Random astro bits

Last Saturday I made a run to Vancouver Telescopes. It's an awesome store, with absolutely amazing service, and I can't recommend it enough. I came home with a few different things:

• My first Televue, a 2X Barlow. So it begins...
• A 6 mm eyepiece, 66 degree FOV; anonymous, but the same as the Orion Expanse
• A Cheshire eyepiece

I've done a little bit of playing around with the first two, but not enough to get really familiar with them. Still, they look good, and the FOV on the 6mm is nice -- it's definitely noticeable when I compare it to a 7.5mm Plossl I've got.

I tried out the Cheshire on Ranger, the 8" Dob, and man that was a revelation. I've been using a film cannister with a hole punched in it, and that worked fine -- but it was a very noticeable difference to have the crosshairs in there too. The scope wasn't too badly misaligned when I started, but it was a lot easier to get everything lined up than it has been in the past...having the crosshairs really shows you the effect of turning this or that Allen key. Speaking of which, next upgrade might be a set of Bob's Knobs...it would be nice to not have to use Allen keys and screwdrivers. Plus, for some reason the Skywatcher needs a 2mm Allen key for the primary, and an Imperial measure (3/64ths? Can't remember) for the secondary.

On Wednesday a friend of mine came over for supper; he's a coworker of mine from OpenDNS, and he was up from San Francisco to work for the week. (Side note: we're working on setting up OpenStack together, and it's amazing to have a partner in crime; it's also amazing to be in person and sort things out. Google Hangouts are great, but they're still no substitute for in-person infinite bandwidth. But I digress.)

He also wanted to see the scope, so we dragged it out to let it cool, then sat out on the porch after supper. We were able to see Jupiter: four moons visible, equatorial belts and south temperate belt easily visible. Then it was the moon -- 95% full, and a lovely set of shadows at the edge. He took a number of photos of both Jupiter and the moon on his iPhone; the moon turned out best, of course, but the pix of Jupiter showed a (sadly) overexposed Jupiter and four distinct moons -- quite a bit better than I've been able to do with Jupiter, and not at all bad for simply holding up the phone to the scope. It was a lot of fun, and I suspect he may be a candidate for a scope in the future...

Speaking of which, I'm going to upgrade this summer. My family and I are going to be spending a couple weeks at my parents' place, and it is dark there -- darker than anything else I've ever seen. They live 10 minutes' drive away from a village of 300, and the nearest big city is ~ 100 km away. My plan is to order a new scope and get it shipped out there before I arrive, use it while I'm there, then ship it back here.

I've thought a lot about what I want to get. A C8 would be wonderful, and the Nexstar Evolution looked really neat -- but it's a very new model, and the reports on Cloudy Nights indicated some worrying problems. A C8 on a GEM, or maybe the CPC, would be a good scope, but it's not terrible portable -- I would have a hard time observing with this on a regular basis here without committing to driving it around everywhere. A small refractor would be nice, and still relatively portable -- but it's still a small refractor.

In the end, I've setttled on an Orion XT10i -- a 10" Dob with Orion's Intelliscope (digital setting circles). It's relatively cheap, at about half the price of a C8. It's still relatively portable, especially compared to a C8 or some such on a GEM; there are lots of people who put these on hand trucks (as I've done with Ranger, the 8" Dob I've got now), and that'll help me walk it around when I want to go observing at the park near my house. And while the upgrade in aperture will be nice, I'm also really looking forward to the Intelliscope system. I think this will be a great thing both here (where light pollution is a problem), and in dark skies (where I will have problems finding my way through the embarrassment of riches!).

I'm tempted to get it now so I can make sure everything's okay (and observe with it, of course!), but I suspect that disassembling it and shipping it twice will be more trouble and expense than I want. It's still going to be a fair amount to ship it back, of course, but it'll be worth it to have it at such a dark site.

The last thing I wanted to put down here was about cooling the Dob. One morning this week I was up early, and brought out Ranger to have a look at M13 in Hercules. Before I got started, though, I took some time to do a star test with the new 6mm eyepiece and Rasalhague. When I defocused the image, the shimmering and dancing of the star's image, from the mirror cooling off, were amazing -- I'd never taken the time to look before, and it was like looking through the bottom of a pool. This was right after I'd brought out the scope, and I thought for sure I wouldn't get a good look that morning. I kept on anyhow, figuring that it wouldn't cool off in less than an hour and I might as well enjoy the view I did have.

Twenty minutes later I decided to try the star test again, and holy crap -- it was immensely steadier. It wasn't perfect, of course, but instead of constant rapid billowing, it was slow ripples. (I presume this would have been mostly the seeing right then, rather than from the mirror cooling.) I also noticed that if I brought my hand underneath the scope's front end, I could see the shimmering from the heat of my hand.

It was an amazing demonstration, and I wish I had thought to try this long ago; it would have helped me guage things, and understand what I was seeing (or not seeing) a lot better. And I can't believe the difference that only 20 minutes made...between that and the ability to see how much it has cooled, I am never going to worry my pretty little head about mirror cooling again. Oh, it makes a difference, of course -- but between the short time it takes to get noticeably better, and the simple fun and enjoyment of any view through the scope, I think there are lots of other things to worry about.