Sunday, February 04, 2024
Issue 601: A ZWO SeeStar Comes to Chaos Manor South
Wow, just wow, muchachos… Now, admittedly I’ve turned into something of an astronomical Luddite who is easily impressed by modern technology. Hell, I’d still be using NexRemote if they’d update it to a version that would take advantage of all the features of my 10-year-old Celestron Advanced VX mount. What’s an ASAIR? What’s plate-solving? What sort of witchery is all that?
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.
Before channel surfing for something for me and Tommy to watch on the dadgum television, I thought I might point missy at "one more." By this time, approaching nine pm, many of the winter marvels were beginning to climb high in the east, putting them out of reach for a little alt-az rig. It was also feeling humid damp out in the yard, so I double-checked I had turned on the dew heater (nope). I took care of that, and, with the star atlas, began searching the eastern sky for a good target.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.
Sunday, January 21, 2024
Issue 600: Smartscope Revolution?
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 3rd 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.
Sunday, December 24, 2023
Issue 599: A Chaos Manor South Merry Christmas 2023
“What in the hail are you goin’ on about now, Unk? Ever’body knows you and Miss Dorothy decamped from the Old Manse to the suburbs almost a decade ago!” Yes and no, Skeeter, yes and no.” I have come to realize Chaos Manor South is more a state of mind than a place, no matter how much I sometimes miss that place itself and those grand old Christmases of yore on Selma St.
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.
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. 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.”
Sunday, November 19, 2023
Issue 598: When is a Star Party Not a Star Party? Redux…
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 9th
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).
Thursday, October 19, 2023
Issue 597: The Big Eclipse
Well, in a small way, muchachos. Not that it wasn’t a fairly big deal, but it hadn’t assumed much prominence in my reckonings in the days before the event. Saturday morning’s annular eclipse had been somewhat on your ol’ Uncle’s mind, of course. How could it not be? Every weatherman, local and national, had been talking about little else for the last week. And yet, and yet… I felt unmoved. Yes, it would be a fairly deep eclipse, around 75% of Sol’s face would be covered by Miss Hecate in the environs of Possum Swamp…but…yeah, just another partial eclipse.
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!”
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? I feared it would be 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!”
I was correct. When I paused for breath THIS TIME after pouring out my eclipse plans, 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 calm if 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 somewhat bitter 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.
Saturday, September 30, 2023
Issue 596: My Favorite Star Parties
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. 2022, the supposed last year of the plague? I had a relatively mild case late that year and I am not anxious to get it again. But…
I sure got sick of the fracking lockdown and am glad to be back teaching undergraduates in person. Dorothy and I made it through this year’s big Huntsville Hamfest no problem…so, what's to worry? Yes, I can still get skittish about crowds. But I think that is psychological more than anything else, and I can shake it off as I did at Huntsville.
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 never like in the days
of my 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 star-partier. By the 2000s, though, I was star party crazy and
you could find me on observing fields from sea to shining sea, both observing the sky and speaking before the assembled multitudes. In fact, I did
so many star parties as a speaker in 2016 that a dear 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.
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 it is focused 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 genuine friends. I
will also admit it’s also been wonderful to have a good star
party just around the corner, less than three hours from home.
How is it now? I’ll just have to go to find out, 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…
This one is long gone. Oh, various people have tried to revive it a time or two. And a semi-Chiefland was held fairly recently when a hurricane caused the Winter’s Star Party’s usual home to be unavailable one year. I will make no bones about it: I loved the Chiefland Star Party. Expansive observing field. Motels and (good) restaurants close at hand. Often outstanding skies. Hell, they had wireless internet on the field years ago.
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 enough star party…it just wasn’t the same. How could it be? The original 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.
There’s got to be a number one in everything, ain’t there? There are other events that might lay claim to the title of “The Greatest” when it comes to star parties, like Stellafane or the (now gone) Riverside. Most active observers will admit, however, that when it comes to deep sky pedal-to-the-metal, The Texas Star Party is it.
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 is 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.
If you haven’t heard of this one, you should have. It’s another Real Dark One with outstanding facilities. It is held on Spruce Knob Mountain in West Virginia, at the Mountain Institute facility there. Do you long for dark, DARK skies (only compromised, of course, by our weather east of the Mississip)? Do you want to sleep in a wooden yurt? Hear great speakers? Go. Just go. You’ll thank me later.
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 knows 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…
Tuesday, August 29, 2023
Issue 595: A New Way to Autostar Part II
Well, muchachos, don’t ever say your old Uncle doesn’t love you. It was hot—90F well after sunset—it was humid. There was a bad something brewing out in the Gulf. Nevertheless, I did not shy from the accomplishment of my goals. I wanted to get out and finish testing Digital Optica’s new Bluetooth module for the Meade Autostar. Secondly, I have resolved not to let a single month go by without an update to this here old blog, so I had to do something so I could write about something.
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.
Oh, those long-ago nights under the stars in an urban backyard! Yes, the light pollution was heavy. The Milky Way was utterly invisible—well you might catch the merest glimpse of it on a cold and clear December’s eve. I could make out M31 naked eye on any reasonable night, but that was as good as it got. I didn’t care. I was in astro-heaven. As recounted here, not only had the lovely Miss Dorothy recently come into my life, so had Old Betsy, a 12-inch Meade StarFinder Dobsonian. She was the largest telescope I’d ever owned, and I was amazed at what and how much I could see with her from downtown Possum Swamp.
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.