Slowly, ever so slowly, I came to believe my next observing interest would be something with a little more form and substance than yet another quest for “small, dim, slightly elongated” PGC sprites. This looking for a new something to look at also coincided with my retirement, which I struggled with and which had left me less than willing to haul out big telescopes to look at anything. Then, in 2019, I suffered a near-fatal accident that temporarily rendered me unable to set up anything but the smallest telescopes. And left me permanently unable to deal with the largest ones.

During that time, I found I wanted to look at something, though. Anything. Something-anything just spelled, yes, good old Hecate. As I related some time back, when I was a kid I knew the face of the Moon, her mountains and craters, as well as I knew Mama and Daddy’s subdivision, Canterbury Heights. But I let that slip away over the course of long years of deep sky voyaging. I came to regret that, and decided I wanted to go home to the Moon I missed.

Eloise

You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about that charm, and found there is another way I miss the Moon. I miss the old Moon. The Moon of Chesley Bonestell and Men Into Space. A Moon of mystery, a Moon of razor-sharp peaks and crater walls. A Moon where almost anything might happen. Oh, even when Unk was a sprout we knew Luna was probably lifeless. But, still, who knew what strange things might lurk there?

I missed that old Moon, but it turns out she is still with us. Yes, the landscape is a gentler one than that depicted above in an illustration from Doubleday’s old book The Moon (from their Science Service series), but the mystery is still there. As I came to realize watching the recent Artemis mission, the prelude to a new age of lunar exploration, we still don’t know pea-turkey about the Moon. Not really.

Despite centuries of observation with telescopes, decades of examination with spacecraft, and all too few years of manned exploration, we haven’t even scratched the surface of our neighbor and friend. What might we find up there? Who knows? Contemplating that, I grabbed a handy telescope and got out under a just-before-First Quarter Moon.  

Before I tell you what I saw on a gentle April evening in the Swamp, though, maybe a word or two about the instruments I’ve used to explore the Moon. I began with a cheap set of plastic binocularsfrom the toy department of our local discount store ‘round about 1960 or so.

These were humble glasses to be sure, though they did, unlike what you’ll likely find in toy departments these days, feature glass lenses. Likely they weren’t really binoculars, so to speak, but actually two Galilean telescopes side by side. But you know what? They showed, just barely, CRATERS to little Rod’s amazed eyes when he thought to turn them on the Moon (said glasses having been bought to use while playing Army).

VMA 8.0...

Flash forward five years to my first telescope, a 3-inch Tasco reflector. It really wasn’t much of a scope, being far inferior to most of today’s similar instruments. I never could make out the rings of Saturn I longed to see. The little thing did do a workmanlike job on the Moon, though. Not just good enough to allow me to begin to begin finding my way across the Moon’s labyrinthine surface, but to actually try taking pictures with my little Argus box camera.

But what finally gave me the Moon? My 4.25-inch Edmund Scientific Palomar Junior. Let me say this:  In lunar observing, more aperture is always better, always. But a 3 – 6-inch telescope is more than adequate—MORE than—for showing you the basic wonders of the Moon, and to allow you to do as I did as a 12-year-old, learn her surface (with the aid of the Moon Map in a long-ago edition of Norton’s Star Atlas).

Of course, I went on to the bigger and better…a 6-inch Newtonian, 8-inch and larger SCTs, bigger and bigger reflectors, computer-controlled electronic cameras, etc., etc., etc. Today? I am back to, yeah, 3 – 6-inch telescopes. They show me what I want to see and they let me relax and enjoy it. Imaging the surface of the Moon in detail with a big CAT and a camera was fun, but the act of doing so always seemed a challenge, a test. Could I succeed in bringing home images? Now I just bask in Luna’s silv’ry glow and marvel at her, not unlike all those nights when I stared open-mouthed with that 3-inch Tasco.

Unk's first Moon picture, 1965...

Anyhow, I grabbed the 3-inch, Eloise by name (who has been with me—GOSH!—for about a dozen years now), and headed for the back 40 just after the passage of a rather violent storm front the day before. “Grabbed”? I was abashed to realize “grabbed” wasn’t the proper word. Maybe “lugged.” As Unk prepares to embark on his 70^th trip around Sol in a few months, it appears the 80mm refractor and “light” alt-az mount have put on weight!  It was enough of a struggle getting Eloise and the AZ-4 out the back door I decided to do it in two trips next time. Out back, finally, I didn’t expect much. The Clear Sky Charts were predicting clear and clean skies, yeah, but, in the wake of a front, as you might expect, seeing would be so-so at best.

With Eloise out in the driveway, how was it once dusk had come and gone? No, seeing wasn’t great, just as predicted, but it wasn’t that bad. Luna looked pretty steady in the 3-inch. That’s one of the benefits of smaller aperture:  you are looking up through a smaller column of air, and the wiggles are less obvious. Funny thing, though? Used to be on a somewhat brisk, seeing-disturbed night we could expect crystal clarity. Not of late. There was substantial haze the front hadn’t cleared out. The reverse is also all-too-true now. On a hazy, humid night, we’d normally have very steady seeing. Not anymore.

Anyhoo, I inserted one of my favorite 1.25-inch eyepieces in the diagonal, a 16mm Konig I’ve had for 30 years (it was the first wide field eyepiece more sophisticated than an Erfle I owned). Focused up at 57x, and had a cruise up and down the terminator. Despite the haze, Diana was beautifully sharp, being just past culmination. But where would I plunk down? Which area of Selene would I concentrate on? My rusty knowledge of Lunar geography impelled me to focus on the northern highlands rather than the crowded southern expanses.

What there was above all was Plato, the great walled plain, a dark lava-floored crater that extends about 100 miles. Foreshortening makes Plato look strongly oval, but it is actually round. What’s to see there? The game I’ve always played is “find the craterlets,” the tiny craters (a couple of miles across or thereabouts) that litter the floor. Replacing the Konig with a 6mm Plössl (151x) showed strong hints of ‘em, though, as you might expect, 150x is about where a 3-incher’s images begin to dim. But some of the little guys were not that difficult with Plato near the terminator on this evening.

VMA has pictures aplenty!

Next? To the south of Plato is another huge walled plain, Archimedes, which is about half the size of Plato, but in other ways much like it, sporting a dark floor and its own gang of craterlets. For some reason, lunar observers tend to talk less about this amazing feature than Plato, but it is well worth study.

As are the two great craters east of Archimedes, Aristillus (34 mi.) and Autolycus (24 mi.). These are more normal looking craters than the two walled plains, with Aristillus sporting an interesting and intricate central peak and terraced walls. Autolycus is without a central peak but there is still plenty of floor detail to pour over.

I didn’t really want to cross the lunar Apennine mountains, so I turned back north, touching down on another pair of exceedingly prominent craters, big Aristoteles (54 mi.) and Eudoxus (42 mi.).  The former looks much like the walled plains we visited earlier, but it doesn’t quite have the “plain.” Its floor has not been completely covered with lava. There are numerous hummocks in the middle, the remains of central peaks not drowned in lava.  There is also wall terracing and other details that invite exploration. Eudoxus? Heavily terraced and intricately detailed walls will catch your eye in any telescope.

I thought I’d head over to the Alpine Valley next to see what I could see. After that, maybe a stop at that fascinating crater, Cassini? Uh-uh. Nosir buddy. Urania had other ideas and just as I finished exploring Eudoxus, she covered her sky with more haze that in minutes devolved into clouds.

But that was OK. I’d seen a lot. And while Eloise was definitely not as easy to haul around as Unk remembered, it was the work of but a few minutes before your correspondent had put Eloise to bed and was sampling the waters of Lethe (which come from a Rebel Yell bottle) while watching TV with the cats.

Before leaving you this morning, let me insert a plug for Virtual Moon Atlas, which I’ve mentioned here a time or two. I was embarrassed to discover I was a couple of versions behind and promptly downloaded and installed the current one, version 8.0, the 20^th anniversary edition (hard as that is to believe).

Sure glad I did. More “textures” than ever, including one from the famous Lunar Aeronautical charts I love so much. Oh, and something you will find useful for deep sky observing, too, “Calclun,” which at a glance will show you lunar phases over the course of a year or give you details for a single night. Go get it, muchachos—it’s still free!

“THE MOON AND YOU” (LeRoy Shield)

It ain’t like the good old days at Chaos Manor South, where whatever was small enough dropped through the mail slot in the front door with a ker-plop. I have to walk out to a standard suburban mailbox on the freaking curb now. One afternoon, I moseyed out there and found a fat envelope among the junk mail and bills. “From Digital Optica? Who the hell is that?”

By the time I’d wandered back to the kitchen, it was beginning to come back to your forgetful old Uncle. Sometime back, a nice feller had emailed me about a new product from the above concern and wondered if I might like to try it, a Bluetooth module for Meade Autostar scopes. I said “yes” and promptly forgot all about it.

Anyhoo, I set the rather intriguing package aside temporarily, as I had remembered something else:  I had an ARRL Field Day 2023planning meeting this evening at our usual radio club committee meeting spot, Heroes Bar and Grill (natch).

Upon my return (not too late), I recalled the package and got it open. What came forth was a professional-looking black plastic module and a USB cable terminated on one end with an Autostar HC connector. Perusing the instructions (before I had yet another cold 807, much less a dollop o’ the ‘Yell), it sounded pretty simple: “Plug module into base of Autostar and Autostar cable from scope into Bluetooth Module.” 

The USB cable was, according to the instructions, to allow you to update the Autostar without having it connected to a computer. Could be handy, I guess, but I don't believe the standard Autostar has had a firmware update in a long while.

That was as far as I got on that particular evening. I was most assuredly not up to fooling with computerized scopes and phones and computers and pairing stuff and yadda-yadda-yadda. Before I turned on the TV at the request of that rascally black cat, Thomas Aquinas, it came to me if I were to test the Digital Optica Bluetooth widget, I’d better do something about Charity Hope Valentine.

If you’re a faithful reader, you know Sweet Charity is my near 20-year-old Meade ETX-125EC.  What would I need to do about her? Well, as I have said before, at this juncture the girl is in better physical condition than Unk and still works as well as her somewhat mercurial personality has ever allowed. But I figgered before I started connecting girly to computers and phones, I’d want to change out the fricking-fracking button cell battery in her LNT finder.

“Her whatsit in her whosit?”  The PE ETXes were like GPS scopes without a GPS receiver.  Enter time and date and location, and unless you moved to an observing site a considerable distance away, you didn’t need to enter anything next time. “LNT?” That stands for “Level North Technology,” Meade’s Autoalign system. The little LNT finder assembly (that also serves as a red-dot finder) includes level and north sensors.  Charity aligns just like big sis LX-200 GPSes, finding north, tilt, level, etc. and heading to two alignment stars.

Nicely done indeed!

Since this was a new idea at the time for Meade—the REAL Meade, the John Diebel Meade, not no Ningbo-Sunny nor fracking Orion—they must not have given much thought to batteries nor done much testing. They said it would last four or five years. The reality? “About two if you’re lucky.” They later redesigned the LNT finder and made the battery more accessible, but if you’ve an older ETX PE like Unk, you are in for some work to get that dang battery changed. Oh, I could replace the button cell with a pair of higher capacity AA batteries in an outboard holder, but I want to keep Charity just as she is, lookin’ factory fresh with no homebrew hacks.

So, one thunderstorm-bedeviled afternoon, I carried the girl out to The Batcave, my workshop of the telescopes/radio shack. “Ain’t nothing to it but to do it.”  I removed the first of two screws (which also serve as aim adjusters) and its associated (small) spring without incident. I thought I was home free; Unk was being extra careful, since at least one of the two springs usually winds up hiding somewhere on the floor.

Sorry. Removed the vertical screw and, dadgummit (this is a family friendly blog), that cotton-pickin’ screw went flyin’. Sometimes Unk gets lucky, though. I could hardly believe it, but that cursed spring landed right in my little magnetic screw holder dish (a Harbor Freight special)!

I carefully lifted the top half of the finder off (there is a thin wire between top and bottom that powers the red-dot LED) and replaced that battery. You can bet I was cautious getting those little bitty springs back in their respective positions. All went well, though, and now I could do—had to do following an LNT battery replacement, I recalled—“Calibrate Sensors.” A procedure in the hand control that calibrates the electronic compass, etc.

While the evening was hazy in advance of yet more thunderstorms, Polaris was visible most of the time. I got Charity on her tripod in the gloaming, fired her up, and went through that sensor calibration stuff again. This time I could indeed CENTER POLARIS. Done, I did drive training, which allows the Autostar to take backlash into account, having you center and recenter an object. The Meade manuals all say “use a terrestrial target,” but I use Polaris most of the time and that works OK.

Done with all that-there good stuff, conditions were getting worse and the skeeters was biting Unk’s legs (he was, foolishly, in shorts). I needed to test Miss, though, who can sometimes amaze you with her goto accuracy, and sometimes do the opposite. I powered the scope off, essayed a normal Easy Align, centered two stars, and mashed the buttons for Messier 3, which was fairly high in the sky, something that can sometimes give ETXes problems.

Nevertheless, there was a big blob of glob in the eyepiece when the slew stopped. It looked purty good given the punk conditions, and even wanted to be “grainy.” Sometimes I reckon I’m too hard on Miss Valentine vis-à-vis goto performance. I forget she is a 5-inch f/15, that a 25mm eyepiece gives you almost as much magnification as in an f/10 C8, and that Charity is dang near 20 years old. Anyhoo, M3 admired for a bit, I decided “one more.”

Off to M53 in Coma Berenices. This is a much more subdued globular than M3, and I wasn’t sure 5-inches would have an easy time with it in the heavy haze and light pollution. But there it was when the slew stopped, shining bravely. I looked upon that as a good omen. On to Bluetooth. But not tonight…the sky was closing in for real.

As you might expect, a long succession of cloudy nights followed…during which I got bored, decided to set Charity up indoors in the Sunroom (natch), do a fake alignment, and see how the Bluetooth widget worked. Which was probably a good thing. As above, there really didn’t look like there was a whole lot to it…but outside in the dark, it’s always something, your old Uncle is easily confused, and it’s just better for him to at least halfway know what he is doing.

Hokay. Got missy on her tripod, plugged the Bluetooth module into the base of the HC (which made for something of a handful), connected the Autostar cable to that, applied power, and did a fake indoor alignment with Charity, just accepting the stars she offered and mashing “Enter.” The alignment seemed perfectly normal, and I went on to the next step, pairing the Digital Optica module with…with…something or other.

I at first hoped that would be my iPhone 14 Pro Max, which has a nice, big screen and is running the very latest version of SkySafari Pro. I was skeptical, however, since the instruction sheet that came with the Bluetooth module only mentioned “Android and PC.” I had a look at Siri’s Bluetooth page anyway, but, no, no “ScopeAccess,” as the Wi-Fi thingie calls itself was listed. Darnit. Oh, well. I’d realized from the get-go that might be the case.

So, it would have to be the PC, the module’s instructions mentioning Stellarium. Well, alrighty then. Fired up a PC in the Sunroom, turned on Bluetooth in Winders, and, sure enough, was able to easily pair the Windows 11 PC with “ScopeAccess.” Now to connect Stellarium (the most recent version) to it.

Which turned out to be a wee bit confusing for your computer ignernt ol’ Uncle. Oh, there was that instruction sheet, but I assume it must have been written for an earlier version of Stellarium or one running an external scope control “helper” app. The instructions talk about selecting “Type = Bluetooth.” You will search in vain for that on Sterllarium’s scope set up menu, muchachos.

What works? Make sure the PC is paired with the ScopeAccess module, then, in Stellarium, set up a connection for Meade Autostar. You will see a com port associated with that (like com 3). Go with that, mash connect, and you will be connected. The software is smart enough to establish a virtual com port over Bluetooth and take care of ever’thing.

And...we have CdC connected!

If you haven’t looked in on Stellarium in a while, you may be surprised. This is a much more expansive program now, and one far more usable in the field with a telescope than it used to be, even a few years ago. Oh, its many features are still buried in help-menu key-combination lists, and its user guide is always several program versions behind, but it can do what you want it to do. Like build observing lists easily. I did that, mashing <alt>-B and making a list of objects fit for a spring night, the objects from the “Tresses of Berenice” chapter of my book The Urban Astronomer’s Guide.

I love Stellarium. It’s my meat and potatoes planetarium program in these latter days. I can use it with my deep sky planner software, Deep Sky Planner. It works great with the Losmandy GM811. It is really all I need. HOWSOMEEVER…  Its prettiness sometimes gets in the way on late nights on an observing field, and sometimes having functions buried in menus or only easily avalable as key combos is annoying in that setting. That means, an old favorite of mine is still used as well, Cartes du Ciel.

With Stellarium squared away, Unk thought he’d get CdC up and running on Bluetooth. “Shouldn’t be no big deal,” he thought. The Bluetooth connection establishes a com port like any other. “Ain’t nothin’ to it.” Ha!

At first CdC refused to connect to the scope over Bluetooth. Every time I tried, “connected” on the ASCOM (the scope driver system Cartes uses) window remained a solid RED. That made no sense; why shouldn’t it work. Then I noticed Thomas Aquinas looking at me with that “Daddy doesn’t understand computers” look of his. What was I missing?

Well, could that be ASCOM itself? As in updating to the latest platform? V6.6SP1? I did that and guess what? No workie. One last thing to (easily) try, a new scope driver. A little looking around on the ASCOM site turned up a link to a recent Meade “generic” driver. Installed that, configured it, mashed “connect,” and we was in business, sending Charity on fake gotos to various objects with Cartes.

Then followed still more cloudy nights (lower case). It finally cleared, but that coincided with a fattening Moon, so following the computer testing, I decided to make this a two-parter. I believe you’ll agree Unk has run on long enough. Meet me back here next time and we’ll see what Charity, Bluetooth-enabled Charity, did with the spring stars. 

Next Time:  Using Bluetooth Under the Stars...

Yeah, I know it’s not spring anymore. Of late, Unk sometimes don’t know what day it is, but he still (usually) knows what season it is. Although spring 2023 is but a memory, and even summer is slowly fading, the marvels of spring are still on display. Hell, Coma Berenices and Canes Venatici are very well placed for early evening viewing (early evening being a must for your aged Uncle).

Alas, ‘twas not to be. Yeah, I’d set that tripod up about 5pm every day, just as it was slowly, ever so slowly, beginning to cool off this hellish summer. And, sure enough, in would come the clouds. Usually great big dark ones festooned with lightning. And the Moon, a fat post-First Quarter one, was back. And it was humid. And it was hazy. Sigh.

I will get to the Digital Optica adapter as soon as possible. Given what little use I’ve been able to give it, it has impressed me. It will not be used to revisit “The Tresses of Berenice” objects from Unk’s The Urban Astronomer’s Guide, of course. More likely, we’ll be doing late summer DSOs instead (if I’m lucky). Oh, well. So it goes here on the borders of the Great Possum Swamp.

I have resolved not to let a month go by without an AstroBlog for y’all. What would I write about, though? I wasn’t sure. Then it came to me: “Telescopes I Have Known,” a rundown of the instruments I’ve used the past 30 (or so) years…something I thought y’all might find to be of at least passing interest. Nota Bene:  These aren’t every telescope I had in my hot little hands over the last three decades—for a while there, I was quite the gear addict—these are the ones that meant the most to me.

Coulter f/7 8-inch Odyssey

They could and did sell me a complete 8-inch Dob, and it didn’t even take that long to arrive (back in the glorious day, now-gone Coulter was notorious for horrendously long delivery times). The telescope wasn’t exactly pretty. She was awfully plain, in fact. Sonotube tube painted fire engine red, a focuser made from plumbing parts, and a rocker box made of particle board that appeared to have been cut with a chainsaw. That was about what I expected. Coulter kept costs down by cheapening their scopes year by year. Plain, she was. Would she be serviceable?

Indeed, she was, giving nice views of the Moon and planets. Maybe not quite as exquisite as I hoped for from an f/7 reflector, but certainly better than those of the other Coulter 8-inch, an f/4.5, I’d had the opportunity to try one night.  A star test revealed some turned-down edge, but not too bad, and wattaya want for 200 bucks?  The Odyssey did well on the deep sky from my club’s old dark site on the Mississippi line. 30 years down the road, I still recall how beautiful the Swan Nebula looked in the Odyssey one summer’s eve.

What became of Mabel (given that name in recognition of her plain yet solid nature)? My brother-in-law in Colorado was without a telescope, and all Mabel had done for years was gather dust in old Chaos Manor South’s Massive Equipment Vault. So, way out west she went, where, I understand, she prospers and thrives to this very day.

Meade StarFinder 12.5-inch Dobsonian

Just when I had accumulated a few more dineros toward a C8, yet another Dobsonian turned my head. Meade’s new 12.5-inch StarFinder Dob was making a big splash in ads in the holiday issues of Sky & Telescope and Astronomy that yule of ’93. She certainly wasn’t 200 bucks, but she was still cheaper than any telescope in this aperture range I knew of other than Coulter’s 13.1-inch Odyssey.

One thing was sure, in the pictures at least, the Meade was a lot purtier than the Coulter 13.1. Lovely gleaming white tube and rocker box. A real rack and pinion focuser. A finder (the Coulter did not come with a finder). A real secondary mount and spider (don’t ask what the Coulter had). Once again, out the door went money meant for a new SCT.

After ordering the StarFinder from Astronomics (an upgrade package that included a couple of eyepieces and a 50mm finder), a long, long wait ensued. How long? When I ordered the scope, I was single and expected to stay that way. I wasn't e'en dating anybody. By the time the 12.5-inch arrived as August was running out in ’94, Miss Dorothy and I were planning our wedding at Chaos Manor South!

In fact, the StarFinder arrived shortly before we were wed, and I wasn’t able to get it under the stars until we returned from our honeymoon. When I did, I was absolutely gobsmacked. I’d expected optical quality in the neighborhood of what Coulter offered. One look at the Moon and Jupiter (followed by a star test) showed she instead had an excellent, outstanding primary mirror.

“Old Betsy,” as the scope became known far and wide, was with me many a long year and went to many a star party. She progressed from her original Meade body to a lovely truss tube configuration (thanks to ATM, Pat Rochford), and to a couple of upgrades—weight saving, better secondary, Sky Commander digital setting circles, super-duper primary coatings. She was always wonderful and I used her till I couldn’t, till she was too much for me and I passed her on. I shall say no more about Betsy lest I get choked up…

Celestron Ultima 8

The price for Celestron's top-of-the-line C8, the Ultima 8, seemed way high (hell, over two-THOUSAND dollars), but Miss Dorothy counseled me to buy quality. I did, and that paid off over the long run. She did need her drive repaired by Celestron shortly after she was delivered, but that was the only problem I had with her over more than 20 years of use. Quality was the word. Massive forks, Starbright coatings, super heavy-duty rubber-coated tripod, same wedge Celestron used for the 11 inch Ultima, PEC (whatever that was). Celeste had it all.

Perhaps the most notable thing about Celeste? She was the telescope that brought me home to astrophotography after a multi-year layoff. And man was she good at it, beginning with closeups and piggyback shots of Comet Hale Bopp. She went with me to the Texas Star Party in ’97 to take pictures, and she was the SCT who taught me electronic imaging with the Meade DSI and the SAC 7b.

What friends we were! I did eventually dispense with that huge fork and drivebase. As above, the Ultima had everything…EXCEPT GOTO. I wanted that, and I was sick of wedges. So, I deforked Celeste and we kept on trucking for many years with A Celestron ASGT CG5. Why did she leave? After I got the Edge 800 (below), Celeste was not being used. Heck, if I still had her, she still wouldn’t be used. I sold her and believe she want to a good home.

Celestron Short Tube 80

"Grab ‘n go" is a cliché in these latter days, I reckon. But a scope I could easily get into the backyard and easily move around when I got there was a must for me at Chaos Manor South.  I had to have a telescope I could move around to peer up through clear spaces between the limbs of the Garden District's many ancient oaks.

I didn’t get the Orion, though. By this time, the Chinese maker, a little outfit called “Synta,” was selling 80 f/5s to all comers, and it turned out Celestron had one with a pretty black tube emblazoned with the Celestron logo. I figgered it would look right fine piggybacked on Celeste. But…it also came with a little GEM, an EQ-1 perfect for waltzing around Chaos Manor South’s backyard. Oh, and a couple of decent eyepieces. All the better? A Celestron dealer, Eagle Optics, was offering a special edition (their logo added to the tube) for an amazing—at the time—price of just under 300 bucks. You got scope, mount, eyepieces, and some other accessories for what Orion charged for just the tube alone.    

I had a tremendous amount of fun with Woodstock everywhere from the backyard of Chaos Manor South to the Great Smoky Mountains, as you can read here. I eventually passed the scope on (I acquired a 66mm ED refractor that was frankly mucho better). But I have no complaints about the little scope some have looked down upon then and now. I still remember watching a double satellite transit on Jupiter, and then me and Woodstock being back in the house and enjoying a glass o’ the Rebel Yell in five freaking minutes.

William Optics 80mm Fluorite Zenithstar

It wasn’t just the William Optics scope’s exquisite optics. I named the scope Veronica Lodge in recognition of her high-toned build quality. This 80mm f/7 was the heaviest 3-inch scope I’d ever lifted. Tube, cell, dew shield, focuser (especially), just everything, reeked of high quality and convinced me it does make a difference. Great optics, not so great everything else…and you cannot have a great scope.

But, yeah, while the little 80 has amazed me with what she can do visually from my suburban backyard, it’s imaging where she excels. At f/7, the image scale is good, but the focal length is still short enough that guiding is easy. Assuming you even need to guide. Ronnie is the only telescope I have ever known where imaging isn’t just “easy”…she almost seems to take pictures by herself. I still have and love this telescope.

Celestron NexStar 11 GPS

At first, I was afraid of Big Bertha. She was so humongous I despaired of getting her safely on her tripod, even in alt-AZ fashion. It took a little practice for me to become confident mounting the scope, but I did get confident, and could finally admire her:  huge fork, beautiful CARBON FIBER tube, futuristic NexStar hand controller, and a giant 2-inch diagonal on her rear port.

I loved Bertha from the beginning. She was perfection itself. The first few days after she came to live with us at Chaos Manor South, I went around mumbling “I have a C11…I have a C11…I have a C11.” Miss Dorothy sure did look at me funny. Bertha's GPS-fueled goto was amazing—she would put any target I requested from horizon to horizon on the tiny chip of my Mallincam Xtreme. Visually, she was just terrific. I can still see in my mind’s eye all the wonders she presented to me at her first dark sky outing at the Chiefland Astronomy Village one long-ago spring.

It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Maybe the most notable thing about her? She was the telescope that allowed me to conquer 2500+ Herschel objects, to view all the wonders discovered by William and Caroline Herschel. And to do that in just a few years. Stationed under a dark Chiefland sky, Xtreme on her rear port, she’d easily bring home a hundred (or more) faint fuzzies in an evening. She wasn’t the only telescope I used for the Herschel Project, but she was the one I enjoyed using the most for it (including visually).

As my 60s wound down, alas, Bertha became a problem. She was just too much. Getting her to the club dark site became not just laborious but dangerous. She nearly messed up one of my knees when I was lugging her down the front steps of Chaos Manor South in her humongous case one afternoon. I deforked her and put her on a nice Celestron CGEM…but eventually that was too much, too. Her beautiful OTA now lives with my friend Charles, a talented observer over in New Orleans. I sometimes miss her, but realize, she would just be gathering dust here.

Celestron Edge 800

What a lovely scope she has been (mostly). And what fun we had on her first deep sky outing to the Deep South Spring Scrimmage 2013 (sans her defective AVX which had to be replaced by Celestron). I had come to laugh at the idea an SCT’s images could be described as “refractor like,” but Mrs. Emma Peel, my new Edge, changed my mind.

Ten years down the road, the replacement AVX mount Celestron quickly got to me has been great, guiding amazingly well and delivering many astrophotos that have pleased me. Mrs. Peel? Mostly good, but one big problem. Several years ago, I found the paint on the interior of her tube was failing. I had to repaint her myself (I had no intention of shipping her to Celestron at the height of the covid pandemic). A pain in the butt, but I believe we are good to go with her excellent optics for many years to come.

SkyWatcher 120 APO

She was and is beautiful. Her build quality is not up there with what you’d get from William Optics but her price at the time was much more doable than what a 5-inch class WO would have cost. No, her focuser isn’t a monster, but it doesn't slip with my DSLR on it, even when I am pointed at zenith. From her first big astrophotography outing at the Deep South Regional Star Gaze, she has delivered the goods easily. Nota Bene:  While she was initially on my CGEM, I quickly replaced that with a far more manageable (for me) Losmandy GM811!

Zhumell 10-inch Dobsonian

Zelda is a cut above the old StarFinder in several ways. While her mirror is comparable in quality to that of the Meade, she has a beautifully finished steel tube, an excellent 2-inch Crayford focuser, butter-smooth lazy Susan azimuth bearings, adjustable altitude balance, and a REAL mirror cell (don’t even ask about the old Meade’s primary cell or what passed for one).

I can still handle Zelda without much trouble, and 10-inches of aperture really helps in suburban light pollution. She has been to the club dark site a few times, but I am thinking she deserves some real dark-sky time. I have been ruminating about doing the Deep South Regional Star Gaze this autumn, and if I do, I think I want to do it simply…no computers, no motors, just a manual Dob and a star atlas…and that is just how Zelda rolls.

And we are out of space and time this Sunday. I really should have mentioned the StarBlast. Certainly, Miss Valentine should be in there. How about my beloved 80mm f/11 SkyWatcher? Well, nothing says there cannot be a "Part II." Anyhow, thanks for indulging me in this trip down memory lane, and I swear I will get out and do some actual observing soon. I hope….  

So it was on one recent passable, though far from good, evening I got my ETX125PE, Miss Charity Hope Valentine, out into the backyard. No, the sky wasn’t good at all. A gibbous Moon was shining bravely in the east, but one look at her and I knew there was a layer of haze encompassing at least that part of the sky. And despite Sweet Charity not being much of a handful to set up, I was sweatin’ by the time I was done getting her on her tripod. I quickly retired to the den to cool off and await darkness.

As those of y’all who’ve observed with me know, however, when there is observing on the menu your old Unk tends to get Go Fever. I fidgeted on the couch for a while, tried to watch the boob tube (Ahsoka), then went back outside to Charity to see how things was a-goin’.

They were going just a mite slow. Yes, here at the tail-end of August it is getting dark a little—a little—earlier, but we won’t see much improvement on that score till dadgum Daylight Savings Time ends. So, I fiddled around, repositioning the eyepiece case, opening it up and looking inside to make sure my fave 1.25-inch ocular was still in there (a Konig I’ve had for almost 30 years), and taking an occasional gander at the sky.  I didn’t like the way it looked, but reckoned it was better than nuthin’. I did precious little observing last month, and August has been even worse in that regard. One good thing:  It has been strangely dry the last few weeks and there were no skeeters buzzing.

Maybe it was thinking about that Konig that somehow led me to ruminating on my long-ago Chaos Manor South nights. Those who haven’t been with this here blog for long might not know what “Chaos Manor South” is (or was). Well, it was the old Victorian Manse where Unk lived with Miss Dorothy from the time of our marriage till about a decade ago, when Unk retired and he and D. decided they no longer needed the space the stately manor offered, nor wanted to do the upkeep it required.

An evening of observing would begin with me dodging cats. Chaos Manor South’s resident Siamese cat (and queen, she thought), Miss Sue Lynn would watch as I began to gather the things I needed for an observing run and would resolutely insist I needed her help. I had a horror of her wandering off in the dark. And being downtown, there was enough traffic to make that a real hazard for her. So, I’d bribe her with a can of Fancy Feast and somehow try to get that enormous old OTA outside before she wised up (in those days, Betsy was still in her original Sonotube body, and it was like wrestling with a water heater).

With Old Betsy in our small urban backyard, what else did I need? The observing table (a TV tray) held the very same old black plastic Orion eyepiece box full of 1.25-inchers I had outside with Charity on this evening. Inside it? Some treasured Plössls from Orion and Vixen, the utterly horrible “Modified Achromats” that shipped from Meade with Bets (why I didn’t just toss them in the trash I don’t know—that bad), and of course, that lovely 17mm Konig I bought at the 1993 Deep South Regional Star Gaze.

This was long before I began using a laptop computer in the field with a telescope. At the time, a laptop was still an expensive thing. It gave me the heebie-jeebies to think about subjecting one to Possum Swamp’s dew-laden night air. I was using a computer (a genu-wine IBM 486) for amateur astronomy though. I’d print out charts from two of the greatest astro-programs there ever were: David Chandler’s Deep Space 3D, and Emil Bonanno’s Megastar. Both are more or less forgotten relics of the amateur astronomy past (DS3D never even made the transition from DOS to Windows), but both could produce very beautiful, very detailed, very deep printed charts.

You might think it funny I’d need detailed charts for a light-polluted urban sky. But in those days, they were actually more valuable to me there than they were under dark skies. As you know, higher magnification tends to spread out light pollution, revealing objects that might be invisible at lower powers. Often, I’d star-hop in an area like the Virgo Cluster with the main scope. I would, as I called it, eyepiece hop with my treasured 12mm Nagler Type II and those DS3D or Megastar printouts.

What else was out there with me as a slight chill descended on a mid-autumn urban evening? If I was being serious, I had some blank observing forms and a sketchpad, pencils, and pens to record what I saw of the urban sky. Not so serious? Just my Orion astronomer’s flashlight (the yellow one with—gasp—an incandescent flashlight bulb powered by two D-cells). Those were the simple days, weren’t they? Of late, at least when it comes to backyard astronomy, I seem to be pining for them.

And then…  I’d just pick a constellation in the clear from the huge old oaks that blocked much of it and see how deep I could drill down. A typical project (I’ve always liked observing projects)? Observe every single open cluster Betsy and me could see in Cassiopeia (there are a few). Whatever I looked at, it was wonderful.

Said ruminations came to a halt when I realized it was finally getting good and dark, and no matter how much I missed The Old Way, it was time to concentrate on new-fangled stuff like Bluetooth…

Well, alrighty then. As I mentioned in Part I, the Digital Optica Bluetooth Module is impressive. It snaps onto the bottom of the Autostar hand paddle and honestly looks like it came out of the same factory that produced Charity. Module plugged into the Autostar, and hand control cable plugged into it and into Charity, it was time to get aligned.

The ETX PE provides a semi-automatic goto alignment routine that makes it a joy to use. Put the tube in home position (level and rotated counterclockwise to the hard azimuth stop), turn the girl on, and she does a little dance, finding north and level. That done, she heads for two alignment stars, bright stars. You center them with the red-dot finder and in the main eyepiece (I use an ancient Kellner equipped with crosshairs) and you are done. Charity’s gotos were good all night, as I expected them to be, since she’d stopped close to both alignment stars.

Next up, I went inside to fetch the laptop I’ve used for astronomy the last several years. A nice Lenovo with a solid-state hard drive. On said drive being more astro-ware than humans should be allowed to have. What I intended to use on this summer night would be my favorite in my current “simpler” days, Stellarium. It is really a capable program now, containing many thousands of deep sky objects. It certainly does everything this old boy can even dream of needing to do.

With it successfully paired, the rest is duck soup if you’ve ever used Stellarium with a telescope. In Stellarium’s scope-set up menu, establish an Autostar connection; you will see there is a com port (like “com 3”) now associated with ScopeAccess. Choose that, click “connect,” and you should be, well, connected. The Stellarium software is savvy enough to establish a serial connection over Bluetooth for you; you don’t have to know anything about any of that—thankfully. Once you are connected, the scope is controlled exactly the same as if you had a serial cable between scope and computer—no difference.

What is the bottom line on Digital Optica Bluetooth device? It works. It just works. It never dropped out on me or did anything funny. There were no delays when I’d choose an object in Stellarium and issue a goto command. If you didn’t know the scope and computer were connected by radio, you’d think you had a serial cable plugged in. I think that is the most praise I can give any observing tool—it worked well, and it worked simply and transparently. Note that the module does not require you to use Stellarium. Any program you can connect to a telescope over a serial port should work just fine. I just like Stellarium. It’s pretty and it is cheap.

“But what did you look at, Unk? What did you look at, huh?”  I looked at quite a few things. Beginning with M3 and M13 and M53. Which almost ended my evening. One gaze at the Great Globular in Hercules and I near about threw the Big Switch, “Hell, it don’t look worth a flip tonight.” But then I thought back to those ancient nights at Chaos Manor South. What would I have done then?

I knew the answer very well. I’d tell myself, “Wait. Concentrate. Look some more. Spend plenty of time with the object. Increase the magnification. Try a different eyepiece. You will only see if you look.” Indeed, following those old strictures I began to see. "Dang! There are some stars in M3! Wonder if I can pick up some in M13 with a 5-inch on a punk night? Yep, takes 200x, but I’m seeing ‘em. M92? Stars, yay!” And so it went till the night grew old (it did not grow cold, alas), and I had finally had enough of the deep sky. Well, enough for one late August’s eve.

As for the Digital Optica Bluetooth widget (well, “module,” or “transceiver” if you prefer). It works. End of story. Game over. Zip up your fly. If you think you’d prefer connecting wirelessly to the scope rather than having a cord you will inevitably trip over for your Autostar equipped Meade, just to get you one. The price sure is right.

Miss Dorothy and Friend, 1994...

What did I start thinking about as I was pondering what to write about here? Star parties. Why? Well it is definitely and obviously the fall star party season in the Northern Hemisphere. There was more to it than that, however. Mostly, how much I miss the star party experience. I haven’t been to one in, oh, about four years.

“Whyzat, Unk, whyzat, huh?”  A couple of reasons, Scooter. The biggest one being covid. 2020 wasn’t any year to gather with a bunch of people even if you tried to keep your distance. 2021 wasn’t either. I almost evaded the virus, having a relatively mild case in 2022. I am not anxious to catch it again… But… I know I can’t hide in a cave, and I am back to teaching undergraduates in person. Dorothy and I made it through this year’s Huntsville Hamfest no problem… I still get skittish about groups, though. Psychological more than anything else at this point, I reckon (though as I write, folks down here are getting sick again in numbers).

That ain’t all that’s kept me off the star party trail, though. A combination of health issues and me getting older is maybe more the reason I haven’t been back to an observing field than fear of the covid cooties. Miss Dorothy and I made a short trip the other day, to Biloxi, Mississippi, and I realized I was just…I dunno…hesitant about driving I-10. I felt shaky behind the wheel. Of course, that is probably just that I haven’t driven long distances much thanks to the combination of retirement and the virus. I’m thinking I could get more comfortable with it again—though it will never be like the days of two-hour daily Interstate commutes.

Anyhow, thinking about these things just naturally led me to thinking about the wonderful star parties I’ve attended. I became a regular at the game about 30 years ago. Oh, I’d been to a couple before that, but wasn’t a regular goer. By the 2000s, though, I was star party crazy and you could find me on observing fields from sea to shining sea. In fact, I did so many star parties in 2016 a friend said in retrospect that that long spring and summer was Uncle Rod’s Farewell Tour.

Maybe, maybe not. I am thinking about the Deep South Star Gaze in November as a way of dipping my toe back in—we shall see. And who knows what the new year will bring? I know I’m interested in going again. But I will only go if I want to. If I know it will be fun.

Be that as it may, over the years I have naturally accumulated some favorites when it comes to star parties, and I thought I would share them with you this morning. As in the old series of articles, My Favorite Star Parties I ran for a long time, “favorite” doesn’t necessarily mean “best.” Sometimes it does…but mostly these are the ones where your ol’ Unk just had him a Real Good Time.

Deep South Regional Star Gaze

This event is still ongoing, now being called the “Deep South Star Gaze.” So why do I refer to it by its older name? I’ve had good times at this Mississippi/Louisiana event for three solid decades, but I believe I loved it best when it was in its original home at beautiful Percy Quin State Park near McComb, Mississippi.

Why is this one of my great ones? I’ll fess up that is mostly because it was the first star party I went to with my beautiful new bride, Miss Dorothy, way back in 1994. But that’s not the only reason. Another is this one is focused like a laser on observing. Oh, there’ve been talks and occasional contests over the years, but what everybody is out for at this star party is observing. It’s also that I’ve been so many times over the years my fellow attendees have become my genuine friends. I will have to admit it’s also been wonderful to have a good—no, great—star party just around the corner, about three hours from home.

How is it now? I’ll just have to go to find out, now won’t I? While the star party is in its fourth home, and while I still miss Percy Quin, I admit I have had terrific times at all of the DSRSG’s locations.  Stay tuned…

Chiefland Star Party

The straight poop on Chiefland? It was held year after year in the first decade of this new century at the Chiefland Astronomy Village near, natch, Chiefland, Florida. Other folks loved it, too, for the above reasons, and also for the incredible friendliness and welcoming attitude of the CAV residents. Maybe we loved it too much. The attendance became so large it overwhelmed the facilities (like porta-potties) and caused various headaches for the residents.

In addition to the WSP year, there’ve been several revivals of the CSP. In fact, I was at one of the last organized ones. But…while it was a good star party…it just wasn’t the same. How could it be? The movers and shakers at Chiefland have like all of us grown older. Billy and Alice Dodd are gone, have passed away. My old friend Carl Wright has left us as well. Others, like the heart and soul of Chiefland, Tom and Jeannie Clark, moved away years ago. I’m thinking I’ll have to be content with my memories. I won’t lie, though:  If somebody decided to put on a CSP in the old mode, your uncle would be SOUTHBOUND.

Texas Star Party

How could it not be? Where is it? Near Fort Davis Texas. Where is that? Go west till you almost run out of Texas. There’s little there other than the picturesque town of Fort Davis, McDonald Observatory, and, yeah, the Prude Ranch. Sometimes it doesn’t rain for months and months. The dude ranch where the event his held is dark, oh, it’s real dark, folks. It’s so dark the sky is that dark gray color it assumes when there is no light pollution. The Prude Ranch is also very nice, the food great, and if you want to meet the big names in amateur astronomy, you will meet them there.

I am proud to say I was at Prude Ranch twice (as an unassuming attendee, not a speaker or anything). It was wonderful. I’ll never forget it. I haven’t been back, though. It’s such a long way. When Dorothy and I were at the height of our careers, there wasn’t time. Now that I’m retired? As above, the idea of that long of a trip on crazy I-10 is a non-starter with moi.

Almost Heaven Star Party

I have been at Spruce Knob many times thanks to the kindness of a couple of sets of organizers (associated with Washington DC’s outstanding NOVAC) who had me up as a speaker. God know why they’d want to hear your silly Uncle more than once, but I’m glad they did. I would dearly love to go back. As with TSP, what has prevented me post-pandemic is my physical ailments brought on by the accident I had in 2019. An airplane ride from the ‘Swamp to DC (and a car ride from there to West Virginny) just doesn’t seem doable. Well, it hasn’t seemed so. Maybe next year will be different. Sure hope so…

Five Star Final

Those are my big four, y’all.  But there are other greats, some of which I only got to experience once. The Idaho Star Party is sure one. Dark, I mean CRAZY dark—topped off by folks who instantly became friends. One of the nicest times I’ve ever had and another of the friendliest groups I’ve encountered is the Miami Valley Astronomical Society (in Ohio, not Florida), who put on the Apollo Rendezvous. You want to get out of the heat, meet some great observers, and experience truly dark skies? Try the North Woods Starfest (Chippewa Valley Astronomy Society) in Wisconsin. Their star party at Hobbs Observatory is just….well, it’s fab, y’all, fab, I tell you.

Next time? Keep your fingers crossed for Unk to get some hours with M13…

Anyhoo, Eclipse morning, I wasn’t thinking much about the Sun; I was thinking more about my current addiction: breakfast biscuits, fried chicken breakfast biscuits slathered in honey sauce. “Guess I’ll head up to Whataburger for breakfast with the hams like I do every Saturday.” In addition to my guilty pleasure, those dadgum biscuits, I am the president of the Mobile Amateur Radio Club and feel like it’s part of my job to attend every edition of the Saturday morning assemblage of OMs and YLs—the fried chicken is just a perk (uh-huh)

It was a jolly gathering at Whataburger that morning. Everybody was awful excited about the Swains Island DXpedition, which had been causing quite the stimulation of the HF ether. But, also, the solar eclipse, which would begin about 90 minutes from the time the nice li’l girl brought Unk his breakfast tray.

Hams and astronomy? There are lots of amateur radio operators who are also amateur astronomers. Radio propagation depends on the Sun, so most hams have a natural interest in it. More than that, amateur radio is a scientific hobby, and hams tend to be curious about things like, yeah, The Great Out There. Question a ham and you’ll often find she/he has a telescope. A dealer at our last tailgater, Bud’s Tailgator, had a couple of scopes for sale, smallish Meades, and they generated a heck of a lot of interest. “Rod! What do you think of this one?”

Our efforts and success or lack thereof in working Swains Island in the South Pacific (I got him without much trouble on CW) talked over at fair length, the ragchewing turned to ECLIPSE, ECLIPSE, ECLIPSE. I grumbled it was just an annular eclipse, and a partial one at that from the Gulf Coast. Nothing to get excited about. My friends looked at me as if I were crazy, “But W4NNF, it’s a solar eclipse!”

Well, I had to admit, I’ve been moved by even a partial eclipse. Unfortunately, I reckon I got off on a bad foot when it comes to solar eclipses just over 50 years ago. I am talking about the great total eclipse of March 1970.  Not only would it be a deep partial one for Possum Swamp, over 90%, the path of totality wouldn’t be far away. It would pass relatively near here in fact, the path going right through this little town on the Florida – Georgia Parkway, Chiefland, Florida (!).

The "pinhole effect."

While I had enough money saved up from my various endeavors—mostly lawn mowing—to pay for gas and maybe even enough for a cheap motel room, one impediment remained—the old man. OK, no use holding back; nothing to it but to do it. I apprised W4SLJ of my plans for the eclipse expedition.

His reaction? About the same as the previous month when I’d asked if I could borrow $24.95 for a Gotham Vertical antenna for WN4NNF: “Daddy," I'd said, waving a copy of 73 Magazine under his nose, "It says right here in the ad it will let me work plenty of DX!”  When I paused for breath after pouring out my eclipse plans, alas, he gave a me a look that indicated he was momentarily speechless and/or concerned his peculiar young son had finally taken complete leave of his senses. He grabbed me by the shoulder and led me outside to the driveway where my prized Galaxie was parked.

“For crying out loud, you are going to drive six or eight hours on Highway 98 with this? Look at those tires!  I’m surprised when you go into the gas station and ask for a dollar’s worth that the attendant doesn’t ask ‘Gas or oil?’ No. I’m guessing you wouldn’t get halfway there. And I’d have to take a day off work to come and retrieve you and figure out what to do with this—junker.” Said he, looking over at my poor Ford and shaking his head.

To soften the blow, he patted me on the shoulder. “Sorry coach. That’s the way it is. Say, you want to put up an HF vertical? Let’s build you one. I’ve got some aluminum tubing here somewhere, and we’ll put together a loading coil.” And that was that.  I was frankly embarrassed I’d troubled the OM, who usually maintained a serious demeanor indicative of his European heritage. I imagined daddy was a lot like Enrico Fermi must have been. Yes, I was embarrassed and had no intention of bringing the subject up again.

The coda on the big spring eclipse of 1970? The OM was mostly right. Oh, I still wonder if the Galaxie might not have made it there and back in one piece…but it wouldn’t have made any difference. It was cloudy in Chiefland. And it was cloudy up here on the Northern Gulf Coast. The way I remember it, I didn’t get a glimpse of the eclipsed Sun that day.

The above memory did pass through my mind at breakfast, but, on the other hand, no eclipse I’ve ever actually been able to see has, yes, failed to move me. Anyway, I was brought back to the present by the excited chirping of my fellow ops about the cardboard box solar viewers they had ready to go—I’d printed instructions on safe solar viewing and plans for a pinhole viewer in the radio club’s weekly newsletter.

I looked at my watch. 9:30 had come and gone and the eclipse would begin at 10:37. I announced we’d all better get a move on, and we headed for the doors nearly en masse—no doubt to the astonishment of the Whataburger crew.

Back home, I couldn’t deny it; a bit of the ol’ eclipse fever was setting in. If you want heresy, lunar eclipses have always meant more to me than solar ones. Maybe because of the events surrounding a memorable one early in my astronomy career. But, like the ops had said, “’NNF, it’s an eclipse!”  Having not prepared in advance for this one, there wouldn’t be any fancy telescopes or cameras. I grabbed my humble 80mm SkyWatcher refractor, Eloise, and headed for the backyard. I plunked her down on the driveway in a spot with a good view to the east, slapped the Thousand Oaks solar filter over her objective end, and was ready.

iPhone 14 Sun.

What was it like? Yes, any solar eclipse is an experience, one that isn’t duplicated by looking at photos of one. For one thing, looking at the Moon blotting out the Sun always gives me a real feeling for the depth of the sky. The Moon, our nearby pal, passing in front of far more distant Sol…I almost get a feeling of vertigo and the view in the eyepiece seems to assume almost the look of 3D.

Feeling that semi-vertigo, I pulled away from the eyepiece for a moment and thought, “Hell, this is a GOOD ONE. Oughta take a picture.” How? Just with my cell phone. I recalled I’d purchased a smartphone mount, a plastic widget that clamps your phone onto an eyepiece, to use when I was writing a Sky &Telescope Test Report on a SkyWatcher reflector and ran inside to fetch it.

With a little fiddling, I got the iPhone 14 set up and starting taking little snapshots. I didn’t expect much, just a souvenir of the day, but the iPhone 14 Pro Max does have a surprisingly good and versatile camera as phone cameras go, and I was able to get a couple of OK snapshots despite my excited fumbling.

With eclipse maximum upon us, I ran inside to get Miss Dorothy so she could have a look (and also document Unk’s uber-simple setup). Soon that eerie semi-twilight that comes with a deep partial eclipse set in, and the world was silent and still for a while. And we looked and we looked and we looked until the Moon passed on in her timeless path. It was a good one y’all and I was happy to have seen it.

Next time:  Shortly, I should have finished my yearly M13 image quest (I would have done that this evening but for dratted clouds moving in in advance of a mild front). So that will—knock on wood—be my subject next edition.  

The extended forecasts for the event’s location near Sandy Hook, Mississippi hadn’t been looking good for weeks. They indicated the time Miss Dorothy and I would be on site, Thursday – Sunday, would be resolutely cloudy, and most likely rainy—game over, end of story zip up your fly. The “safe” thing to have done would have been not to even register. Or, to have saved some gas and not hit the road for the Mississippi backwoods when November 9^th came around.

Nope. No way. I was finally back in the mood for a star party, and, in particular, for this star party after a lay-off of six years. After not the best star party experience in 2017, mostly thanks to deteriorating conditions at the event’s previous location, the Feliciana Retreat Center in Louisiana, and the change of venue in ’18 to the current White Horse Christian Retreat Center, we took a couple of years off. Then came covid. And we hadn’t been back since the end of the plague. Once you get out of the habit of going to a star party, it’s sometimes hard to get with it again, but this year, I’d decided, would be different.  

In dipping-toe-into-shallow-end-of-pool fashion, Miss D. and I began slowly, ever so slowly, planning for the 2023 Deep South Star Gaze. At first it seemed strange to be rounding up the sleeping bags and the tent canopy again (I sprayed plenty of waterproofing on the latter in view of the forecast). But mostly, it just seemed right and natural. After all, Deep South was something we’d been doing together since we were married in 1994. What was feeling strange now was those six autumns without a Deep South.

In addition to gathering up the ancillary gear, I naturally had to decide “Which telescope?” The weather forecasts didn’t quite look horrible, not yet, but they did not look good. It was not a year for fancy mounts and SCTs and computers. Also, something simpler would be more in line with the “dipping-a-toe-back-in” theme for the year. So, what I decided on (at first) was my 10-inch GSO Dobsonian, Zelda. Object finding assistance? Her 50mm finder, her Rigel Quickfinder, and Sky & Telescope’s Pocket Sky Atlas Jumbo Edition backed by my treasured deck of George Kepple’s legendary Astro Cards.

Wednesday evening before our departure, I loaded up the 4Runner, Miss Van Pelt. What I did not load up, after all, was Zelda. Why lug a 10-inch when there was little—if any—doubt it would be clouds and rain for our entire stay at White Horse? The forecasts had just got worse, not better. I wouldn’t be without a scope, though. I packed a smallish one just in case we saw something. Frankly, for reasonable people (obviously that does not include your strange, old Uncle) this would have been the time to say, “Let’s stay home and watch it rain in comfort.”

Nope, nosir-buddy. Not only were we interested in giving the new star party site a look-see, we wanted to show we still support the event, and, maybe more than anything else, we wanted to see friends we hadn’t seen in years and whom I’d begun to wonder if we we’d ever seen again. I finished loading the truck, just like the good, old days and called it a night reasonably early…after indulging our resident black cat, Thomas Aquinas, by watching WWII videos on YouTube (he favors “Midway” and “The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot”).

Interior of the rustic lodge...

The drive was, yeah, a short one, and there wouldn’t have been much to say about it if not for the nostalgia factor. Like our long-ago visits to Percy Quin State Park, original home of the star party, the journey to White Horse is up Highway 98 to Hattiesburg (and then on to Sandy Hook). Miss D. and I sure did a lot of reminiscin’ about our trip on this very road through the Mississippi piney woods in 1994 when we were newlyweds.

A big difference this time? No AAA trip-ticks or Rand McNally Road Atlas. It was GPS all the way, and she did get us to White Horse, albeit not without one bit of minor unpleasantness. As we neared our destination, the GPS, Samantha, told us to turn onto THE ROAD. Yep, no name, just “the road.” A dirt road that quickly devolved into a rutted two-lane track, and then into mudholes just short of a swamp. Miss Van Pelt loved it, since she rarely gets to be a real off-road 4Runner. Dorothy and I sure were bemused…to put it mildly…wondering what would have happened if we’d turned down THE ROAD in her Camry!  I am still washing the mud off Miss Van P.

Soon, we were on another nondescript (but at least paved) road.  The excellent directions Barry provided for the area near the site reassured us we were indeed in the right place. Soon, there was, as mentioned in said directions, a column with, yep, a white horse sculpture atop it. And…in just a moment we were at the facility.

White Horse Observing Field...

Driving toward the building we noticed a paddock-like area on the right festooned with a few tent canopies and even a few telescopes. We figgered that must be the place, parked there, grabbed our suitcases, and headed back to the main building. Inside, we were informed by the friendly star-partiers there that DSSG Director Barry Simon had left the site for lunch and would be back shortly. We spent half an hour or so looking around and getting a feel for the place. The interior of the lodge continued the hunting camp theme but was really purty darned nice. Oh, and there was Wi-Fi. At poor, old Feliciana that had often been missing.

Upon Barry’s return, he pointed us at our room—the facility has several small motel-like rooms in addition to bunkhouses. It was even tinier than what we had become accustomed to at Feliciana, but was clean and really just perfect for us. The window air conditioner was noisy but cooled remarkably well.

The storied pumpkin...

Afterwards, there not being much to do before supper, it was back to the main building, “the lodge,” for web surfing and getting reacquainted with old friends. If I don’t list your name here, I’m not slighting you. It’s just that I’d have to list 40 or more. All of you, old friends and new ones alike, are important to us.

That hour or two in the lodge was the high point of the star party. What else did I do other then get caught up with buddies?  I took frequent trips outside for looks at the sky—all in vain. And I kept my eye on an app recommended to me by Sky & Telescope’s Sean Walker some time back, Astropheric. It took a while for me to get used to it, but, yeah, it really is better than Clear Sky Charts. In fact, it’s like CSC on steroids. If you don’t have it on your phone already, you should (it's free).

Then came supper. Miss Dorothy and I were signed up for the meal plan, but were informed that had been cancelled (because the weather kept attendance down so much, I guess). Instead, there were hamburger and hotdog plates available for a reasonable price. Dorothy and I ordered hamburgers…and were a little surprised at their definitely different taste. The ebullient lady who owns White Horse informed us that was because they were made from not just beef, but pork, and deer meat, too! Well, when in Rome do as the Romans do, I reckon.

My usual mascot promoting "Dark Nights."

The good thing? While the Wi-Fi was not exactly strong outside the lodge, it was strong enough in our room for my Macintosh Airbook M2 to pull in YouTube with ease. I spent the evening looking at whatever whack-a-doodle videos my heart desired until it was nigh-on ten o’clock.

In the morning, another cloudy morning, Dorothy and I showered, dressed, and said our farewells. There were to be talks Friday, but we’d decided it would be best to get back down Highway 98 before the weather worsened. Barry was already planning on finishing up with all the talks and the prize drawings as well that afternoon. Which was wise—the field was already practically empty, and it was clear few folks would hang on till Saturday, much less the official end of DSSG Sunday morning.

As we pulled away from White Horse, was I sad to be leaving? Well, sort of. I was happy to have seen my old buddies again. But…leaving a clouded-out star party just doesn’t have the same feel—that wistful regret—you get when departing one that’s had nights and nights of deep space voyaging. Well, maybe next fall.  Maybe even this coming spring (Deep South still does its smaller Spring Scrimmage edition).

Yeah, muchachos, those exciting Yule eves sporting a giant tree crowded by presents and a house of little ones unable to sleep. And me sitting, a season of furious preparations done, watching for a glimpse of that most numinous of all Christmas ornaments, Messier 42.

So here we are. The years have passed as years do, crowding one upon another. Christmas is again on the doorstep—they seem to come thick and fast in these latter days.  What is also almost here, amazingly, is issue 600 of the Little Ol’ Blogfrom Chaos Manor South. If you’d told me in the beginning that it would still be going 18 years down the line I’d have laughed. But, yes, here we still are.

One other thing that hasn’t changed? Here I still sit on the couch in the den with Chaos Manor South’s resident black cat, Thomas Aquinas, waiting for the sky to clear and for us to get a glimpse of the Great Nebula. Tommy and I are older now, but that is the only difference. Our hopes for clear skies on Christmas Eve are as firm and resolute as ever.

Admittedly, it doesn’t look as if those hopes will be borne out this year. I was awakened at three in the morning by the weather radio alarming its head off about flood warnings. By 9am, it began to sprinkle. It would, looked to me, be a blue-eyed Christmas miracle if we got even the tiniest sucker-hole.

But you know as well as I do the key to practicing amateur astronomy successfully is being ready to take advantage of miracles, Christmas or otherwise. To wit, I needed to have a scope ready. Oh, I could have just said to myself that my old but still beloved Burgess 15x70 binocs would be fine “just in case.” But somehow that didn’t seem in the spirit of the thing, my traditional Christmas Eve look at “Orion,” as I simply and innocently called the Great Nebula when I was a boy.

So, Tommy and I sat and waited. And waited. He watching something or other on television. Me, naturally, ruminating on Christmases past as I am wont to do on Yule Eves. Which one spells “Christmas” for me? There are several, including some newer-ish ones, like the first Christmas I spent with Miss Dorothy at the Old Manse. But if you are going to pin me down, I guess Christmas for me is still and will forever be:  Stars instead of Cars.

Here we still sit as it pours.  The weather goobers are predicting 2-inches of the wet stuff before morning. I’ll be surprised to hear the rain slacken, much less see a single star wink through this mess. Them’s the breaks. I’ve had a pretty good run of clear Xmas Eves of late, and, as always in amateur astronomy, you take what you get. We shall sit a while longer, Tommy and I. Till I finally drift off and a little black paw nudges me, telling me it is time for bed.

Have a merry one. When we meet again in the new year, I will tell you what the hell happened to my other yearly tradition, my annual imaging run on the Great Globular, M13. Till then… “This is Chaos Manor signing off and clear.”

ZWO SeeStar S50

Not long after I retired, I found for various reasons I had to back off the weekly blog releases I’d done for years and years. For a while thereafter, it was hard for me to buckle down and get a blog out the door every few months. There was one year, 2019, when there was one new entry. For the whole freaking year (one of my excuses is in 2019 I delivered TWO new books to their publishers). Eventually, however, I adjusted to retired life, the Universe, and everything, found I missed doing this, and, yeah, here we are. The last year or so, I've even found I don’t have to make myself do the AstroBlog. I want to again.

Twenty-five years, yeah. Retirement. Getting older with a capital “O.” Your old Uncle put up a brave fight and played Peter Pan up until the fricking pandemic, which kinda took the wind out of me sails. Now, I have to admit age ain’t just a number as some boomers like to say. Hit the big 7-0 as Unk has, and you’ll gain a real understanding of that every freaking morning when you get out of bed. To the accompaniment of more aches and pains.

None of which means I don’t observe or at least want to. It’s just getting harder. A recent Sky & Telescope assignment required me to set up a scope and a mount and a computer and do some imaging, somethin’ I hadn’t done a lot of in the last several annums. It was doable for me mainly because of the stretch of OK weather we were having. Once I got the telescope set up, I could leave her (the Edge 800, Mrs. Peel) outside under a cover for multiple nights.

Not that getting her, an AVX mount, etc., etc. into the yard was a treat. Neither was operating her when she was set up. Not so much because of age, but because of the accident I suffered in 2019. One of my multiple injuries was a compound fracture of my right arm. The docs did a good job of putting me back together with the aid of screws and metal plates. But I noted none of ‘em assured me I’d be as good as new.

Five years down the line, I have regained most lost dexterity. I can get on my Vibroplex keyer and send Morse code at 30 words-per-minute again. BUT…  It’s clear the strength in that arm is not coming back. I can very easily drop something if I am not careful, and the arm will quickly warn me if I try “too heavy.” Ever since the accident I have also, strangely, found my ability to endure the cold much reduced. To top if all off, I have developed a lingering and seemingly unreasoning fear of falling in the dark. None of this a recipe for setting up and operating old-fashioned astrophotography rigs. Or big, complicated telescopes of any kind.

So, what have I done when I want to observe? I’ve mostly kept it simple. I can still get my 10-inch Dobsonian, Zelda, into the backyard if I am careful, take is slowly, and use a hand truck on bad days. Her simple operation means my fuzzy-headedness as the hours grow late (as in 11pm) is not going to cause a major equipment disaster.  It’s not a night when I feel like wrestling with Z? One of my smaller refractors on my SkyWatcher AZ-4 alt-azimuth mount serves me well when I get cosmic wanderlust.

Equinox II

Which brings us to our subject this morning, smart telescopes. “Wut’s they-at, Unk?” If you’ve been under a rock the last three-four years, they are a new breed of scope. Most are small-aperture short focal length reflectors or refractors on alt-azimuth mounts. While at least one allows you to view objects with a built-in display, most depend on your smart phone for both display and control. And the big deal with all is something most of us have experimented with:  taking and stacking many short exposures (like 10 seconds) into finished images. All feature goto via plate solving and include the usual frippery like GPS.

 I knew about these scopes almost from the beginning since an old friend and accomplished observer, Jack Estes, was an early adopter and has shared the images he’s obtained with his Unistellar smartscope with me on occasion. I had to admit I was impressed. But, somehow, the whole thing seemed like heresy. Like cheating. I wasn’t quite ready to hang up my Peter Pan duds.  I’d sold my C11. Was I now going to embrace a tiny telescope that sat in the backyard and took pictures for me as I sat in the warm den?

Well, why the Hell not? Would it really be such a come down? The thing is seeing. If that means with a big scope and an eyepiece…or a smaller scope and a Mallincam extreme…or a tiny scope and a digital camera, that’s still seeing the Universe, ain’t it? I never felt like the Mallincam was a compromise; it was just the opposite. It expanded my horizons from the Messier and NGC to the dim and distant marvels that lie beyond them.

Vespera II

I began to think all signs pointed to a smartscope as being what I needed to get me observing more frequently again. Then, of course, the question became which one?

So, who do we have here?

Unistellar’s instruments, most of which are 4-inch reflectors, go from around $2000 to $5000. The middle of the road is the Equinox II.  Unlike some of the more expensive Unistellars, it doesn’t feature the unique electronic eyepiece technology that makes you feel like you’re using a “real” telescope. Instead, like other smartscopes, it depends on your phone for display of the images produced by its Sony IMX347 sensor, and communicates over Wi-Fi. Seemed nice. But…I dunno. $2500 made Unk skittish despite the fairly impressive pictures I’ve seen from these scopes.

Vaonis produces several different models. The one I’ve heard the most talk about, however, is the futuristic looking Vespera II ($1590 without field tripod or case). It’s a 50mm f/5 refractor, and features the usual things: built-in camera, automatic stacking and—necessary for an alt-azimuth telescope, natch—field de-rotation to prevent star trailing. Various filters that fit on the front of the OTA are available as options. The image sensor is a Sony IMX 585.

Cheap as your old Unk is…investing in a technology I wasn’t sure I’d like to the tune of well over a thousand dollars didn’t seem smart, smart telescope or not. Then I heard about a Chinese company, Dwarf Labs…

Dwarf II

I don’t know why I was surprised when Celestron announced recently that it’s getting into the smartscope game. Anyhoo, it’s a sign these little scopes are going to be a big factor in amateur astronomy going forward. Probably including Celestron’s not-so-little new one, the Origin. Yes, it really kicks things up a notch. This is a larger Smartscope, based on a 6-inch aperture f/2.2 version of their Rowe Ackerman astrograph OTA.

The Origin is mounted on a pretty standard-looking Evolution mount…but obviously that’s been upgraded with some fancier firmware. The brains are in part from Celestron’s StarSense autoguider technology. Their Smart Dew-removal system is also incorporated—I was impressed by that when I did the S&T Test Report on it a while back. Finally, the mount can be placed on a wedge and used in equatorial fashion with a guide camera, giving it the capability of much longer than 10-second exposures. Impressive specs, indeed, I had to admit.

The images taken by the Origin and its Sony IMX178LQJ chip displayed on the Celestron pages look good. Impressive, even. But…well…the chip is similar to what’s in the other smartscopes, so the Origin pictures are not in a whole other category. On the good side, Celestron says the onboard camera can be replaced by possible future models (I would assume from 3^rd party manufacturers, too).

So, did I preorder an Origin? No. It wasn’t so much the 4K price tag that dissuaded me (though, of course, it did), but the fact the Origin is right back in the “getting difficult for Unk to handle” category. It’s substantially larger than my ETX-125, Charity Hope Valentine, and she is pretty much the limit of what I’ll use frequently.

Celestron Origin

I still wasn’t sure…but screwing my courage to the sticking place, I ordered one and wondered if I’d done the right thing or not. I trust ZWO—I’ve used one of their planetary cameras for years—but a smartscope? For me? Really?

And then…and then...  We are out of time and space for this morning, and Unk is waiting for the ZWO to arrive as he writes this. I will be back with the big reveal in a week or three, after I’ve had some time with the new telescope.

Wow, just wow, muchachos

If I didn’t write the occasional Sky & Telescope Test Report, I’d be even further behind. For example, all y’all know about plate-solving. Been around for years I reckon. But I was recently gob-smacked in the course of doing an S&T Test Report when a plate-solving camera widget would unerringly center the telescope on anything. I mean dead center. Every time! Some kinda hoo-doo it seemed like.

Anyhoo, that was the way it was when a box appeared on the doorstep of (the new, of course) Chaos Manor South. When I saw it there, I was both excited and intimidated. If you read the previous installment of the Little Old AstroBlog from Possum Swamp, you know I was casting about for something that would get me observing more frequently. And you know I decided that might be a Smartscope. One o’ them small, robotic image-makin’ telescopes that are the current rage. To that end, I gave the good folks at Highpoint Scientific, who had ZWO Seestars in stock, my credit card number and hoped for the best.

Why the SeeStar? If you indeed read the previous edition of this-here AstroBlog, you also learned its price—about 500 dollars—was just right for your stingy old Uncle. But it wasn’t just that. I had looked at quite a few online pictures obtained by the scope. And I had viewed a passel of YouTube videos on the SeeStar (our resident black cat, Tommy, Thomas Aquinas, got real tired of those—he favors World War II documentaries). What I gleaned was the pictures the little thing takes are impressive for a 50mm aperture refractor, it appeared simple to use, and nobody had much bad to say about it including Dennis di Cicco in his Test Report in S&T. I was still worried, though. Mostly about getting it going. All the stuff about wi-fi and Bluetooth and blah-blah-blah.

As your Old Uncle is wont to say, though, “Nuthin’ to it but to do it!”  I grabbed up the box, moved it to the dining room table, opened it up, and pulled out a nice-looking color box. The packaging was very professional; ZWO sure has come a long way in the decade-plus since I took a chance on one of their initial products, a little 120MC planetary camera. Inside the pretty box was a nice enough case containing the scope. This case was sorta weird…being made from something like slightly denser Styrofoam…but it was nice to have some kind of case anyhow.

There was not the slightest chance of using the scope under the stars—or even on the Sun. It had been storming for days. But I figgered I could download the app for my iPhone (there's a version for Android, too), initially connect it to the telescope, and see whether everything at least appeared to work.  

One thing I’ve learned about Chinese widgets from cat toys to radios that are powered by cell-phone-style batteries: it’s best charge ‘em up before doing anything else. From the row of indicator lights on the side of the SeeStar that illuminated when I plugged it into a 5-volt phone charger, it was about 75% charged out of the box. I left for a radio club meeting, and when I returned a couple of hours later, Missy was all charged and ready to go.

Next step, I imaged the QR code on the instructions with my phone and downloaded the impressive-looking app to my iPhone 14 Pro Max. That done, it was rubber-meets-road time. As instructed, I did a short press of the power button, then a long press, and the scope came to life announcing, “POWERING UP! READY TO CONNECT!” (I also had to push a reset button on the underside of the scope’s mount during first-time set up). Unlike some reviews I’ve read that stated the telescope’s initial voice (yes, this telescope talks) was in Chinese, my small wonder spoke in perfectly un-accented English. ZWO must have tidied up some of the installation details.

Then? Well, I just touched "connect." The app responded by asking permission to use Bluetooth, location, etc., etc., etc. I accepted it all. When the app showed “connected,” I clicked the telescope's picture at the top of the screen to go to communications settings and put it in Station Mode. That way, the telescope joins your home network and it and your phone communicate over that network, not directly with each other with wi-fi. That ensures greater range and a simultaneous Internet connection. If you are away from home, you can connect directly to the scope with your phone or tablet. There were no snags when it came to set up. All went smoothly and without problems.

App and Atlas (zoomed way out)...

Then it came to me. I’d use my good, old Manfrotto tripod.  Its tilt/pan head has a ¼-inch bolt and the SeeStar takes ⅜-inch, but I recalled you can unscrew the head to reveal, yep, a ⅜-inch bolt. I did that. What I also did was attach a tripod leveling widget (I got from B&H photo some time ago) between scope and tripod in case precise leveling was needed. That done, I put the scope back in her case and the tripod back the closet and waited for clear weather.

Which came the following afternoon when I noticed ol’ Sol peeping out. I got the scope and tripod into the backyard, set the tripod up in the spot where the Advanced VX usually goes (there are three flagstones there for the tripod feet to rest on), leveled the tripod with a bubble level, and mashed the “on” button. After a short interval missy announced she was ready to connect. I opened the app, connected to the scope, tapped the “solar” button just below the weather window. Following instructions, I moved her li’l tube up in altitude with the onscreen buttons so I could insert the solar filter over the objective.

Shortly, the SeeStar informed me she was going to the Sun. When she stopped, I was offered an onscreen joystick thingie and told to adjust until the Sun was centered. I didn’t have to. The Sun was already centered when the scope stopped. I skipped that, mashed “AF” (autofocus), the SeeStar focused, and with “photo” selected, I pushed the big red button to take a picture. I did that several times, and also shot a short video.

The results? Unfortunately, I caught Sol at one of his more peaceful moments of late. There were a couple of big sunspot groups about to rotate off the limb, one small spot in the middle of the disk, and one new group on the opposite limb. However, for a rather short focal length scope the pictures (which were sent to my phone from the SeeStar) were impressive. The lighter areas around the groups were easier to see than they are for me in my white light-filtered C8 SCT. And so was granulation. Miss Dorothy and I thought the video, which showed incoming clouds moving over the Sun’s face, was awful pretty. Yes, the clouds were back.

When I got back to Chaos Manor South that evening at around 8, somewhat groggy Unk was glad he’d had the sense to set the SeeStar up in the backyard beforehand. I removed the plastic bag I’d covered her with “just in case,” connected to the scope, and mashed “M42” in the “tonight’s best” section. Once the li’l gal unfolded herself, pointed to M42, and began taking her brief preview shots, I autofocused and that was about it. I touched the big red button and she started taking and stacking ten second frames. Oh, before that, I had had the presence of mind (barely) to go into the telescope menu and enable the SeeStar’s internal dew heater on this somewhat damp night. The scope had already engaged her built-in dual-band nebula filter herself.

Yes, M42 is bright, but I was still FREAKING AMAZED that by the time I’d got back inside and was in the den with Miss Dorothy, the telescope had already produced an image of the Great Nebula far better lookin’ than what I see visually in a ten-inch telescope like my Zelda in the backyard. And it just kept getting better.

What did I have to do next? Not much. I turned on the cotton-picking television set for me and Tommy, Miss D. went off to bed, and I and that rascally feline sat and watched TV while the SeeStar did her thing out in the cold (man alive, it was around 40F out there!).  You don’t have to watch the scope. The phone doesn’t need to be awake. The SeeStar does just fine on her own.

When our program wrapped up somewhat over half an hour later, I thought to look at the iPhone again. HOLY COW! The SeeStar had accumulated just over half an hour of exposure (she will occasionally discard a frame due to star trailing or other issues). The result was, frankly, competitive with anything I’ve ever done with a “real” telescope and mount! I was just gobsmacked. Yes, it seemed like hoo-doo witchery! The picture at the top of the page is just as it came out of the telescope. I tweaked it a little later, but only with the minimalist tools in my iPhone 14.

With a little processing...

That was good. But after the big meeting, those 807s, and the excitement of first light on the night sky, Unk was feeling the need to wind things down. I swiped “shut down” on the app, and by the time I got to the scope in the backyard, she’d tilted her little tube down to its stowed position and powered herself off. I picked her and the tripod up, carried them inside, put her in her case, and was back in the den with Mr. Tommy in about 5 minutes.

And then we waited again. What should I go after next? There are numerous winter targets, but I thought one I should essay before it got too high (the SeeStar does not like tracking objects much about 80 degrees) was M1, Old Crabby. The SeeStar app is quite full featured, and tapping M1 in its object list gave full details of the supernova remnant including a graphic showing its elevation over the course of the evening. Oh, let me also mention the app includes a very high-quality star atlas. You don’t have to select objects from a list. You can go to the atlas—which appears to have a very large complement of DSOs—and select and go-to them from there.

The next night was pretty anticlimactic. Sent the little telescope to her target, Messier 1, and after some hemming and hawing about “enhancing-calibrating-please wait,” she began shooting. I could see she’d do a pretty good job on the Crab after just a couple of frames, but there was a problem:  the object wasn’t well centered. On a hunch, I went to the star atlas. There was a frame around M1, but not centered on M1. I dragged it to center the nebula, missy said she was doing a goto, we began shooting again and all was well.

A this point I had checked into our weekly 6-meter SSB net, signed off, locked up the radio shack, and walked back to the main house. There, I picked up the phone and was greeted by the very nice shot of the Crab Nebula you see here. Oh, it’s not as impressive as M42; M1 is a smallish object not as well suited to a small, widefield telescope. Still, the colors and detail easily rivaled what I used to do with Big Bertha, my old C11, and Mallincam Xtreme from the dark skies of Chiefland, Florida. And the wide-field nature of the SeeStar did place the nebula in a dramatically star-rich field.

M35, the big galactic cluster in Gemini would be fine for a while, it appeared. I sent the scope there via the atlas (inexplicably, the wonderful M35 didn’t seem to be in “tonight’s best.”).  There, I adjusted framing to put the smaller, more distant cluster NGC 2158 in the field, autofocused, and let the ZWO have at the cluster for around 15 minutes.  All this was done while sitting on the couch in the den, you understand.

The results? The pair of clusters is maybe not as inherently interesting an object as the supernova remnant, but is really more suited for a widefield instrument (in fact, it coulda used more field). Being able to place the smaller cluster in the frame really helped, and I was pleased with the results. And ready for the evening to begin reaching its conclusion as 10pm came on. When M35 finished up, I commanded “shut down” and retrieved scope and tripod from the yard, putting the little scope back on charge after two nights. Miss Dorothy was somewhat startled to see the odd-looking scope—she’d only seen it briefly once—sitting in the living room attached to a cell charger when she got up the next morning.

And that was that after two nights. I was frankly thrilled by the small scope, think we will have a lot of fun together, and told her she could officially join the Chaos Manor South family. She then whispered me her name (y’all know I name all my telescopes), “Suzie,” as in “Suzie-Q,” she said. That sounded about right. She is a cutie in her odd way. But this little thing is also surprisingly powerful. If you’re an over the hill suburban astronomer like your Old Uncle? RECOMMENDED.  

NGC 2903

In particular, “Lion’s Den” is the chapter in the book (I often call it “the City Lights book” since its genesis was a series of articles by that name in my old SkyWatchnewsletter) concerning Leo the lion and his innumerable galaxies. What I thought I’d do this time was turn the SeeStar loose on those Leo galaxies and see how the little telescope would fare under varying conditions from a typically light polluted suburban backyard.

And light polluted the backyard of Chaos Manor South is. Oh, nothing like the back forty of the original Chaos Manor South downtown. Here, we are on the edge of the suburban/country transition zone. It’s not that bad. On a really good night I suspect you can pick out 5^th magnitude stars at zenith. The trouble is getting a good night, especially in the spring when humidity in the air scatters light pollution, making it worse. I didn’t give a hoot ‘n holler. I’d take what I could get and find out what the ZWO could pull out of the hazy soup.

In particular, I wanted to see what the SeeStar can do more as an “EAA” (“Electronically Assisted Astronomy”) system than the more serious instrument some are using it for. Talented workers are doing flat-out amazing stuff with the little ZWO. You know, the people who append information to their images like, “Ten hours exposure with the SeeStar, processed in PixInsight.”

Leo Trio

Now, none of that is meant to talk down Rock Mallin’s wonderful cameras. They really are flat-out amazing. During the vaunted Herschel Project, they brought home bushel baskets of PGC galaxies and quasars in addition every one of Willie and Lina Herschel’s thousands of deep sky objects. But… "right tool for right job,” no?

My brief foray with the SeeStar had already shown me it was capable of better on the more prominent objects. And not by me downloading fits frames from the scope and stacking and processing them with fancy software, but just by letting the telescope do the work. And me at most doing some minor processing of the .jpgs the SeeStar sends to the phone. That is where I am at right now for many things, campers: “No fuss, no muss.”

It ain’t just the difficulty involved in making OK-looking still pictures from Mallincam videos, either. The other drawback to the Mallincam Xtreme, you see, is the setup it requires. In addition to telescope and mount, I need a computer to control the camera, a separate DVR to record the video, an analog display for the camera, power supplies, cables, video switcher, etc., etc. I just don’t have as much patience for that sort of thing in these latter days as I used to. Oh, I’ll still do it, or do similar for conventional DSLR astrophotography, but it’s obvious I won’t do it very often.

My routine with the SeeStar couldn’t be more different:  Plunk down my old Manfrotto tripod in the backyard. Eyeball level with a circular bubble level. Mount SeeStar on tripod. Turn on SeeStar. When the little gal says (she talks), “Power on! Ready to connect!” I can head back in the house, plunk myself down on the couch in front of the TV with the felines, tell the scope to go to the target of my choosing, open some cold 807s and some catnip, and let theSeeStar do the work.

Do I miss fiddling with a telescope and computer in the cold or skeeters to take pictures? Not one bit. Now, visual observing is still something I like. A lot. But that is a whole ‘nother kettle o’ fish. Here, we are talking getting nice pictures of the deep sky from suburban skies in a fashion that encourages me to do so more than once in a blue Moon.

NGC 3190 Group

Let’s go. If you’ve a mind to glom onto a copy of The Urban Astronomer’s Guide and follow along, that won’t hurt my feelins none, but if not, if you rummage through those old issues of SkyWatch, you can find the Leo article “Lion’s Den” germinated from…

Having, as above, set Suzie up on her tripod and returned inside, I opened the SeeStar app, turned on the little scope’s dew heater (it was a rather humid evening just before the change to DST), and accessed the SeeStar app’s built-in star atlas. Oh, I probably could have found my quarry under “Tonight’s Best” on the main page, but I chose to use the nice atlas. I searched on “M65,” and when the app located the galaxy, I told it to center M65 on the star atlas screen.

M65 was up first since, just as in the Urban book, I thought I’d begin with Leo’s showpiece, the Leo Trio, M65, M66, and NGC 3628. The idea was to try to frame the shot so as to include all three in one image. I did that by moving the image format frame the atlas displays until all three galaxies were within its border. Possible, but just barely. I mashed “goto” on the iPhone’s screen and off Suzie went.

After Suze did some various calibration stuff in addition to gotoing, and finally stopped, I could see despite the short exposures of the preview mode that the little scope’s pointing (via platesolving) was right on. There were two obvious dim smudges on the right side of the frame, and maybe the barest hint of one on the left side. The stars in the field looked purty sharp to me, but I engaged autofocus anyhow. The scope took a minute or so to deal with that, and when done I had to admit them stars did look a mite smaller. OK. Off to the races. I touched the “go” button and Suzie began accumulating and stacking 10-second exposures.

While the telescope was doing her thing, I thought I’d refresh my memory as to what I’d thought of the Leo Trio on that long-ago evening when I did the observing for Urban Astronomer. As for M65 and M66:

These galaxies, and especially M66, are fairly impressive in the C11. No core noted for M65, it’s an oval smudge of light. M66 is brighter but looks much the same. The real attraction under these skies is that both can be seen in the same field of a 22mm Panoptic eyepiece at 127x.

The third member of the Leo Trio is substantially harder to see than either M65 or M66 in the C11. It’s a dim smudge that fades in and out as the seeing changes. Some hint of its strong elongation…

M105 and friends...

I’ll let you be the judge (picture above), but it’s clear we are in a whole other dimension here. M65 and M66 aren’t just elongated somethings-or-others without cores. They are detailed, both their outer regions and their centers. No, Unk don’t know pea-turkey about processing, and has overexposed the nuclei, but yeah, detail there. Otherwise? Damn…you don’t have to guess at spiral detail. It slaps you in the face. The “hard” member of the Trio, NGC 3628? It could have used a little more exposure but still looks purty awesome with that dark lane and the distinctive flaring ansae of its disk.

Yes, your Uncle is something of a Luddite, has a hard time wrapping his mind around technology—especially involving smartphones—and is easily impressed. But, yeah, just damn. It simply astounds me I was able to see the Leo Trio like that from my suburban yard. In a few minutes. With a 50mm f/5 telescope. Without me having to do much of anything.

After The Good Ones, the Leo Trio, I traveled the constellation stick figure, beginning with the Sickle, the Lion’s mane, and the galaxies I called <ahem> “Mane Lice” in the book. The first of which was with a sprite I didn’t find exactly overwhelming in the eyepiece, NGC 2903:

Visible but not starkly apparent in the C11. Its large disk tends to wink in and out of view as I switch between averted and direct vision. Averted vision seems to show a tiny nucleus at 127x, but I’m not sure on this.

After Suzie had devoted half an hour to this one, I picked up the phone and had a look. Again, the difference between what I could see in the simple picture and my visual description couldn’t have been starker. In fact, that difference was more apparent here than with the Leo Trio, since NGC 2903 was higher in altitude and well out of the light dome to the east (Greater Possum Swamp).

Lest I make all this seem like magic, it was not at all immune from your silly Old Uncle’s fumbling and bumbling. Take the Leo Trio image. The one shown here is actually one I took a week or two later. The original? It looked good enough, but the bottom half was hurt by a strong light-pollution gradient. Why?“Oh, yeah… Shoulda turned the carport light off, I reckon.” My initial attempt on NGC 2903 failed completely. Why? Forgot to turn on the telescope’s dew heater. So, some things never do change in Uncle Rod Land.

Continuing on down the sickle, getting close to Algieba, we land on the NGC 3190 group of galaxies. There is a bit of confustication here. The brightest galaxy in the group is sometimes identified as NGC 3190, and sometimes as NGC 3189 with the whole group of galaxies being referred to as “the NGC 3190 Group.” Be that as it may be in the sometimes-baffling world of deep sky object nomenclature, I was quite taken by prominent little 3190 and its nearby neighbor, NGC 3193, in my old 12.5-inch Newtonian, “Old Betsy” from my downtown backyard:

This little pair is a real surprise. NGC 3190 is bright, definitely elongated, and shows a small, stellar core. It really “looks like a galaxy” and not just another smudge. NGC 3193 in the same field, is a typical round elliptical, a fuzzy ball… A third galaxy, NGC 3185, should also be present…but I’ve never seen it from light-polluted home.

Looking at the final pic Suzie Q kindly sent to my phone (if you like, you can watch each 10-second exposure come in and be added to the stack and see your subject getting better and better), my visual description with the C11 was pretty right-on. While bright 3190 does offer some detail, especially in its inner region, it’s basically that typical small galaxy with a bright elongated core. 3193? I pretty much nailed it:  bright core set in haze. What’s notable is what I couldn’t see but Miss S. could.

This group actually has a name, “The Leo Quartet.” Galaxy three, NGC 3185, is fairly prominent in my image, but isn’t that interesting. Elongated core, oval haze. The fourth member, which I didn’t mention at all—because I didn't see it in the C11—is NGC 3187.  It could have used more exposure, but when I really cranked up “levels” in Photoshop and made the picture look ugly, I could begin to see its weird bent ends. It’s one of those really barred spirals that look like a pair of connected hockey sticks.

Done with those Mane Lice, we move to theTummy fleas and M105 and company. I’m not sure how many of you look at this little group of three galaxies regularly, but they deserve your time and are especially rewarding if your skies ain’t perfect:

This trio was quite a treat… M105 is bright and round with a stellar nucleus. NGC 3384 looks larger and dimmer than M105 and shows some elongation.  NGC 3385 is smaller and dimmer and a little difficult in the 12.5-inch scope—it was dim enough that I couldn’t be sure exactly what its shape was and whether or not it displayed a core.

NGC 3521

How did 50mm Suzie stack up against 300mm Betsy? In a mere 15-minute exposure (the night was getting a little old and I was ‘bout ready to tell Suze to shut down)? M105 and NGC 3384 are just as I saw them in Bets, if, naturally, better defined. “Bright cores set in haze.” NGC 3385 is more interesting. It’s easy to see in the picture, and, YES, shows off one of its spiral arms. This nice galaxy needed more exposure, and twenty lashes with a wet noodle for Unk for not giving it more, but, yeah, looks way better than just another faint-fuzzie.

A mere degree and a quarter to the southwest is the somewhat far-flung (40’ apart) pair of bright galaxies, M95 and M96. “Bright,” of course, is a relative thing when talking galaxies, and both are fairly large and in the magnitude 9 neighborhood, making them a little dicey in the city at times. Anyhoo, my look at ‘em with my 8-inch f/5 Konus (Synta optics, natch) from the public schools’ suburban Environmental Studies Center where I often observed revealed…

Conditions are not good and getting worse as the night wears on… M96 is large and fairly prominent. It is obviously elongated and shows a stellar core. M95 is considerably harder and requires averted vision at times, but I can see it is elongated and also that it doesn’t possess an obvious nuclear region.

So, I really didn’t see much. In the final image that popped onto my iPhone screen “No nuclear region”?! Both show impressive details. M96's bar is prominent and lovely. M95? The SeeStar shows a lot going on there, including a bright nucleus, bars coming off that nucleus, a “ring of stars” feature, and tenuous spiral arms. In addition to the two nice galaxies, I noticed a roundish fuzzy in the frame and checked Stellarium. The little guy turned out to be PGC 32119, a 14th magnitude galaxy. Good show, Suze, my girl!

I ended my visit to the Lion’s Den with what I called “Hindquarter Ticks,” but that was really kind of a stretch, since the destination, NGC 3521, is considerably removed from the Lion’s triangular rear end, being located some 18 degrees southwest of Denebola. NGC 3521 is sometimes known as the “Bubble Galaxy,” but which I christened “Sunflower Junior” because of the clumpy appearance of its disk. It is a nice one to end on:

On this not-so-good night, I was surprised to find NGC 3521 without much of a struggle. At 220x in the C11, it is large, obviously elongated with a stellar core, and its disk seems to occasionally give up fleeting hints of detail, as if a multitude of spiral arms is just on the edge of detection.

In the Suzie Girl? As you can see…the patchy nature of the disk is on display. However, my experience is that in images as opposed to visual, the galaxy looks a little less like M63's twin and more like a normal intermediate inclination spiral. 

I didn’t end here, actually. One of the things I did in The Urban Astronomer’s Guide is end every chapter with a double or multiple star. I love double stars and am glad I did that. The choice for Lion’s Den was obviously Algieba, which I likened to yellow cat’s eyes winking in the darkness in a low power eyepiece as seeing changed.

Alas, I got distracted and let the sequence run on too long. 10 or 20 seconds would have been appropriate. Two minutes? The comes was buried in the glare of the primary star. Oh, well. I had a pretty portrait of golden Algieba, anyway.

Journey to the Seventh Planet

Algieba in the can. One for the Road imaged. And the night a big success—given my modest goals—it was time to close down. What that involve? Clicking on the picture of the SeeStar in the app and sliding the shutdown thingie to shut-her-down. By the time I got outside, Suze had folded herself up, turned off her dew heater, and killed main power. I grabbed her and her tripod in one go, took her inside, put her on charge, and settled back on the couch where I had spent the evening. Time for a mite more TV-watching with Thomas Aquinas, Chaos Manor South’s resident black cat.

That wasn’t all. I was pretty darned happy about what The Suze and I had accomplished (the above actually recounts three separate nights under the sky) in pretty short order. Suzie was enjoying a nice shot of 5-volt current, so I thought I’d allow myself a touch of the ‘Yell as my reward. Not that I’d felt like I’d done much. The scope did most of the work. And you know what? At this stage of the game I am just OK with that, muchachos.

Up Next:  The Big Eclipse. If it’s clear. Hope it is. Don’t want to jinx myself.

Eclipse morning at Chaos Manor South.

Ah, yes, THE GREAT AMERICAN ECLIPSE How did it play out down here in the Swamp? The night before as I sat on the couch with the felines watching a rerun of a (Bob Heil) Ham Nation episode on the YouTube, I wasn’t feeling overly excited. The weather forecast for Possum Swamp did not look good. No, not good at all:  Clouds, unrelenting clouds. Maybe rain. 

In fact, eclipse day forecasts had sounded lousy for weeks. Not much hope for us—nor for more than a few points west into the path of totality. That was OK; I’d long ago decided to sit this one out. In these latter days, I’m just not up for long drives and trying to find a $250-a-night room at the freaking Motel 6. Anyhoo, I planned to go to bed when I got tired, wake up when I felt like it Monday morning, prepare to teach my afternoon and evening classes at the university, and not spend much time worrying about eclipses.  

Not that I wouldn’t try to see SOMETHING. I had a secret weapon. A special sort of telescope, a ZWO SeeStar S50 smart telescope. Despite the somewhat corny name, this little device is making waves amongst those interested in such things for its ability to take pictures of things in the sky—Sun, Moon, galaxies, nebulae, star clusters—with amazing clarity and to do that cheaply and easily. That, a couple pairs of eclipse glasses for me and Miss Dorothy, and that would be it for our eclipse expedition to the backyard. 

What’s involved in taking pictures of the Sun with the SeeStar S50? Not much. Level the camera tripod. Put the scope on it. Push the power button. When the scope says, “Power on! Ready to connect!” Open the SeeStar app on your smartphone, click “connect,” click “Solar,” and the scope will unfold itself and tell you to attach the (included) solar filter. It then finds, centers, and tracks the Sun on its own. 

You don’t have to stay outside with the SeeStar; once you turn on the scope, you can retire inside with your smartphone. In the SeeStar’s normal “station” mode, it communicates with your smartphone through your home network. It also has considerable built-in memory and is, yeah, a smart little telescope.

Inside, sitting on the couch with Miss D, the scope was delivering a live view of the Sun on my phone. You can just watch that. Or you can take still photos the scope will send to your phone. Or you can take videos and time-lapse sequences that are stored in the telescope’s onboard memory for later retrieval. I had intended to do a time-lapse of the whole eclipse, but it looked like the clouds would make that futile. 

Just before eclipse time, though, there was a little more clearing. Oh, it was obvious we were still looking through a layer of clouds, but the Sun was brighter and suddenly I could see a missing chunk that signaled the Great American Eclipse had begun.

I went outside occasionally and looked up at Sol with eclipse glasses but could definitely see more on the iPhone. Not that we were seeing much. A little here, a little there. Just enough to tempt and tantalize. I did take some stills and a short video (posted on the W4IAX Facebook page), but they were really not much. Better than nothing? Sure. More than I’d expected to get? Definitely.

Suzie's M13

Summertime, summertime, sum-sum-summertime!

“After what, Unk? Wut you talkin’ ‘bout now? Too much Yell last night? Did you bump your head gettin’ outa bed? What?” Simple, Skeeter:  my yearly quest to image that greatest of all Northern Hemisphere globular star clusters, Messier 13. That is a long-running astronomy ritual with your old Uncle. Like my annual Christmas Eve observation of M42. Weather ‘n stuff conspired to make me miss the Big Glob last annum, and I wasn’t gonna let that happen again this year; I’d get started as soon as possible, like RIGHT AWAY.

The only question was “How would I get M13?”  The last decade, the answer has been “As easily as possible.” Yeah, some years I’d drag out big mount, SCT, computer, and CCD and go whole hog, but those years became fewer as I hit my mid-60s. Mucho fewer. And soon enough, the days of setting up my SBIG CCD on a C11 were gone forever. As the years roll on, and the gear seems to get heavier and the spring and summer nights ever hotter, I've looked for ways to corral ol’ Herc (or whatever) without busting a gut or being a sweat-drenched wreck at the end of the run.

The first Quick and Dirty approach I took to M13 was video, deep sky video. As y’all know, during the years of The Herschel Project, I was all about video. So, it seemed a natural to go after M13 that-a-way. No guiding. I could even use an alt-azimuth mounted scope. The original Stellacam (analog black and white video and <10-second exposures) did a credible job.

The Mallincam Xtreme that followed it was better still with less noise and longer exposures. But while I didn’t have to worry about guide scopes and polar alignments, that was still a load of gear:  scope, mount, camera, cables, monitor, digital video recorder, etc. There was also no denying the results didn’t look that great. Oh, the videos looked pretty good, and the still frames from them were acceptable. But attractive? Not really.  I looked for that much wished-for and sought-after Better Way.

At about this time, quite a few refugees from the analog deep sky video scene began experimenting with a similar imaging mode. This was short-exposure imaging with digital cameras. CCD cams, DSLRs, you name it. The idea was to take a bunch of short—as in 10 - 15 seconds or so—exposures and stack them together in the usual way. I was rather skeptical of the idea, thinking that at a minimum 2 – 3-minute subs were required for a decent image.

However, I had a camera suitable for experimentation—my ZWO ASI 120mc color planetary camera. While I could have used an alt-azimuth scope for my testing, I chose to put the OTA on an equatorial. I figured that would eliminate noise and other trouble from field rotation and would give the short-sub idea its best chance at success.

And away we went. The C8-on-a-GEM setup was a slight pain, but not too bad. Soon my old Ultima 8 OTA, Celeste, was riding on the CG5 with the li’l ZWO cam on the rear cell. Other than that, I had a laptop set up on the deck running the amazingly versatile FireCapture software, which is just as much at home saving single exposure frames of a deep sky object as it is planetary .avi files.

M13? Easy as fallin’ off a log. As you can see in the image here, M13 with the 120mc is considerably better than the inset longer exposure (1-minute subs) of my stacked Meade DSI image from many a Moon ago. I was pleased. But I put the ZWO away and never came back to it for the deep sky. Instead, I took to doing my yearly M13 with an 80mm APO and a DSLR. That was easy to do, but f/6 80mm plus DSLR frame size produced a rather miniscule M13. In retrospect, I could have gotten better images with my ZWO and the little refractor.

That has been the story the last several years. Me using a small, short refractor and a DSLR to do the Great One. Was I satisfied with the images? No. As above, M13 was just too small, and the 80 APO and DSLR were not well-suited for the suburban environment. That’s where my Yearly M13 came to rest for a while, but that was then, ladies and gentlemen. This is now.

What is different now when it comes to taking decent deep sky images easy-peasy? Do I even have to tell you? It is the coming of the smart telescope.  I’ve talked about my little ZWO scope frequently here—I am very fond of her. She's not perfect. Some of the images are better than others, I’ve observed, and it’s not always clear why. Oh, no doubt you could achieve more consistency as far as perfect stars in every shot by downloading individual sub-frames and stacking ‘em yourself. I choose not to do that because I am rather lazy these days and find the stacked .jpgs Suzie delivers to my phone almost always more than acceptable.

When I thought it was dark enough to begin, I trotted out, turned Suze on, connected to her with the iPhone, and used the manual altitude slewing buttons (a recent addition to the app) to raise the girl’s little OTA out of parked position. The reason for that was so I could install a dew shield I’d purchased. Not because of dew, though. The scope’s built-in dew heater has always kept that at bay, but I wanted to block some of the ambient light that inevitably intrudes into a suburban backyard. I thought images would look better with minimal processing without the gradients the neighbors’ yard lights inevitably cause.

Which dew shield? Where do you get such a thing for the SeeStar? Take a stroll through the eBay. You’ll find a surprising number of sellers offering dew shields and other plastic 3D-printed SeeStar accessories. I got mine from an outfit called “West Coast Astro.” On the plus side, it is reasonably attractive and works fine. On the minus side? I couldn’t use it the first night after I received it; it wouldn’t fit the SeeStar. I had to do some sanding of the barrel. Not a lot, just a little and then it was fine. On the plus side again? The seller included a bag of Haribo gummies in the box—just like Adrian of Adrian’s Digital Basement often receives in his Mail Call packages… so I was placated.

Me turning on the Suze, connecting to her with iPhone, and installing the dew shield was the extent of my night under the stars. How do I feel about that? I’m not sure. There is certainly something to be said about a calm and peaceful night under the shimmering stars of spring. Instead, I spent the balance of the evening on the couch in the den with Tommy, Chaos Manor South’s resident black cat, watching the aforementioned Adrian’s Digital Basement to the accompaniment of cold 807s (me) and ‘nip (Tom). It was relaxing, yeah, but decidedly lacking that “romance of an evening under the stars.”

On the other hand…  An imaging run done the conventional way is usually spent staring at a laptop screen rather than the stars. What I shoulda done, I guess, was grab the Burgess 16x70 binoculars and do a little bino tour while Suzie did her thing. Next time, perhaps. And I will admit that even purely visual observing ain’t always a picnic. Heat. Bugs. More heat. Dew. Sweat. And, when I was a young’un, the sneaking suspicion THE VISITORS might pounce on me as I stared into my Ramsden. In other words, some, not all, but some, spring/summer visual observing runs are better to relive in fond memory than to experience.

Postscript:

This past week I got Suzie out for a longer go at the Bigun. 15 minutes does produce decent images with the SeeStar but doubling that to 30 minutes makes the shots look a little smoother and more finished. Half an hour is what I aim for when I am granted clear skies for that long. When M13 was done, I shot M92, too, which also looked right nice.

Before shutting down, I devoted a couple of minutes to The Turtle, NGC 6210. As I’d feared, it was pretty small in a 50mm f/5, so I cut things short and shut ‘er down. In retrospect, I should have given Suzie more time on the nebula. It’s possible that in a longer exposure, I could have picked up a trace of the two ansae, the nebulous extensions on either side of the disk. I didn’t, so all I got was a little green ball. Next time, maybe.

And that, muchachos, is one of the things that has kept me in this business nearly 60 years down the line. There is always that Next Night to look forward to...

There were times in the decades I lived downtown at the original and storied Chaos Manor South that collecting and dreaming about new Astrostuff was almost my sole focus in the hobby. It was often all I could do night-by-night. I was lucky to get out to a dark site once a month, and what I could see from my oak-enshrouded backyard was limited to say the least.

How things have changed. It seems I am back to observing with telescopes rather than collecting them. And that is observing in a relaxed fashion. When you have a decent—if not perfect—suburban backyard as I do at the new Chaos Manor South, you don’t feel as pressured to go pedal-to-the metal every time you are out under the night sky.

But that’s not the only reason. Post pandemic, it’s no secret there’s less of that astrostuff tobuy (Taken a stroll through the astromag ad pages lately?) and what there is is more expensive and often backordered. There have been some interesting advances over the last few years, nevertheless, like the rise of the smartscope and black boxes like ZWO’s ASIAIR, both of which make astro-imaging into a new ballgame. But we no longer wait breathlessly for the next ginormous Meade technicolor catalog extravaganza. That sort of amateur astronomy appears to be in the rearview mirror.

There’s also the ME factor. As in, I am a different me than I was when I retired in 2013. When we left ol’ Chaos Manor South, all, it seemed, would go on as it had the past two decades. I’d just transfer the contents of the Massive Equipment Vault to the new manse. Then, shockingly, your Old Uncle began to realize he was tired. Tired of ALL THE STUFF. Now that I could use telescopes, it seemed I was more interested in doing that than worrying about what, if anything, might come next. And, so, I began to thin the telescope herd…

Tanya the Rescue Scope

That’s a good question, Skeeter. I could go on about the lovely APOs I still have, and the beautiful Losmandy mount, yadda, yadda, yadda. That would be whistling past the graveyard, though. The only time any of that gets pulled out is when I need it for a Sky & Telescope assignment. I don’t choose to use it because I want to use it.

What do I use first and foremost? A pair of 15x70 binoculars I bought from the late (that is hard to believe) Bill Burgess twenty-one years ago. If there’s a more versatile pair of glasses than 15x70s (or so), I don’t know what it is. They offer good aperture, but also enough magnification to keep compromised suburban skies on the dark side. Also, they are still handholdable—if a slight pain for extended use. I have numerous pairs of binoculars, from exquisite 35mms all the way up to 100mm giants. None get used other than the 15x70s. The Burgess binoculars are what I will and do use.

When I want or need to use a telescope? If I’m lazy and/or need wide fields, the scope I grab ‘n go with is one I would have laughed at 20 years ago. I am talking about Tanya, the Rescue Telescope. She is a 4.5-inch Celestron Newtonian with a focal ratio of f/5.2 and a spherical mirror. She is perched on an alt-az fork on a spindly extruded aluminum tripod, the kind I used to preach against those decades ago. Why would your Old Uncle use a Department Store telescope? Why would I allow one in my presence?

That is simple. When I want to see something, whether a planet, or a deep sky object, or the latest comet, or whatever I use Tanya because she works. The way I want a scope to work. She sits in my radio shack/workshop of the telescopes, the Batcave, near the door and is ready to go at a moment’s notice. Oh, she takes a little while to acclimate, but by the time I’ve rounded-up a box of 1.25-inch eyepieces she is ready to run. When I am done, or if the sky clouds over, or hour grows late (that is now 10pm) I can pick her up in one hand, tripod and all, and waltz her back inside.

“But Unk, ain’t the images pitiful?” No, they ain’t. Yes, there is a limit to the resolution of a 4.5-inch spherical mirror. At f/5.2 one approaches ½ wave of error. But guess what, campers? At 100x and lower her images are just fine. The Moon is beautiful and sharp, I can see the Great Red Spot, and Saturn is the detailed wonder he always has been. She will even go beyond, a little beyond, 100x without complaint. More than that and the trouble is more with her little mount than her mirror.

Miss Valentine

Of course, there are times when I want more. Specifically, a goto telescope so I don’t have to spend my night squinting up at the hazy suburban sky with a red dot finder when I am hunting subtler prey (which for me now is DSOs like M82, not some dadgum PGC).  And one with a little more focal length to make achieving higher magnification easier. As with the Burgess binocs, more magnification makes the field darker and improves contrast. What spells relief? 5-inches at f/15 on a goto mount. That of course is my old girlfriend, the one you’ve so often read about in these pages, Miss Charity Hope Valentine, an ETX-125PE.

I used to make fun of Charity’s sometimes varying goto accuracy. Now? I don’t care if she puts something on the edge of the field instead of smack in the middle (which she often does anyway).  I am no longer obsessed by such things. Her optics are sharp, dead sharp, and she has enough aperture to make most of the deep sky objects I visit, the bright and prominent ones, “acceptable.” Which is enough for me now, it seems. At any rate, as with the binoculars and Tanya, when I want more telescope, Charity is what I will use.

Are “telescope years” like dog years or more like human years? I ain’t sure. One thing I am sure of is that Charity is almost 20 years old now. There is the chance she will let out the Magic Smoke some night. I’ve taken care of her and done any repairs she’s needed. But it could happen. If it did, her replacement would be a six-inch f/5 SkyWatcher Newtonian on a goto mount. The optics are good, the goto is accurate, and it is controlled from a smartphone, something I find handy in my old age as I get lazier and lazier. Right now, the SkyWatcher gets out under the stars when I need goto, but a little more field than what the f/15 Miss Valentine can offer. 

How about eyepieces? Oh, I haven't got rid of any of them. No need to; they don't take up much room and most do get into a focuser occasionally. The same old crew is still here, ranging from time-honored Vixen Plössls to high-toned Televue Ethoses. If I needed more, I wouldn't hesitate to still buy oculars, but I seem to have what I need. Since the telescopes I use are 1.25-inch only, naturally the 2-inchers don't get pulled out often. Luckily, the Ethoses and Explore Scientific eyepieces I own are all 1.25-inch capable. "Come on, Unk. Which ones do ya use?" OK, I'll fess up. That's most often the 1.25-inchers in the old Orion eyepiece box. Those Vixen Plössls, some Expanse Wide Fields, and that wonderful König I bought at a long-ago star party.

Dang! Almost back where I started!

Staying on the topic of what I will use, but switching gears a mite to astro-software, there have been changes aplenty there as well, muchachos. Yes, sometimes I just grab the Sky & Telescope Jumbo Pocket Sky Atlas and use that to plot my journey. But I find I see more if I generate an observing list with software. And my aging eyes do find it easier to decipher a chart on a smartphone or laptop screen than on dew-laden paper. So, yeah, I still use an observing planner, if not the sophisticated sort I once did.

Back in the glorious Day, when I was decidedly more ambitious than I am now, I’d use huge and powerful planning programs like SkyTools or Deep Sky Planner to generate my object lists. Those are two wonderful pieces of software and I recommend them highly if you are more hardcore than latter-day Unk.  Now? The lists I can generate with the SkySafariapp on my iPhone are more than good enough. Click “observe,” create a new list, and start populating it with objects, all with a few touches of the iPhone screen. No, it ain’t got the power of DSP or SkyTools, but—soundin’ like that proverbial broken record—it is what I will to use and is mostly all I do use.

I don’t just use SkySafari for list-making, either. I use it for almost everything astronomical ‘round here. As y’all may know, I’ve at least tried just about every piece of astronomy software from Sky Travel(Commodore 64) onward that has come down the ol’ pike. All the biggies. And I’ve loved many of them and found many of them indispensable for our pursuit. Now, though, SkySafari does what I need, does it well, and is beautiful.

I do love me some SkySafari!

When I finally got tired of dumb old Winders and got myself a MacBook Air M2, I thought, “Well, dang, now I can get the Mac version of SkySafari!” Alas, the Mac page at the maker’s, Simulation Curriculum’s, site was gone. The program was still apparently available in the app store but had not been updated in years. What the—?  I temporarily gave up the idea of SkySafari on a laptop and loaded up the Mac flavor of Stellarium.

Then, recently, I decided to do some research about SkySafari on the Mac. The gist of it? Seemed as how the old Mac SkySafari was dead. As dead as theIntel Macintoshes. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t have SkySafari for my Mac, it ‘peared. Many iOS apps now run jus’ fine on the new Macs, the Silicon Macs (machines with an Apple M1 processor or better). Was it possible I could run SkySafari Pro on my Apple Computer, my M2? ‘Deed it was.

For less than 20 bucks I could download SkySafari Pro from the Mac app store. Which I did. After it installed? SHAZAM! There was my favorite astroware on a big(ger) screen and looking pretty—awful pretty! I haven’t had a lot of time to play with it yet but suffice it to say it seems to work great on the Mac, looks beautiful, and, not surprisingly, seems to have every feature of the iPhone app (which is what it really is, after all).

Anyhoo, there you have it. That short list is the astronomy tools I use, binoculars, a couple of smallish telescopes, my iPhone, and a laptop once in a while. But I’m keeping on trucking, onward and upward as they say, whoever “they” are.

And what’s onward from here? This installment was supposed to cover my reobservation of the objects in Coma from my book, The Urban Astronomer’s Guide. The “Tresses of Berenice” chapter, that is. Urania had other ideas, keeping her sky veiled down here in the Swamp night after night. Coma is sinking now, and I hope I get a shot at it before the Gulf storms begin spinning up. Yay or nay, though, I’ll be back here next month with more of my down-home astro-foolishness...

Excelsior.

As with many of Unk’s birthdays, this one combined “space” (as in building a new model Launch Umbilical Tower to go with my recent Airfix Saturn V build), Mexican food, ham radio, and a sizable portion of amateur astronomy. Actually, the amateur astronomy got done the evenings prior to and immediately following the big day, since I knew I’d likely be tuckered out from activating a park for Parks on the Air and too full of Tex-Mex chow and margaritas to even think about taking a telescope into the backyard…

Indeed, I was. We had a great time at Park US-1042, Gulf Shores State Park, but oh-was-it-hot. We made 40 CW QSOs with my new Yaesu FT-891 in just over an hour, and that was enough. It was crazy hot, even under a picnic pavilion and even with the constant sea-breezes blowing. Back home, I dumped the sand out of my Crocs, spiffed up a little, and made tracks for Unk’s longtime fave Mexican place, El Giro’s. Many margaritas cooled me off, and I was soon ready to tuck into my unwavering birthday fare, the famous #13.  A little TV with the felines thereafter, and it would be night-night time. I’d hit the backyard the next eve.

If you are a long-time reader of the Little Ol’ AstroBlog from Chaos Manor South, you know five years ago, it had almost run up on the rocks. In 2019, there was but one new post—and not until the end of December of that year! An accident the Rodster suffered at the beginning of ‘19, and the lingering effects of a rather un-looked for early retirement almost spelled curtains for theNews from Possum Swamp.

I got back in the saddle as 2020 came in—I found I still wanted to bring the AstroBlog to you—and we are now on the reasonable schedule of one issue per month. At my age and with my physical infirmities, I don’t travel as much as I once did. I did make it back to one star party last year and hope to do so again this fall. But…  No longer traveling from star party to star party like a demented Johnny Appleseed means I don’t have as much to tell you about. It sure ain’t like 2016, the year I did so many events a friend of mine started calling the annum “Uncle Rod’s Farewell Tour.”

Not being hither and yon much and having cut back on my astro-gear addiction means the emphasis now is on observing. In part, that is choice. I just don’t need (and don’t want to spend on) more and more astro-goodies. In part that is necessity. Post-pandemic, there ain’t as much astrostuff to spend on. Mostly, though, as the autumn of your Old Uncle’s time on this world deepens to winter, observing is more important to me than buying. And most of my observing is now right back where it began all those decades ago,in the backyard…

And so, we’ve come to summer in Chaos Manor South’s backyard. This is a better time for me to view the spring deep sky objects than earlier on. They are across the Meridian, into the west, and out of the trees and the most egregious part of the Possum Swamp light dome. Oh, there are more bugs than there were, and it’s hotter and muggier, but at least Suzie the SeeStar, and my friendly old (don’t tell her I called her that) ETX, Charity Hope Valentine, and I, can get a better good look at the great galaxies of Spring.

The Number 13!

Nota Bene:  The imaging was done over the course several evenings, and the visual work on a couple of separate nights…

Do you have to be crazy to do deep sky astronomy in Possum Swamp at the height of a Gulf Coast summer? No, but it helps <badda-bing!>. Me and the girls, Charity and Suzie, did our best, but every evening was plagued by haze and often by drifting clouds. There were nights when it didn’t get much under 90F till near midnight.  Suzie’s exposure times were limited, 30 minutes being about as long as she could often go. Sometimes, Charity and I would cool our heels for quite a spell while waiting for the sky to improve.

M3

Yeah, yeah, I know, Skeeter. Messier 3 ain’t in Coma but in nearby Canes Venatici. So what? On any night it's above the horizon, I am gonna take a look at the ruler of the spring globs (not that it has much competition).  Honestly, I didn’t expect much. The sky was literally milk. There wasn’t a Moon in the sky, however, so Charity and I remained hopeful and went that-a-way.

One long ago Urban Astronomer observing run, I turned my scope to Messier 3 from the heavily light polluted backyard of the old Chaos Manor South. That scope happened to be my humongous C11, and I was amply rewarded: “MAN is M3 beautiful! 127x with the C11 reveals many tiny stars from the outer periphery of the cluster and extending right across its core.”

Beautiful M3...

Susie? As you can see, she delivered a credible M3, even with just 21 minutes of exposure. Despite the icky skies, Messier 3 shined on—yeah—just like some crazy diamond. Not only that, one of my favorite little “field” galaxies, NGC 5263, shows off its minute disk in the shot. The image, by the way, is nearly unprocessed. It’s just the .jpg that Suze sent to my phone after she stacked it. I adjusted levels a bit, but that was it.

M64

Hokay, over to tonight’s stomping ground, Coma Berenices. I began where Urban Astronomer begins, with one of the constellation’s showpieces, M64, the Blackeye galaxy.  When Miss Charity stopped her weasels-with-tuberculosis slewing noise and I put my eye to the eyepiece, there the Blackeye was. Well, the galaxy, anyway. Given the sky and the fact M64 is now getting down in the west, I had to guess at the black eye, the dark spot near the M64's nucleus. I thought I could detect it with the 15mm Expanse eyepiece, but that verged on wishful thinking.

Which was really not much different from what I’d seen with my 6-inch Newtonian and younger eyes those years ago at Chaos Manor South: “I convinced myself I saw evidence of the black eye, but, in truth, I’m not sure if I saw it or not. It’s incredibly subtle in this aperture in the light pollution…”  Wanna make the dark feature pop out in the suburbs? 10-inches of telescope and high power on a night of steady seeing is what is needed.

It should be no surprise by now that The Suzie laughed at the minor challenge of the Blackeye. Not only is the feature starkly visible in her images, enlarging the picture and doing some processing revealed surprising detail. Other than cropping, the pic here is, again, purty much as it came out of the telescope.

NGC 4565

There are some deep sky objects that never look bad. Almost any telescope and any sky will give you something of them. That said, NGC 4565, the vaunted Flying Saucer Galaxyis a galaxy, and no other variety of deep sky object is more damaged by light pollution. Nevertheless, one spring eve I had a go at the ‘Saucer with my C11 downtown… 

With direct vision at 127x, NGC 4565 first appears as a round nebulous blob about 1’ or less in diameter with a tiny, bright star-like nucleus.  A little averted vision quickly reveals the edge-on disk that forms the saucer. I’m confident I’m seeing at least 5’ of disk on either side of the core.”

Blackeye lookin' good!

I was afraid Charity’s answer to “Have you see the saucers?” would be NO. My best girl surprised me though, turning up 4565 without fuss in the 26mm Super Plössl. That said, on this eve we didn’t get farther than the “round, nebulous blob” stage, and I’m not convinced I saw a trace of the nucleus, either.

By the time Suze set her sights on the Saucer, it was riding high, and I didn’t think she’d have much trouble with it. I did know that the higher an object, the more apparent the field rotation, but that isjust the way it is with an alt-azimuth mount. Anyhow, Suzie’s shot shows off the nucleus, the bulge of the The-Day-The-Earth-Stood-Still flying saucer, and the equatorial dust lane.  Zooming in even hints at irregularity in the dust-lane. NGC 4562 is easy to see. All that in a mere 25 minute of exposure.

M53

M53 is OK, it really is. But it definitely plays second fiddle to M3. Its main problem is it’s a little small. Resolution is not at all difficult, though, as I found with my urban 6-inch: “Round with a grainy, diffuse core. As I continue to stare…I’m surprised to see stars popping out at the edges.”

That must have been a way above average night. On the night me and Charity were given, the 5-inch MCT required 200x and some averted imagination to pull some stars out of the soup. They were impossible to hold steady and winked in and out like far-distant fireworks.

Charity’s rendition of M53 is pretty pleasing. 22 minutes shows a fine spray of stars and even shows color in them. But you know what? In some ways I prefer her 4-minute exposure. Almost as many stars, and a more even background.

Lurking near M53 is its little-buddy glob, NGC 5053.  It really is Gilligan to the Skipper of M53. It is loose, very loose, looking much more like an open cluster than a globular (a quick glance at its color-magnitude diagram, however, shows it to be a glob). It is not easy for any telescope in the city—I wasn’t always successful with it even with my 12-inch, Old Betsy.

I think my NexStar 11 GPS did very well to show a few of its stars and the vague general haze that forms the flattened body of the cluster. But it wasn’t much, no not much at all. In the ETX 125PE? Was it there or was it not there at all? I had a tough time deciding. Switching eyepieces, doing lots of looking, and using every visual trick in the book—averted vision, jiggle the scope, etc.—made me decide I’d seen some hint of this toughie.

What’s tough for my aged eyes isn’t at all difficult for young lady Suzie. Her 17 minutes of exposure gave The Blah-blah-blah Cluster (my nickname for it) form and substance. Lots of teeny stars. It made me wonder if a darker sky and a longer exposure could have made it look a little like a glob, as shots from good skies do.

And so, the hour grew late—as your aged Uncle reckons such things now—the dew began to fall ever more heavily, and it was time to wrap up my birthday evening backyard deep sky tour.  Soon, Charity was safely in her case, and I was again ensconced on the couch with the felines watching Project Mercury videos on YouTube to the tune of cold 807s for me and mucho catnip for them.

Postscript… RIP Charity?

The “Tresses” chapter in The Urban Astronomer’s Guide goes on to seven more objects beyond NGC 5053. Why aren’t they here? Because Charity and I did not get to observe them. Just as we finished with NGC 5053, disaster struck. I hit the mode key to select the next DSO…and nothing happened. I mashed it again…and hieroglyphics appeared briefly on the Autostar display before it went blank. I cycled the power, and it was clear the Autostar was booting, just no display.

Next morning, I opened up the HC cleaned the ribbon cable connection with Deoxit, reseated it, etc. No joy. It appears the display is gone. I am examining my options. I could pay a lot of money for a used Autostar on eBay that might last a while or might not. Buying a new Autostar/Audiostar is out of the question.

As you may have heard, Meade has gone out of business along with Orion. There’ve been no official announcements, but it’s clear these companies, at least under their current owner, are GONE PECANS. Even if they weren’t gone, the Autostar, like a lot of other Meade items, has been unavailable for quite some time. Sure, I could defork Charity’s OTA and put her on another mount… but it just wouldn’t be the same.

Miss Charity Hope Valentine 2004 - 2024.

“Wut objects, Unk? Wut objects, huh?”  Well, Skeeter, I’ve kinda been on a roll revisiting the chapters of my urban deep sky observing book, The Urban Astrnomer's Guide, so I figgered I’d keep on keepin’ on with that for now. Specifically, with the Cygnus chapter, “Star Nests in Cygnus.” The ol’ Northern Cross would be near-perfectly placed in the east mid evening, and maybe the weather gods would indeed show your ever-hopeful Uncle some mercy.

By “star nests,” natcherly I meant “open (galactic) star clusters.” They were a favorite of mine when Miss Dorothy and I lived downtown in the original Chaos Manor South. They were the one deep sky object I could see easily and well. “Opens” became something of an obsession with moi—one time I set out to view all the clusters in Cassiopeia visible with a 12-inch telescope from an urban backyard (recounted in Urban Astronomer’s “The Cassiopeia Clusters”). That’s a lotta star clusters, campers, but, amazingly, I wasn’t tired of ‘em after that binge and soon went on to survey the Swan’s clutch.

Anyhoo, after checking-in to the Mobile Amateur Radio Club’s Wednesday Night Net, I stuck my head out of the radio shack and had a look. As astronomical twilight came in, it was just as Astrospheric had said: “Mostly clear.” But that blessed clear sky was accompanied by haze and poor, very poor, transparency. Oh, well, as Unk often says, “Ain’t nuthin’ to it but to do it.” I’d see what Suzie could pull out of a milk-washed Cygnus.

I had set the SeeStar up on my old Manfrotto tripod just before dark. She was leveled (a good idea if you want decent tracking) and ready to go. All I had to do was remove the scope cover I’d put over her to ward off the errant shower—they can show up any time of the day or night in the Swamp. Mashed the power button, and The Suze intoned, “Power on! Ready to connect!”

Zelda.

The first target would be Messier 39, an old favorite located to the Northeast of shimmering Deneb. To get to it, I brought up the SeeStar’s star atlas on the iPhone, searched for and located M39, and chose “gazing.” Suze performed her usual initial calibrations, and, in a minute or three, headed for the cluster. Our target was obvious even in the short “gazing” exposures. As usual, she had placed it dead center in the frame. I started the exposures, ten second exposures, rolling in, and headed to the kitchen to retrieve some cold 807s (for me) and catnip (for the felines).

All Unk and the cats did for the balance of the evening was choose the next target when the stacked results Suzie delivered to my phone looked good enough. Given the conditions, I didn’t want to go too long. Also, I hoped to cover all the targets in one night, and, so, limited each open cluster to 10 minutes or less. With just a few minutes exposure, they looked purty derned good. I did go a little longer on globular cluster M71 and M27, The Dumbbell Nebula, my pièce de resistance for the evening. Suzie did a nice job given the conditions.

Anyhoo, that was part one of the observing for this one. The next morning, Miss Dorothy asked me if I didn’t miss being outside with the telescope, “Not on a night like that one,” was my quick reply, but, truthfully, I did miss being under the stars. That came some days later when we got another clear—if no more transparent—evening.

Into the backyard went the 6-inch SkyWatcher (who whispered to me her name is “Brandy,” which seems to fit). It was pretty much a semi-scrub. Out there in the humid heat, I refamiliarized myself with the SynScan Pro app on my iPhone that serves as Brandy’s hand control. Once I got the hang of it, gotos were fine, even with just a two-star alignment. But you know what? The punk sky conditions were just too much for the girl.

I was disappointed, but not much surprised. Thinking back to my initial visual testing in the backyard of New Chaos Manor South a decade ago, that was exactly what I’d experienced. Yes, of course the skies are better than they were downtown. On a good, dry night, magnitude 5 stars are visible in this suburban/country transition zone. On a dry night, which is something we don’t often get in spring and summer (and increasingly, fall) in Possum Swamp. On a humid summer’s eve, the heavens look much like they did from the original Chaos Manor South in the Garden District.

How much telescope is needed for rewarding deep sky observing under these conditions? The aforementioned testing showed that often even 8-inches wasn’t enough. At 10-inches, however, the improvement was marked. The deep sky went from “kinda icky” to at least “interesting.” It looked to me as if the visual scope for work from my backyard would have to be my 10-inch Zhumell (GSO) Dobsonian, Zelda, at least until summer wanes and some semblance of autumn comes in.

Miss Zelda is a great telescope with a surprisingly excellent primary mirror. No, she’s not grab ‘n go in any shape form or fashion, but it’s no problem to leave her outside under a scope cover in our secure backyard as long as violent thunderstorms are not forecast. The only question was whether I could still get her safely into the backyard without damaging her, myself, or both of us.

One mostly clear if hazy afternoon, I found the answer is still “yes.”  To begin, I cautiously removed Zelda from her rocker box—first time I’d done that in several years, I was embarrassed to realize. Heavy, but not too heavy; at least not when just lifting her out and standing her up on her (sorry, girl) rear end. Well, there would be a problem if somebody decided to push the tube over with a paw, which is why I locked the felines out of the sunroom to their outrage.

Moving the rockerbox/groundboard to the backyard was simplicity itself. There’s a nice big handle on the front. Then, I returned to the tube, lifted it with one hand on the rear cell and one arm around the middle of the OTA. It’s harder to describe than do but suffice to say that while I wouldn’t want to waltz Miss Zelda across the dance floor, carrying her ten meters into the yard was no problem, even considering I had to go down three steps.

The verdict? The tube is heavy. Heavier than I remembered. Eventually I’ll likely have to use a hand truck to get the scope into the back 40. But if I must do that, I will do that. The last 30 years, a 10-inch has come to be thought of as a “small” telescope. It’s not. One is a powerful performer on the deep sky.

Zelda mostly ready to go, I plugged in the battery pack that powers her cooling fan; she’d been in the air-conditioned house, and, while not as bad as it had been, the weather wasn’t exactly cool as the afternoon waned. Next? A little TV with the cats until the long, slow DST hours between now and astronomical twilight passed…

Nota Bene:  The order of the objects I looked at with Z was the same as in the book, Urban Astronomer.

M39

It took me a long time to learn to appreciate this galactic cluster, which lies well away from the Northern Cross asterism, about nine-and-a-half degrees to the northeast. On a summer’s eve’ as a kid astronomer, I’d maybe take a quick look at it and move on. All it was was a patch of medium-bright stars, with the more brilliant ones forming a triangle. It was soon in the rearview mirror as me and my fellow members of the Backyard Astronomy Society continued our fruitless search for the veil nebula with our long focal length three and four-inch scopes.

As the years rolled on, and I turned more appropriate instruments on M39, my opinion of this magnitude 4.6 cluster began to change. What’s “appropriate”? A scope/eyepiece combo that puts some space around this half-degree size group. Oh, and aperture doesn’t hurt either. Enough dark space to frame it, and enough aperture to begin to show off the magnitude 12 and dimmer stars that lurk inside the triangle of magnitude 6-range suns, and you begin to have something.

While M39 will never be a showpiece, yeah, it is something. How do you look at it? On this evening, it showed off plenty of stars in Zelda with a wide field 13mm ocular, but it just wasn’t pretty.  I knew the solution:  more field, less magnification. Inserting my 35mm Panoptic into Zelda’s focuser rewarded me with the, yes, awful pretty. All those dim stars higher magnification revealed had disappeared, but just as in Urban Astronomer, where I switched from a "big" scope to my old Short Tube 80 (mm) refractor, I thought it was worth it. With plenty of space around it, M39 it looks more distinctive and just better.

How about the SeeStar, Suzie? As you can see, she’s a mite field-challenged for this one given the geometry of her chip. Oh, she shows scads of stars. Everywhere. Yes, the bright triangle stands out. But the cluster doesn’t have much snap. It doesn’t pop out of the background as it does with a wide-field visual scope.

M29

Something puzzled me and my BAS buddies back in the day. There’s only one other Messier object in Cygnus, a rather lackluster galactic cluster that pales compared to some of the other sights in the Swan. Why? Who knows, and be that as it may, with M29, it is what it is.

Suze? I devoted a mere 6-minutes exposure to Messier 29, and that was all it took. Even in that snapshot, many dim background stars are visible across the frame that weren’t seen in Zelda. The cluster itself looks much the same; it sure stands out from the background. What helps this magnitude 6.6 group? That small 10’ size. Dare I say it? It’s almost photogenic.

M71

Despite titling this chapter “Star Nests in Cygnus,” I did take some detours, including to nearby Sagitta’s M71, which is 5 degrees south-southwest of its famous neighbor, M27, the Dumbbell Nebula. The only claim to fame M71 has is that while it is a globular cluster, it doesn’t look much like one, appearing to be a rich and compressed open cluster like M11. There was supposedly some debate over its status for a while, but I’m skeptical about that. One look at M71’s color-magnitude diagram says “globular.” And that is what it is, a (very) loose Shapley-Sawyer Class XI glob.

So, what’s it like visually? You’d think this magnitude 8.6 object would be as challenging as Lyra’s M56 or Coma’s NGC 5053. Nope, it’s easier with smaller aperture scopes due to its small, 7.0’ size. It was certainly visible with a 6-inch telescope on good nights. As I observe in Urban Astronomer, though, more aperture helps. In the 12mm Ethos in the 10-inch, it’s an obviously resolved little clump o’ stars.

In pictures, this wee globular is pretty and interesting if not spectacular. Missy Suzy easily resolved hordes of cluster stars set against a very rich background. You know what M71 looks like in Suze’s shot? It looks amazingly like the Wild Duck Cluster. But, no, M71, which I’ve heard called “The Angelfish Cluster” (?) in recent years, is a globular star cluster, y’all.

NGC 6910

And that exhausts the Messiers. What’s left galactic clusters-wise is, yes, NGC clusters. Now, now, don’t take on like that. Some of ‘em ain’t that bad, like 6910 which those long years ago I thought was, “A real surprise with the 8-inch f/5! Very nice indeed for a non-Messier…about 10 – 15 stars visible.” In Zelda with the 150x delivered with an 8mm Ethos, what was in the field was a scattering of dimmish stars around an acute triangle of 9 – 10 magnitude ones. As on that long ago night, there appeared to be around a dozen dimmer stars visible.

NGC 6866

What did I see when I took a gander at 6866 with my old Meade 12.5-inch way back in the 1990s (it seems odd to say that; lately it seems like yesterday)? “Beautiful field with the cluster looking like a miniature M39.” And that’s still accurate; that was also my impression with Zelda: a vaguely triangular shape of suns (I’ve heard this group called the “Kite Cluster”).  This magnitude 7.6, 6.0’ size cluster is another NGC open that’s easy to see.

Suzie did a nice job on this one in only 5 minutes. Yes, there are hordes of background stars, but the cluster is again easy to pick out. Maybe it even looks a little more like a kite than it does visually, with two curving arcs of stars that aren’t as noticeable visually forming the sides of the kite.

NGC 6819

This is yet another example that makes a lie of the old saw, “All NGC open clusters are the same—boring.”  The somewhat well-known Fox Head Cluster has a combined magnitude of 7.6 and covers a mere 6.0’ of sky. In the book, I pronounced it, “A very attractive NGC open cluster in the 11-inch Schmidt Cassegrain…looked more oval than square.” In Miss Z, the impression was, conversely, a diamond shaped pattern of many tiny stars.

Inexplicably, I didn’t get NGC 6819 on my observing list and, so, didn’t get a SeeStar image.

NGC 6834

For this one, we leave the “cross” area of Cygnus and head towards Albireo. Our quarry is a small magnitude 7.8, 4.0’ across group. My impression in the 10-inch Dobsonian was “small and dim,” and that was also what my old 11-inch SCT showed in the glorious Day: “Small and dim. In the 11-inch scope, I see a 5.0’ oval of faint stars…crossed by a prominent line of brighter stars.

NGC 6830

And yet another good NGC open star cluster glowing softly at magnitude 7.9 and extending 8.0’.  For this one, I again ventured out of Cygnus to another small nearby constellation, Vulpecula, The Little Fox, home of the abovementioned Dumbbell. In Urban Astronomer, I found 6830 to be, “Very distinct from the rich beautiful field it is set in. Rectangular in shape.” Today? Much the same. A vaguely rectangular or diamond-shaped pattern of a fair number of magnitude 9-10 stars and many dimmer ones. Oh, for some inexplicable reason, some call this “The Poodle Cluster.”

In the Suzie-shot, the cluster is identifiable around a diamond of brighter suns, but, admittedly, it is beginning to recede into the background. In the image it’s still easy to pick out but proceeding toward “not well detached.”

NGC 6823

This magnitude 7.0’, 10.0’ size group is involved with a large complex of nebulosity which was totally invisible in my urban skies. What was visible was a nice enough galactic cluster: “A nice medium-sized open cluster in the 8-inch f/5.” I also observed that the cluster looked like a miniature Scorpius. I didn’t see that on this latter-day night with a 10-inch. What I saw was a rather shapeless sprinkling of magnitude 10 and dimmer stars.

That is what I saw with the SeeStar as well. I didn’t expose for long, and didn’t use a filter, so any nebulosity that might be there wasn’t visible. I do note some star chains that give 6823 a vaguely flower-like shape.

Albireo              

I ended each chapter of Urban Astronomer with a double star. For this chapter, Albireo was obviously it. Now, the lustrous blue and gold “Cub Scout Double” is not an object for a 50mm f/5 scope, but Suze still did a fair job, showing a pair of strongly colored stars.

So…I saw some cool sights and found I could still (fairly) easily set up the 10-inch.  This night was a win, then, especially since I’d had a good time, and it had brought back some nice memories of my Urban Astronomer runs.

Next up? Another observing article, but we’ll give Urban Astronomer a rest in favor of something (sort of) new.

Set the WABAC machine for a decade ago. In 2014, your just-retired Uncle had finally wrapped up the vaunted Herschel Project and was looking for something to replace it. I thought that might be what I initially called “The Burnham Project,” and later “The BCH Project.” What I planned to do was observe all the objects in Robert Burnham Junior’s justly famousBurnham’s Celestial Handbook.

Well, not quite all of them. There are thousands of bright stars, variable stars, and double and multiple stars in the Handbook if you include the object lists that accompany each constellation’s chapter. A huge number of mostly pedestrian-looking stars would be a bit much, I reckoned, and pared things down, but even the resulting 800 objects began to seem to be that daunting “too much.” So, I thought I’d confine myself to the DSOs Burnham details in the body of each chapter in his “Descriptive Notes.”

That’s what I thought I was gonna do, anyway. Unfortunately, The BCH Project died on the vine. Why? The reasons I gave myself, including that I didn’t feel a “connection” with Burnham, weren’t really the problem. The problem was after three years of observing the Herschel objects like a madman, everything else seemed like small potatoes. Or, maybe even moreso, that I wasn’t quite ready to let the Herschel Project go.

What I really wanted was to relive the years of the Herschel Project. In 2014, my life was changing, and I sure did miss the go-go days of The Project—jumping in the 4Runner and heading for the Chiefland Astronomy Village (and Cedar Key) at the drop of a hat.

So, the BCH Project never did get off the ground. I did some preliminary observing for it and dropped it. I tried again, but no-go. I started looking for something else, some other big project. That failed miserably, as well. The truth, Unk eventually admitted? The Herschel Project was the big observing project of a lifetime, and there was no replacing it.

Today, my perspective is decidedly different. I don’t like to drive the Interstates anymore, and even if I did, there’s no bringing back the Chiefland of a decade or two ago. Latter-day Unk likes relaxed observing, both with telescopes and cameras, in the comforting surroundings of the backyard of the (new) Chaos Manor South. So, as I was wondering what to write about, I got to thinking about the BCH Project again…

The more I thunk, the more fun it sounded, and the more I came to believe I was awful misguided saying I felt no connection to Burnham and his Handbook. Just looking at the covers of the three volumes took me back to the early 1980s when I got my first copies from the old Astronomy Book Club. Between their covers were countless marvels and mysteries I had yet to visit. The deep sky was still relatively new to me, and I turned to its depths with a will. Now, the Handbook is delicious nostalgia, but not just that. Every time I read one of Bob’s DSO descriptions, he teaches me something.

So, the plan was… the plan was…  The BCH Project will be back—in the informal style that suits your now-aged Uncle. No time limits, no object quotas, no rules. It will be simple: When I want to, I will visit one of Burnham’s constellations. I’ll observe his objects visually with one of my instruments and image the wonders in my simple fashion.

Other than “informal,” what’s different from my initial go at Burnham? My decision the first time out to limit myself to just the Descriptive Notes objects won’t do. Some constellations, like Hercules, only describe one or two objects. So, in addition to the Descriptive Notes fuzzies, I’d also observe the choicer deep sky objects in each constellation’s accompanying list. 

Simple. Neat. No trouble at all (I hope). If there are objects in the list I don’t think will look worth a flip (like teeny-tiny planetary nebulae), I’ll skip ‘em:  NO RULES. I am now calling this series “Project BCH,” to distinguish it from the earlier attempts. I swear I will actually DO IT this time, y’all!

Up first? Everybody’s favorite hero and demigod, great Hercules. The night I took the images (with my SeeStar, Suzie) was relatively good. Hazy, sure, but mostly clear. Then came an intermission due to clouds while we waited for Hurricane Helene to pass by well to our East. That brought a spell of clear weather. Even one night (barely) good enough to impel your lazy old Unk to get his 10-inch Dobsonian, Zelda, into the backyard.

What was notable about that night? Other than the heavy dew? For one thing, I found I can still wrassle the Zhumell Dob into the back forty without much trouble. Oh, it’s not something I’d want to do every day, but I can still do it. What’s really notable is how I sent Miss Z to her targets:  with a cell phone app called “AstroHopper.” More about that next month (maybe); for now, all I'll say is it worked amazingly well, placing anything I asked for in the field of a 70-degree 25mm eyepiece.

Anyhoo, here we go (as above, I skipped the teeny tiny objects in Burnham's’ list) ...

What could I possibly say about this globular star cluster that Bob Burnham didn’t say eloquently in the 15 pages he devoted to the Great Glob?  Not much, muchachos, not much. While much of the science (though not all) Bob gives us is now badly dated, that is OK. The historical background makes reading Burnham’s Descriptive Notes more than worthwhile; it is a joy.

Unk? I did not take a separate image of Messier 13 on this night. After all, I devoted a blog entry to “My Yearly M13” not long back. Old Globbie did photobomb my shot of NGC 6207 and I figgered that was enough. He was looking good, though, showing colors in his stars and considerable resolution in a mere 15 minutes of exposure.

In the eyepiece? Well, it was what it was. Obviously, the 10-inch showed considerable resolution even at 50x. The sky background with the humidity spiking ever higher was gray, however, even at higher magnifications and didn’t make for an overly satisfying view. Yeah, it was what it was, but I have seen far worse.

NGC 6207

In the 10-inch, even on what was turning into what Unk calls "a pretty punk night," the Great Globular wasn't a problem. But NGC 6207was—a little bit, anyhow.  Ain’t run this one down, yet? It’s a little magnitude 11.65 SA galaxy less than half a degree from M13. Ain’t much to it:  bright core and a little elongated fuzz around that core. The main/only attraction is that it’s close to M13 and in the field with it in a wide field eyepiece under good conditions in a medium-sized scope. The saving grace here is the galaxy is small enough—2’30”—that its light is not badly spread out and it’s fairly “bright” visually.

Well, these weren’t good conditions by any stretch of the imagination. It took about 190x with an 8mm TeleVue Ethos to convince me I was even seeing 6207 on a worsening night (I was now having the fogged eyepiece blues). I saw it, though, if not quite in the field with the Great One.  Suze had no trouble with it whatsoever, even lending the little sprite some form and substance.

What did Burnham say about it? Nuttin’ Honey. NGC 6207 only appears in Hercules'“List of Star Clusters, Nebulae, and Galaxies.” As above, only two deep sky objects, M13 and M92, get Descriptive Notes. And yet, he goes on for 18 pages about what most of us modern observers would deem nondescript stars.  That is not so much a failing as it is just witness to the fact that Burnham’s book is from the amateur astronomy of another age.

M92

As I have often said, M92 ain’t, as some claim, a rival for M13. Even if it were in a constellation where the spotlight wasn’t stolen by an M13, it wouldn’t be top of the pops glob-wise. Let’s face it. It is more like an M30 than an M2, much less an M5. Which doesn’t mean it isn’t good. As Burnham notes, it shows resolution in fairly small telescopes—I’ve seen stars in it with fair ease with my 3-inch APO refractor at high power. It’s considerably looser in structure than brighter M13, making it easier to break into teeny-weeny stars.

Which Miss Zelda did this evening without complaint (I'd imaged M92 with Suzie not long ago, so we skipped this one). Not that it looked that great visually. As did M13, it appeared badly washed out in the eyepiece. But you take what you can get, campers. I was shocked—shocked, I tell you—to see how low ol’ Herc has gotten by mid-evening. By 9:30 local, M13 was barely 30 degrees above the horizon. If you want a last look at the Hero’s wonders, best get on it.

Did you know there’s another fairly easy globular star cluster in Hercules? There is, little (2.0’) NGC 6229, one of the objects discovered by the sainted Sir William Herschel. This magnitude 9.86 star-clump lies about 11 degrees north of M13. I said “fairly easy,” and the emphasis is definitely on the “fairly.”

The small size of the cluster is both a blessing and a curse. As with NGC 6207, it does keep it reasonably bright, but it’s small enough and still dim enough to be passed over if you don’t really pay attention to what’s in your field. 150x is probably the magnification to begin with. As many observers have noted, what this glob looks like visually is a small, round planetary nebula.

Visually for me on this night? I was purty happy just to see it as that “planetary nebula.” I have achieved resolution of 6229 from good sites under steady seeing, but there wasn’t a prayer of that on this evening. The Suze? As usual, she impressed, not only resolving some of the little guy’s stars, but even showin’ some color in them.

Hercules Galaxy Cluster Abell 2151 and NGC 6045A

I reluctantly passed NGC 6210 by. This wasn’t the night for the tiny Turtle Nebula. Suze doesn’t have enough focal length to show much there other than a fuzz-spot. Oh, I could have applied high magnification to the reptile with Zelda, but, strangely, on this very humid evening the seeing was poor; usually it’s the opposite. Onward to one last object, then. One I considered impossible all the way up until the 1990s, the distant Hercules Galaxy Cluster, which lies some 500 million light years from the Third Stone from the Sun.

The word on this object for amateur astronomers in the 60s – 70s? Burnham does a good job of summing it up with his caption for a 200-inch Hale Reflector picture of the (unnamed) cluster in the book: “DISTANT FIELD OF GALAXIES in HERCULES. A very remote group of galaxies, showing a variety of types in a single photograph.”

Certainly, by the 1990s, I’d seen members of Abell 2151 visually with modern telescopes and eyepieces, and I’d imaged many, many of its members with my old C11, Big Bertha, and my Mallincam Xtreme. But bring home the Hercules Cluster with a 2-inch f/5 telescope? Nah. “That’s just too much for you, ain’t it, Suzie?” She laughed.

You’ll find The Hercules Cluster to the west of the main part of the constellation and the stick figure. It’s near the border with Serpens Caput. I wasn’t sure the SeeStar Atlas includes the Abell clusters, so I searched on the most prominent member, NGC 6045A. Suze slewed that-a-way and began taking her 10-second integrations. Amazingly, 6045 was visible almost immediately, and more members began to pop in as the exposure progressed. Alas, by the time I’d got 21 minutes, the cluster was low and in the limbs of a neighbor’s tree.

And that was it, muchachos. It was miserably damp by this time. Luckily, my phone had been showing Zelda the way to targets because the Rigel Quickfinder and the 50mm RACI finder were completely dewed over (and I wasn’t in the mood to hunt up a dew-zapper gun and a battery). It was time for cold 807s and TV with the felines. Wisely, I didn’t even try to get Zelda back inside; that would wait for the morning…I was pretty sure disaster would have resulted if I’d try to get that big OTA into the sunroom in the middle of the night (well 10pm, anyhow). I covered Z, and I called it a night. 

Next Time:  AstroHopper.

Maybe. While clearer and drier as September came in, the sky could still be hazy, and there is considerable light pollution here at the suburban Chaos Manor South. Not horrible like downtown, no, but enough to make locating objects with a finder scope, much less a zero-power red-dot finder, a right good pain in the rear. I got to thinking I might want to put digital setting circles on Zelda.

If you’re a long-time fan of the Little Ol’ AstroBlog from Possum Swamp, you know I had DSCs on my long-gone truss tube Dob, Old Betsy. Sky Commanders they was, and they worked a treat. I think I saw more with Bets in the first year or two I had the ‘Commanders than I’d seen with her the previous decade. So, I started shopping. But it turned out ordering circles for the Dob wouldn't be so easy this time.

The problem, it appeared, would be mounting theencoders, the widgets that tell the DSC computer where the scope is pointed, to Zelda’s somewhat different altitude and azimuth axes. She is nicely equipped with smooth bearings and large tension knobs for altitude and a lazy-Susan-style azimuth bearing system, but those things make encoder mounting more complicated than with a simpler “Teflon on Ebony Star” Dobbie.

I did find a set of DSCs available with an encoder hardware kit for my GSO, but it was expensive, would have to be ordered from overseas, and it appeared I’d have to ship them one of the mount’s altitude trunnions for modification. All the way to Australia. That seemed like a deal-breaker to moi. I kept looking and found a digital circle vendor stateside who could provide encoders and encoder mountings for Z, but still…more than I was comfortable paying given—to be honest—the limited number of nights I observe with the Z-girl. If only there were another way…

Then, I ran across a YouTube video about that “another way.” It seemed there was a (free) program for smartphones, both iOS and Android smartphones, AstroHopper, that used a phone to replace digital setting circles. Unk was mighty skeptical, however.

Folks tried that years ago when smartphone astronomy apps that could find sky objects with the aid of a phone’s compass became popular. Oh, they worked well enough to point the way to naked eye objects but weren’t nearly accurate enough for use with a telescope. I didn’t imagine anything had changed, but I watched some more YouTube videos on AstroHopper anyhow.

Surprisingly, the consensus seemed to be AstroHopperdoes work with a telescope and delivers accuracy similar to DSCs.  I did note video posters seemed to have a range of results from “works great” to “well, sorta works.” Sounded to me like I should at least have a look-see at AstroHopper’s website, which I did:  AstroHopper - Web Application for Sky Navigation Manual.

AstroHopper (formerly known as SkyHopper) is a free and open-source web application developed by Artyom Beilis that helps to find objects across the night sky. It does this by allowing an accurate hop from a well-known and easily identifiable star to other fainter stars or DSO by measuring changes in pointing angles of the cell phone using built in gyroscope and gravity sensors. It is similar to Digital Setting Circles implemented in a smart phone.

Then came the hard part, figuring out how to mount the phone on the telescope’s tube. It needs to be secure and needs to be pointing along the scope’s optical axis. I had a couple of ideas how I might do that if ‘Hopper worked, but I certainly wasn’t going to go drillin’ holes in poor Zelda’s OTA without being convinced this was for real. The solution, then?

What came to mind was a smartphone camera mount for telescopes I’d bought some time back to take afocal Moon pictures for an S&T Test Report. Maybe I could use the phone-holder part of it to affix Siri to Zelda’s tube temporarily?  I taped the holder to Z with blue painters’ tape (to avoid damaging Zelda’s finish) using enough tape to ensure the iPhone would be held as securely as possible. I inserted my iPhone 14 Pro Max into the taped-down camera mount and called that “good enough.”

It looked wacky and Rube Goldberg-ish, and as a mild September evening came in, I didn’t have much hope. Hell, I felt a little silly, y’all. Nevertheless, I got Miss Z into the backyard, inserted a reasonably low power (50x), reasonably wide-field (70⁰) Bresser 25mm ocular into Zelda’s focuser, and got started.

I hadn’t installed the app on the phone yet. You don’t have to; you can just run it as a web page. Obviously, you have to have an internet connection, though, so if you plan to go to a dark site somewheres without a cell tower signal, you need to install AstroHopper on the phone (full instructions are on the ‘Hopper website). Anyhoo, with the web page up (it was in red-screen mode from the get-go), I set out to put it to the acid test.

When you have the app onscreen, you’ll get step by step instructions as to how to align AstroHopper, but in truth there ain’t much to it. Find a bright star near the object of your desire, center it in the eyepiece, tap “align” on the app, and touch the alignment star (or planet) on the displayed star chart.  Once ‘Hopper says it is aligned, enter your target's designation in a search box and you will be given onscreen directions—a line pointing the way and azimuth and altitude distance figures—to your object. Then, yep, just move the scope to the indicated spot and there you are. That’s what the app said, but, yeah, your skeptical old Uncle was skeptical.

Alkaid in the center of the 25mm Bresser’s field (could have rounded up a crosshair eyepiece, but didn’t), I clicked “align,” and chose Alkaid on the map. StarHopper claimed it was aligned, so I typed M13 in the little box and followed the app’s directions to the Great Glob. When it indicated we was there, I put my eye to the eyepiece, expecting absolutely nothing…

Damn! There was M13! Not centered, no, but not on the field edge, either. Howsabout M92? Boom! M57? There was the little smoke ring. M56? Looked better than I thought it would. I was frankly amazed. I can only suppose cell phone compasses and accelerometers have improved a lot over the years. And obviously Mr. Beilis is a talented programmer.

Takeaways? Having an alignment star reasonably close to the target object helps, but it doesn’t have to be right next door. As with many alt-az DSC and goto systems, avoid alignment stars that are near zenith. Also, if you let your phone go to sleep, you will have to realign. It will claim to still be aligned, but it won’t be. Finally, yes, AstroHopperworked. It worked as well as many DSCs and better than some I’ve used. Only aligning on one star and using a compass and accelerometers rather than inherently more accurate encoders means it doesn’t yield the horizon-to-horizon alignment of the Sky Commanders, but for my purposes it is good enough.

Convinced AstroHopper at leastworked, the next step for your old Uncle was ginning up some kind o’ more elegant mounting for the iPhone than fricking masking tape.  That was easy enough to do. The camera mount came with a knob-headed bolt that screws into the back of the phone-holder portion. I hated to take an electric drill to Zelda’s beautiful black steel tube, but if AstroHopper worked consistently, I judged doing surgery on the girl would be worth it as it might impel me to get Z under the stars more frequently.

I drilled an appropriate hole in Zeldas’s tube, and after I was done spent a little time cleaning up that hole with a file. Done, I inserted that knob-head bolt through the hole and fastened the phone-holder down. The result looked purty darned good, I must say. Now to see if my original success had been a fluke. Why not undertake “A Trio of Fall Globulars” from The Urban Astronomer’s Guide? The sky was clear, and all were riding high…

So, me and Zelda hopped from globular to globular under (once again) humid and hazy October skies. How did those globs look in the 10-inch? That, muchachos, is a story for next time. While it seemed I’d only been out under the stars a few minutes, the falling dew and the wheeling vault of heaven that had sent old Hercules into the horizon told me Z and I had been voyaging the sky for hours, not minutes. I reluctantly covered the girl and headed inside for TV and Yell with the felines (well, catnip for them). Need I say it? It was a good night, y’all.

The Comet…

Of course, your lazy old Unk saw the comet, but being lazy, waited till Tsuchinshan-ATLAS had rounded the Sun and got into the evening sky before hunting her up. A good buddy of mine and a longtime friend of this here blog, astrophotographerMax Harrell, got some lovely pictures from our local dark site. Alas, the evening he and some other fellers headed out there was my teaching day (and night) at the University. So, I had to be content with the front yard of Chaos Manor South, which offers a view low enough in the west to allow me to spot the visitor.

And spot her visually was about all I did. I scanned around in the correct area with my much-loved Burgess 15x70 binoculars, and finally saw…well…a slightly fuzzy star. My SeeStar, Suzie, laughed at me and told me to go back in the house and have some Rebel Yell while she fetched the comet. Which she did in rather impressive fashion (above) given the sky quality and the comet’s low altitude.

Next Time:  A Trio of Fall Globulars with Zelda and Suzie…

Thanks to the kindness of a friend of mine, Jack Estes, who is also a longtime friend of this here AstroBlog, and an amateur astronomer/imager extraordinaire, I was able to level up in the smartscope world. To the tune of Unistellar’s Equinox (the first iteration as opposed to the new Equinox 2).

“What in pea-turkey is they-at, Unk?” It’s a smartscope, Skeeter, you might say the smartscope that set the pattern for what these instruments would be like. Specifically, it is a 4-inch (114mm) reflector with its secondary replaced by an image sensor. It is made by a French company, Unistellar, which now offers several rather advanced smartscopes.

Other specifics? The Unistellar is as above a 114mm reflecting telescope, one with a focal ratio of f/4, meaning its focal length comes in at 456mm. Like almost all other smartscopes, it rides on a one-arm goto fork mount. Other than that? It features a Sony Exmor IMX224 imaging sensor with a field of about ½ degree. Also like her sisters, the Equinox is powered by a USB-C rechargeable battery and operated via wi-fi with an app on your smartphone.

That was what I had gleaned from talking to Jack, reading the manual, and watching cotton-pickin’ YouTube videos. That reading and watching (and downloading of the iOS app) done, Ibegan anxiously awaitingthe scope’s arrival at Chaos Manor South…

Your impatient old Uncle didn’t have long to wait. In just a few days, a largish box was on the doorstep of Chaos Manor South, and your decrepit correspondent had somehow manhandled it into the Sunroom, traditional staging area for new (or at least new-to-me) telescopes. I went to work, aided by Wilbur Wright, second in command of our feline detachment.

Being President of the MARC, it was incumbent upon Unk to be there, natcherly. I told Miss Dorothy, “Guess I’ll try the new telescope when we get home.”  She just laughed. Indeed, upon our return I was way too tuckered to do anything other than imbibe a few cold 807s in the company of the cats as we watched silly YouTube videos. “Tomorrow night, for sure!”

Strangely, the arrival of the Unistellar Equinox had coincided with a short span of cool and clear evenings. Only downer? There would be a fat Full Moon on the rise. I hoped to get in a few minutes with the Unistellar before Luna got too high. While Jack had provided me with some instructions to get me started beyond what was in the manual (typical of today’s manuals) and on the Unistellar website, I still felt like I was flying by the seat of my pants when I headed for the backyard with this sizable smartscope (still very manageable for Unk, nevertheless, at about 20 pounds).

Out in the back forty in my customary spot adjacent to the deck, I got the scope mounted on the tripod—by means of lowering its base into the custom-style head and fastening a couple of retaining bolts. Now to wait for darkness, which, thankfully, is arriving at a decent hour now that that dadgum DST has been turned off. Standing there in the gloaming, I had to admit the Equinox looked impressive—and a lot more “telescopey” than the oddly shaped (sorry, girl) Suzie.

Hokay, the app said I was connected to the scope, so this was rubber-hits-road. Next step would be moving the OTA to an altitude of about 45 degrees. After a bit of fumbling around to figure out Unistellar’s onscreen joystick trope, I got the tube pointed at said 45 degrees. Hell, y’all, I even remembered to remove the aperture cover! I gotta tell you I was heartened by the sounds the Equinox made as I slewed her. None of that old-timey Meade-style weasels with tuberculosis noise. The sound emitted by her altitude motor was sure and steady.

Next up? Time to do what Unistellar calls “orientation.” What I call it is a “plate solve.” Mash the appropriate button on the app, and the Equinox takes pictures and figures out where it is from the star field. It seemed to me this worked—near as I could tell from what the app said. Before trying a goto, however, I would need to take a manual dark frame, which Unistellar refers to as a “sensor calibration.” I might have figured that out on my own eventually, I reckon, but thank goodness I had Jack’s quick-start instructions.

The Equinox does not have automatic focus, so you focus manually by turning the large knob at the rear end of the tube, which I assume moves the primary mirror forward and back leaving the secondary (the camera) undisturbed. While the quick-start instructions Unistellar furnishes advise you just to focus on a starfield by eye, Jack told me to go whole hog in Bahtinov mask function.

With only a mite of fumbling, I found Altair in the app’s object list (the Unistellar app works with lists rather than a star atlas) and sent the scope there. The Equinox hummed reassuringly, headed in the proper direction, and soon had Altair in the frame. I centered up a little bit and installed the Bahtinov mask—a plastic one that is normally stowed attached to the aperture cover. As Jack had instructed, I used the onscreen live-view controls to make Altair pretty dim, and focused till the star spikes were properly spaced. Focus wasn’t far off to begin with, testament to the scope’s mechanical quality, but I could have done better. I should have zoomed in on the star a bit, but, yeah, I was excited. I got OK focus.

When the Equinox stopped, there was that glorious ring. Was it huge on the phone? No. But it was considerably more than the wee spot it is with the SeeStar. While Suzie’s ring is identifiable, good luck being able to make out the central star no matter how much you zoom. With the Unistellar, even unzoomed on the phone screen, I could see the center of the Ring wasn’t dark and make out there was something else there. Just a bit of zooming/cropping, as you can see here, delivers that central star detail on the Ring itself. Was I happy? You betcha.

Alas, wouldn’t you know it? By now the clouds was rolling in. I did do two other objects in quick succession, M2 and M56. One thing I noted on both objects? The exposures went quickly with no frames dropped. It’s normal for the SeeStar to reject a sizable number of due to star trailing. The Equinox’s tracking was better. In part, that’s attributable to the shorter 4-second exposures, but I suspect the gears are a lot more refined than those in li’l Suze.

Shorter exposures were not a problem, by the way, thanks to the Equinox’s sensitive camera. Almost too sensitive if’n you ask me. My single problem at first light was blowing out the cores of globs (as you can see, M57 is also somewhat overexposed. I didn’t have a clue about settings for exposures on this first night. Ah, well, NEXT TIME. And rest assured, you will learn a lot more about this amazing telescope in the future. And with that, Evie’s first light night with me had come and gone.

Evie? As you well know, all my scopes tell me their names. For some reason, I thought that would take a while with this one. Nope. As we were headed back to Chaos Manor South’s den for cold 807s and TV with the felines, the girl said,

“Hey, y’all! I’m Evie! Unk, are we gonna be friends?”

“We sure are Evie, we sure are!”

Note that the Equinox saves photos both in this format and standard presentation.

Next Time:  As has long been the tradition ‘round Chaos Manor South and the Little Old AstroBlog, next month’s entry will appear on Christmas Eve and will maybe be a mite more sentimental and briefer (well, maybe) than usual. See y’all then.

Nota Bene Department:  I had a request for the observing list from The Urban Astronomer’s Guide in computer form the other day. I rummaged around and found that despite the shutdown of the Yahoogroup that supported UAG with observing planner files, I’ve still got one. Specifically, it’s in SkyTools 3 format (which some other planning programs will be able to import). If you’d like a copy, shoot me an email at rodmollise@southalabama.edu and I’ll get the file on its way to ya.