That’s a problem for your correspondent of late, since, for some reason, I seem to feel the cold more acutely after my accident last year. Much as I might want to do some observing, the idea of shivering in the dark sometimes keeps me inside. Be that as it may, I did get out one recent chilly evening. How could I not? It was the GRAND CONJUNCTION.

Like everybody else, your old uncle was very much looking forward to the once in a lifetime experience of seeing Jupiter and Saturn in one eyepiece field. Howsomeever, as the 21^st of December approached I sensed not all was sweetness and light with my fellow astronomers. What was raising some of you folks’ hackles, oddly enough, seemed to be the public’s excitement about the event.

Yeah, that did seem a mite strange. Most of us wantmom and pop to look up and see the stars. Alas, some of us also insist that has to be done our way, with respect and no appropriation of our turf. What I’m referring to is irritation over the conjunction being touted in the media and by the man-on-the-street as “the Christmas star.”

Why did that bother anybody? Well, some of us said it was merely because they wanted the facts clear in the minds of the public. This wasn’t any star. It was merely an effect of perspective. The two planets only appeared to be close to each other in the sky from our vantage point. There was no magic or miracles to it. “Why can’t we just stick to the cold, hard, immutable laws of physics?”

“Now, now. Calm down, y’all” was my advice. I suspected most of the general public actually knew the conjunction wasn’t a star, but the planets Jupiter and Saturn. The reports I saw on CNN and MSNBC certainly emphasized that.

Anyhoo, I believe the problem for some of us wasn’t so much  our fear the public would confuse planets for a star as it was the religion angle. But you know what? For many people, including people in the sciences, even in these latter days,  faith is important. Very important indeed. And if this conjunction reaffirmed that faith and brought a little hope at the end of a dark year, so what? Is that such a bad thing? What’s also worth noting? A conjunction very much like this one did take place in 3 BC.

Another irritant for not a few sky watchers? That darned public was poaching in our private preserve. Trying to filch OUR conjunction. We’ve seen this before with Blue Moons and Super Moons. I admit the latter used to drive me bananas, too. Until the night I was strolling Selma Street back in the heyday of Chaos Manor South on the evening of one such Super Moon... 

I was all primed to tell any of my neighbors who inquired, “Sorry, the difference in the size of the Moon is undiscernible by the human eye. There is nothing ‘super’ about it.” That’s what I was gonna say until I noticed all the little families gathered on their front porches gazing at Luna in wonder. Instead, I bit my tongue and let them marvel at a glorious sight.

Which is what I advised folks in our community to do when the subject of the Christmas Star came up. I took some heat for that. But I didn’t care. I took quite a lot of heat for a Focal Point (editorial) I wrote for Sky & Telescope many years ago wherein I opined the (now bygone, I guess) practice of buying and selling stars was maybe not the bad thing some of us made it out to be. I didn’t care then, either. If “buying” a star or gazing at a Christmas one causes someone to wonder, I am happy.

Anyhow. Enough editorializing. I wanted to see that Christmas Star with my own eyes. The question was how. It didn’t take long for me to decide I’d do it simply. No fancy cameras or tracking mounts. Just my 80mm f/11 SkyWatcher refractor, Midge, on her AZ-4 alt-azimuth mount.

There were several reasons for that. Given our weather of late, it wouldn’t be unlikely we’d be clouded out at the last minute and I’d be setting up a big scope just to tear it down and carry it back inside a few minutes later. Also, the planets would be awfully low by the time darkness came on December 21^st. I suspected I’d have to move the scope around to avoid trees. Finally, I just wanted to enjoy the event and maybe show it to a neighbor or two, not worry over cameras and computers.

Pretty Moon.

Almost ready, I had a quick look at the fattening Moon so I could precisely align the red-dot bb gun finder on the scope—Selene was beautiful, natch. But I didn't linger, quickly moving over to the pair of planets—who were now, indeed, a single point to my eyes. In went a 13mm Plössl, and to that went my eye.

To say the sight was a beautiful one would be an understatement. It wasn’t just that the planets looked good in the (relatively) long refractor. It was the idea of the thing. Those two enormous gas giants in one rather small eyepiece field. Furthermore, it was the realization that Jupiter was a much closer foreground object than the ringed wonder, who was about twice as distant as Jove. Pondering on that and looking and looking almost made it feel as if I were seeing the depth of a 3D image…and I almost thunk myself into a mild case of vertigo!

While it was the juxtaposition of the two that was so striking, there was no denying my inexpensive refractor was delivering the goods. At 68x, there was plenty of banding detail and color on Jupiter. Saturn was a deep yellow, showing off Cassini’s Division and a little disk detail. Upped the magnification to 150x and they still looked great despite the fact the Christmas Star was getting lower and lower and the seeing was naturally becoming lousier and lousier.

The SkyWatcher, Midge, came to me quite a few years ago and for only one reason:  I fancied her mount. I had originally intended to buy the alt-az rig from Orion, where it was badged “Orion Versago.” Luckily, I announced that intention on a Cloudy Nights forum, and a kind person clued me in to the fact I could get the same mount for less money from B&H Photo, where it was being sold as the SkyWatcher AZ-4. And not only that, the SkyWatcher package included an 80mm f/11 achromatic refractor.

Naturally, I went for the SkyWatcher and immediately recognized Midge was a fine little telescope. Beautifully finished tube, good focuser (though only a 1.25-incher), and surprisingly good optics. I will admit the scope was little used for the longest time. But a decade later she is out in the backyard a lot. She is trivial for your now somewhat feeble old uncle to set up—if I am just going to be giving something a quick look, I leave the eyepiece tray off the tripod, and am able to quickly collapse the legs to maneuver through doorways.

My souvenir of the evening...

Eventually, of course, the Star really got down into the mess at the horizon. Before winding things up, I held my iPhone up to the eyepiece and shot a few pictures. Not because I expected much of an image, but just so I'd have a "souvenir" of the evening. I went back to the pretty Moon and shot a few of her as wall. Soon thereafter, your uncle retreated to his den for a warming potation and a second viewing of the season 2 finale of The Mandalorian. 

I am always a little stressed out over big astro-events that capture the public's attention. There have been a lot of Kahouteks over the years, afterall. But this was one astronomy Special Event that really worked out; not just for me and my fellow astronomers, but for everybody, and for that I am glad.

Christmas Eve…

These latter-day Christmas Eves are nothing like those huge Christmas Eves of yore at old Chaos Manor South with a giant tree and little kids, eyes full of wonder, running everywhere. And no trips to old El Giro's for margaritas like we used to do each Yule eve, either. This Christmas in the Year of the Plague was an even more quiet one than those of late. Just me and Miss Dorothy. On the morrow, I’ll fix a nice Christmas repast for two (I’m doing a ham this year) and see what the Jolly Old Elf brought me. 

Whether I get out with a telescope or not between now and New Year’s, I’ll be back before long with an article to, if nothing else, tell you WHAT I GOT! Have a beautiful holiday, muchachos. 

"Wait just one cotton pickin' minute, Unk! Ain't you forgettin' something?!"Almost did:  My traditional Christmas Eve viewing of that greatest and most numinous of ornaments, M42, The Great Orion Nebula. It hadn't looked good when I had arisen at my accustomed 07:30 local time Christmas Eve morning. Windy, thunderstorms, generally yucky. Looking at Accuweather on my phone (I got tired of the Weather Channel's pop-over ads), and the Clear Sky Clock (I will never call it "Chart"), however, showed maybe there was some hope.

Following my normal Thursday night routine, checking into the Lockdown Fun Net on 28.420Mhz, I peeped out the radio shack door. And there was Rigel shining on like some crazy diamond. I hurried into the house, fetched Midge, and inserted the 17mm Koenig eyepiece I'd purchased at the 1993 Deep South Regional Star Gaze into her diagonal. Best view of M42 I've ever had? No. This was a 3-inch telescope under suburban skies with a waxing Moon nearby. But beautiful? Yes. I looked upon it as a good omen.

Before we get to that, however, I know y’all wanna know WHAT SANTA BRUNG Unk. Well, not any new telescopes; that’s fer sure. If you follow this here blog even intermittently, you know Unk has been engaged in thinning the scope herd over the last several years. Oh, I’ve still got telescopes and eyepieces aplenty. But I’m down to one SCT, a few nice refractors, and a 10-inch Dobbie.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t get anything that was kinda-sorta astro-related, however. Something I like to do every week when I can is check into the Amateur Astronomy Digital (radio) Voice Net. A weekly meeting of amateur radio operators who are also amateur astronomers. This very fine net, hosted by NCS Jason Hissong, NX8E, a great ham and a great observer, can accommodate both DMR and D-Star users. The net meets every Wednesday night at 9 pm EST.  It’s a good net, but I wasn’t checking in very often. Why? Because the only D-Star radio I owned was a HT (handie-talkie, that is). Unk has never been a big fan of HTs, you see.

Anyhoo…the little VHF rig in the shack here, a Yaesu FT-1900, was about a dozen years old, so I figured it was time to upgrade. What did I ask Santa for? I thought about the Icom ID 5100—I love its big display—but it really seems more suited to mobile use, so I went with the ID 4100. And, after wrestling with the RT Systems programming software on Christmas afternoon, I got it set up for both analog and digital operations, and hope to become a regular on NX8E’s net henceforth. You can too if you hold at least a Technician license. If you’d like to join the net, see the Amateur Astronomy Digital Voice Net page on Facebook for details.

Anyhow, now for the annual wrap up…

January

January brought an article on poor, old Meade, which was in the midst of yet another bankruptcy. The long and short of it was the company that bought Meade after their last crash some years ago, Ningbo Sunny, lost an anti-trust suit, declared bankruptcy, and was looking for a buyer. Where are they now? I haven’t heard much news about ‘em lately. They are apparently still getting some product to dealers, however. The website comes and goes and products, even bread and butter ones like the LX90, are frequently shown as “out of stock.” The irony? As that bad news came out, I’d just completed a review of their LX85 and was quite impressed. “Meade is back,” I thought.

In a good sign for the revival of the Blog, January 2020 featured not one but two entries. The second being an account of my yearly ritual of photographing M13. This edition concerned me doing that with the above mentioned LX85 the previous fall. As above, I was quite impressed by the optics of the 8-inch Coma-Free SCT that came with the LX85 GEM package, and also by the quality of the AVX-like mount. Actually, I thought the Meade LX85, which features ball bearings on the declination axis as well as the RA axis, unlike the Advanced VX, tracked better and was easier to guide.

April

April? How about February and March? There wasn’t any February and March. Unk wasn’t quite ready to get the Blog back on the rails till April, but when I did, I swore I would get at least one and sometimes two new articles out the door every stinkin’ month. The first of these was a real blast from the past, since it found me in the backyard with my Mallincam deep sky video camera I hadn’t used in years.

I was curious to see how it would work—or if it would work at all—since I had not applied power to it in at least five annums. But the Mallincam Xtreme fired right up and worked just as well as it ever had. So did everything else. Yes, your silly Unk did fumble around a bit with the Mallincam software, but he finally got back in the groove.

May

As with the Mallincam, I was hoping all would be well after going on two years of disuse. And it was save for one thing:  the mount’s internal battery, a button cell. After getting over the shock of what one little battery can cost on fricking Amazon, Unk installed it in the Gemini II, got the mount into the backyard, and got it going again. “Going” meaning this wonderful mount performed just as well as ever.

Confronted with a downright strange stretch of clear spring weather, your uncle was able to get another Blog entry into virtual print in May. I realized that if I were to get outside with a telescope more regularly again, I needed a project. That project, I decided, would be The New Herschel Project.

Which would be decidedly more modest than the original Herschel (2500) Project documented in this blog. That project, a.k.a. “The Big Enchilada,” involved me observing all 2500 Herschel deep sky objects in less than three years. This time? Fewer objects, but more challenging in its own way:  I would observe the original Herschel 400 objects from my average suburban backyard. I would use the Mallincam when necessary, but the largest aperture telescope would be the largest left in my inventory. My sweet 10-inch Dobbie, Zelda.

June

The month’s first entry concerned the first evening of the New Herschel Project. And, more prominently, the telescope I used to essay that:  Charity Hope Valentine, my Meade ETX 125. Like everything else the little scope had lain dormant for years.

Before I could think of getting her into the backyard, I knew I’d want to replace the battery in Charity’s LNT finder (she is a PE style ETX). That battery, like the Gemini II’s cell, keeps the scope’s clock running. I ordered one for Charity, and ordered one for the Celestron AVX as well, since I reckoned it would be good and dead too. Replacing Charity’s battery was a pain as always, but I got ‘er done and got the little scope into the backyard.

Alas, clouds scuttled our mission after we’d seen but one object. I was glad I’d got the little scope outside, though. For one thing, I found that the hand control cable was going bad. The insulation was gone in places. I’ll replace that “soon.” Another reason? She is a good little telescope and I still and always will love her.

There was a third entry in June, believe it or not. But it recounted a rather bitter affair. I’d found that my Celestron Edge 800 had a severe problem. After seven years, the paint on the interior of her tube was failing. That necessitated carefully removing as much of the old paint (which had quite obviously been applied to an improperly prepared surface) and repainting the interior.  

July

July’s second article took Unk from the high-tech to the very lowest tech. Wherein your correspondent went hunting for the amazing Comet Neowise with binoculars. I began with my 100mm giants, but when it became obvious I’d have to hunt up the parts and pieces of their mount, I backed off to my Burgess 15x70s. The comet looked amazing nevertheless.

August

August recounted Unk’s adventures with hand-held astronomy software from the Palm Pilot days onward. This was spurred on in part by a Sky & Telescope assignment I was working on, a Test Report on the new version of SkySafari. Needless to say, I was impressed by the new ‘Safari. I’d skipped a version, and was amazed how far the software had come in a short while. I don’t hesitate to say it is now fully the equal of most PC and Mac astronomy programs.

September

Well, Muchachos…September was not exactly an astronomy-friendly month down here in Possum Swamp. We were hit by a pretty serious hurricane, Sally. This installment was about the passage of the big storm. While it caused a lot of damage to our east, the sum total of her depredations here was a downed 6-meter antenna and a few limbs in the yard. We were on the standby generator for less than an hour.

October

The year began with my M13 tradition and it was ending with the same. I knew I had to get out right away, as soon as the Gulf calmed down, or there would be no yearly M13. To be honest with y’all, it had been about three years since I’d done any astrophotography, and I was a mite nervous about whether I’d remember what to do and how to do it.

To make things easy on myself, I employed my beloved William Optics Megrez II Fluorite, an 80mm f/7, Veronica Lodge. She makes astrophotography as easy as that difficult art ever can be with her excellent wide-field optics. My results were nothing special, but got me back into the groove of polar alignment, guiding, and image processing.

November

November brought another Herschel evening, and a pretty good haul of objects. The ostensible goal was getting CPWI working in wireless fashion with the AVX mount, but it didn’t take me long to figure out that was a no-go. The first generation Celestron wireless dongle just wouldn’t stay connected for long. I went back to “wired” and had mucho fun doing Herschels visually.

December

The final post of the year was about—what else could it have been about?—The Christmas Star, a.k.a. the grand conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. The article also comprised my annual Christmas card to you, my dear readers, but the focus was on the opposition. For once the weather cooperated, and I was able to see the spectacle and show it off to Miss Dorothy and a few neighbors with my 80mm f/11 achromat, Midge.

2021? Who knows what this year will hold? It is starting off in genuinely crazy fashion. Unk? I have two hopes:  that me and Miss D. get the vaccine soon and that I get up the gumption to get a scope outside and really start knocking off some Herschels. Which I promise to do just as soon as it gets a little warmer, muchachos.

That often sought after but also much-feared Ground Truth? I am a FAR less active observer here in my late 60s (it feels awful strange to say “late 60s”) than I was even five years ago.  In part, that is due to the accident I had in early 2019 that most of y’all know about. I talk about it more than I should, perhaps, but that is because it now seems to have been the watershed between “young” Uncle Rod and "old" Uncle Rod.

How has that affected my observing? Well, most noticeably it left me not as able to deal with gear setup. And I don’t just mean heavy stuff. This afternoon I made the mistake of picking up my ETX 125’s tripod with my “bad” arm and it sure let me know that wasn’t what I should have done. Thankfully, I began selling off my big/heavy astro-stuff—the C11, the truss-tube Dobsonian, the Atlas mount, etc.—about five years ago. I had a strong whiff of “change is in the air” even then.

Certainly, I still have telescopes and mounts. I have a C8, a Celestron Advanced VX mount, some nice refractors ranging from 6-inches to 66mm in aperture, a Losmandy GM811G, and my 10-inch truss tube scope, Zelda. And, when I’m feeling good, I can handle any of ‘em. When I’m not so good but still want to look at something, my 80mm f/10 Celestron achromat, Midge, on an AZ-4 alt-azimuth mount works—like she did for the Saturn – Jupiter conjunction.

But it ain’t just that I sometimes have a hard time physically dealing with telescopes and mounts. That is far from the whole story. Another result of the accident is a lingering fear of falling in the dark. For that reason (and the pandemic, of course), I haven’t been to a star party since January 2019. Heck, I haven’t even been out to the local dark site. I feel much more relaxed in the familiar backyard even if it means giving up magnitude 6 skies for mag 5 ones (at zenith on a good night).

I also feel the cold more acutely than I did. This had actually begun some time before 2019, but seems to have accelerated since then. The result is unless it is a mild night, I’m staying inside. Oh, I can still do astrophotography on cold nights, since I can get the scope/camera/mount going with the aid of PHD Guiding and Nebulosityand duck back into the den while the exposure sequence runs. But that doesn’t much feel like a night out with the telescope to Luddite Unk.

Even my astrophotography has ebbed. Not so much in the number of targets I shoot, but in how I do it. ‘Twas not long ago I was eager to embrace the latest hardware and software to hit the imaging game. Now? I have more time to play with such things, but I just don’t seem to have as much patience for the new and (for moi) complex—at least not when it’s dark and I’m hooking things up by flashlight.

I know the big deals today are things like Sequence Generator Pro, and small computers like Raspberry Pis mounted on the scope to manage everything and shoot images to a phone or tablet. Not for Unk, I guess. If I take pictures, it’s usually with my thirteen-year-old Canon 400D DSLR. And I no longer participate in the Cloudy Nights mounts forum quest for ever tinier PE figures. Nor do I dream of more-better-gooder to the tune of ten thousand-dollar telescope mounts. If my stars look round, and I think my pictures look pretty, that is enough. More than enough.

Still as pretty as the day I met her.

And that’s the way it is at the beginning of a new decade of this new century. Hey, y’all, I ain’t looking for sympathy. Don’t need it. I was quite active in astronomy from the 80s and into the mid-90s, and extremely active from the mid-90s to about 2015. There weren’t too many things in the sky I didn’t see or image; too many outstanding astronomers I didn’t meet; and too many star parties, museums and observatories I didn’t visit. It was “What a ride, what a ride!” folks. I just wanted y’all to know the reasons you don’t and won’t see the blog as frequently as you once did (I would still like to do at least one new article a month).

Enough of that stuff. Let’s talk telescopes. Not quite a year ago, I resolved to get my beloved 15-year-old ETX125 PE, Miss Charity Hope Valentine, out of mothballs. I replaced her LNT battery, got her into the backyard and had a good time. For a while. The next time I drug Charity out, she was acting a mite peculiar. The Autostar display would come and go. Sometimes she wouldn’t respond to commands. Once in a while the Autostar computer would reset.

Now, I was tempted to say “She’s just gettin’ old—like you, Unk.” But I didn’t want to leave it at that. Charity still looks beautiful—as pretty as the day I met her. I’m proud to say I’ve taken good care of her. Surely, I could do a little troubleshooting?

A 16-year-old Autostar cable.

Which I did—some eight months later. What was up with that? Well, at the time I discovered Charity’s problem we were right at the start of the 2020 hurricane season, which was a doozy, and whose storms stretched on to November. Then it got cold and I went “refractors on grab ‘n go mounts” all the way (Charity is less of a hassle to carry and set up than a fork-mount 8-inch SCT, but not by much).

Anyhoo, couple of days ago, I got off my butt and ordered a replacement from one of my long-time go-to vendors, Agena Astro Products. After it arrived, a test with Miss Valentine showed it and her worked just fine. What was left to do other than set the girl up in the backyard on a cool but not bitter spring night?

Now, originally the scope to be set up wasn’t going to be Miss Valentine. I still have every intention of carrying on with the New Herschel Project. However, one look at the afternoon sky showed that was likely a non-starter. While still clear, there was obviously increasing haze. The C8 would stay inside and the ETX would go outside because of the degrading conditions—the situation that is her forte'.

When it finally got dark (blast this DST), out back went your old Uncle. As you know if you’ve read my past installments concerning her, Charity can be a neurotic sort. Some nights, gotos are bang-on all over the sky. Others, she can’t find anything. Which would it be tonight?

While I probably should have done drive training after a year, almost, of the scope not being used, it was chilly, so I just set Miss in PE home position—turned counterclockwise in azimuth till she reaches her hard stop—and turned on the power. That is all you have to do with the ETX PE. The scope reads the time that’s kept current with the battery in her LNT (“Level North Technology”) module, finds tilt, level, and north with the aid of her sensors and compass, and heads for the first of two alignment stars. Charity chose Sirius and went that-a-way.

Charity has the most trouble with targets anywhere near zenith. That is compounded by her long focal length and the fact that since she is limited to 1.25-inch oculars, you ain’t gonna be using long focal length ultra-wide 2-inch eyepieces to make finding easier. Nevertheless, my girl put both M35 and M37, both of which were up pretty high, in the field of that 25mm. How did they look? Not so hot. The haze was thickening and really scattering the light pollution.

But, with Charity aligned, I thought we might as well visit some old friends anyhow. Which? Oh, the usual heavenly masterpieces like the above-mentioned open clusters, and, of course, M42. If you’re an “advanced observer” you’d probably scoff at the targets Charity and me essayed (we spent quite a bit of time on the near First Quarter Moon). I know. I once fit that “advanced” appellation and was more interested in chasing quasars than looking at the dumb old Moon. But that was then and this is now and Rod and Charity had a fine time oohing and ahhing at marvels that never age even as we do.

Note Bene:  Miss Dorothy and I have now received both doses of the vaccine and hope the same is true for you.

Plenty of clouds down Chiefland way...

I haven’t been able to keep the blog on a monthly basis.Heck, I haven’t been able to keep it on a bimonthly schedule. When I can’t/won’t get out with a scope thanks to clouds, what am I gonna write about? Oh, I could go in for nostalgia, but there’ve been a bunch of posts of that sortover the fifteen years the blog has been around (yes), and that well is almost dry, muchachos.

I know it’s a cliché, but the dadgummed weather is just crazy-cloudythese days. A decade of Unk’s impressions doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in the world of climate science, I know, but my impression is things are worse clear sky-wise. As I’ve said before, I noticed a change in my part of the country, the deep south, beginning nearly a decade ago, around 2012.

In those days, I was still loading up the truck, Miss Van Pelt, with a ton of astro-gear and heading south to the Chiefland Astronomy Village down in Florida at the drop of a metaphorical hat. I maybe didn’t get down there every dark of the Moon, but I got down there plenty, whether to pursue the Herschel Project, or just to take a picture of M13 from a dark sky, or play around with some new gear.

I’d usually do three days, and you know what? Even at the height of those southern summers I’d usually get two clear nights and sometimes three. But, then, about, yeah, 2012, I noticed the summer weather seemed different. I began to spend a couple of nights of a three-night run in the cotton-picking Chiefland Days Inn instead of on the observing field. And then there began to be complete skunkings. To the point where I grew reluctant to drive six freaking hours to sit in a déclassé motel room.

A rainy night in...Florida.

And it has now got to the point where (to me) the weather is more than noticeably worse year-round; not just in the summer. To include increasingly troublesome hurricane seasons  that stretch well into the fall.   And the weather ain’t just worse way down in Florida, but here along the northern Gulf Coast and throughout much of the country from what I hear. I maintain, again without scientific evidence, that something has changed with the weather and not for the good.

I’ll also admit I’m less hardcore than once I was. To be honest, I have trouble convincing myself to brave the clouds and the bugs and the haze and the heat to see a little something from suburban skies. I know I’ve missed some cool views that way, but there it is. Forty lashes with a wet noodle for Unk, and I promise to get out into the backyard more frequently henceforth. If it ever clears up and Gulf storms stay away.

Rather than let another month go by blogless, I thought you, my (overly) loyal and kind readers, might enjoy a little something…just a few bullets, really, about what's been going on around here (I almost said “around Chaos Manor South,” but those days are gone forever).

·       I had the pleasure of reviewing Phyllis Lang’s latest edition of Deep Sky Planner (Version 8, if you can believe that). You can read all about it in my Test Report in the upcoming issue of Sky & Telescope, but I can tell you it’s a goodun. 

·        Don’t forget to check your scope covers before you use them. I had a Telegizmos cover I bought back around 2016. While it wasn’t their “365” model, it was a good one, well made I thought. Six years is six years, though, and it did get a fair amount of use in my backyard. It’s so nice to be able to leave a scope set up under a cover for a few days. Almost as good as an observatory (which I have no interest in building at this juncture in my life). I should have paid more attention to it, though. The cover was looking a little tattered…but so what? The “so what” is we got a right good rainstorm in the early hours one morning and the cover leaked. Badly. 

There was some water intrusion into the tube of my SCT, Mrs. Emma Peel. That was not a huge problem to fix, however, since I’d become rather experienced in disassembling the Celestron (I’m still mad at them). However, what was even more drenched with water was my Advanced VX mount head. Rut-roh, Raggy. 

·       I love the AVX. It has never failed me for anything I’ve wanted to do with it. Heck, I’ve even gotten good guided astrophotos with it and the SCT at f/7. I’d hate to have to think about replacing it. I opened up the mount, dried it out, and let it sit in a low humidity environment disassembled for some days. Back together, I did a fake alignment indoors and the mount seemed fine. The only true test is under the stars, of course, and I have not been able to do that yet.  Fingers and toes crossed. 

·       If I have to replace the mount, what would I replace it with? Maybe not an AVX. You never know the truth of what you read on the consarned Internet, but it seems like not everybody gets a VX as good as mine. I’d probably replace it with… I dunno… An HEQ-5? iOptron’s new lightweight mount, the GEM 28? Search me and hope I don’t have to find out. 

·       What else…what else? Some folks get the impression I’m now telescope poor. Yes, I did sell off a lottastuff, the larger instruments (good thing I did given my current condition), and also some of the less used astro-junk. But I’ve still got… 

66mm William Optics SD patriot refractor.

80mm WO fluorite APO.

80mm SkyWatcher f/11 achromat.

90mm Orange Tube Celestron C90.          

100mm f/5.6 Explore Scientific achromat.

100mm Celestron f/10 achromat.

120mm SkyWatcher f/7 ED APO.

125mm ETX 125 (the storied Charity Hope Valentine).

150mm Zhumell f/8 achromat.

200mm Edge SCT, Mrs. Peel.

250mm Zhumell f/5 Dobsonian, Zelda, who is now my Big Gun. 

And I still have a couple of boxes of eyepieces, three mounts (the AVX, a SkyWatcher AZ-4, and my Losmandy GM811G). So, don’t weep for me, AstroBloggers. That I got rid of so much and still have so much is a sign  I let my astro-buying get a little out of hand for a “while.” I’m good now and feel good equipment wise. 

·      What gets used the most? That’s easy, the 80mm APO, the SCT, and the 120mm APO. That’s for “serious” astronomy. What do I mostly use for a quick look at something and to keep my proverbial hand in? The 80mm f/11 SkyWatcher on the AZ-4 alt-azimuth mount. 

·      Do I at least think about new stuff? Not much. I don’t need more eyepieces, I’ve clearly got all the scopes I can use, and the three mounts are more than good enough. Assuming the Advanced VX still works. If it doesn’t? I need something in a similar weight class. As above, in the event, I’m thinking about an HEQ-5. I wouldn’t mind going back to EQMOD for scope control. I’ve also, yes, considered the iOptron GEM 28. Its weight and payload are impressive sounding. But I hear a lot of not-so-good experiences with their mounts. But I’m, yeah, hoping not to have to go our and buy any mount anytime soon. 

·       Astronomy software? These days my needs are simple. What I mostly use is three programs, which tend to the simpler compared to what I ran during, say, the go-go days of the Herschel Project:  Deep Sky Planner, Stellarium, and Nebulosity. 

·       There are many things to like about DSP. It is a mature and capable astronomy program. But sometimes it’s the little things. What has encouraged me to adopt it for my personal use? Nice large fonts. Having to squint at minute text on a dim red screen, even with your glasses on, ain’t no fun. 

·       Stellarium? I still love Cartes du Ciel and use it for some tasks. But Stellarium has come an awful long way in the last five years, and I don’t know what else I require. It’s just so pretty, too. That it now has built-in support for ASCOM makes the deal on this (free) software even sweeter. 

·       Nebulosity? It just works for acquiring images with my old Canon 400D and 60D (which are actually more sophisticated and capable than your silly old uncle needs for his astrophotography). It also has the best stacking routine in the bidness.

And…and…and… Can’t think of nuthin’ else campers. I hope to be back here again soon. Probably with the results of the AVX post deluge check ride. Till then, then...

Where it all began...

I did get the Advanced VX mount out one evening long enough to test a new astronomy program—which will be the subject of an upcoming Sky & Telescope Test Report. But only long enough to do that. As you may recall, my AVX took a bath, literally, recently due to a leaky scope cover. During the brief period before a fresh batch of clouds blew in, the AVX seemed OK, but I am not willing to give the mount a clean bill of health until I can spend a few hours under the stars with it.

Anyhoo, like last time, I didn’t want to let a month go by without a blog. So, here are my reminiscences on the vaunted Herschel Project.

Act I:  The Dipping of the Toe…

I was thinking about the ‘Project the other day. Maybe because Son of the Lockdown has me at home again without a whole lot to do. “What in tarnation is Unk talking about this am? Too much Yell Saturday night, maybe?”

What I’m talking about, Skeezix, is The Herschel Project, the observing project of a lifetime, of my lifetime anyhow. Most of us conceive big observing programs at some point in our astronomy careers, but most of those fall by the wayside long before they are finished. Mine didn’t. Maybe because it had such a clear goal and maybe because the equipment I was using at the time was so well suited to accomplishing that goal. Maybe an even larger reason was two books I’d read.

Anyhow, set the WABAC machine for an October Night in 2009. Your Uncle was out on the observing field of the old Deep South Regional Star Gaze in the days when it was held at the Feliciana Retreat Center in the backwoods of Louisiana. What I was doing was wonderingwhat the heck I was gonna look at.

It had been a good night with my 12-inch Dobsonian, Old Betsy. I’d seen more than a few deep sky wonders, some pedestrian, some not so much. One in the latter category was the Crescent Nebula. That night it was a spectacle, with the center of the crescent beginning to fill in with textured haze in my 12mm Nagler 2. But suddenly, just after midnight, my observing list was done. There weren’t enough objects on it to see me through two nights of a star party much less three. I reckon I hadn’t been sanguine enough about what Betsy could accomplish under dark skies on a superior evening.

After a look at M42, I essayed a few easy showpieces, covered Bets and headed back to my little motel room in the Retreat Center’s Lodge where I ruminated on the What to Look At business. I spent some time wondering what that might be to the accompaniment of a little Rebel Yell and a DVD of 2001:  A Space Odyssey. By the time Moonwatcher had thrown his bone into the air, I thought maybe, just maybe, I had a glimmer of an idea.

I was nervous as sunset Saturday came in; I’ll admit. I considered the Herschel II a difficult, daunting, and even scary list. Maybe that was because I hadn’t taken a really good look at the details of the list's targets. Most of its dimmest DSOs are small and thus not much of a challenge for an 8-inch telescope under good skies. So, I was a little skeered as I punched the first object ID into Betsy’s Sky Commander digital setting circle computer.

The Results of what I was now calling “The Herschel II Project”? Between sunset and 2 am on Saturday evening at Deep South, I logged 26 Herschel IIs. And I wasn’t trying to move particularly fast.  Maybe the H2 wasn’t as hard as I thought?

Act II:  The Big Enchilada with Julie, Julia, Bill, and Lina

That idea was bolstered by my object haul on my next dark sky Herschel observing run. I realized if I were to finish in a year, I’d have to get on the stick given our usual weather in the southland. That in mind, I packed up Miss Van Pelt, my Toyota 4Runner, with a ton of astro-gear including my Stellacam-equipped NexStar 11 GPS and headed south for the Chiefland Astronomy Village despite the fact we were dealing with the lingering effects of (yes) Hurricane Ida.

Out on the Billy Dodd Observing Field, I discovered the true power of a C11 and a deep sky video camera. The old Stellacam, which had a maximum exposure of 12-seconds, was purty humble, but man did it pull in Herschel IIs. They fell to the C11 like autumn leaves before the wild hurricane fly. The grand total after my second big expedition?  Over 100 more objects:  159 down, 241 to go.

The former came to me thanks to the wonderful Miss Dorothy. One day there was a rare book sale at the university where she was a Department Chair. One of the volumes on sale was that big, fat Scientific Papers. She bought it for me, lugged it home, and I was soon immersed in reading the words of The Man himself and learning more about him and his sister and fellow observer, Caroline. That led to me devouring biography after biography of the pair and becoming even more interested in (or maybe obsessed with) both Herschel and his deep sky objects.

The latter was a book that brought its author deserved if brief fame. It was the adaptation of Julie Powell’s The Julie-Julia Project blog articles wherein she cooked all Julia Child’s recipes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. That’s just the jumping off spot for a little tour de force of a book that showed everybody what one of these new-fangled blogs could be when coupled to a big project and written with humor and heart.

Unk was smart enough to put two and two together, a big project and a blog, and thus was born “The Herschel Project,” aka “The Herschel 2500,” aka “The Whole Big Thing,” aka “The Big Enchilada.” I would observe all the Herschels, not just the H2, all of them. Which, after eliminating the non-existent and duplicate objects left me with 2500 targets, some of which were considerably dimmer and more obscure than those in the Herschel II. The details? As I wrote in the blog one Sunday morning:

The perceptive (or nitpicky) amongst y’all may have noticed something different from the last Herschel blog. The title is no longer “The Herschel II Project,” but just “The Herschel Project.” What does that mean? Well, I’ll tell ya: the more I’ve researched ol’ Willie and the more of his objects I’ve seen, the more I’m inclined to go past the Herschel I and the Herschel II and tackle The Whole Big Thing, the 2500 objects (give or take) that constitute the entire Herschel List, the whole schmeer, that is.

That might seem like the project of [many] years, but with modern technology and with a little luck, I don’t believe it will be. Based on the slew, and I do mean slew, of Herschels I captured down in Chiefland this past weekend and which I’ll tell you about next week, the Big Project seems more and more doable. Not only did I do bunches of Herschel IIs, I did Big Bunches from the parent list, the Big Enchilada, finishing all the multitudinous galaxies in Aquarius and most of ‘em in Cetus. So, I am on the verge of committing myself to going for the gold.

And commit myself I did. I wasn’t about to be pinned down regarding time limits, but I secretly hoped to be done in about two years, by sometime late in 2012, I hoped.

It wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns, of course. I missed my self-imposed deadline for completing the Herschel II by 6-months, not wrapping it up until April 2011. For months, I was down to a mere handful of HII spring galaxies that always seemed too low or behind a cloud or a tree. I finally completed the Herschel II Project down at Chiefland and heaved a sigh of relief. But not toomuch relief. I still had an almost overwhelming number of Herschel Big Enchilada Objects to go.

But that number soon wasn’t so daunting. Trip after trip Down Chiefland Way, doing 100 or more objects every time, soon whittled the big list down. So did getting into the blessed zone. I developed a routine that served me well.

The night before a Big Enchilada Trip, I’d load up Miss Van Pelt, the 4Runner, with plenty of gear and a telescope appropriate for the conditions I’d face. That was usually the C11, but if things looked iffy I might drop down to the C8. I’d invariably bring the Stellacam (or, as the project rolled on, the color Mallincam Xtreme), since I soon learned video would be key to allowing me to complete all those objects in just two years.

When we rolled into Chiefland, I’d check into the old Holiday Inn Express. I found being able to get a some rest in comfort following a long night on the field allowed me to be ready to face the stars with a will on the next evening.

Thence, back to town for a stop at the Walmart. Therein, I’d stock up on snacks for the observing field—being able to take a break, drink some water, and half a bite to eat helped me pull some really long runs. In those days, I wasn’t much of a health food fan, invariably choosing Jack Link Sasquatch Big Sticks. Another big help on those late/early runs? Monster Energy Drinks. After WallyWorld, it was supper, usually at the Taco Bell next door to the motel.

Finally, it was time to hit the Herschels. My final and most effective lineup of gear included, in addition to the telescope and Mallincam, a little DVD player I used as a monitor, Orion’s digital DVR, and a Laptop connected to the scope running Greg Crinklaw’s SkyTools 3 (the software of the Herschel Project) and NexRemote.

My procedure was simple. Click on an object in ST3, send the scope there with the program’s Real-Time module. Center it up in the field of the camera if necessary using a Wireless Wingman gamepad. Record 30-seconds of video and an audio commentary on the object. Repeat as often as the sky, available objects, and your old uncle’s stamina held out. When I could no longer hold out, back to the motel for a little Yell, some silly TV like Ghost Adventuresor UFO Hunters, and some sleep in an airconditioned/heated room.

Following this simple, rote, routine allowed me to observe with maximum efficiency. Still, I was surprised how efficient I was. I completed the Big Enchilada, The Herschel 2500 Project, on a dark run in Chiefland in July of 2012, months sooner than I dared hope when I got the crazy idea to observe over two thousand faint deep sky wonders.

Act III:  August and Everything After (the Herschel Project).

It’s hard to let go. And at first, I didn’t. I just kept observing Herschels. I told myself there were reasons for that. For one thing, I had all along thought the Herschel Project might form the basis of a book. I wanted better images of the Herschels than those I’d captured with the Stellacam, so it only made sense to go back and re-image many of them with the Mallincam Xtreme. I also thought I’d want some sketches of objects to show that while the project was mostly done with video, I’d done a fair amount of visual observing too. I spent a couple of memorable nights on the CAV field observing the old fashioned way—with eye and telescope.

So it went for quite some time, beginning in 2013. That year was notable since it was when I retired—in the spring. My first Herschel run after that was a memorable one. I headed for the Feliciana Retreat Center, the place the Herschel Project was born, and the Deep South Regional Star Gaze Spring Scrimmage (the smaller spring event I’d always had to miss because of work).

I had a new telescope with me, my retirement gift to myself, a Celestron Edge 800 SCT (along with an Advanced VX mount to replace my old CG5). What do I remember most about that expedition in addition to nearly being the Lone Astronomer of Feliciana (see this)? How wonderful it was to get up Sunday morning and realize I didn’t have to be in a hurry.

I could leave anytime I wanted and get home at any time I wanted—no work on Monday morning. That home, by the way, would soon not be the legendary Chaos Manor South. Lots changed following the end of the H-Project including where Dorothy and I lived. We decided downsizing made sense and lit out for the suburbs.

And so, it went for the next couple of years, with Unk grudgingly hanging onto the Herschels. Oh, I tried a couple of other observing projects, but none lit my fire like the Herschel Project had. I was beginning to believe lightning only strikes once.

How about the book? I began assembling it much the way Miss Powell assembled her blog into one. But I only worked on it for a little while. Many things were changing with me in addition to the above, and I found my heart just wasn’t in it. Then, I had the second edition of Choosing and Using a New CAT to get out.  And a new deep sky observing book to write…and The Herschel Project Book just kept receding farther into the background—where it remains to this very day, nine years after the last object was in the can.

Eventually, I stopped looking for another big “Herschel Project.” If one comes to me, so be it. But, as above, I have decided The Big Enchilada really was the observing experience of a lifetime. That's OK. Even if I didn’t have all those old blog articles, and videos, and photographs, The Herschel Project would remain green in my memory where it shall remain to the end of my days.

Your broken-down old Uncle had also been experiencing some health issues that made him reluctant to hit the backyard. You know, this “getting old” stuff is for the birds. Finally, just as clear weather came and Unk began to feel more like his old self, a third shot of Moderna had him laid pretty low for a couple of days.

Thankfully, all that is now past, and I am indeed close to being my old self again for good or ill. In fact, this past week I felt Good Enough to tackle my number one astronomy priority, checking out my faithful Celestron Advanced VX GEM mount. If you’re a faithful reader of the Little Old Blog from Possum Swamp, you know my AVX took a bath some months ago. I’d left the mount outside under a Telegizmos cover. Said cover was beginning to show some wear five years down the line, but it had not had a huge amount of use, and I thought it would be OK.

That’s what I get for thinking. I noted some gathering clouds as I covered scope and mount following my backyard observing run, but it didn’t look like seriously bad weather was on the way. Unk was soon snoozing peacefully and was not fully awakened by the sound of heavy rain and thunder. Oh, I came somewhat to my senses, but thought, “The scope will be fine under that cover,” turned over, and went back to sleep. The next morning, I found that dadgummed Telegizmos cover had leaked and mount and scope were truly drenched.

What to do? I first addressed the C8, Emma Peel, my Edge 800 SCT who’d been riding on the mount. There was a little water in the tube. But as you know, your ol’ Unk is nothing if not experienced in pulling SCT correctors. In just a few, the scope was dry and snug again in her case. The mount? Thatwas a different story. It looked wet enough that I thought there was likely some water intrusion. Removing the plastic cover of her electronics enclosure, I did note some dampness. Rut-roh Raggy…it doesn’t take much to cause problems.

What I did was dry the boards off with gentle heat from my heat gun, and leave the mount head open in the air-conditioned sunroom of the New Manse. For several days. I then had another look. Didn’t notice any signs of corrosion, soo….  I applied power and the AVX appeared to function normally for an indoor “fake” alignment. However, nothing would tell the tale like a long evening under the stars. And there things rested for a wearyingly long time.

Finally, just the other day, the Clear Sky Charts and other weather resources indicated I might get some clear—if cold—weather following a front passage. Maybe one night. I was determined to take advantage of that, and despite some high haze I got the mount into the good old backyard.  In the interest of keeping things simple, I left the StarSense camera and hand control in their box and just plugged in the good, old NexStar+ HC. It had been so long since I’d done a non-StarSense alignment, I wondered if I’d still remember how to do one.

Which telescope went on the mount? My SkyWatcher 120mm APO. It had been way too long since I’d used this pretty telescope and was anxious to point her—Hermione Granger is her name—at Jupiter before it was too late. It was pretty clear seeing wouldn’t be too hot, not hardly, but I wanted a look at Jupe anyhow.

OK, power on…the NexStar display came to life with only a slight delay despite the cold weather (it was in the fricking 40s, y’all). I was gratified to see the mount's real time clock was only off a few minutes despite it having been months and months since I replaced the little internal battery and not having used the AVX frequently. Not at all. Hokay, let’s get aligned.

By “aligned,” I mean the Autostar 2+4 alignment. I planned on nothing more than some casual looking, and, so, my polar alignment consisted of merely eyeballing Polaris through the mount’s hollow polar bore. One of the great things about the Celestron NexStar goto system is that it is quite immune to goto errors caused by polar alignment.

It turned out I did remember how to do an old-fashioned alignment.  Got it started and the HC requested Vega, which was pretty far off center, but still in the finder. Centered it up in the eyepiece, remembering—shazam! —to do final centering with the up and right keys only. Altair next. That sparkler lined up, the NexStar+ axed if I wanted to add calibration stars “Sure, why not?” The first, Fomalhaut, was behind a tree, so I picked another. Calibration star three was near-centered in the eyepiece of the main scope when the mount stopped, but I did one more anyway…well…just because I could.

The resulting alignment? It was a good one. For a while, anyway. Anything I requested was in the center of a 12mm eyepiece. Heck our first target, Jupiter was centered in a 7mm when the slew stopped. And that’s the way it was until I decided to fetch my observing chair, and in the course of placing it at the scope bumped the tripod, but good. Henceforth, objects were toward the edge of the 12mm, but always in view. And…that’s just the way it goes on an Uncle Rod observing run, as you surely know if you’ve been reading here long.

Next up? If I couldn’t take a picture of the Great Globular, maybe I could get a parting glimpse of him as he plunged into the west. By this time, M13 was maybe 15-degrees above the horizon. Alas, when the slew stopped and I inserted the 13mm Ethos I saw exactly nuttin-honey.

I wasn’t about to give up. I suspected the problem was the focus difference between the 13 and 7mm eyepieces. I should have focused the 13mm before I left Jupiter. Down here in the horizon muck, no bloated stars were visible in the field to use for focusing. So, off I went to Vega to focus. There I sharpened things up. Did I note the utter lack of false color displayed by the SkyWatcher APO? Nope. After this long, I just take it for granted. Vega was a pure, icy blue sapphire.

Back to M13. I spotted the cluster the moment the slew stopped. Not bad, really. Dim, sure, but grainy and wanting to show a little resolution. Would more magnification have helped resolve more stars? Perhaps, but the cluster was dim as it was. Pouring on more aperture would have helped, but I wasn’t about to lug out the 10-inch Dobsonian, Zelda. The SCT? My observation is there’s not a huge difference in visual images presented by the 8-inch SCT and 5-inch APO, not enough to justify me changing OTAs, anyhow.

What next? How about M57? OK. Off to Lyra we went. The Ring was just that, a perfect little donut displaying plenty of contrast. Since the constellation was riding high, I thought we might essay the somewhat dim globular cluster M56. It was actually pretty good, looking much like the horizon-bound M13. My observation over the years has been it takes about 10-inches of aperture to make this somewhat neglected glob look good. And 12-inches is better. My long-gone old friend, my 12-inch Dobsonian Old Betsy, could make this seemingly nondescript object into a freaking showpiece.

The next target, M76, the Little Dumbbell is thought by some to be “difficult.” Not so. I once viewed this little sprite with my old 60mm ETX from deep in the light polluted suburbs, at my old observing site at the public schools’ Environmental Studies Center. The secret is an OIII filter. But it has to be the right OIII filter. I walked into the sunroom and fished a little box labeled "OIII" out of my accessory box. Onto the 12mm it went--with some difficulty. I was nonplussed that for some reason it didn’t want to thread onto the eyepiece properly. With the filter finally in place, still no M76 did I see. What the—?

My red flashlight revealed the problem. On the edge of the filter-holder was inscribed “Lumicon.” When I bought this one in 1995, I thought it was the bee’s knees. But either it has somehow degraded over the years (possible, I guess), or I just know more about filters 25 plus years down the road. At any rate, this old thing (one of the pink-hued Lumicons) doesn’t work very well, and the filter threads on it were never quite right. In I went and retrieved my Celestron (Baader) 1.25-inch OIII. Ahhh…there it was. Not only was the mini-Dumbbell visible, it even showed off its twin-lobed shape.

After that? Hermione and I hopped around the sky, me occasionally looking at SkySafari on the iPhone for inspiration. In no particular order…

M103. This oft-overlooked small (6’) but brilliant galactic cluster was just beautiful.

M31 and company. M31 looked maybe a bit better than it usually does from the suburbs. M32 was a brilliant little thing, naturally. M110 was something of a surprise. It was easily visible despite sometimes being a trial from compromised skies.

M27, the (big) Dumbbell was attractive, especially with the OIII. Unfortunately, haze was developing in Cygnus area, and I had a hard time seeing nearby M71, the loose little globular star cluster once thought not to be a glob.

NGC 457, The E.T. Cluster. Does this little guy ever look bad? Well I remember showing him off to Miss Dorothy from the urban backyard of old Chaos Manor South. He looked good there, and he looked great here, a little stick figure awash in a sea of stars.

M15, The Horse's Nose Globular. Haze was creeping into the Pegasus area now, so I didn't expect much from this little glob. Surprise! In addition to M15's preternaturally bright core, quite a few teeny-tiny stars were on display at the edges of this wonder.

Alas, before long, old Unk had reached his infamous “I have had enough” stage. Those of you who know me or who’ve been aboard this blog for long know that happens once my feet get cold. When they do it is time to throw the big switch and cover the scope. Which I did. Said cover being a new one, which I hope proves to be better than the lastun.

As for the mount, the Advanced VX, I was satisfied all is well with it. Not a single hiccup from power up to power down. Which is a very good thing. I need a mount in this weight/payload class, and with anything that comes from China—as the AVX and her cousins do—being nigh impossible to get these days, I certainly wouldn’t want to go mount-shopping right now.

Alrighty then. See y’all next time. Which will surely be by Christmas Eve for our traditional blog post. But I do hope “sooner.”

But that’s next year. How about this year? How about now?Even in the sparse years, 2019 – 2020, for the little old blog from Possum Swamp, I have always managed to get the Christmas Eve edition out. And so it is this Christmas Eve in the strange and alien Year of our Lord 2021.

What exactly is going on at the New Manse here on the borders of the Great Possum Swamp this Yuletide? As you can imagine, it is a quiet Christmas Eve. Until the plague well and truly takes its last bow, no festive Christmas Eves like those of yore drinking Margaritas and eating fajitas at El Giro’s Mexican restaurant—though there is still an El Giro’s, which is barely two miles from Unk’s suburban digs. That will wait for next year (I hope).

What’s it like on this numinous day? Well, it don’t feelvery Christmassy. Now, I don’t expect a white Christmas in the Swamp, but I do expect something with more of a Christmas feel than this. A glance at the weather station display in Unk’s radio shack shows it’s 73F outside and climbing. Whatev’. Unk will not let the cursed weather gods spoil his Christmas Eve.

You know what? In some ways, I’ve always preferred Christmas Eve to Christmas. There’s that wonderful sense of anticipation of wonders to come that maintains even in these latter days. And one of those wonders is one of your old Uncle’s astronomy traditions. To wit, my Christmas Eve viewing of that greatest of all ornaments, M42, The Great Orion Nebula.

So, what was up with that this Xmas Eve? In the days leading up to the glorious 24^th, Unk had been purty derned sanguine, “Hell, why not get the GM811 and C8 out into the back 40 and get started on the articles about the mount?” But in addition to temps in the 70s and rising humidity, the weather had brought clouds. Not in overwhelming numbers at first, mind you, but they were flowing in from the southwest. So, the Losmandy, C8, and laptop might be a bit much. But which scope wouldn’t be a bit much?

My beautiful little C90, "Stella." I’d been thinking I needed to get her out of her case after the long, weary spell she’s spent in there. And she’s about perfect for a humid, hazy night where the light pollution is amplified and I only want to look at bright stuff anyhow. Under those conditions, her 90mm of aperture and f/11 focal length can surprise.

Miss Stella's optics still look good all these long years down the line.

Many have been the permutations of Celestron's little (Gregory) Maksutov Cassegrain. In addition to the orange tube, there’ve been black-tube models, chrome-plated ones, rubber armored scopes, and the current dirt-cheap (f/14) Synta version. It’s been a spotting scope, it’s been on fork mounts, it’s been sold with GEMs. And most have been good little telescopes. The optics, including those of the current bargain-basement model, have always been good—though you often hear the opposite about the original orange-tube models.

There is a reason for that, campers, and it has nothing to do with the telescope’s actual optical quality, but with its focusing method. You see, the earlier C90s don’t focus by moving the mirror forward and back like SCTs or the current Chinese C90. They focus by moving the corrector and secondary forward and back. You twist the front part of the OTA to focus, not unlike a camera lens.

That works well, but you have to learn to exercise a light touch, or you get terrible shakes. Especially since the temptation is usually to under-mount this small but long focal-length scope. Those “bad optics” are usually due to owners not being able to attain sharp focus due to the shakes. Mount the girl on a sufficient mount and you will see how sharp C90s can be. My own orange tube is dead sharp with excellent optics.

Overkill? Not at Chaos Manor South it wasn't!

The original telescope used the old Japanese Standard .965” eyepieces. Since you won’t want to mess with those if you, like me, acquire one of the original C90s, you have to rectify that one of two ways:  With an adapter called an “LAR,” a Large Adapter Ring, or with a hybrid .965” – 1.25” diagonal. I have an LAR and can even use 2-inch diagonals with the li’l C90, but most of the time there’s no reason to do that. My (Scopestuff.com) hybrid diagonal is just fine.

So, I grabbed the C90 case out of the sunroom closet where the astrostuff (sorry Rex) lives. And also, my SkyWatcher AZ-4 altazimuth mount, which is perfect for the little gal. However, to mount my spotter-heritage C90, which sports only a ¼-20 tripod block, on the AZ-4 I’d need a Vixen dovetail on the scope. I have one from Orion that has an integral 1.25-inch bolt for easy mounting to the OTA. But nowhere could it be found. I know I have it still—I saw it not long ago—but where?

While, as my loyal readers know, I’ve divested myself of a lot of unused astrostuff over the last six years, I still have a lot. Including a heavy-duty William Optics Vixen dovetail with a captive 1/4 20tpi bolt. Way overkill for a C90, but it would work fine. Slapped that on the girl, mounted her on the AZ-4, and out to the backyard Stella went to wait for darkness and for Orion, who, according to Stellarium, would be high enough for a look by 8:00pm.

There was no denying that by 2pm the scent of skunk was in the air. Clouds weren’t just flowing in; they were pouring in with the sky almost totally overcast. I didn’t stress out. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d been cheated out of my M42 on Christmas Eve. But the Clear Sky Charts was still predicting mostly clear.  Anyhow, if there weren’t even sucker holes by your old Uncle’s (increasingly early) bedtime, I’d just bring Miss Stella back inside, the work of maybe 5-minutes, one of the prime attractions of the little critter.

So, Unk settled in with a bottle of sarsaparilla to watch television with the cats and see what would happen. I peeped out at the sky every once in a while. By 6pm, it was looking a small amount better, and I actually got a look at Jupiter in a sucker hole. Naturally, the seeing was dreadful, but Stella had no trouble showing the equatorial banding on and four Galilean moons nicely spread out on each side of Jove. Then the clouds cam again, and back inside I went. 

Finally, it was 20 hours local. It was time. Best look I have ever had at M42? No, of course not--the drifting gangs of clouds saw to that. But it was there. My little telescope was showing the wonder to me, just as my Palomar Junior had showed it to me many, many long Christmas Eves ago. The clouds came, and the clouds went and it was enough. 

What more is to be said? Have a wonderful Christmas everybody. These are tough times, but steady as she goes. I'll be back here again, soon. I promise!

Nota Bene:  Want some Christmas Eve Cheer in the old Chaos Manor South Tradition? This here is one of my favorites.

Nota Bene 2:  I appreciate all your kind comments. Unfortunately, the university email system pretty much prevents me from replying to them. Feel free to email Unk direct, however.   

Anyhow, I’ve got what I think will be an exciting series of blog articles lined up for 2022. They will be observing-oriented, and will depend on the weather to some extent, but I hope “at least every month.” IOW, “steady as she goes.” This time, however? January is the annual recap of my blog-centric astronomy year. Hey, y’all, I’m just happy there’s anything torecount.

January 2021

January was just what you are getting’ here today, a recap of your old Uncle Rod's past year. Which was not a bad one. The lockdown definitely encouraged me to start thinkin’ about this blog again, and slowly, ever so slowly, bringing it back online more regularly. I was pretty sure 2021 would not bring a return to normalcy, as in me going to star parties. I foresaw yet more staying at home and observing from the backyard, but I was used to that already.

I’ve been more of a backyard/club-site observer since 2016 than a star party monster. 2016 was what a dear friend (you know who you are) dubbed “Uncle Rod’s Farewell Tour.”  I did star party after star party as a speaker, seemingly spending more time in the air than on the ground. I found as my mid-sixties came over the horizon, I didn’t want to do that anymore.

March 2021

Missed February but was back in March for the return of my old friend, Charity Hope Valentine, an ETX with whom Unk has shared more than a few adventures.  After she had been in her case at the New Manse untouched for several annums, Unk finally had the good sense to get her out in the backyard again. Before doing that, I had replaced Charity’s LNT battery (she’s an ETX PE), never a pleasant task, and figgered she was ready to go. Unfortunately, under the stars the little Mak had fits. Her Autostar display would disappear. Sometimes the HC buttons wouldn’t work. Occasionally, the Autostar would reset itself. Bad juju for sure.

June 2021

No April or May either, but that was pretty much due to the incredibly punk spring weather here on the borders of the Great Possum Swamp. June was not much better, but Unk was at least back with an update on doings ‘round the New Manse. Chief among those things? How much I was enjoying Phyllis Lang’s new version of her long time hit, Deep Sky Planner (8).

I’ve long been a fan of observing planners, which are essentially huge databases of objects that allow you to produce observing lists easily (and do, as they say on TBS late at night, “Much, much more!”).  In fact, the vaunted Herschel Project could not have been done in just three years without the aid of a planner, which easily showed me what I’d observed, what I still needed to observe, and when I could observe what I needed.

Much of the Project was done with SkyTools 3 (now in version 4). And it is a fantastic program. However, my more casual observing programs of today are really a better match for Deep Sky Planner (not that you can’t essay the most ambitious projects with it). Which is a way of saying the new SkyTools 4 is kinda over your silly old Uncle’s head. Things I really like about DSP? Large fonts that are easy on my aged eyes, and the fact it works with my fave planetarium program, Stellarium.

There was also some not-so-good I reported on. My Edge 800 and Advanced VX had taken a bath in the backyard thanks to a failing Telegizmos cover. Said cover was admittedly five years old, but I didn’t expect it to give up the ghost in such dramatic fashion. Both the C8 and the mount head had considerable moisture inside.

The C8 was easy enough to fix, Unk pulling the corrector plate—something he’s done a few <ahem> times to SCTs over the decades—and drying Mrs. Emma Peel off. The AVX was a bit dicier. Unk disassembled the mount head, dried the PCBs out, and hoped for the best. Indoor tests revealed the AVX was fine, but due to a stormy Gulf, testing under the stars would have to wait a while.

July 2021

Unk was on schedule with an entry that recounted some good times with yet another edition of The Reminiscences of Uncle Rod. This time about the 2000 Deep South Regional Star Gaze. That was notable because it was perhaps the last good DSRSG at its old home at the wonderful Percy Quin State Park in Mississippi. Of other interest? Mention of George Kepple’s Astro Cards—index card finder charts for locating deep sky objects.  Unk purchased a deck of ‘em at the star party and has been using them frequently for two decades since. They, in fact, deserve a blog entry of their own someday.

August 2021

The Herschel Project, thanks to a couple of nights watching some old DVDs recorded during the go-go days of the Big Enchilada. As you know, I never got around to assembling the Project blog entries into a book ala’ Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia…so this article will have to do, an executive summary of the Herschel Project, Unk’s quest to observe all 2500 objects discovered by Will and Lina.  

November 2021

Despite Unk’s best intentions, the Astroblog was not back till November. Yet another round of health problems ensured that (this Getting Old bidness is hell). November was a rather important entry. Night-to-night, my most used telescope mount is my Celestron Advanced VX. If my old bones are weary and hurting, I can still get myself to set it up in the back 40. As above, however, the mount had been drenched in an unlooked-for storm, and I needed to give it a full checkout outside under the stars. If the mount was a goner, I’d have to replace it with a similar-sized one, and I sure didn’t want to be faced with “decisions-decisions.”

Thank goodness, the AVX was just fine. Heck, even the RTC battery was still good. I plugged in the HC, fired the mount up with my 5-inch APO, Hermione, onboard, and had quite the time eyeballing the late summer to early winter showpieces. What would I have replaced the mount with had she been kaput? That would have been the big question. Another AVX? An iOptron? Something higher-toned? Thinking about that makes my head hurt, so I sure am glad I don’t have to think about it.

December 2021

How did I do that this year? For a while, it looked like the answer would be “not at all.” Clouds were everywhere. By mid-evening, however, they cleared somewhat, and Unk took a look with another MCT that hasn’t got much use in many a weary year, my little Orange Tube C90. The denouementwas M42 looked wonderful it the small (but high contrast) view of the 90, and that, along with a bottle of a certain potation, put your old Uncle in a rather jolly holiday mood.

So, that was the year that was, muchachos. This year? As above, a fun observing project is in the offing. What’s it about? I will give you a hint: It concerns one of Unk’s books. See y’all soon where all shall be revealed!

Alas, in February and March your broken-down old Uncle’s health or lack thereof was once again a factor. A big one. In April, I was feeling better, almost like my old cantankerous self, but I had a bigresponsibility that month, the 2022 Mobile Hamfest. I am the president of the Mobile Amateur Radio Club, and the hamfest, which we’ve been putting on at least since the end of World War II, was job numero uno for me and my fellow officers.

But now it’s May, and I actually feel even better than I did during hamfest month (knock on wood) and am ready to get the blog on the road again, THIS TIME FOR SURE, with a brand new (in a way) observing project. So, what happened to Unk’s last big observing idea, “The New Herschel Project,” which was to be my quest to observe the Herschel 400 objects from my backyard with a 6-inch telescope? “Nuttin’ honey” is what.

Those lingering health issues that stretch all the way back to 2019 is why. It is still going to happen, though, and will run concurrently in these pages with the new one.  I’ve found my observing is most productive these days when I’ve got a couple of things to work on. So, expect to see “The New Herschel Project Night 4” here before long. But the new one? Unk’s new quest? It came to me in a flash one cloudy evening.

The thing with your old Unk when it comes to observing projects?  The successful ones are rarely those I struggle with and dig for. They are the ones that come as if by magic. Like the morning a few <ahem> years ago I awoke with the idea of observing every Cassiopeia open cluster my 12-inch Dobsonian, Old Betsy, could reach. An abbreviated version of that project appeared some years later as a chapter in my book The Urban Astronomer’s Guide(2006). The point is I didn’t agonize over anything; “The Cassiopeia Clusters” just bubbled up out of my subconscious.

And speaking of that book, while I will readily admit it’s not perfect, I think it is pretty darned good and is the one book of mine I am 100% happy with (though the Second Edition of Choosing and Using a New CAT comes close). Does it sound like Urban Astronomer had been on Unk’s mind? It really hadn’t. Nevertheless, just as on that long-ago dawn at old Chaos Manor South, an observing project, one involving that book, sprang from Unk’s mind (such as it is) Athena-like.

Unk figgered a 6-inch refractor would be a good compromise. More oomph than Urban Astronomer’s old 6-inch Newtonian, but still true to the small-aperture spirit of the book. Of course, my 8-inch Edge SCT, Mrs. Emma Peel will get her share of starlight. If neither of those two proves sufficient for a target? I still have one larger-aperture instrument, my 10-inch Dobbie, Zelda,to call on if and when needed. But the idea of using the 6-inch refractor, Big Ethel, for at least part of the project was appealing. I was curious to see what she could do with the urban objects from my backyard—and curiosity is a verynecessary ingredient in any of my projects.

First step in getting The Urban Astronomer Project off the ground was putting together an observing list of the book’s objects. I had a SkyTools 2 format observing list posted online for years. Unfortunately, its location was the files section of the Yahoogroup devoted to my book, which is, of course, long gone, vanished into the ether with the rest of the vaunted groups. I searched my hard drive, but didn’t find a copy. What I did find was a Word format list of the book’s DSOs.

Being lazy, Unk really didn’t want to sit down and manually key-in every one of those dadgummed 154 objects, though that wouldn’t have been that bad.  So, I said to myself, “Self, the Deep Sky Planner 8program is supposed to have a pretty good import function. Worth a try, anyhow.” I saved the Word file as a plain text document, opened DS8, went to “import,” and <boom> I had a DSP observing list in just a minute or two. Frankly, I was amazed it had been so easy, but I shouldn’t have been. Deep Sky Planner is one of those few astronomy programs that do everything right.

I’d already decided on a scope for the project, Big Ethel. The only question was the mount. But that wasn’t much of a question either. The big refractor is usable on my Celestron Advanced VX GEM mount. She’s a little shakier on the VX than I’d like, but not bad at all. More problematically, if you send the AVX to an object above about 75 – 80° altitude, you run the risk of crashing the OTA into a tripod leg. So, my Losmandy GM811 GEM it would be.

Or so I thought. My latest assignment for Sky & Telescope wrought an immediate change in gear lineup. I was engaged in doing the S&T Test Report on Celestron’s new dew heater system for SCTs (look for it soon), and I’d obviously need to use an SCT, a Celestron SCT, for that. Checking out their Smart Dew Controller’s Celestron-specific functions would require a Celestron mount and Celestron software (CPWI), too. So…

Since, I’d be out with the Edge 800 and the AVX mount working on the Test Report, I thought I might as well piggyback the first night of The Urban Astronomer Survey on that.  I do need to get the refractor and Losmandy mount into the backyard and check them out after another long period of disuse, but that will be “next time.”

Equipment settled, all that remained was to decide upon my starting place in the sky. I’d originally, back in February, intended that to be Orion. Specifically, Chapter 9, Tour 1, “Return of the Hunter.” But, suddenly, it was May and the big guy was down on the horizon at dark. It was spring…glorious spring…and where better to start than Chapter 6, Tour 1, “Burning Heart of the Hunting Dogs”? Not only does that include some truly archetypal spring deep sky objects, it’s the first of the book’s sky tours and thus seemed a perfect place for us to begin our journey.

If you have the book, follow along with it. If you ain’t got the book, why ain’t you?Just kiddin’…all are welcome to join our little expedition whether they have contributed to your parsimonious old Uncle’s Rebel Yell fund or not.

So came a clear night. One of those currently rare clear nights down here on the borders of the Great Possum Swamp. Oh, it wasn’t perfect…there was a thin crescent Moon riding high and casting shadows on the Earth below, humidity was at 60% and rising, and there was haze aplenty. But it was OK. And it had been obvious enough it was going to be OK to impel me to get Emma and her AVX mount into the backyard late that afternoon. It was hot as the day waned, not punishingly hot, but a foreshadowing of things to come in just a month or two. I got the scope set up without breaking too much of a sweat.

Were we ready to go? I hoped so...

I’ll admit I hadn’t updated the AVX MC or HC in years. In at least five years, y’all. There really wasn’t any reason to. Mount worked fine, and none of the minor improvements in the Celestron firmware I’d read about seemed to apply to me. Last time I’d upgraded anything was shortly after I got a Celestron StarSense. I did update that, since I’d been told it was a must for the thing to work right. But that was well before 2017

Hokay, what will be, will be. I downloaded CFM, the Celestron Firmware Manager. I vaguely remembered the last time I updated an HC that Celestron had gone to a Java app that somewhat automated the process, but recalled no details.

“Alright. Got ‘er downloaded. Zip file. I’ll just extract it into a new directory and have a look-see. Wait. What the hail is this? A .jar file?!”  What was I supposed to do with that? How did I extract it? With what? I started looking for an app to expand such files, but then a small light went on in Unk’s increasingly confused noggin. Celestron’s instructions were clear: Click on the jar file and CFM will run. No extraction required. So why was I getting “Which app do you want to use to open this?” instead? Wait. Did I even have Java installed on the laptop?

A quick visit to the Java website revealed, no, there was no Java on this here computer. Installation of the latest version got us back on the road again. Sure was glad I'd gone over the manual one last time that afternoon and found I needed that update. If I hadn't, 'twould have made for a disastrous comedy of errors out in the dark.

Anyhow, I connected the AVX HC to the Windows laptop (with a serial cable; it’s an old +HC), powered up the mount, and started CFM. It immediately found a NexStar+ HC and began the upgrade. Only fly in the ointment? During the process, Wilbur, our rascally ginger cat, tried to bite the serial cable in two.  Wilbur corralled and HC done, I instructed CFM to look for another “device,” the mount (the mount's motor control board, that is), and update it. Which it did. Or saidit did anyhow. You know your ol’ Unk is all about “trust, but verify.”

I disconnected AVX from the PC and booted the Advanced VX and it came right up, albeit with a sign-on message a little different from the old one. But a sign-on message nevertheless. I checked my location in the HC and sure enough, it was somewhere way to the west. Maybe Torrance, CA. I reentered lat/lon, time, time-zone, etc. and thought we might be ready to go. I did make a note to myself that the update had probably wiped-out my PPEC recording, but I would worry about that some other day—er… “night.” The mount seemed OK with the new firmware, but only its behavior under the stars would tell that tale.

The Celestron dew system, which you’ll learn all about in the aforementioned Test Report before long, had taken little fiddling or head-scratching on the part of your Uncle to get going. But it was Something New, and by the time I was done setting it up, it was dark and I was anxious to begin wandering the spring stars...

Power turned on, the AVX started her alignment, and we were off. I had to reject an alignment star here and a calibration star there thanks to spring foliage, but that was just OK. When I punched “M 003” into the HC, the AVX whirred, took off, and when she stopped the king glob of spring was centered in my 13mm Ethos and looking mighty nice. Plenty of resolution, which increased when I switched in my ol’ 8mm Ethos—under the haze-scattered light pollution, more magnification rather than less was better. That was something I learned on those long-ago nights in the early 1990s when I was beginning the observing that would eventually go into the book.

I spent some time thereafter experimenting the heater system, to include viewing its status—things like its current-draw and the dew-point temperature—on the HC and, later, on Celestron’s CPWI software running on the laptop. Worked jus’ fine, but I’ll say no more about that here, though. If’n you’re interested, read all about it in a forthcoming issue of Sky & Telescope.

That done, it was time to tackle my little list, which I did in almost the same order they are presented in The Urban Astronomer’s Guide (I've reversed M81 and M82 here; everybody looks at M82 first).

The Objects:

The Croc on a long ago night..,

How does it look? Back in the supposedly glorious day, I commented the galaxy looked distinctly stellar in a 4-inch telescope at low power and that at higher magnifications the small disk brightened smoothly to an almost stellar center, the galaxy’s fiercely bright elongated core, which has given this object its common name, The Croc’s Eye Galaxy.

Another comment I made in the book concerned how much this galaxy looks like a small, unresolved globular star cluster. And that just how it appeared at 175x in the Edge 800. There was that preternaturally bright core (the “burning heart,”) and haze surrounding that, fairly extensive haze. If I stared long enough, I could almost convince myself I was resolving starsin that haze. Just as astronomers of old, like Willie Herschel, convinced themselves they were seeing stars in far distant galaxies.

Wow! What a trip down memory lane. I hadn’t viewed 94 in a long, long time, and it almost felt as if I were reliving one of the nights of “From City Lights to Deep Space,” the columns in my old Skywatchnewsletter upon which (some of) Urban Astronomer is based.

M51. Next up, a toughie. Messier 51, the Whirlpool Galaxy, is such a renowned and beloved object and one that presents such detail from dark sites we forget it’s a challenge for urban and suburban astronomers. In the book, I warned my readers the Whirlpool looks nothing like its pictures if you’re observing from compromised skies.  In the city, it and its interacting companion, NGC 5195, were merely two blobs, a bright one and a dim one; nothing more.

Don't expect this from your bright backyard.

M106, a big, 17.4’ x  6.6’, but bright, magnitude 8.3, SAB galaxy, is, as I opined in Urban Astronomer, less frequently visited and probably less well-known than nearby M51. Which is a shame, since it really looks better in small city-bound scopes. With my homemade 6-inch Newtonian back in the day, the galaxy was visible with direct vision. It was mostly just a bright, round fuzzy, but I thought I noticed some elongation. 

The same was true at first with Emma. But then I began to see more. The core wasn’t just elongated, but strongly elongated. And there was a patchiness that hinted at 106’s somewhat odd-looking spiral. If you haven’t visited this one in a while, do yourself a favor and get after it with a scope tonight.

M63, the famous Sunflower Galaxy, can be a real beauty, showing off at least hints of its big spiral and the dust patches that give it the sunflower appearance. On the time-washed Chaos Manor South night I viewed M63, a magnitude 8.6 SA spiral that subtends 13’ x 7’, I did it in style with long-gone Old Betsy, my beloved 12.5-inch Dobsonian. In that telescope in a 12mm Nagler eyepiece on a relatively good city night, I was astonished to see not just a bright core and a strongly elongated disk, but considerable hints of spiral structure.

This night? I stayed with M63 for some time, struggling for detail, but the best I could come up with was a subdued core, an elongated disk, and the barest hints of some sort of dark detail in that disk. I think I’ll revisit this distant giant with the 10 inch, Zelda, before spring is out.

The EXPLODING Cigar Galaxy...

On that Urban Astronomer night of the Hunting Dogs, the galaxy was much more modest, but still a treasure. Most of the time, M82 was just a featureless cigar, but by sticking with it and doing my best to keep ambient light out of my eyes and off the scope, I was sometimes able to pick up those crazy dust lanes and patches. It was the same this night. Oh, M82 was bigger and brighter with Mrs. Peel than it had been with my 4-inch Palomar Juniorreflector, but initially that was all.  It was at first just that gray whisp of a cigar, but the dark patches put in an appearance as the night grew older and a little darker.

Back in the Chaos Manor South days, there were times M82’s companion galaxy, M81, was completely invisible with the Palomar Junior or my 6-inch Newt. I did get an OK look at it with the NexStar 11 GPS one night. Oh, I couldn’t see those far-flung gossamer spiral arms—the only superior visual look I’ve had at those has been from the Texas Star Party—but it was good enough. A big, elongated disk that wanted to reveal some sort of detail

I was frankly surprised what Emma did with M81. I expected to have to fight for the galaxy on this night, but no. The big magnitude 6.9 SA spiral was starkly, and I do mean starkly visible with the 13mm Ethos at 107x. Not just that; I’d say it was easier to pick up a little detail in the galaxy than it had been with the C11 at Chaos Manor South.

M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy, is what I called a “been-there” in the Chaos Manor South days. An object difficult enough you have to be satisfied you’ve seen it at all, that you’ve been there. The problem with the Pinwheel Galaxy? It’s not that it’s dim. It’s a respectable magnitude 7.9. It’s that this SAB is face-on to us and is large—28’ x 26’. “Big” and “face-on” galaxies are the toughest of all. Their light is badly spread out and their surface brightness terribly low.

From an observing site in the Possum Swamp suburbs only a little worse than my current digs here in Hickory Ridge, M101 was nearly impossible with the NexStar 11 GPS. All my tricks—dark hood, jiggle scope, averted vision, etc.—were required to turn up a “[A] vague, nebulous ball 10’ across.” Would Emma do as well? She did, or at least I think she did…I am pretty sure I saw an elusive something in the field of my 16mm “Happy Hand Grenade” 100-degree AFOV ocular. Maybe.

We end this excursion with the famous Owl Nebula, M97, a relatively large 3’ diameter magnitude 9.9 planetary. This was another Urban object I turned my old C11, Big Bertha, on. With an OIII filter it was not a problem. I could see the nebula easily, and the big prize, the two dark patches than form the bird’s eyes, were, while not exactly easy, visible—they tended to swim in and out of view. Guess what? The same maintained this night with 8-inch Emma. In fact, I’d say the eyes were easier than on that evening of yore. Was the seeing steadier? The OIII filter I was using better? The eyepiece (Ethos) superior to my old 12mm Nagler? Maybe all of the above.

And, so, our cosmic tour bus has pulled into the station. Thanks for travelling with us. Be careful getting off the bus; the night is old, and the Moon is down and it is dark. Rebel Yell will be dispensed in the lobby to all comers. And please join us for our next big outing, “Lion’s Den.”

Anyhow, I wanted to get a June 2022 issue of the blog up, but it was clear now was not the time to try to continue one of my two current observing projects, “Urban Astronomer” and “The New Herschel Project.” Why? You know how it’s been in most of the country in mid-June—hot, and I do mean h-o-t-t hot. It’s probably been bad enough in your part of the USA, so you can imagine what it’s been like way down here on the borders of the Great Possum Swamp.

If you can’t, I’ll spell it out for you: “Feels like 95F (plus) way after sunset.” Oh, and that light pollution-scattering haze from stagnant high-pressure systems? Lookin’ up at the sky has been like seeing stars immersed in a bowl of milk. So, it ‘peared it would be “No blog for you!” Till early one hot evening I was walking back to the main house from my radio shack/workshop, the vaunted Batcave.

It can be boring out in here suburbia if’n you’re retired…well, unless you have an amateur radio license (your ol’ Uncle Rod has had one since 1969). There is no shortage of things to do on hot days and hazy nights if you can get on the air. Especially if you can do so from the air-conditioned comfort of a shack like the Batcave, which I had a contractor finish-off about four years ago (it began life as a detached garage). Anyhoo, having pulled the Big Switch on my beloved Icom IC-7610, I was heading back to the house to inventory the Rebel Yell <ahem>, when my eyes lit upon the Thirty-Seven-Year-Old Telescope.

I wrote a blog entry about this old instrument some 14 years ago. If you’re interested, read the story of the telescope that began life as a mirror kit I received as a graduation gift in1971.Ol’ 37 was a good telescope, and I used her purty frequently for six years. But then she met her near demise.

Miss Dorothy and I decamped from legendary Chaos Manor South for the suburbs following my early retirement at age 59 in 2014.  Ol’ 37, of course, went with us, but I never quite found a place for her. She spent some time in the not-yet-finished Batcave. And she spent some more time in a corner of the sunroom. Until…

I’ve made no secret in these pages I had a difficult time adjusting to retirement. Very difficult. I went from 30 years as an engineer working plenty of 12-hour days to “Well, whatta I do now?” I won’t say more about that today, since I’ve mostly come to terms with it, and you’d just find the details boring. Be that as it may, 2015 was a particularlytough year for your old Uncle…

One afternoon in the summer of that misbegotten annum, I nearly knocked Ol’ 37 over in the sunroom. At the time, I had very little patience for anything, had had enough of the scope being constantly underfoot, grabbed her up, took her to the carport, and stashed her on a shelf. A shelf open to the elements, though, of course, partially protected in the carport.

Operating Position Number One at W4NNF...

Then, just a few days ago, as above I was walking back to the house from the shack and my eyes lit upon the scope as they often did. Something was different this time, though. I began to think about the wearyingly long years the poor thing had sat on that wretched shelf waiting for a taste of starlight that never came. I was suddenly overcome with remorse and the resolve to do something about it. I grabbed a step ladder, got her down, and brushed some of the thick layer of dust and grime off before heading to the ‘Cave with her.

As you won’t be surprised to hear, after seven years the plastic and masking tape sealing the tube had deteriorated to the point it all crumbled when I began to carefully remove it. Frankly, I was afraid of what I might find. Would I be years too late to save her?

Nope…looking down the tube I could see the primary mirror was dusty and badly in need of a bath, but not far gone at all. The same was true of the secondary. I removed the primary and the secondary from the tube by the simple expedient of pulling the whole spider assembly (a nice curved one that produces no diffraction spikes) and primary cell. I stashed ‘em in the kitchen for cleaning after I did something about that horribly grimy tube.

I didn’t take a picture of the tube in “before” condition, campers. Frankly, I was embarrassed to share that with you. The dust of years…spiderwebs…bug poop… It was so bad the only way to attack it was with a garden hose and rags and a bottle of Dawn dishwashing detergent. As you can see, she cleaned up rather well. Oh, the girl will never look as good as she did in just-painted condition, but is fine.

I could grab a can of Krylon and repaint the tube. However, I have decided against that…maybe it’s best to let the OTA be and serve as a cautionary tale for your old Uncle concerning being too hasty. I should have stopped, counted to ten, and returned Ol' 37 to the Batcave rather than exiling her to the carport.

Would the optics live again? I cleaned them carefully with water and a little Dawn and, yes, they would. They are no longer pristine. There are a couple of spots on the secondary. And on the primary too. There’s also a “sleek” that’s actually more of a scratch on the periphery of the main mirror. However, that has been there since the mirror returned from the fricking-fracking coater, Spectrum, who put it there. Luckily, it affects nothing.

On the operating table...

Finally, I mounted a Synta-style finder shoe on the tube with double-sided tape. Yeah, there was a Telrad base on the OTA already, but I was surprised to find I no longer have a working Telrad (!). I’ve switched over to Rigel Quick Finders and didn’t have an extra base (I could locate) for one. I figured a Synta red dot sight would be enough for goto alignments.

Time to get the old gal’s optics reinstalled. Assembly was easy enough…though it was a minor struggle to get the wooden primary cell back in the not quite round tube and screwed down. Nothing a few minutes and a little patience couldn’t see to, though. Naturally, after removing and reinstalling both primary and secondary mounts, the scope would need to be collimated. I went up to the main house and fetched my Celestron combo Cheshire/sight-tube. And stopped dead in my tracks.

It had been a long, long time since I’d collimated a Newtonian that needed anything more than a minor touch-up. My single other Newt, Zelda, a 10-inch GSO Dobsonian reflector, holds her collimation remarkably well. Since we haven’t traveled to any star parties or even the local dark-site since Covid began, she hasn’t needed any attention at all. So…to my embarrassment, I realized I’d kinda forgotten what to do. Embarrassing, yes, but I recalled I’d done a detailed article on collimating in these very pages years ago. My own words would see me through.

Indeed, they did. The secondary was only off a mite. And the same was true, rather surprisingly, for the wooden primary cell. In about five minutes collimation was done and it would be possible to get the old girl under the stars and see how she might fare. Frankly, even after rereading the above article on ol’ 37, I didn’t have much memory of what her images were like. So, I was curious to say the very least.

When would Isatisfy that curiosity? Why, the very next evening. I had initially intended to wait till late afternoon to set the scope up, but knew if I did, it might not get done at all. The heat and humidity at the tail-end of a Possum Swamp afternoon would be just too much for your increasingly feeble Unk. Now, when I was a boy, setting up a telescope early was usually a recipe for disaster. I’d get distracted by a TV show, and when it was over, I’d be reluctant to walk out into a completely dark yard for fear of what might be waitingwith the scope. Better to assemble the Pal Junior in early evening and stick by her side as the shadows lengthened.

Not lookin' bad at all...

No, it wasn’t terribly not, not yet…but it was hot enough I went for “easy.” My beautiful Losmandy GM811G ain’t tough to get set up, but nothing(well, no goto-equipped GEM) is easier than the Advanced VX. So, the Celestron mount it was. In addition to the ease of erecting it, it has the advantage I know its hand control and its quirks in general so well I can practically align it with my eyes closed. On a hot and breathless evening like the one sure to come, I didn’t want to fool around with remembering which button to push. OK, mount up, Ol’ 37 on mount…a little balancing, and we was done.

Well, almost. I hopped down to Publix on this warm Sunday morning for a 2025 button cell battery for the SkyWatcher red-dot finder and a couple of shower caps to serve as Ol’ 37’s aperture covers. That accomplished, I had to admit she didn’t look half bad. No, not bad at all. But the only proof in the astro-pudding is an evening under the stars. I’d wait for that before getting more excited about the old telescope’s apparent resurrection.

And wait Unk did. This time of year, it’s almost 2100L before it’s dark enough to begin a goto alignment. “Oh, well, maybe it’ll have cooled off by Astronomical Twilight.” Nope. Walking out of the house was like walking into that proverbial steam bath. But I did persevere, for a while anyway.

How did it go? I’ll give ya the good and the bad…

The Good…

As above, I honestly didn’t have a clue what to expect of this old mirror begun by moi and finished by talented ATM, Pat Rochford. But it was just fine. No, more than fine, darned good as a matter of fact. As is strangely often the case down here of late, the seeing wasn’t really great despite the high pressure we were under. Advancing front? I dunno, but near as I could tell, the star test was pretty good.

The focuser worked as well as it ever had, easily coping with a 35mm TeleVue panoptic. Due to the quality of my alignment (below), I figgered I’d better stick with a low-powered finding eyepiece.

Maybe best of all? Being on the field with a white-tube Newtonian telescope brought a flood of memoriesrushing back. Ol' 37's aperture was larger than that of the Pal Junior and the mount far more sophisticated, but all-in-all, the experience was much like what I remember of that long-gone eve in the Swamp.

The Bad…

The SkyWatcher BB gun red-dot sight was nowhere. I could only get it adjusted roughly, so it barely coincided with what was in the eyepiece. And the more I fiddled with it, the worse it got. With sweat dripping into my eyes, I decided a “good enough” goto alignment was, well, good enough.

She lives!

The collimation could stand a touchup, but I wisely decided this miserably close night was not one for essaying that.

Did I mention it was hot and humid?

Which doesn’t mean I didn’t see a couple of cool things. While the haze was growing steadily, both M13 and M3 were nice. Going from the 35mm Panoptic to the 8mm Ethos (once I figured out I’d need an extension tube for it to come to focus) delivered some rather convincing resolution, even of tight M13. Certainly, I’d have been thrilled to see the ball of stars actually looking like a ball of stars on the long-ago night recounted in the link above. Going from 4-inches, even to include a 4-inch refractor, to 6-inches really doesmake a difference.

M13 viewed for a fair length of time, I decided to pull the Big Switch. Observing is supposed to be fun, after all, and I was beginning to feel miserable. Inside with a cool sarsaparilly, I recovered and planned what’s next for the old telescope.

"Next" is order a Quick Finder base (from Scopestuff, my usual source for such things). That will make a huge difference. When will I give Ol’ 37 another chance? I won’t wait for cool weather—which might be a long time coming—but I will wait for better than this.

That sure sounds reasonable to me. I cannot fathom how that birthday week of Unk’s in July recounted above could possibly be a decade in the rearview mirror. But what a week it was! As you’ll learn if you read thatun, I spent those days in July recreating the Race to the Moon on Chaos Manor South’s dining room table, drinking margaritas and eating Mexican food, and…to cap it all off, driving hundreds of miles to Chiefland, Florida and imaging hundreds of Herschel objects. Today, just thinking about all that makes me tired.

Back then, though, it was a good tired by the time my week was out. I was only on the verge of my 60s, still pretty hardcore as an observer, and able to stay up till the wee hours—under the stars or not. Ten years down the line? Heck, y’all, I am lucky to make it to 2300 on or offthe observing field (my backyard, not the CAV’s Billy Dodd Field these nights). 

Still, this week was once again my birthday week, and what’s a birthday without involving astronomy, or at least “space”? It looked like the former was o-u-t. The weather here on the borders of the Great Possum Swamp was and is horrible. Even if it ain’t cloudy (or thundering and raining, more like), it is miserable. It’s not dark enough to do anything till 2100 at least, and it is miserably hot and humid (and hazy) even then. Oh, and the bugs? They just love your old Uncle—as a square meal!

So…that left…SPACE, THE FINAL FRONTIER. Not with the crew of the fictional Enterprise, but with some real spaceheroes. What in tarnation is Unk goin’ on about now?Has being over the hill and ready to proceed down the opposite slope deprived him of what little sense he had?

Found it!

No replacing the Revell either. The long out of “print” kit can be had on eBay but expect to pay a hundred bucks for it. Which didn’t seem reasonable to cheap ol’ Unk given current economic conditions. Oh, well…I guessed that meant the closest I could come to recreating that fondly remembered 10-years-ago week was drinking a Margarita or two at El Giro’s…or maybe just an Ultra down at Heroes Sports Bar and Grill.

And then…and then…sometimes the stars  align. I opened the door to the closet in the New Manse’s office to get something—I can’t remember what and it does not matter—and for some unknown reason, looked up. What should I spy? A familiar box on the very top shelf. Could it be? No…no way! Yep, my “lost” Gemini capsule. And the box next to the kit? The Realspaceadd-on accessories to fix the mistakes Revell made and add the things to the kit they left out. I figgered this must be some kinda sign I really shouldbuild the Gemini capsule.

What to do first? Well, I take this rather seriously. If I’m gonna build a spacecraft model, I’m gonna build a spacecraft model. I’d need to do some research. I still had the excellent DVDs mentioned in the above-linked blog entry, DVDs from Spacecraft Films. I wondered, though, if they might have some more Gemini-related films available…

I was actually somewhat surprised to discover their website is still on the air in this mostly post-DVD age. It is, but has an untended, near-ghost town look and feel to it. Trying to order any of their products takes you nowheres. But that was OK, I still had their Gemini disks and, more importantly, found there’s tons of material on Project Gemini—documentaries, old NASA films, you name it—on cotton-picking YouTube. Tons, campers.

Gemini was a hot rod compared to Mercury...

Truth is, that One Small Step of Apollo would have been far too large a leap from Mercury. There had to be a program in-between. Something that allowed us to perfect the vital arts of rendezvous and docking.  But not just that. Mercury was a primitive little spacecraft that depended on batteries. The longest duration Mercury mission was Gordo Cooper’s Mercury 9, Faith 7. After less than a day and a half, the Mercury spacecraft was on the ropes with multiple failures. We’d have to do better to get to the Moon.

Gemini was a considerably more advanced spacecraft. Oh, it wasn’t roomy. There was no room for the crew to speak of. The two astronauts (one of the reasons the program was named “Gemini”) had to endure something akin to spending an entire mission in the front seat of a VW bug. But, yes, the Gemini capsule made Mercury look like a Wright Flyer. All but the earliest spacecraft were powered by fuel cells rather than batteries, and the capsule was much more “flyable,” which it would have to be for rendezvous and docking.

Gemini and the Gemini pilots delivered on that. Not only did Gemini VI and VII rendezvous in space, there were highly successful dockings with the Agena Target Vehicle, five of them over the course of the program.  The first, done on Neil Armstrong’s Gemini VIII mission, was a near disaster, not due to Agena, but due to a stuck thruster on the Gemini spacecraft itself. Armstrong dealt with it in his accustomed cool and competent manner and the mission was deemed a success despite an early landing being dictated by Mission Rules after the thruster problem.

It was with Gemini we began to first catch up with and then surpass the Soviets. Gemini set some impressive records. In addition to those docking missions, Pete Conrad and Richard Gordon’s Gemini XI set an altitude record of 739.2 nautical miles (with the help of an Agena’s engine). On the last Gemini, Gemini XII, Buzz Aldrin made a record-breaking 5-hour and 30-minute EVA. Maybe most importantly, Gemini VII, crewed by Frank Borman and Jim Lovell, set an endurance record of nearly 14 days. That proved NASA’s spacecraft and astronauts could hold up for considerably longer than the time required for a lunar mission.

That’s a brief summary of NASA’s Gemini. If you want the complete story, there are plenty of resources including the above-mentioned NASA documentaries to be found on YouTube. Want a book? There are many. Some I can recommend? If you’re a space nut like ol’ Unk, you probably know about Apogee Books. They are still in business and offer an outstanding volume on Gemini. They also have individual books on some separate Gemini missions.

What did Unk need to do to get his own Project Gemini off the ground? I needed a few inexpensive supplies…the usual things required for building plastic models. Much of what I was using 8 - 10 years ago—paints, putty, glue, airbrush propellent—was ready for the trash. Luckily, our local hobby shop (we have a real hobby shop, Hobby Town, in addition to the strange and execrable Hobby Lobby) fixed me right up. Those things obtained, I thought I’d go ahead and do something about the decal situation.

The washing of the parts...

Just before Unk’s birthday. Which arrived as it always has with fun and foolishness. How did your increasingly aged Uncle celebrate this year? It was not that different from the space summer that decade ago. Oh, no Chiefland…I haven’t been Down Chiefland Way these seven years, so I suppose that is finis for me.  But, no, not that different; there was even an expedition of sorts.

On my birthday eve, I did a sorta spacey thing for Apollo 11 anniversary week by watching Sandra Bullock in Gravity on HBO Max. When it first came out, I remarked here that, while I appreciated being able to watch the pretty Ms. Bullock cavort in her skivvies, I was disappointed in the scientific faux pas in the movie. I hadn’t watched it again since it was in the theatres (which I was amazed to realize was nearly 10 years ago).  This time? The film looked beautiful on the 4K TV…and…I must be gettin’ less critical and cynical in my old age, cause I really enjoyed it.

The big day brought that expedition, to Meaher State Park here on the Causeway across Mobile Bay. Why there? It’s a nice place to activate for (amateur radio) Parks on the Air. Miss Dorothy and I drove out to Meaher State Park on Mobile Bay, which is only about half an hour away, and I made contacts all the way from Maine to Texas and everywhere in-between with my battery-powered 20-watt Xiegu G90 transceiver.

And as a suitably appropriate finish to the day? Well, there was Mexican food. El Giro’s, our ancient haunt back when we lived at Chaos Manor South (and often the site of our legendary Christmas Eve dinners), burned down many years ago. Not long after, they built a new El Giro’s out in west Mobile, which, we found after we moved out here, was barely three miles away from our new home. Yes, sometimes the stars, yes, really do align.

But what about that Revell Gemini spacecraft, huh, what about that? I got it underway, beginning the Saturday before my birthday with the ritual Washing of the Parts (to get rid of any lingering mold-release lubricant). But…I decided what I want to do is Gemini VIII, the Armstrong mission. To that end, I ordered the Apogee book on that mission to use as reference and am cooling my heels until it arrives. Rest assured; I will update you as we go along, at least occasionally.

I thought I was done with long, long blogs, but I’ve just kept going and going like the dadgum Energizer Bunny. We are well and truly out of time and space. Almost…

El Giro's!

So, while it might be covering old ground, I think I might do another Saturn and that LUT too. I have the feeling being able to work on the latter for longer stretches and without any pressure to finish may make it a more fun and less harrowing experience. Be that as it may, Uncle Rod’s Little Space Museum is opening up again.

Astronomy-wise? Amateur astronomy-wise? I have but two words: “Destination Moon.” Unless the weather becomes a lot more comfortable and clear a lot sooner than I think it well, deep space, the deep sky, will wait a few months more.

You know, I really thought we'd dodged a bullet when it came to the plague. Miss Dorothy and I made it through the peak years of 20 and 21 unscathed. Hell, I taught in the classroom last fall and spring and didn’t even come down with the sniffles. Did I let my guard down a little? Not in any egregious way I don’t think, even though I was hoping my total of fourvaccine shots would be enough to keep the virus at bay.

Nevertheless, a couple of weeks ago I was sitting out in the vaunted Batcave (my radio shack) and began to realize I didn’t feel worth a crap. At first, I attributed that to allergies or just some kinda dadgum general malaise, but I went steadily downhill from there. Mostly it was nausea, though I recalled I’d awakened that morning with a somewhat scratchy throat: “Musta been them leftover tacos…I ain’t coughing…this can’t be the covid 19!”

Uh-huh.  As the evening wore on, I began to feel like, well, pounded puppy poop. Even that magical elixir, Rebel Yell, didn’t help. I sat in the den with our rascally black cat, Thomas Aquinas, watching TV for a while, but had a hard time absorbing what I was seeing. By the time I decided I was better off in bed, around 9pm, I was feverish and had the chills.

Sunday night was truly rotten. I had weird dreams, if they could even be described as “dreams;” they were more like the strange impressions you sometimes get (well, Unk does) in that odd space between waking and sleeping. Long night. At one point, I thought it surely must have been 4am. Nope, the clock said “11:00pm” …sigh.

Next morning, I knew it was time to do a covid test (we’d got quite a few of the free ones the gubmint was sending out some time back). After fumbling with the little test-tube and test strip, I waited the prescribed 15 minutes for a result. And, yep, “positive.” I really wasn’t surprised.

The good thing? Over the ensuing weeks, I never really felt that sick. Oh, Sunday and the Monday that followed I was not feeling great, but after that first night I was able to sleep with the aid of that wonder drug, Nyquil. I never felt bad enough to think about ringing my physician (a fellow amateur astronomer).  I had a cough, but my throat was never even scratchy again after that first day.

And, finally, after two long weeks I tested negative. I still have an occasional cough but feel OK. I won't sugar coat it, though:  I am tired, real tired, and fuzzy headed and don't feel up to doing anything productive. 

Where did I pick up my case of the plague? Best we can determine, it probably came from the grocery store. I haven’t been out that much otherwise. As always, I take summer off from my teaching gig with the physics department here, and even my normally minimalist social life is currently at a low ebb. I do do my weekly foray to Heroes, but usually sit at the bar on my lonely barstool watching the game.

Takeaways? If you haven’t had the boosters, get them. If you haven’t been vaccinated, for God’s sake, get vaccinated. I had a mild case, undoubtedly thanks to the vaccine, but it was still no fun. Final word? Same as with Harley Quinn’s crew (while I was sick I watched the whole Kaley Cuoco series again):

“Covid 19 ain’t nuthin' to f*&k with!"

See y’all sometime next month, maybe a couple of times next month, you never know…

Yeah, what makes autumn great on the Gulf Coast is the blessed relief it offers from the heat and humidity (and bugs) of summer. We areprone to equinoctial gales, and it can still get hot as September wanes—your Uncle well remembers the sweltering, un-airconditioned Possum Swamp classrooms half a century ago—but it’s often drier, and the nights can be cool and gentle.

Those milder nights are one of the two things that encouraged Unk, who’s spent most evenings the last three months in his cool den, to get into the backyard. The other thing? Anew telescope, the SkyWatcher Heritage 150P 6-inch Newtonian I’m writing a Sky & Telescope Test Report about. You’ll get to read that in the magazine in due time, but tonight our focus is on where I went, not how I got there.  Our destinations are the three fabulous autumn globulars I wrote about in The Urban Astronomer’s Guideyears ago.

As I said then, one of the best things about early fall is you get the best of both worlds:  the autumn objects are on the rise, but the multitudinous wonders of summer are still available under more comfortable conditions. As I also opined in the book, on these nights who isn’t going to make Hercules’ Great Globular, M13, the first stop on a sky tour? I hope to come back to it in the next few weeks and take my yearly portrait of the Great One, but on this night, I would just see what a “little” 6-inch Newtonian could do for it with your aged Uncle’s fading eyes.

The only question was “when?” When would I see much of anything? We were experiencing the same heatwave much of the country was under, as in “feels like” temperatures over 100F. Then, a nasty tropical storm, Ian, which quickly developed into a hurricane, drew a bead on the Gulf, heading for our neighbors in Florida. The strange thing? The downright weird thing? That coincided with cool temperatures (upper 50s) and clear skies in the Swamp. You can bet I wasted no time getting scope to backyard.

M13

Telescope goto-aligned, I mashed in M-1-3 (on my iPhone, not a hand paddle), and we were off. When the slew stopped, there was M13 looking pretty bright and bold. Now, it is fall and this is a “summer” object, but as above, the summertime wonders hold on well into deep autumn. The King was 50 degrees above the horizon and was really perfectly placed for viewing with an alt-azimuth telescope.

M15 in the Palomar Junior

M13’s lustrous beauty admired for an appropriate length of time, the little scope and I bopped over to neighboring Herc glob M92 for a look-see. And looking good it was with a scattering of resolved stars. Of course, despite what you may hear down to the astronomy club, M92 is not in M13’s class—or in M5’s. If M13 weren’t there, it would still be a second-stringer. Next up? That trio of globs…

M15

M15 ("The Horse's Nose Cluster") in Pegasus is one of those objects that always look good in smaller scopes from city or suburbs, but never approach what they can be from a dark site. As I wrote way back when: “Unfortunately, under the poorest skies with telescopes 6-inches in aperture and smaller, all you may see is M15’s preternaturally bright core.” As I also wrote, an 8-inch in the suburbs can bust this glob into hordes of stars under decent conditions.

How did the 6-inch fare from the noticeably better skies I have in West Possum Swamp? As you might expect, it was between the two extremes.  Even out here under reasonably OK skies, in a 4-inch at low power the cluster can look like not much more than a fuzzy star. But in the 6er, even at just 30x, it was obvious there was a globular in the field when the slew stopped. I’d be lyin’ if I didn’t say I missed that extra two inches of aperture oomph of an 8 inch, though. But, still…not bad.

Increasing magnification even revealed a scattering of tiny, tiny Suns, though not many. However, yeah, the view was better than what I get in any 4-inch in the backyard, game over, end of story, zip up your fly. And resolution or lack thereof notwithstanding, M15 was beautiful, glowing like a dying ember in the subdued autumn heavens.

M2

The Horse's Nose Cluster with camera and refractor...

When I was a young observer, I didn’t visit M2 as often as I should have. It was to the south in the star-poor “water” constellations of fall, which were often down in the haze. You young’uns with your gotos and computers don’t have that problem. You can visit M2 anytime you like with the push of a button. Do so; you will be rewarded.

M56

Great googlie-wooglies! Did this one ever give me fits when I was a kid out in Mama and Daddy’s backyard with the Palomar Junior. It was a Messier, and it should have been easy to find in the little constellation, Lyra, but I couldn’t see even a trace, not a dadgum hintof this globular star cluster. The problems with this one are it is loose and it is distant. I never saw it, as a matter of fact, until I’d moved up to a homebrew 6-inch from the Pal Junior.

This lovely evening? Oh, there was no doubt in my formerly military mind it was there. But it was, as I expected, just barelythere. It wasn’t even a fuzzball; it was largish smudge on the sky. It was a “been-there,” one of those objects where you tell yourself you have to be happy just having been there. Frankly, to make this one look decent takes a 12-inch telescope far deeper into the suburban-country transition zone than my backyard is.

And that was a wrap, muchachos. The clock was creeping on past ten, which is late-late for your now-aged uncle, and the call of the den and the TV and maybe a sip of the Yell was strong. If you have the Urban book, you know I visited a number of fascinating objects beyond the trio, but I think maybe we’ll save that for a part 2 where I’ll give those even more subdued objects a better chance to shine, maybe with my 8-inch SCT…or maybe I’ll even get the 10-inch, Zelda, into the backyard after a long, long layoff.

What else? As I said last time, I’m getting my tabletop space program back underway. Artemis, it seems, has re-lit a little of the old fire for space in me. One change:  I decided to set the Gemini aside for now and build a Saturn V to make up for the one that was lost in our move (apparently; it seems nowhere to be found unless it’s in the attic, and it’s been too hot for me to check). I also intend to do a Launch Umbilical Tower for it. I’ll let you know how it goes when I make some progress. For now? Back to that aforementioned TV and those frosty 807s…and maybe if I dare…even a little of the old Rebel Yell…ciao!

Alas, ’22, while it started off promisingly enough, was the year your Old Uncle got the covid. Purty ironic, I thought, after two years of taking precautions, even to include staying out of Heroes Bar and Grillfor the longest time(!). And having had four shots. Luckily, no doubt thanks to those shots I had an extremely mild case and was soon feeling almost normal enough to contemplate M13.

As the year wound down and the Great Globular sunk ever lower, though, the less likely that began to seem. You may have heard about that post-covid tiredness some sufferers report. After I’d recovered from the plague, I felt pretty good. For a while.  I went from not just thinking about taking my M13 snapshot to at least considering getting back to our local star party, the Deep South Star Gaze. Then—BOOM!—I was suddenly wondering if I could even get up from my desk and walk out to the truck after I was done teaching my university classes. I began to think I wouldn’t get M13 this year much less travel to the DSSG. 

But… (sometimes that inevitable “but” is a goodthing) over the last week I’ve begun feeling a lot more like my old self. No, I wasn’t going to pack up and head for the dark piney woods of Deep South but getting a telescope and camera into the backyard for some quick imaging of M13 didn’t seem downright impossible anymore.

Ah, yes, “imaging,” “astrophotography.” If you have never attempted it in at least semi-serious fashion (“semi-serious” being your Uncle’s beat on a lot of things) you don’t know what a complex set of tasks it is, and how easy it is to forget what to do and how to do it after even a short layoff. Unk hadn’t shot a guided deep sky image in a long time, and figgered there’d be plenty of hiccups, but I bravely began to move gear from the sunroom to the backyard, anyhow.

‘Course, before I could move anything into the backyard, I had to decide what to move. If you’re a regular reader of the Li’l Ol’ Blog from Possum Swamp, you know I began reducing scope headcount rather dramatically seven years ago. But that don’t mean Unk is exactly scope poor. I have a brace of refractors in addition to my old friend, Emma Peel, my Edge 800 SCT. I also have a pair of GEM mounts suitable for imaging, a Celestron Advanced VX and a Losmandy GM811G.

Choosing a scope wasn’t difficult. “Feeling better” does not mean “at the top of my game.” I wanted a telescope that’s easy to take pictures with. One that almost takes pictures by itself. That’s my 80mm William Optic Fluorite Zenithstar. She’s an F/7, meaning the focal length is short enough guiding is not overly necessary with reasonably brief exposures. One night a few years back, I was out clicking off subframes with the scope, “Veronica Lodge” by name, and thought “Man, PhD sure is guiding well tonight!” Till I realized I’d forgot to start the autoguiding program! The images Ronnie produces are absolutely color-free, too. Down checks? 600 millimeters of focal length ain’t a lot for smaller targets like globular clusters.

Ronnie:  Still pretty after all these years.

The main camera, as it often is, would be my Canon Rebel XTi. The chip size and resolution and sensitivity of the old-timer are a good match for the 80mm. Nearly 15 years down the road, the Rebel just keeps on keepin’ on like the dadgum Energizer battery. I mounted the Canon on the scope with the aid of a Canon T-ring that attaches to my Hotech SCA Field Flattener(highly recommended).  In place of a battery, the Canon is powered by an AC power supply. Since I normally operate the camera with a computer program, Nebulosity, she is tethered to the laptop with a nice cable I got from, yep, Tether Tools.  

Yeah, cables. That is one of the prime aggravations of the imaging game. I’ve got a cable from the camera to the PC, a shutter control cable from the Canon to the computer (the older Canons could not be triggered over USB; I use a Shoestring Astronomy DSUSBto do that),  a USB from the guide camera to the PC, an ST-4 cable from guide cam to the AVX’s guide input, the power supply cord for the mount, the HC and its cable, and—well, you get the picture. It is extremelyimportant to be diligent about cable wrap issues.

Computer software? I’d keep that to a minimum. I’d use Sharpcapto get the mount precisely polar aligned, the above-mentioned Nebulosity to acquire and store photos, and PhD (II) Guidingto guide the mount. I decided not to use any mount control software like Stellarium. I’d only be after a single target and I figgered the good, ol’ NexStar hand control would suffice.

Cables? I has a few...

With the stars beginning to wink on on a frankly chilly—as we judge such things—Possum Swamp evening, came Job One, polar alignment. I used to hate polar alignment, which, when I began astrophotography, involved either the drift method of alignment, or using a polar finder with a polar alignment reticle. The former took as much as a half hour, but was accurate. The latter was quick and easy, but yielded so-so polar alignments. I’d often find myself in a hurry to get exposures underway, and usually opted for a polar-scope alignment, which meant my pictures suffered.

Flash forward to the turn of the last century and relief was in sight. Almost all of us were using CCD cameras by then, so polar alignment was slightly, but only slightly, less important. Yes, exposures were shorter, but our imaging chips were small and the “magnification factor” inherent in that meant field rotation due to polar misalignment showed up easily and would make your pictures ugly. So, I still had to drift align? Nope. Celestron automated the polar alignment process.

As the NexStar hand control matured, Celestron began to offer a polar alignment routine in the firmware. It worked simply, but pretty well with my old CG5. Set the mount up with the RA axis at least roughly pointed at the Celestial Pole and do a good goto alignment. The polar align routine would then slew the scope to where Polaris should have been if I had a perfect polar alignment. All I had to do then was use the GEM’s azimuth and altitude adjusters to center Polaris in the field of a reticle eyepiece, and, voila!Perfect polar alignment.

Well, not quite. The quality of the goto alignment (and the particular alignment stars used) could and did affect the quality of the polar alignment. Celestron improved the routine over the years, though, and about a dozen years ago debuted the version that’s in their hand controls to this very day, “AllStar polar alignment.” AllStar allowed you to use a larger number of stars (though not all stars as implied) for alignment. Improvements in the mount’s goto alignment algorithms made an AllStar alignment good enough for most imaging tasks.

Typical Unk film image from a long, long time ago.

Then came Sharpcap. You can read all about it in this blog entry but suffice to say it has made AllStar obsolete for me. The Sharpcap software uses your guide camera (or your main camera if you’ve got a wide enough field) to do the polar alignment. In my opinion, it’s as accurate as a good drift alignment, and much quicker. I can have a Sharpcap polar alignment done in five minutes now. And since it is quick and easy, I will do it. Especially in the beginning the most important thing you can do to improve your pictures is a good polar alignment.

So, yeah, with stars winking on, it was time to get polar aligned. I set up a little aluminum camp table next to the scope, plunked the laptop onto that, plugged the guide camera’s USB output into the laptop, started Sharpcap, and we was rollin’. I was gratified to see the guidescope was still in focus and picking up plenty of stars just past 7pm. Hit “next” a couple of times, Sharpcap had me rotate the mount 90 degrees in azimuth, and it was time to actually adjust the polar alignment.

The AVX is a nice mount for the price, quite an improvement on the old CG5, but it has one problem it shares with most other imported mounts. The bolts used for altitude and azimuth adjustment are a little course and demonstrate a little backlash. That didn’t prevent me from getting a polar alignment Sharpcap pronounced to be within 10” of the NCP; it just took a little longer than it would have with my Losmandy mount and its much better alt-az adjusters. Maybe closer to ten minutes than five.

Then, it was time to shut down and head to the local radio club meeting. I’d wanted to get polar alignment out of the way, at least. That would save time the following evening—I was pretty sure I wouldn’t feel like taking pictures when I arrived home after a couple of hours with all the friendly OMs and YLs.

The next night, as predicted, was again clear and cool, if a little hazier and a lot damper than the previous one. It was time to screw my courage to the sticking place and get some subframes in the can. First order of bidness was getting the scope goto aligned. To that end I replaced the guide scope with a red dot finder temporarily. Next, I fired up Nebulosity in Frame and Focus mode, and it began clicking off exposures with the camera. The mount had stopped with the telescope obviously pointing in the right direction, and I was hoping the first alignment star would be in the frame. Nope.

Went over and peered up through the finder. Vega was near centered. What the—? Back to the deck (the PC is on the deck on a patio table under a dew-reducing umbrella). A look at Neb revealed the problem. It was taking exposures alright, exposures of 0 seconds duration. Doh! Changed that to 1 second and back at the scope used the HC to center Vega while peering up at the laptop.

Rebel XTi

Like the alignment stars, M13 was dern near centered when the slew stopped, and focus, amazingly, was pretty much dead on without adjustment. Guess someone up there was takin’ pity on your benighted Uncle who had been rather worried about getting all this workin’ after not taking astrophoto one for many, many months.

Finally, I set Nebulosity to take 20 1-minute lights and 20 1-minute darks. I usually try to get 30 minutes on the Great Globular, but it was only at about 30 degrees altitude and by the time 40 minutes had elapsed would be real low and fuzzy. Watcha gonna do? 20 minutes was better than none. I could have gone much longer on the individual subs, but with the target down in the west in the brighter sky near the horizon, I figgered a minute would be best. I watched PhD for a while, but there weren’t nothin’ to watch. It was locked on a guiding without complaint.

Image subframes clicking off, I strolled back into the house, poured out a dollop of Yell, and then walked back out into the yard and stood there next to the scope gazing up at somewhat hazy skies that were not a lot different from those I had in Mama and Daddy’s backyard some 55 years back up the timestream.  

Those familiar-looking skies encouraged my mind to wander back to the long-ago days when M13 was new. New to and quite a pain in the rear for the young Rodster. I wanted to see M13, maybe more even than a spiral galaxy. But when I finally got it in the field of my puny 4-inch Edmund Scientific Palomar Junior, I was badly disappointed. It was just a fuzz-ball…none, not a one, of its hordes of stars were visible. Which might sound strange. Hell, Veronica will resolve some stars in M13 with her 80mm of aperture at high power. So why couldn’t I see a one with my Pal?

First, I didn’t know how to observe. Most of the amateur astronomy books I had read warned against high power. Patrick Moore practically preached against it. That being the case, I mostly just used my 25mm focal length Kellner at about 45x. If I’d tried my 12mm eyepiece, maybe with my Barlow, I probably would have seen some stars, but I just didn’t know.

Perhaps as importantly, I didn’t know what I should be seeing. Sam Brown in his famous All About Telescopes tried to give ideas of what objects would look at in amateur telescopes, but he was a little ambiguous when it came to M13. His wonderful little picture tells us M13 is just a fuzzball in a 3-inch…and goes on to say a 6-inch is needed to resolve stars in the marvel. But what could my 4.25-inch hope to do? Maybe at least a star or two? Sam was silent on that.

Be it all as it may have been, I kept trying with M13 and loved it despite my continuing disappointments—which were not to be alleviated for some years, not till I built a 6-inch and got it to some darker-than-suburban skies.

Next day with the Sun setting, the task was getting those flats done. I am not fancy in that regard. I make them with a couple of layers of t-shirt material rubber-banded over the end of Veronica’s tube. It’s easy enough to make flats, and they really do make a huge difference in processing. Unfortunately, something didn't go quite right with my flats. I'm not sure if the exposure was too short, or I didn't apply them correctly in Nebulosity. Oh, well, tomorrow is another day, I guess. 

Anyhoo…how I do run on. To cut to the chase, I obtained the flats, stacked them into a master flat, subtracted that from my lights (which had already had dark frames applied to them), and we was done. The result? Nothing Earth-shattering, that’s for dadgum sure. About what you’d expect for a DSLR shot from a suburban sky with an 80mm refractor operated by an old coot who can best be described as “astrophotography dabbler.”

But you know what? The shot is mine. I made it with my telescope. In my backyard. Even better, I took it as a sign things are getting back to normal for Unk, and I hope for y'all too.

“What in pea-turkey is Unk going on about now?”It’s like this, muchachos. With a waxing Moon in the sky, I thought it was time to seriously revisit her. For me, like for many of you, Luna, Selene, Diana, Hecate, Artemis was my first love in astronomy, a love I’ve never quite got over. So, I thought I’d drag a scope into the backyard for a quick look. But whichscope?

“Quick look” is just about synonymous with “3-inch alt-Az refractor,” and I could certainly have used my SkyWatcher 80mm f/11 on her AZ-4 mount. I wanted “easy,” yeah, but I wanted more. I wanted to kick up the power on an evening predicted to deliver good seeing.  The scope that would excel in all those things? Charity Hope Valentine is an f/15 125mm aperture Maksutov-Cassegrain with excellent optics, an OK drive, and at least some claim to portability—if not anything approaching that of the SkyWatcher reflector.

As above, I was gobsmacked to realize how long Charity had been with me. That one of my first blog articles about her, “Two-and-a-Half Years After the Honeymoon,” had been written in <gulp> two thousand and fracking eight! Not only has she been with me for a long while, it has been months since Charity was out of her case, and it was time. So, one morning out here in suburbia, where every day (they say) is like Sunday on the farm, your Unk determined to give the scope a checkout prior to lugging her into the backyard.

Protected by the decent aluminum case Meade used to sell for the ETX scopes, Charity is in good physical condition. Frankly, she looks brand new and has weathered the near two decades since she came to stay with Unk better than he has. My main concern was her LNT battery, a button cell that keeps date and time current among other things. I found a 12-volt power supply with a cigarette lighter style connector, plugged Charity in, and fired her up. I was hoping the battery was OK, since replacing it ain’t no fun, lemme tell you. It had been over two years since I’d swapped it out, so I wasn’t hopeful.

Power up, mash “Mode,” scroll down to time…and…  It was way off. But the fact the Autostar HC displayed the date of the last time I used the scope, January of this year, not something random, led me to believe the battery might have some life left. I entered the correct date and time, cycled power, and, yeah, it stuck. I figgered if time were off by evening, I’d have to bite the bullet and replace the cell—“soon.” I’d manually set in the correct time if necessary and keep on truckin’.

Some months back, I talked about resuming my lunar series, Destination Moon. So how come up top it says “The Moon and You,” not “Destination Moon Night Umptysquat”?  A good reason. That series was largely concerned with me imaging lunar features. I planned to do 300 of them, the prominent ones shown in the old Moon map in the mid-sixties edition of Norton’s Star Atlas. I got a lot of ‘em, but not all of ‘em. The holdouts were those of unimpressive nature visible at inconvenient times. So… I didn’t quite make it. Just like when young Rodresolved to draw those 300 and also got much of the way there…but not quite all the way.

My conclusion was if I failed to finish those particular 300 features twice, it meant I was likely never gonna do ‘em all. Also, I wanted this series to be a little broader in scope. If I wanted to capture Selene’s beauty with my ZWO camera, cool. But if I just wanted snapshot Moon pictures with a cell phone, that would be good too. Heck, if I only wanted to look. Or maybe make a quick little sketch of a feature than interested me like I used to do all those years ago, I’d write about that.

After essaying Destination Moon’s multiple installments, I was left knowing the Moon a lot better than I had during my deep-sky-crazy years. Heck, I now probably know her surface almost as well as I did when I was a kid and it was as familiar as Mama and Daddy’s subdivision, Canterbury Heights. But I’d still need a map.

I’ve got several, including the outstanding Rukl Atlas of the Moon (autographed by its late author at a star party, the Peach State Star Gaze, right after he finished enjoying the Moon in my old Ultima C8, Celeste). But if you use a star diagonal with your scope, as I do with Charity (she has a built-in diagonal), be it refractor or CAT, printed maps will never match what you see. You get an upright but mirror-reversed image.  Also, once you get beyond basic lunar touring, the level of detail in Rukl is a mite low.

What to do? Easy-peasy. Virtual Moon Atlas. Yes, this (Windows) program by the author of the Cartes du Ciel software, Patrick Chevalley, and lunar expert Christian Legrand is still around and better than ever. I talked about it frequently in the Destination Moon days, but suffice to say it’s the program I always dreamed of for lunar observing. In addition to displaying crazy-detailed charts that can be customized to match the view in any scope, it will even send your goto mount to lunar features. It’s free, and if you are interested in the Moon, it should be your number one observing tool.

So, on a gentle Gulf Coast early-November evening, one on which the Moon shone down turning the landscape to silver, I set Charity up in the driveway, a spot with a good view of the eastern horizon. All ready to go, I turned the on-off switch to “on” and checked date and time. The date was still good, but time was already off by over six hours. I set it correctly and returned inside for a box of eyepieces.

What sort of oculars would I use with Charity this evening? Nothing fancy. I didn’t feel the need to drag out any of my heavy-metal TeleVue or Explore Scientific eyepieces. Instead, I grabbed the box of Celestrons I won years ago at one of the last Deep South Regional Stargazes I attended. They are all 1.25-inch (Charity is limited to that format anyway) Chinese Plössls that perform just fine. Frankly, it’s been quite a few years since I’ve seen a truly bad ocular from any half respectable vendor.

In went a 32mm for alignment. I coulda grabbed a crosshair reticle eyepiece out of Charity’s case up in the house, but I didn’t feel like going inside again, and a so-so alignment would be good enough for lunar work anyway.

Anyhoo, Charity is a PE model ETX, which means she can perform an automatic alignment not unlike a GPS scope sans GPS. Set her in home position and she does a little dance, finding north and level. This took a couple of minutes, but eventually she headed for alignment star one, Vega. It wasn’t in the eyepiece, but just outside it. The next star was a problem, though.

Because of my position in the backyard, many of Charity’s choices were in the trees. I rejected one star after another till we got to Enif and could finish up.  How was the resulting alignment? Saturn was in the eyepiece at 60x when Charity stopped, no problem. OK, OK! I’ll fess up. That was the result of my SECONDalignment. In typical Uncle Rod fashion, I kicked the tripod by accident, ruining the first one just as I finished centering Enif. In my defense, the legs on Charity’s tripod are more wide-spread than on most.

It shouldn’t be surprising mighty Eratosthenes was my first stop. It was perfectly positioned at 8.5 days, just a bit off the terminator. It would be hard to miss even if this 60Km diameter crater didn’t display such beautifully sharp, terraced walls. It is located at the termination of the lunar Apennines; your eye just naturally follows their arc to this stupendous formation. Despite blah-blah-blah seeing Charity easily revealed the complex central peak and the rough floor of this great crater.

Where next? I moved north, flying over a tremendous amount of territory LM style with a push of an Autostar direction button. I skimmed over many wonderful destinations, but something had caught my eye; that “something” being the amazing 101Km crater (or is it really a walled plain?), Plato. While Plato, lying at the other terminus of the huge arc of mountains that begins as Apennines and winds up near Plato as Alps, looks elongated due to its position, it’s, like almost all craters, actually round.

What does every observer long to see of this giant? Some of the craterlets that pepper the dark lava-floor. At eight and a half days, the crater is a little far from the terminator to make that easy but running up the power to 250x and waiting for good seeing stretches revealed a few spots that mark the (relatively) tiny pits.

What else is of interest in the area? Plenty.  Only beginning with the Alpine Valley, which runs for over 130 Km through this mountainous area of the Moon. It’s beautiful in any telescope, but the prize is the rille down its center. About a mile wide, this sinuous “channel” is a high challenge for a visual observer even when the Alpine Valley is perfectly placed. I’ve seen it at those times, but, frankly, the best way to view it is really in images with a planetary camera like my little ZWO.

One more, though. That “one more” was mighty Tycho. When the Moon approaches full, Tycho is the most prominent feature on Luna thanks to its draw-dropping system of lunar rays. End of story, game over, zip up your fly. But even at this phase, it stood out like a sore thumb in the rough lunar highlands.

What makes Tycho so prominent even when its rays don’t shine is it is sharp, and it is young (the reason its rays are still so prominent). This 86Km diameter formation’s imposing walls contain a complex and interesting triple-central peak. Anyhow, Tycho just looks young (it’s less than 1 billion years old) and is eye-catching at any phase.

And that was that. I could have kept going, but I decided to savor what I’d seen and visit more old friends “next time.” One of the beauties of Miss Valentine, of course, is she’s easy enough to get back inside and in her case despite bringing quite a bit of horsepower to the observin’ field. Soon, I was in the den watching TV with the cats, sipping a portion of Yell, and strategizing about the upcoming eclipse…

The Great November 2022 Total Lunar Eclipse

Nah, not as good as a Christmas eclipse, but this one was pretty spectacular from the ‘Swamp. Course, there would’ve been no eclipse at all for Unk if he hadn’t been able to drag himself outa bed at freaking 4am. Amazingly enough, he did!  I’d stationed a tripod bearing a Canon DSLR with a medium telephoto lens by the front door so things wouldn’t be too painful at that now unaccustomed early hour (I went about ten years getting up a 4:30 every morning for work, but that seems a long, long time ago). I’d just waltz into the yard with the rig, shoot some pretty pictures, and that would be it. I hoped.

There’s not much more to tell. It had been a while since I’d shot at lunar eclipse, but I still remembered how. Lens wide open, ASA 1600, exposures under a second, 250mm of focal length, lots of shots. Despite my bleary eyes, I could tell the images displayed on the Canon’s little screen were pretty good. One nice thing was Luna was in a fairly star-rich area (and Uranus was nearby), making her extra photogenic. It was a pretty dark eclipse, too.

Done just before five, I downloaded the images to a laptop to make sure all was well and uploaded one to Facebook to share with my friends. Yep, looked purty darned good, I told Miss Dorothy, who was bustling about, serving the felines their breakfast at their strong insistence.

To be honest, I’d been sorta dreading the morning…having to get up so early, get a camera outside, and see if I remembered how to take lunar eclipse photos. But it all went amazingly smoothly…the whole thing was, to quote the poet, “simple — neat…no trouble at all — not the least.” I was glad I’d imaged (and experienced) this grand eclipse.

In witness of that, I hoped we could take our Christmas Eve luncheon at El Giro's Mexican Restaurant, just as we used to all those long years ago (it seems strange to say that, but, yes, those days are 25 years or more up the timestream, though it doesn’t feel like it). Anywho, that's what Unk planned, El Giros, the new El Giro's out here in far west Possum Swamp. 

After arriving back at the New Manse and thawing out, I decided lunch at home would be just ducky. That was OK. Like many other things post-covid, I suspect El Giro's might not be quite the same anyway. I still hope to find out sometime soon.

Be that all as it all may be, back home, I ruminated on Christmases Past. Not those at Chaos Manor South, but those of long, long, long ago. Christmases I’ve recounted in this here blog a time or three. Two of those reminiscences, I think, sum up my feelings about this most numinous time of year better than anything I could write on this Eve:

“Uncle Rod’s Christmas Carol”

And…

“Stars Instead of Cars”

Unk puttered about the place the rest of the afternoon. While it was comfy up in the main house, out in the radio shack, aka "The Batcave," the little heater struggled to keep the temperature at around 65F.  But you know what? The cold made it seem a bit more like Yuletide than the usual Possum Swamp t-shirt weather does. While we can still have cold at Christmas, it's less frequent than when Rod was a boy. Hell, it's now getting rare for use to even have a hard freeze.  Unk spent the remainder of Christmas Eve day with a wary eye on the sky. Clouds had begun to roll in just after dawn to his dismay.

As A Charlie Brown Christmas wrapped up on TV (thanks to a DVD), I found myself growing drowsy—couldn’t have that!  I wasn’t at all interested in hanging out with any of those dadgum Christmas ghosts this year! I jumped up—badly startling the felines. I wasn’t gonna fall asleep and miss my Christmas Eve tradition.

That's something that’s been a constant over many years:  My Christmas Eve look at that greatest of all ornaments, Messier 42, the Great Orion Nebula. IF IT WAS CLEAR. Was it?  Unk poked his head out the Sunroom doors. Despite being assaulted by an icy blast that near-about blinded him with tears...it was obvious it was, yes, clear. Time to get about my business.

How would I look at M42? “Simple” would have been my 80mm f/11 SkyWatcher achromat. Given the insane temps, that would have been understandable. Understandable, but still The Way of the Astro-wimp. No. I would do it right, really right, for the first time in a long while. With my ancient and beloved Edmund Scientific Palomar Junior. 

I had got my Pal outside in late afternoon before the cold and a few eggnogs sapped my will, as I was pretty sure they would. I am a lot older and weaker than I was in these days, but the Palomar Junior sure didn't feel like she'd lost any weight over the intervening six decades. Getting the heavy old mount and pedestal out the door wasn't a bit easier than way back when (Luckily, I didn't have to worry about bashing Mama's prized mahogany coffee table in the process!). I got the scope to a spot on the turnaround with a clear view to the east, just as I might have in days of yore.

And then it was time, about 2000 local, when the Great and Glorious Cloud had ascended above the neighbors' trees. How was it? Well, IT WAS COLD MUCHACHOS. Otherwise? Sometimes these sorts of things are anti-climactic. Not this time. The way M42 looked in this little scope over half a century ago is locked in my mind, and you know what? Despite my fading eyesight, it looked exactly the same on this night. Maybe the eyepiece I used, an inexpensive Celestron Plossl, was better enough than the Kellner I used on those long-lost nights to make up for my poorer vision. I don't know. And I don't care. 

What I know is the feel of it was so much like those ancient December nights that I could almost feel my old friends, Wayne Lee and Miss Jitter Jones, standing by my side. Was it just my imagination that Jitter exclaimed at the beauty we were witness to, or that Wayne Lee begged for a look? I choose to think not. 

Anyway, what this all means, my friends, is MERRY CHRISTMAS, EVERYBODY!

 

Back in her natural element...

What in pea turkey is a rescue telescope?! A “rescue telescope” is most often a modern iteration of the Department Store Telescope that has fallen on hard times, has fallen about as far as a telescope canfall. Maybe it began as a Christmas or birthday present to a young person or an impulse buy by an adult. It was quickly found to be deficient in that its images didn’t rival those of the Hubble Space Telescope. It was under the stars a few times and brought its owner a pretty Moon but was soon found to be Too Much Trouble. The briefly loved scope, its wonderfully gaudy box long discarded, finds its way into a closet where it sits bereft of starlight for a long, weary time.  

The scope’s descent doesn’t stop there. Sooner or later, it becomes an annoyance, taking up room in that closet, crashing to the floor every time the owner retrieves their galoshes, and making a general nuisance of itself. Sometimes it’s given away and the story thus far repeats itself. Most often, it is put on the curb, to be either plucked by the trash pickers or sent to its final demise. Sometimes it gets lucky, though; the owner donates it to a charity thrift store and sometimes, just sometimes, someone comes along and gives the poor thing a second chance.

Anyhoo, one recent Thursday evening, Unk found himself arriving a little early for a radio club meeting held at a Goodwill Community Center adjacent to a Goodwill Thrift Store. The previous week I’d found a Simpson 260 multimeter in there for the grand sum of nine dollars. With a little time on my hands, I wanted to see if I might get lucky again and headed for the back of the store where the electronics are kept…but didn’t get that far.

At first Unk thought he was going crazy(er). I seemed to be hearing a plaintive little voice. A little female voice: “HELP ME, UNCLE ROD! YOU’RE MY ONLY HOPE!”  My puzzlement turned to understanding when I spotted a 4.5-inch Newtonian sitting beside the aisle on her spindly tripod.

“Hello, little one. How long have you been here?”

“Oh, Unk, I’ve been here the longest old time!”

“Well, let’s have a look at you.” What was before me was a current Department Store Telescope (DST). You thought they were gone? No, they, the telescopes in-between toys and genuinely serious but inexpensive scopes like the Orion Starblast, are still with us.  They are still sold in actual department stores, but also in hobby shops and, of course, online. Most of them are the ubiquitous 114mm (4.5 inch) Newtonians, 60mm refractors being less numerous than they once were.

How is the current crop compared to those of yore, like the famous Tasco 11-TE? Compared to 60s – 70s DSTs, they are mostly worse. The big and debilitating problem is their mounts are shakier (and they weren’t the Rock of Gibraltar way back when), wooden tripods having given way to extruded aluminum jobs barely adequate for low power. Eyepieces, however, are definitely much better now. Most are fairly good 1.25-inch oculars that blow the doors off the .965-inch horrors of the past. Finders have improved, too, red dot jobs having displaced small-aperture, stopped-down optical finders or the dreadful “reflex” finders Jason-branded scopes once sported.

That glorious box promising wonders...

Looking at the waif before me, I noted the label on her (plastic) focuser read, “Celestron 114-AZ SR D=114, F=600, F=5.2, MADE IN CHINA.” I almost walked on, knowing the limitation that would impose given the spherical mirror I knew this little girl would have. But I didn’t. I’ve seen Celestron 130mm scopes with spherical mirrors do OK on the Moon and other subjects at similar focal lengths, so why not?

I’ve also gotta admit the Celestron tugged at my heart strings, looking sad and pitiful with her banged-up steel tube tarted-up with paint to make it look like carbon fiber.  And I am always on the lookout for scopes to pass on to enthusiastic young undergraduate astronomy students. Also, there was the price tag on her, “$19.99.” Finally, paraphrasing Charlie Brown, I said out loud, “Besides, I think this little telescope needs me.”

The Celestron, who told me her name was “Tanya,” begged to be taken home: “Uncle Rod, my red dot finder alone is worth 20 bucks. PLEASE GET ME OUTA THIS PLACE!” I took a look at her primary, which appeared bright and clean, and surveyed the rest of her. She looked complete with a couple of cheap Plössls, one in her focuser and one in her little eyepiece tray. Well, almost complete; her aperture cover was long gone. I scooped the girl up and headed to the checkout, “Oh, thank you, Rod! I know we’ll be greatfriends!”

A hard-knock life.

My initial examination showed one of the two eyepiece locking screws was jammed. It was so tight I had to resort to (carefully) unscrewing it with a pair of vice-grips. To my surprise, it wasn’t cross-threaded and stripped, just screwed down awful tight. When it was loose, I was able to extract the 9.7mm Plössl (both eyepieces being Celestron’s extra-cheap ones with metal barrels but plastic bodies) and examine the secondary mirror. A look in the now empty focuser showed several big blemishes on it. Might just be dirt or might be damage to the coating—there is no telling what a kid who got a telescope instead of the battery-powered scooter they really wanted will do to torture the poor thing.

Otherwise, it was clear Tanya had indeed led that proverbial hard-knock life. There were several small dents and dings on the tube, and something—who knows what?—had been sprayed on it here and there. There was also plenty of the dreaded Chinese glue-grease (apparently made of ground-up weasels), which had migrated from focuser, to tube, to mount, to tripod with the aid of young fingers.

There was a crescent Moon in the sky, so naturally I got little Tanya into the backyard for a look. Before doing that, I gave both her oculars a good cleaning—they were filthy. How was that Moon? Not bad. It was sharp enough given the obvious mis-collimation of the un-cooled-down optics, poor seeing, and the only fair quality of the eyepiece (these plastic-bodied Plössls are used on many of Celestron’s/SkyWatcher’s lower-priced scopes). Anyhow, Tanya did well enough I declared she had possibilities and told her we’d get her cleaned up in the morning.

That morning, if not too early that morning, I set off to obtain something I knew I’d need, paper-reinforcers to make a center dot for her primary mirror so I could collimate her. To my astonishment, Publix had none. Neither did Walgreens. Nor did the Walmart food store. I finally turned some up at CVS drugs. Is there a paper-ass*&^% shortage or something?

I did that, which was just as much of a pain as removing the other screws, since all were held in place by tiny nuts and Unk couldn’t get his fingers very far into the tube due to the thick plastic spider vanes. Finally, all screws were removed, but the plastic assembly still refused to budge. It was pretty obviously glued as well as screwed into place. One of the problems with this and similar little scopes is they are not made to be maintained—they are like Chinese puzzle boxes.

Ready for collimation.

Next up was collimation, but to do that, I’d have to center-dot the mirror. I was surprised not to see a dot on the primary. Even Celestron’s lower-priced “amateur astronomy class” scopes like the aforementioned Starblast have ‘em. I suppose they don’t bother with those like the 114AZ bound for hobby/toy/department stores.

How do you center dot a mirror that ain’t got one? Grab a compass, draw a circle the same diameter as the primary on a piece o’ paper, fold it into quarters, snip off the apex of the cone formed, unfold it, place it on the mirror, and carefully make a dot on the primary through the hole. Center the paper reinforcer on the dot. If you’re as OCD as Unk, you’ll then take a Q-tip moistened with alcohol and gently remove the sharpie mark.

I collimated the little thing using the Celestron combo sight-tube/Cheshire I’ve had for years. If you want to know how to do Newtonian collimation, see my blog entry on the subject. Having done a Newtonian fairly recently, I did not have to reference my own article. Denouement? Secondary and primary were both off a considerable amount but were easy enough to get “in” in just a few minutes.

Done for the moment with the OTA, it was time to see what I could about the mount. The azimuth axis had a healthy dollop of that glue-grease. So much of the viscous stuff the tube tended to continue moving in azimuth when I stopped pushing it. A little of my favorite cure, DeOxit, and the application of some Blaster synthetic lube freed up the motion quite a bit. There was only so much I could do, since the azimuth axis was pressed into place and would have been difficult or impossible to remove, but it was better.

Wasn’t a whole lot to be done for the altitude axis. A little lube in the trunnions and that was it. The altitude slow-motion arm (talk about a blast from the distant past) did not need any attention.  Finally, I used some 99% isopropyl alcohol, DeOxit, and WD-40 to banish the many patches of weasel grease on mount and tripod.

The spider is d part of the end assembly of the tube.

Last thing? I tried to make poor Tanya pretty againand was partially successful. I was, with mucho scrubbing and application of Pledge furniture polish, able to remove most of the nasty-looking spots on the OTA. Oh, she’ll never look like she did the day excited hands pulled her out of her Technicolor box, but, yeah, she looked much better. I picked her up, cradled her in my arms, and took her to the backyard to acclimatize ahead of darkness. You know what? The little scope positively glowed sitting there.

While waiting, I thought I’d learn a little something about Missy. It turns out she is a currently sold scope retailing for about 100 bucks at—fittingly—Kohl’s department store. Seems to me I may even have seen a 114AZ in the Kohl’s up the street last Christmas.  I also solved a mystery:  what the “SR” in the telescope’s model number means. The 114AZ SR is smartphone ready. What does that mean? As she came from the factory, the scope was furnished with a little cell phone mount so you could take pictures through the eyepiece. That mount, which apparently involved rubber bands, was not with Tanya at Goodwill, and had no doubt gone missing along with the aperture cover (and a pack-in DVD of the Starry Night software) long ago.

I sat and waited for it to get dark enough. But you know Unk; I got “go” fever: “Hail, it’s dark enough to look at the Moon.” And it was. The difference between bedraggled Tanya the previous night, and tonight’s prom-queen Tanya was more than palpable. The just before first quarter Moon was simply scrumptious.

At 60x with her so-so (or maybe not so so-so) 10mm eyepiece, Selene was a thing of wonder. With darkness having arrived, I thought I’d push her a small amount. I plucked one of Celestron’s slightly better Plössls, a 6mm, out of its case to see what she could do with 100x, a more practical magnification for observing the Solar System. With a little more power, the trio of craters, Theophillus, Cyrillus, and Catharina, was simply breathtaking.

Was the wee scope perfect? Hardly. Even at “just” 100x, there began to be problems. Not with the optics, but with the mount. At that modest magnification, it began to border on unusable. Oh, I could get the telescope in focus, but it was quite shaky and I had to exercise a light touch. Combine that shakiness with the shallow depth of focus of its fast focal ratio, and a scope like this challenges the very people it is supposedly designed to serve, children and beginners. However, it is definitely at least OK with the two supplied eyepieces, which furnish 23x and 60x.

Looking and feeling much better!

While the sky was beginning to haze over, as it had been since sundown, I just had to take a look at M42. The Trapezium was easy and there was as much nebulosity on view as I’d expect any 4-inch to show on a less-than-average night. Oh, we made a few other stops as well. The ET Cluster, NGC 457 was pretty if more subdued than on a good evening. But we ended on Luna again. I couldn’t stop marveling what at what this formerly debased little telescope was showing me.

Frankly, I was thrilled I’d been able to bring this sad little refugee back to life. Unfortunately, while the sky wasn’t looking any worse than it had, and the winter stars were glittering bravely in the haze, the one thing that always indicates it is time for Unk to end an observing run occurred. My feet got cold. When that happens, it is end of story, game over, zip up your fly. I picked the little scope up, deposited her in the Batcave (her aperture covered with a shower cap), and was inside watching television with the cats in just a few minutes.

When the time is right, yes, Tanya will undoubtedly go to some deserving young person, but till then, yeah, it’s just as she said; we’re going to be great friends.

Lovejoy

In fact, in the past the arrival of one has driven some humans plumb crazy. Halley’s brilliant apparition in 1910 inspired a DEADLY COMET GAS scare. As the story goes, some poor mooks were so frightened by the prospect of dying from AGONIZING COMET GAS(cyanide in the tail) they committed suicide. I would guess that’s an apocryphal story—the suicide part, anyhow, yellow journalism about comet poison gas was very real.

The maleficent effect comets have on us isn’t something of a century or centuries ago, either. Well I remember the madness associated with the passage of another great comet, Hale-Bopp, back in ’96. That time the suicides were all too real. Members of a crazy-ass cult, Heaven’s Gate, killed themselves. Why? Their whack-a-doodle leader, “Bo,” told ‘em HB was really a spaceship carrying their other guru, the recently deceased “Peep,” and they could board it and join her if they offed themselves by gobbling Seconals washed down with vodka.

A few years back…well, actually going on a decade now…your old Uncle was excited by the visit of anothercomet. While in no way “great”—it went mostly unheard of and unseen by the general public—little Lovejoy, C/2014 Q2, put on quite a show in January and February of 2015. At that time, your correspondent was pretty hardcore amateur astronomy-wise and was determined to get plenty of astrophotos of the wee, green feller, including from a dark site.

I was fairly successful in that quest, as you can read here and here. That really ain’t the point, though. The point being the effect the visitor had on me. Itthrew Unk for a loop. Those evenings watching the exposures come in and—Shazam!—actually looking at the comet occasionally with a pair of binoculars seemed to have an unlooked for effect.

I don’t know exactly what it was. Maybe it was the lonely nights under the stars. Or the contemplation of the fact we’d all be dead and gone and forgotten when the little sprite paid her next visit to the inner Solar System in, oh, ‘round ‘bout 8,000 years. Whatever it was, I entered a period of contemplation of my years on this flyspeck of a world, focusing mostly on the mistakes and missteps. No doubt the shock of retirement, going from 50- and 60-hour work weeks to near full-stop, had more to do with Unk’s mental outlook than the comet, but, still, this not-so-happy time did coincide with the apparition of Lovejoy.

The denouement? Once the following year was out I had begun to come to terms with Life, the Universe, and Everything—as much as any of us can, I guess. Oh, there were changes going forward. A new mindset began to crystalize. Some of that new mindset having to do with astronomy.

Talk about "well placed"!

While I’ll still slap a camera on a telescope and fire up Nebulosityand PhD Guiding on occasion, those occasions are fewer by far than they used to be. I now want as little between me and the sky as possible. I don’t want to lug equipment cases around nor spend an hour (or two) setting up a scope. I just want to see.

So came this winter’s little visitor, The Green Comet, Comet C/2022 E3 ZTF. The weather hasn’t been exactly conducive to observing of late. It’s either been cloudy or cold, real cold. These days I find I don’t bear cold weather as well as I did in, yeah, 2015. If my feet get cold it is end of story, game over, zip up your fly. Still, something about ZTF, mostly its passage exactly eight years after Lovejoy’s, seemed auspicious. The sky cleared, and despite the presence of a full Moon, I determined I’d have a look at the new comet.

When that Moon began to rise a little later, I thought I’d better get a move on. The possibility of clouds is always with us down in the Swamp, and I knew capricious weather could easily spoil my chances of seeing ZTF while she was still bright. One other thing the last ten years has brought is cloudier winters. It used to be unusual for us to get lines of vicious thunderstorms this time of year. Now? Not so much. So, I’d get out to see the comet right away. But, how would I see it? Not with DSLRs and goto mounts and laptops, that was sure.

My first thought was to leave it at simple-as-simple-can-be with my beloved Burgess Optical 15x70 binoculars. These excellent glasses have shown me much over the <gulp> 20 years since I bought ‘em at the 2003 ALCON conventionin Nashville. Their larger aperture and higher magnification compared to 10x50s allows them to do a pretty derned good job in my suburban backyard. But, I dunno, that just didn’t seem to be enough, somehow.

What would have been perfect or nearly so for a little comet like ZTF? My old Orion StarBlast Richest Field Telescope, Yoda. A 4.5-inch reflector capable of low magnification and wide fields makes comet-snaring as easy and pleasant as can be. Unfortunately, when I was thinning the scope herd, the StarBlast went to a new home. I just wasn’t using him and am thrilled his current owner gets him under the stars frequently, which he deserves, being a Good Little Telescope.

Tanya...

Getting Tanya into the backyard was, of course, nothing. She weighs maybe 10 pounds sopping wet with dew, if that. When darkness finally came, that’s just what I did, waltzed her into the back forty. Well, it was dark enough, nautical, not astronomical, twilight having arrived. With a big Moon on the rise in the east and already illuminating a wide swath of sky, I figgered I’d better not wait and quickly positioned Tanya’s OTA on the proper spot using her red-dot finder.

Finding the comet’s position was trivially simple since she was just a smidge, about a degree and a half, northwest of bright Capella. In went Tanya’s cheap Celestron 26mm Plössl and to that eyepiece Went your Uncle’s eye. Seeing was typical for winter—punk at best—but coulda been worse. At first, I saw…nuttin’ honey. But I continued to look, slewing the little scope around a mite…and…there it was! ZTF was subtle at first, just an unassuming patch of nebulosity, but, yes, there.

I didn’t settle for just having seen the Green One (who was, not surprisingly, gray in the little telescope’s eyepiece), I continued to watch, and as it got a little darker ZTF took on form and substance. The coma became brighter and larger and a small nucleus popped into view. Was I seeing a hint of tail? Maybe, maybe. ZTF was good enough that I hopped inside and retrieved the Burgess binocs. At first the comet wasn’t easy in the glasses, but soon it was looking marvelous with that 3D effect only binoculars can deliver. I went back and forth between RFT and binocs for quite some time. Until the Moon got high enough to ring down the curtain on the show.

Takeaways? Tanya, the Celestron 114-AZ really is quitea little telescope. Every bit as capable optically as the StarBlast—the StarBlast’s mini-Dobsonian mount is somewhat steadier. I suspect she’ll get a fair amount of usage here. Well, every once in a while, anyhow. A suburban backyard sky is really not much of a place for a Richest Field Telescope. As I said last week, she’ll, like Yoda, likely eventually be passed on to some deserving scope-less person.

The comet? It’s a pretty li’l thing; get out and see it before it is too late. Your ol’ Unk was feeling pretty darned good after his night of comet watching and takes ZTF’s passage as that rarest of things in comet lore: a good omen.

Stellarium:  Now that's a pretty soft, paw-paw!

Nota bene:  this time we are talking only about planetarium/planner software…some other time we can jaw about imaging and guiding programs and stuff like that.

What Has Stuck

Stellarium

I was awful skeptical about this astro-soft for the longest time. It was awful purty, sure. Very. And amazingly responsive on modest PCs despite that beautiful depiction of the sky. But it just didn’t seem to offer much beyond that. Hell, it wouldn’t control a goto scope, and its selection of deep sky objects was quite limited. It was an “armchair astronomer” kinda thing, I reckoned.

Not anymore. This freeware program has evolved into a powerful tool for doing many things in amateur astronomy. It has built-in telescope drivers, ASCOM compatibility, and a huge number of DSOs. Stellarium’s visualization of the sky is prettier than ever, and the performance hasn’t suffered.

Cartes du Ciel

Cartes du Ciel. As pretty as Stellarium? No, but very useful!

Howsomeever. Understand that comes in a pretty plain package. Oh, it has been frequently updated by author Patrick Chevalley, and doesn’t look like a refugee from the early 90s, but it doesn’t worry about an overly realistic depiction of the sky. Its display is plain but clear and it is legible, which is often a good think out on a dark observing field.

Skytools 3

Author Greg Crinklaw has had Skytools 4 out for a number of years. But you know what? I never got friendly with it like I did with 3.  Maybe that’s because the version of ST4 I have is the imaging flavor and is far more powerful and complex than simpleminded moi needs. 

ST3 was the software that carried me through the Herschel Project, my quixotic quest (this is alliteration day) to observe all the thousands of deep sky objects discovered by Sir William Herschel. Skytools 3 gave me all the tools I needn't for that enormous observing project:  a versatile log, robust planning features, a highly detailed sky atlas, telescope control, etc., etc., etc. I think it is fair to say I could never have finished the huge Herschel list without Skytools 3.

Deep Sky Planner

“DSP,” by Phyllis Lang, now in version 8, is, like Skytools, a planning program/logger. I don't doubt I coulda used this program to do the Herschel Project if that was what I’d had on my hard drive at the time. What initially drew me to DSP (when I rediscovered it; it has been around for decades), however, was something simple: its large screen fonts. I found them easier to decipher with my old eyes. Once I started using Deep Sky Planner, though, I realized what a powerful and versatile package it is. One feature I particularly like is it allows me to use my favorite planetarium programs for charting and integrates very well with them. DSP is what I mostly use these days.

Virtual Moon Atlas. Still free and still the best.

As I have said many a time, for years I dreamed of lunar observing software as detailed as the big deep sky planetariums and planners. And once again Patrick Chevalley hit a homerun. Oh, there’ve been a few other attempts at a computerized lunar atlas, but none has come close to this freeware software.

What’s great about VMA? Well, the detail for one thing. It leaves print atlases like the venerable Rükl atlas in the fricking dust. It incorporates a lot of professional references and images like Lunar Orbiter data. Hell, it will even send your goto scope to lunar features (I have done that and it really works). I don’t have to dream about computer Moon atlases anymore. Virtual Moon Atlas gives me everything I need and want.

What Hasn’t Stuck

TheSky

This is heresy, I know, since Software Bisque’s TheSky is such a long-running and, I’ll readily acknowledge, powerful tool. Straight skinny on it from Unk? I used TheSky 6 quite a bit years ago and dabbled with TheSky X, but the program was never quite silly old Unk’s cuppa tea. It just seemed counterintuitive to the way I work. And, if’n you axe me, overly complicated.

Another factor? I had transitioned to planners like SkyTools and DSP, and didn’t really need a humongous standalone planetarium program. Finally? TheSky is good software, but it ain’t cheap:  $400 for the top-of-the-line non-imaging version. That may be a very reasonable price for those who need its power, but for the relatively simple observing I do of late, I just don’t need to spend that kind of money. $400? That will pay off my bartab for quite a while.

Starry Night

I gave Starry Night (6) a good try some years ago thanks to a review copy that came my way. I was somewhat impressed. Its depiction of the sky was unarguably even more beautiful than that of Stellarium—its sky was stitched together with actual images by way of the old Desktop Universe software (that the Starry Night folks had bought out). It had some abilities I hadn’t seen in any astro-ware, too, like built in links to weather services—that came in right handy one time down Chiefland Astronomy Village way.  And yet…at yet…

Starry Night 6 seemed a little, I dunno, “clunky.” A little sluggish, for one thing. Also, even more than Stellarium, it didn’t seem as legible for my tired eyes at 2am as Cartes du Ciel, not by a long shot. Then came Starry Night 7, which I am told was pretty derned buggy. The current release is Starry Night 8, which I hear is quite good. What dissuades me from giving it a try? Mostly the $259 price tag. That, again, sounds like something that does more than I need. I’ll use the money I save for yet another evening at my favorite sports bar, Heroes USA.

Deepsky

I used this venerable planning program for many years. I believe it was the second planner on the market after Ms. Lang’s original Deep Sky Planner (unless you consider David Chandler’s Deep Space 3D the first planner, which maybe I do). It had some things other planners still don’t, like the log entries of talented amateur observers like the late Barbara Wilson. Unfortunately, it was never quite up there with Skytools and DSP, lacking such simple things as a way to rearrange column order. Author Steve Tuma gave up on it a few years back, but it is still available as a free download now…but…  It always had a few problems and I suspect as Windows has evolved it has even more today.

Finally, there’s that group of programs I might still use if they’d run on a modern PC. The above-mentioned Deep Space 3D comes to mind. It did pretty great charts; it was the first astronomy software to be able to produce maps comparable to those found in a print atlas.

Another is Skyglobe. Like DS3D it was a DOS program (a semi-working Windows version was released shortly before Skyglobe sank), and you’d have to know more about Winders than I do to get it to run there. But there has never been a better soft for quick “What’s up?” looks to see what your sky is like right now.

Finally, there’s Megastar. After the transition of its former seller, Willman-Bell, to the AAS, I believe this has been made into a free download by its author, but I’m not sure whether it would run on a modern machine. Be that as it may be, Emil Bonanno’s software was the most detailed computerized deep sky atlas ever seen when it came out in the early 1990s, and I shall remember it fondly.

To tell the truth, y’all, astronomy-computing is in transition here. I have switched to Macintosh for many of my computing tasks, including astronomy. I am currently using the Mac versions of Cartes du Ciel and Stellarium, but am thinking about ponying up for the Mac version of SkySafari. I love it on the iPhone, I do not hesitate to say. When/if I do, you shall here all about it.

What else? I swear, y’all, I will get out with a scope next month. I am about to go stir crazy here. Every night the same thing, TV with the cats accompanied by catnip for them and cold 807s for me. I need some photons!