software, and an IR block filter to make it easy to get shots with easy to balance color. Heck there was even a fisheye lens for the cam, which some folks have used to turn the 120 into an inexpensive all-sky camera.

Anyhoo, the little camera has been my sole Solar System imager over the last decade. Hey, I don’t aspire to become the next Damian Peach or Chris Go—even if I had the talent and dedication to achieve the results of those masters. As always, Unk is a dabbler. One night, I’m looking at a bright comet with a 3-inch refractor, the next I’m doing deep sky video, the next, spectroscopy. You get the picture. The ZWO proved to be simple to use and has produced results that have pleased me.

Oh, Unk did fib a bit. I do have another camera that would work well on the planets, my QHY5L guide cam. However, it’s black and white. I want color, and if you think your fumbling Uncle is gonna start shooting through RGB filters, you’ve got another think coming. It’s one-shot color all the way ‘round here.

By the way, the 120mc is still readily available from ZWO and their dealers. It’s a little more expensive than mine was, but you do get a little lagniappe for the extra dineros: the camera now sports an ST4 auto-guide output. Is the 120mc color version sensitive enough for guiding? Based on my experience using the camera for short-exposure deep sky imaging, I would say it definitely is. And for planetary use, it is still the bomb. You can get ZWOs with bigger chips these days, but, again, for the planets you don’t needbigger chips. The megapixel range 6mm sensor in this little camera is just right.

Would it still work, though? I hadn’t used the camera in quite a while, and many Windows 10 updates had intervened. Only one way to find out…downloaded the latest driver from ZWO’s website, rounded up a USB “printer” cable, connected it to the laptop and cam, lit off Sharpcap, and she started right up, no problem.

Sharpcap? Yes. While I previously used Firecapture(and before that, the now-forgotten K3CCD Tools), I’ve chosen to move on to Sharpcap for control of my planetary camera. Firecapture is still great, but, for one thing, I am more used to using Sharpcap now, since I fire it up on a regular basis to do polar alignments (its polar alignment toolis flat-out amazing). Also, I might as well get my money’s worth out of the software since I am paying for a subscription to the Pro version Sharpcap. Finally, it is an impressive, professionally executed, frequently updated piece of software.

And so, it was time to put the scope together on one cool if hardly chilly Possum Swamp afternoon. The telescope was, as I’ve done mentioned, Mrs. Peel. To get planetary images that show much detail, you need mucho focal length. Even my girl’s 2000mm would not be enough. I would increase that, however, with a 2x Barlow.

I began with the ringed wonder.

The Barlow I use for imaging the planets isn’t anything special; just an Orion “Shorty” I got from them several decades ago. It is surprisingly good optically, however, and gives me 4000mm of focal length with the SCT, which is a nice match for the camera on many nights. When the seeing is really fine, as it sometimes can be down here on the Gulf of Mexico coast, I’ll kick that up a notch to 6,000mm. I do that with a good 3x Barlow I got from renowned (and now retired) astronomy dealer Gary Hand recently. Well…recent for your Uncle, which these days is “about ten years ago.” OK, so I use a Barlow. I don’t just plug it into Mrs. Peel’s (ahem) rear port, though.

Many years ago (more than I like to remember) when Unk first began imaging the Moon and planets with small-chip electronic cameras (primitive video cams at first), I was amazed at how terribly difficultit was to get even the Moon in the frame. That’s still true today. Even if your goto mount yields spot-on gotos, you will likely find that at 4000mm Mars is not visible on the computer screen when the mount stops. So, you do what? Waste a lot of time slewing around trying to get to your target. After spending much too much time doing that, you’ll say to yourself, “Self, there’s gotta be a better way.”

There is. The secret is a “flip mirror.” A flip mirror is like a star diagonal, but with a couple of differences. Normally it works just likea diagonal: light enters from the telescope and is diverted 90-degees by a mirror and to the eyepiece. However, a flip mirror includes a knob or lever that allows you to flip the mirror down, out of the light path. Images then go out the back of the diagonal through a camera port. Put an eyepiece in the flip mirror’s eyepiece holder, attach your camera to the camera port, center up the target in the eyepiece, flip the mirror down, and it will be in the field of your camera (flip mirrors are adjustable so you can align the camera and eyepiece views).

A flip mirror makes finding and centering objects at large image scales and with small imaging sensors trivial. Only fly in the ointment? While you can still buy flip mirrors, they are not as plentiful as they once were. They were originally popular with deep sky imagers as well as planetary imagers back in the dark ages. Once DSO astrophotographers went to large chips, they had little further use for flip mirrors, and there was then a reduced demand for them. But you can still find them both new and used. I’m am still chugging along with the 1.25-inch Meade I’ve had for the better part of 20 years.

Not my fave side of Mars, but there's Olympus Mons!

OK, so flip mirror attached to Mrs. Peel, Barlow in flip mirror, camera in Barlow. Anything else I did to prepare? Yes, I did a precise polar alignment with Sharpcap. At long focal lengths, declination drift from poor polar alignment will be exaggerated and you will get tired of mashing the dec buttons all the time to recenter your quarry.

Alrighty, then. I did a quick StarSense auto-align (yes, I am too lazy to center a few stars with the hand control these days, folks). Mars was still low and in the trees, so I thought I’d give Saturn a look see. Maybe Jupe, too. I started with the king, old Jupiter. Got him framed nicely, and focused and started exposing. And, in Uncle Rod fashion, I screwed up right out of the gate.

To begin, I forgot one of the first things I learned about planetary imaging way back in the webcam days: aim for the shortest exposure possible; one that yields an onscreen image that looks slightly underexposed. I didn’t. I overexposed Jupiter. However, since I plan to get out at least every couple of nights (giving Mars time to rotate new features into view) I’ll be back to Jupiter soon.

My other foul up? You want plenty of frames, but not toomany. Jupiter rotates so rapidly that if you go much over a minute features will actually begin to blur. More importantly, stacking programs like Registaxand AutoStakkert will refuse to process videos that are too large. For moi, about 30 – 45 seconds at 20 fps or so is more than good enough. Yes, more frames can yield a less noisy image, but you do reach the point of diminishing returns after about 1000.

The B.A.A.'s excellent Mars Mapper.

Head finally on straight as I shifted to Saturn, I got in the groove. One thing I really like about Sharpcap? Its simplicity. Now, you may be surprised to hear that, since the program is renowned for its power and features, but it is true. Yeah, it will do stuff like live-stacking and even more complex things, but it can be operated simply and easily for basic planetary imaging.

All you need to do to capture Mars or whatever is set exposure and gain till you get that slightly underexposed look onscreen, open the capture menu, click “start capture,” tell Sharpcap how long or how many frames, and hit the go button. When your sequence completes, the program conveniently places your file in a folder called “Sharpcap Captures” on your desktop. Whether you go for Sharpcap Pro or the basic version, the software is highly recommended by your old Uncle, and if he can get pretty good results with it, you surely can.

When Mars finally got high enough to fool with at about 21:00 local, I went there, touched up focus and ran off a few sequences. Now, what was on display was not my favorite side of Mars. I find the Mare Serenium “streak” slightly blah. However, it’s not entirely without its points of interest. On this steady night, even before I processed the images, I could see Olympus Mons was visible. Of course, Mars’ rapidly shrinking polar ice cap was on stark display.

“Mare Serenium?! Unk, I don’t know pea-turkey about that-there!” If you’ve done everything correctly, including when stacking your video frame with Registax or AutoStakkert, and have judiciously applied Registax’s famous wavelet filters, you will be surprised at how much detail you’ve recorded. You obviously need a map to sort out that detail. Ideally, one tailored for the date and time you took your pictures.

A chart just like that “MarsProfiler,” this can be found on Sky & Telescope’s website. It’s actually a little app. You enter the date and time of your image’s acquisition and it will show just what in tarnation you are looking at. While it’s not quite as detailed, I also really, really like the British Astronomical Association’s “MarsMapper.” In some ways I prefer its Mars disk format to S&T’s flat chart, but I find both of these apps absolutely indispensable.

The beloved Rat-Bat-Spider from Angry Red Planet.

So, what remains for you to do? If you don’t yet have a camera like the ZWO 120, there’s still time to get one, but don’t hesitate; Mars will recede into the distance quicker than you might expect. Ring up yore favorite astro-dealer and tell ‘em Unk Rod and the Rat-Bat-Spider sent ya.

Then, get out with the scope and get some shots of the Angry Red Planet. Even if you don’t know a thing about processing planetary images right now, you’ll have some video sequences in the can that you can work on next month—or next year—and your results will just get better as you go along.

Unk? I’ve got to teach my university classes tonight, so I may not get back to the 4^th stone from the Sun this evening, but I darned sure will tomorrow night. No, it ain’t as good as 2003, but it sure feels a lot like that, muchachos, it sure feels a lot like that.

Postscript...

One thing you can say for your old Uncle Rod? He ain't no piker. Well, he tries not to be one anyways. Two nights after I snapped the image above, I thought I'd give Mars another try. Two days is enough time to give the planet, which has a day only a bit longer than ours, a chance to rotate into a slightly different position so it will reveal a few new features.

Edge 800 8-inch SCT, ZWO ASI120MC, 6,000mm

Standing out on the deck on Tuesday evening, I could tell that, while seeing was not absolutely perfect, it was pretty darned good following the passing of a cold front several days before. Typical Possum Swamp October evenin'...warm, humid, still. Seemed like a great time to, yeah, kick it up a notch. To the Tune of 6,000 rather than 4,000mm of focal length.

Naturally, even with a flip mirror, imaging at a focal length of nearly 20 feet can make aiming downright tough. Hairline reducing tough. Unk, however, got smart for once, centering up the Angry One at 4,000mm before switching out the 2x Shorty Barlow for the 3x Handson Optics job. I tried to be careful with focusing, too, working on it for quite a spell. Frankly, however, the seeing was good enough that focus was easy enough to achieve.

My results? I had to throw out a few sequences due to dust on the sensor chip. Once I noticed that, I moved the planet to a clear spot (I'll clean the ZWO's chip before doing any more work). The remaining sequences I got were easy enough to process, and the resulting final stills, while they darned sure won't win any prizes, are good enough for me; they make me feel like I've come home to Mars once again.

Which I'll admit is sometimes MY Mars. Not the Mars of NASA's rovers, but an old Mars of beautiful princesses, bizarre creatures, and mile-high skyscrapers adorning strange Martian cities. That's what I dreamed of when I shut down the laptop, stowed the bottle of Yell, and dozed away on the couch, anyhow.

When I resurrected the good, old AstroBlog some months ago, muchachos, I said it was my hope to bring you a new article at least every other week. ‘Twas not to be in November. In this time when everybody with a lick of sense is sticking close to home, it wasn’t like I could travel to a star party or a dark site somewhere. I’d have to report on my backyard adventures. That is just OK, but it takes clear skies to do that and late-season hurricane Zeta saw to it I didn’t have any of those.

So, the first half of the month went down the tubes thanks to the lousy WX. What about the second half? As November neared its end and hurricane season finally petered out, it was time to play telescopes. It was time to do a little backyard astronomy before the month was done in hopes of keeping my head above water Herschel-wise.

That was what was on the agenda: Night Three of the New Herschel Project, my quest to observe and/or image all 400 deep sky objects from the first, the best, the brightest list of ‘em, the Herschel 400. And to do it from my humble suburban backyard. I had another mission, though. I had satisfied myself Celestron’s neo-NexRemote, CPWI, worked fine with my Advanced VX mount. It worked fine with a serial cable from the PC to the AVX. How about with a wireless set-up?

Since I expected to do some wrestling with the laptop trying to get CPWI squared away, I thought I’d keep Night Three relatively simple. I’d leave the Mallincam alone and go visual. On a good night, my backyard has a zenith limiting magnitude of about 5, so doing the more prominent aitches with an eyepiece shouldn’t be a problem.

There would be one other change from Night One. I decided to put SkyTools 3 on the bench. While I love the program, there were a couple of issues regarding its use in the New Project. First off, something is squirrely with the H-400 list I downloaded from Skyhound.com. When I’d load the list and connect SkyTools to CPWI so I could initiate gotos from SkyTools, the program would crash. Investigation revealed it was fine with any other list. Apparently, something in the list of 400 objects was driving my Lenovo laptop computer bats. I tried redownloading the H-400, but no dice. SkyTools 3 would just suddenly go away.

Problemo numero dos? My eyes have been going south for over three decades. I’d always had outstanding vision and expected that not to change. Until one evening in the late 80s when I was out cruising the Messiers with a small scope and Jay Pasachoff’s Field Guide to the Stars and Planets. The Tirion charts in the book are on the small side, and they are of the white stars on black sky variety, which is harder to make out in the dark than the opposite. But I’d never had trouble using them with a dim red light. Until this particular evening, when I realized they were now totally unreadable for me. How does that relate to now? The text in SkyTools 3is on the small side, and can be a pain even though I’m wearing glasses.

Deep Sky Planner 7

So, what to do? I already knew the answer; in fact, I’d known the answer for over seven years: Phyllis Lang’s Deep Sky Planner. One night I was working the Big Enchilada, the original Herschel (2500) Project at the Deep South Regional Star Gaze Spring Scrimmage. On my agenda that evening was trying Phyllis’ program. What I found was that not only was it an outstanding deep sky planner, the text on the lists it generated was easy for me to read despite the laptop’s dim, red-filtered display (with my glasses, natch). For these reasons, it looks like DSP will be the official software of the New Herschel Project.

Once the Edge 800, Mrs. Emma Peel, was on her mount in the backyard in late afternoon, I took a couple of minutes to check her over. As you know if you read thisun, I had to do some rather serious maintenance on the telescope not long ago. The problem, if you haven’t read that entry yet, was the paint on the inside surface of her tube was failing. I had to remove as much of the old paint as I could, which wasn’t hard—it was coming off with mild scrubbing—and repaint the interior. I’m still awfully mad at fricking-fracking (this is a family friendly blog, y’all) Celestron, but the new paint is adhering well. My brush-on job will never look as good as spray-paint, but it looks OK.

Emma’s physical done, all that remained was to set up the laptop. That wasn’t hard since I’d be going visual. All I’d require was the Lenovo itself, its power supply, mouse, and the Xbox gamepad (a wired model) I use to slew the scope when it’s under the control of CPWI.

I did round up my Celestron-style serial cable just in case the wheels fell off the wireless business. But I had some hopes since I’ve recently had very good success controlling the scope with the SkyQ Wi-Fi dongle and SkySafari. I also fetched the StarSense hand control just in case. Finally, I plugged the StarSense alignment camera into the port where the HC would normally go—no hardware HC is needed when you go wireless.

When darkness arrived—blessedly early these days—I powered up the Advanced VX, turned on Emma’s DewBuster heaters, and got set to tackle wireless scope control. Next step, of course, was to fire-up the CPWI program. It has been updated fairly recently, so you might want to check your version and head to Celestron’s website (such as it is) and do a download. There are some bug fixes and also some additional features for the gamepad. Those gamepad options are still not nearly—not NEARLY—as robust as they were for NexRemote, so it’s reassuring Celestron seems to be slowly chipping away at that.

Celestron's latest CPWI.

OK, might was well see what was what. Selected the SkyQ as the laptop’s Wi-Fi on the Windows taskbar, and told CPWI to search for and connect to that Wi-Fi device. I was skeptical but <BOOM!> CPWI found the dongle and connected to it without complaint. Next would be a StarSense auto-align, which also went without a freaking hitch. Sent the scope to the ET open cluster in Cassiopeia and the little guy was placed dead center if the field of my beloved 13mm TeleVue Ethos. I was so excited to have such an easy success I ran inside and told Miss Dorothy all about it.

Alas, your silly old Uncle’s elation was not to last. Remember what I said up above about wheels falling off? Well they came off my wireless wagon in just a few minutes. There was no apparent cause; CPWI just disconnected from the telescope and there was nothing I could do to get it to reconnect short of rebooting the laptop. It wasn’t just a fluke, either. I tried a couple of times and the same thing happened: I could connect and align without a hassle, but that connection only lasted a few minutes.

Why? It wasn’t the strength of the Wi-Fi signal from the SkyQ dongle. I was less that three meters from the scope and the laptop’s Wi-Fi signal strength indicator was maxed out. Also, I was using the SkyQ’s simplest mode, Direct Connect, which does not involve your home network. I suspect the problem lies deep within the SkyQ.

My SkyQ Link dongle (it's now called "Sky Portal Link") is, as I’ve mentioned before, the seven year-old first version of the device. Today, it works pretty reliably with SkySafari, but apparently that is kind of its limit. Even there, if I let my iPhone go to sleep it takes the App about 15 seconds to reconnect to the scope. I don’t believe that can be normal, and suspect that’s because of the shaky first version nature of the dongle. Heck, at least I can do something with it. When I first got it, it wouldn’t do a derned thing.

Oh, well, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles and not overly surprising. I shut off the mount, shut down CPWI, connected the serial cable between the Lenovo and the StarSense hand control and started over. There were no surprises thereafter.

The night was getting slightly old by the time I finished messing around with my wireless debacle. I did a StarSense alignment, brought up Deep Sky Planner 7, connected it to the CPWI program and essayed a few objects before it was time to shut down so your Uncle could go inside and watch the latest episode of The Mandalorian, a show he fancies.

Before I address the evening’s rather paltry haul of objects, I do want to talk a little about Deep Sky Planner. I’ve gone into detail about this wonderful program both in the AstroBlogand in a Test Report I did for Sky & Telescope some years ago. But I want to give it a little space here since it is one of the best planning programs in the business, has been under constant development by Ms. Phyllis for many years, and is remarkably stable.

This subject is particularly appropriate at the moment since Unk has heard Deep Sky Planner 8 has just been released (I used 7 on this night). If you haven’t given the program a try—there is a limited trial version available, I believe—you owe it to yourself to do so, and I’m hoping a few words on it here might impel those benighted souls who don’t know the program to at least visit its Knightware website.

What is great about Deep Sky Planner? It’s not just that it is very legible out on the observing field, even for my tired, old eyes. It is its simple, elegant design. As you can see in the screenshots here, DSP sports a fairly standard Windows menu system—you, know File, Window, Help, etc. Certainly, it has specialized menus because of its specialized nature as astro-ware: Observing Log, Telescope Control, etc. But here’s the thing, campers…the menus, even the specialized ones, are in the usual place at the top of the display.

The Herschel 400 plan loaded and ready!

So what? Why does that matter? Because keeping the user interface simple and standard and as intuitive as one for a program like this can be helps new users begin using DSP in a hurry, and those, like moi, who haven’t opened the app in a long time pick it up again. Of course, Deep Sky Plannerdoes many, many things, so having some guidance in the form of Help files and documentation helps. DSP has that, but it has something that’s maybe even better: numerous YouTube videos where Phyllis demonstrates how to do stuff with her software.

What else? These days, the number of objects contained in a program is not as much of an issue as it used to be. Heck, even smart phone astro-apps contain millions of deep sky objects. However, those of you who, like me, started using computers in astronomy back when the Yale Bright Star Catalog and the Messier list made a planetarium program a heavy hitter, probably want to know the totals for DSP. They are impressive. Deep Sky Planner 8 holds 1.6 million objects (you can get the breakdown on the Knightware website). I believe that will satisfy most of us even in these latter days. Let me add that you may not have to spend any time searching that big library to build observing plans. The program's website has many ready-made plans posted (accessed with the "Community Page" selection in the Help menu).

Any downsides to the program? I’m not sure it’s a downside, but DSP does not offer charts of any kind. That may surprise some, since sky maps have been a feature of most planning programs since this type of software appeared way back in the early 90s with DS3D (Deep Sky 3D, an MSDOS program). But that’s the way Deep Sky Planner has always been

Truthfully, though, it doesn’t bother me regarding DSP. You can download images of target objects from the Digitized Sky Survey, so you can easily see details of an object's field. More importantly, the program can be linked to a number of planetarium programs including TheSky and Cartes du Ciel. Only wish I had? That Phyllis would figure out how to connect DSP to my fave planetarium, Stellarium. Guess what? That has happened in Deep Sky Planner 8.

OK, so I hope I’ve encouraged you to visit the Knightware site and have a look around at least. Anyhoo, once I had the scope aligned via CPWI, and Deep Sky Planner runnin’, I had a look at a few of the Herschel 400’s bright showpieces. Wait. What? You didn’t know the Herschel 400 hadbright showpieces? Hoo-boy, are you in for a treat when you begin the list! These are just a samplingof ‘em. Oh, if you find the Herschel Numbers puzzling, have a look at this somewhat dusty old AstroBlog entry.

First up was one of my all-time favorite open star clusters, H45-4 (NGC 457), the ET Cluster (DSP lists the common name for this one as the “Dragonfly,” but it will always be the little Extraterrestrial to me). It was quite a sight in Mrs. Peel with my 25mm 2-inch Bresser wide-field eyepiece (that Unk, amazingly, won at one of the last Deep South Regional Star Gazes he attended). The field of the Bresser was littered with myriad little gems, and ET’s googly eye, bright Phi Cassiopeiae, just blazed away.

Since I was in the north, I decided to view the Dragon’s H37-4 (NGC 6543), the Cat’s Eye Nebula. It’s bright, at magnitude 8, but if you expect the Cat to look anything like its amazing Hubble portrait from your backyard with an 8-inch telescope, you are in for a big disappointment. At high power with the 4.7mm Explore Scientific 82-degree (another win, from my last Chiefland Star Party), I could get fleeting hints of some sort of internal detail. But that’s all it was, “fleeting.” Mostly it was just a somewhat off-round blue-gray ball of smoke with a prominent central star.

In early evening this time of year, that great old horse, Pegasus, sprawls across Northern Hemisphere skies. He was my next stop for an easy and pretty catch, H18-4 (NGC 7662), the Blue Snowball nebula. At the 298x delivered by the Explore, the magnitude 8.4 Snowball was quite obviously blue, and, yeah, looked like a ghostly snowball. Pretty, but no hint of any detail.

Another piece of low hanging Herschel fruit is in Andromeda, H224-2 (NGC 404), Mirach’s Ghost. This is a relatively small (3’) S0 galaxy with a magnitude of 11.7. You’d think this might be hard from the suburbs, but it is not. The only impediment is that magnitude 2 Mirach is a mere 7’ away. Nevertheless, even in the suburbs the galaxy is easy-peasy looking very much like the “ghost” of Mirach—or maybe an eyepiece reflection.

Old Betsy in her original form 26 years ago at Chaos Manor South.

How about a trip to the far south, to H1-4 (NGC 700), the justly famous Saturn Nebula. How was it in the eyepiece? It was no trouble to see this planetary nebula’s strong elongation and slightly greenish hue, but the “ring,” the “ansae,” the extensions of the nebula that give it its name? Fuhgeddaboutit. It was a difficult task to see the ring with my long-gone 12-inch, Old Betsy. It took a very special night to detect it—barely. Of course, with the Mallincam Xtreme Mrs. Peel will show the ring easily on any night and on a superior one will reveal the “fliers,” the clumps at the tips of the rings.

The night was getting older, and, almost unbelievably, the great swan, Cygnus, was preparing to dive beneath the western horizon. I had just enough time to visit one of the constellation’s many wonders, H73-4 (NGC6826), the Blinking Planetary. The popular name comes from this object's peculiar feature: look straight at it in the eyepiece and the round nebula surrounding a bright central star disappears. Look away, use averted vision, and the nebulosity pops back into view. Alternate looking at and away from the nebula and it indeed blinks on and off.

Normally, my skies are good enough and Mrs. Peel is large enough that the blinking effect is reduced (more aperture allows you to see the nebulosity with direct vision and the blinking pretty much goes way). Tonight, however, the effect was pronounced—likely because the object was in the thick and dirty air at the horizon.

With later evening upon me, the stars of winter were beginning to glitter in the East. One of my all-time fave planetaries is located in Gemini, H45-4 (NGC 2392), the Eskimo Nebula (I know it’s now politically correct to call it the “Clown Nebula,” but after this many years I can’t get used to that name). How was this bright ball of fluff? As midnight approached, it was able to put on a pretty good show with the Explore. The central star is trivial to observe; the goal is detail, like “ruff” of the Eskimo’s parka (the central star is the Eskimo’s nose). I’ve at least had hints of this with a 4-inch from the city. With the SCT from the suburbs it really wasn’t a huge challenge—of course I’ve had many years of experience with this object. Pretty!

Time enough for just one more. Unk’s warm den was really beckoning by now. H27-5 (NGC 2264), Monoceros’ Christmas Tree Cluster is another DSO I’ve often visited over my decades of amateur astronomy. Verdict? It looked good from Chaos Manor South with an ETX, and it looks good from the deep suburbs with the Edge 800. It sure doesn’t take much looking to see how this open cluster got its name. Bright (magnitude 7.8) 15 Monocerotis forms the base of the tree and scads of dimmer—but still brilliant—sparkers form the near perfect outline of a Yule tree. What about the famous Cone Nebula, LDN 1613,at the top of the tree? It is a challenge for very large Dobsonians from the darkest sites. On the other hand, my Xtreme will make pretty quick work of it with the SCT from reasonably good skies.

After sitting there at the foot of that beautiful Christmas Tree for quite some time, gazing up at its numinous ornaments, your aged Uncle began to feel chilled. It was time for that den, a little TV, and perhaps some warming libations.

This night was fun, but thanks to the weather I am badly behind the New Herschel Project power curve. I need to do objects and lotsof them to keep on my “one year” informal timeline. So, next time, whenever thatis, it will be “Mallincam Xtreme” all the way, muchachos.

Finally, given the pandemic, it was a quiet Thanksgiving at home for Unk and Miss Dorothy. Our many Thanksgivings at the beautiful Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans' French Quarter seem a long, long time ago now. Nevertheless, it was a nice holiday and Unk's turkey--the first one I've ever brined--turned out very well indeed. I hope all of you, my dear readers, had a happy and safe holiday, too.

Issue #551: The Simple (Suburban) Astronomical Life…

Issue #551: Merry Christmas Eve from the Astroblog!

The Simple Way Redux: KStars

Merry Christmas 2018 from the Astro Blog!

Merry XMAS 2019! Uncle Rod's Astro Blog Slight Return...

Meade on the Rocks, Rock Bottom...

Better Late Than Never…

Astrovideo: Slight Return

#559: Return of the Losmandy

#560: The New Herschel Project, the Preparation

#561: Fifteen Years After the Honeymoon or "The New Herschel Project: 1 Down, 399 to Go"

#562: The New NexRemote

#563: “Celestron Screws Up” or “Poor Emma”

#562: The New Herschel Project Night 2, 21 Down 379 to Go

Night of the Comet

Stars in the Palm of My Hand Redux

Hello Sally!

#568 My Yearly M13: 2020

#569 Mars Redux

Issue 570: The New Herschel Project Night 3: 29 down and 371 to Go