Another night out on the front porch, but unlike last time the
clouds did not roll in. Hurrah for that!
First up was M78. I think I tracked this down, but it's hard to
be sure; the nebulosity, if any, was very faint. Not a good one to
track down from Suburbia, I guess.
Next up was M42. This was my first good look at it through the 10"
Dob, and OH. MY. GOD. I saw a ton more detail than I've seen
before. Dark lanes & dark spots, a big swooping curve to the south,
and actual nebulosity with AV for M43 rather than just "Yeah, I think
it's there". The 6mm eyepiece really brought out the dark lanes.
Just amazing.
I looked up HD 34445. Why? Because it's got an exoplanet,
that's why; 0.8 Jupiter masses, a 1049-day period and about a 2AU
orbital radius. The star is 152 +/- 5 light years away, meaning the
light started off around 1855. Neat...but the fun was in knowing what
it was. Nearby, there was an asterism that was almost shaped like
an E, but seemed to have one member running away...this amused me.
Searched for OC NGC 2194, an entry on the NGC Finest list, but that
was a bust -- simply could not find any sign of it. Looked in the
atlas and saw that OC NGC 2169 was nearby, so checked it out -- and
it was absolutely charming. It's known as the 37 Cluster (though
I hadn't known this or heard of this OC before), but I immediately
thought of the Greek letters Delta and Sigma. It's only 8 million
years old, and seems bright for being 3700 light years away.n Very
nice.
Picked another random OC, NGC 2129 in Gemini. About 18 suns
were visible in the 6mm. It kind of reminded me of the Lunar Module
-- something about the sort-of-triangular shape. The sketch on
this page matched what I saw pretty closely. It's young (10
million years) and relatively far (7000 light years). NGC 1664 in
Auriga however, reminded me of a dandelion on its side. Faint, but
still easily picked out. It's about 3900 light years away; not sure
about the much brighter star right by it, but I'm guessing that one's
much closer.
Took a brief look at the Double CLuster (again, wonderful through the
10") and then called it a night. Not terribly long -- 2 hours all
told -- but completely enjoyable. And ZOMG is the Intelliscope ever
wonderful; there's no way I could have looked at as much as I did
without it.
It is a strange thing to be watching "The Longest Day" on Netflix.
When it was made, D-Day was only 18 years in the past. From right now,
that's 1998; according to Wikipedia, that includes a shocking
number of wars I didn't know about, but also the Kosovo War and the
Civil War in Afghanistan. It's not that long ago.
When I was a kid I played with toy soldiers, and enacted imagined
battle scenes not too different from what I see play out in this
movie. It's not so much that it was wrong to play like that; it's more
that I was so grossly ignorant of what that really meant. Trouble
is, there's no way to convey that to a nine year-old. There's little
that could have been different then, and little that could be
different now.
I have a habit of buying movies, the cheesier the better. But I also
have this habit of never, ever watching them. I've decided to fix
that this year. My plan is to watch them once a week, and write
'em up here...and then give them away to clear space on the shelf.
First up is "Black Rage", which according to IMDB is also known
as "Charcoal Black." I picked this up years ago in a Value Village,
or maybe Army & Navy. It's a VHS tape (ask your parents, kids) from
the good folks at Front Row Entertainment.
Side note: I'm pretty certain Front Row Entertainment shot their own
photo for the cover; the folks on the cover does not in any way resemble
any of the actors in this film.
Other side note: This film was also released as "Charcoal Black" and, in
Australia, "Catch the Black Sunshine":
The plot is simple enough: Two slave brothers, one black (played by
Chauncey "Lord" Westbrook, a jazz guitarist) and one black albino
named Sunshine (geddit?) (played by a Rutger Hauer lookalike, which is
basically the whitest sort of person you could possibly find), find a
treasure map. The overseer (played by Lurch!) tries to steal it
from them. They run away, so Lurch hires a drunken, rage-filled
bartender to help catch them. Hijinks ensue.
Memorable bits? Not many. The theme song, "Catch the Black Sunshine"
sounds like Nina Simone in an echo chamber if you squint (ear squint?)
but is apparently Mel Carter. During the chase scenes, disco
kicks in -- but with a harmonica and somehow a polka feel. There's an
extended scene in a backwoods moonshine joint with more insane
cackling than I've ever heard outside a Russ Meyer film. (My wife's
comment on this film: "It's like a low-budget Russ Meyer, but with
pretensions.") At one point the runaway slaves, hungry and exhausted,
spend ten minutes stealing a chicken and a bicycle, then lose both in
the swamp; the music, obviously sourced from Movie-Music-4-Cheap,
switches to something out of Benny Hill.
This tape (I said ASK YOUR PARENTS) has waited, stuffed in a milk
crate in the corner of our bedroom, for a long, long time to be viewed
in its entirety. It will now be set free. Fly free, Black Rage. Fly
free.
It has been a rare bout of mid-winter clear weather here. I couldn't
head out somewhere dark like Boundary Bay 'cos I'm on call at the
moment, but I could set up on the front porch. Sure, it's filled
with lights and isn't terribly private, but it does have the advantage
of being as close to home as you can be while still asserting that
you're outside. Plus, the Intelliscope makes it, like, really really
easy to find things.
First up was NGC 1514, a planetary nebula in Taurus that's either
600 ly or 4300 ly or some other distance away. This took a bit of
tracking down, since it was not immediately obvious -- but once I
started panning aroudn with a 15mm Plossl and an O3 filter, it didn't
take long to find. (Incidentally, I'm coming to love that Plossl.
Plossls 4eva!) Confirmed that I got it by looking at some other
folks' sketches. The Wikipedia entry says that William Herschel
discovered this (as he & Caroline discovered so very much), and it
changed his mind about the nature of the universe; it made him doubt
his own theory that all nebulosity was just distant, unresolved
stars. Neat!
Next up was NGC 1931, an emission/reflection nebula in Auriga.
This took even more tracking down, not least because M38 was right
close by and who doesn't want to look at M38? But at last I found it
(confirmed with this image from Deepskypedia.com), and it was
neat. Barlowed 15mm showed 2 stars; Barlowed 6mm showed three. No
sign of the extensive nebulosity other folks seem to see.
These two were on the Finest NGC list from the RASC, which means I'm
starting another list now. (4, maybe 5, out of 110 since you're
asking.) I also got in looks at M36/37/38/35 (no sign of that nearby
NGC cluster) and M42 briefly briefly briefly just as the verdammt fog
was rolling in. Boo for that! But yay for just five steps to bring
everything in and sit down.
The leadup to Xmas 2015 has been, um, slack...at least for me. Clara
has done so very much of the work, both because of my general
laziness/busyness and because I've been sick for a couple weeks with
flu. It has been hard to find a rhythm in all of this, a chance to
get into the spirit of things. (I may be an atheist, but between my
childhood and the excitement of everything/everyone around me I don't
even try to resist the appeal.)
Today, though, the day was finally here, and late though I was I got
into it. The kids, bless their hearts, were fine not receiving iPhone
6s in Rose Gold, or Samsung tablets, or XWii4 console stations;
instead, they were genuinely thrilled to bits with what they did get:
notebooks; games; pyjamas:
books; and best of all, digital cameras
from their grandparents that, it turned out, did creepy special
effects on pictures that delighted them because it disturbed us.
("Daddy, look at this picture! --Hey Arlo, he made that face again!")
I got the gift of beer from Clara and my parents:
Clara was happy with the donation I made in her name to
Options for Sexual Health (nee Planned Parenthood). I got to
make Apple Pancake, a staple of Christmas from my childhood, for my
own kids:
It wasn't exactly a Christmas present, but my father-in-law made me
wheels for the new Dob out of stuff he just happened to have lying
around the house:
Overall, it was a damn good time. And on top of that, I got to set up
the scope on the front porch -- first time I've observed in 2.5
months. I saw NGC 457 (ET Cluster, but I saw it as a spaceship), and
the full moon (wonderful view of Aristarchus plateau). A great day
all round.
Must be that time of year again...I've gone through yet another blog
migration, and this time I've ended up with Jekyll. Comments are
still static, and sadly generating the pages is slower than Chronicle
now that I've enabled tags and comments...but it's good to have a
change, and I was getting a little tired of Chronicle. Thanks to
karloespiritu for BlackDoc, the theme I'm using for the site.
Years ago, my wife and I realized that, with two incomes, we had ended
up in the habit of spending more than we realized. It had happened
without thought, which disquieted us, so we sat down and figured out
how much came in and how much we needed to spend. It wasn't anything
too onerous, and while we saved some money that wasn't really the
point; the point was to keep track of things, and to be on top of our
money.
The habit has continued, more or less since then. Periodically we'll
realize situations have changed, or enough things we've been meaning
to talk about have queued up, that it's time to sit down with the
spreadsheet again. A bottle of wine later, we've usually got things
sorted out.
This week has been unusually clear and cold. Every night I've been
looking up at the sky wishing I could go out, but it hasn't worked out
-- I don't want to drive, I haven't got the new scope set up with
wheels yet, I don't always like being on the front porch and having
lights shine in my eyes. But today I realized I could do something
different: go to bed on time, then get up at 3am. Let the scope cool
outside for an hour, then go out to see Jupiter, Mars, Venus and the
waning moon. Perfect!
But then the rest of the day happened. There were errands and library
books and grocery runs. By the end of the day I was tired, really
tired. I had a run-in with a virus earlier in the week, but
seriously? Then I realized: I'd blown my budget.
Thursday my wife and I had a big talk -- nothing serious, just a night
spent talking about all the things we talk about. We stayed up 'til
10.30, which when you get up at 5.20 every morning is not
insignificant. Then Friday we stayed up to watch "Master of None" on
Netflix and read in bed. And apparently, being (scare quotes) up late
two nights in a row is all I can handle anymore, because I recognized
just how tired and cranky I was.
I don't want to budget for this. I don't want to count hours of
sleep, figure out where to trade two hours here for three hours there.
I've made my peace, or at least stayed on the bemused/amazed side of
the road, with getting older so far, but this, this is utter
bullshit.
Busy week. The team is in town from San Francisco and we're all doing
agile training together. I just got off a week of on-call that was
busier than it has been for a while; I've got two retros to prepare
for, and on top of that there are the other bits of work I'm trying to
attend to. It's not the best week for thoughtful retrospectives on
behaviour and work habits, but I'm trying to make do.
Just spent half an hour digging around on my wife's phone to figure
out why in heaven's name our wireless bandwidth goes away when it's
got WiFi on. Turns out it's probably Google Photos backing
up...probably. This is what comes of buying Turing devices (phone,
router) that don't have a proper userland (and by "proper" I mean "has
tcpdump or equivalent").
November has hit. It's raining hard in YVR -- El Nino year -- and we
are getting regular warnings from the weather office about dressing up
warmly. I've taken this to heart by wearing two hoodies at a time,
because apparently I'm getting old and need some soup.
Speaking of which, it has been 18 months since I've brewed. I've got
some hops grown in my in-law's garden that I need to use up, and I'm
thinking of doing an extract version of my Dubbel recipe. Not
sure when I'll brew it -- Saturdays are getting filled up in advance
at an alarming rate, by which I mean more than 0 -- but it would be
nice to have some nice homebrew for the winter.
Random thing: My youngest son had soccer practice yesterday. He likes
it a lot. Last night there were fireworks going off near the park
where his team was playing. During a break, he tried to tell some of
the other kids that the people setting off the fireworks weren't
allowed to do that...but they were too busy clobbering each other to
pay attention. He tried to tell them again, but the fistfight was too
interesteding. It reminded me of my own childhood, not being able to
talk to other kids -- not having anything in common.. Then I thought
about how we see what we want to see in the world, and maybe that was
why I saw this. Then I thought about how this is exactly the sort of
thing I think, so of course I think it. That way lies recursion.
Couch: delayed. Will: still on track. Oncall: NOT GONNA JINX NOTHING.
I'm signed up for the LetsEncrypt.org beta! You can sign up too by
filling out this form (link taken from this page).
I'm seriously considering getting a Yubikey as well. This seems to
be the week of shoring up security at home. (Because I'm totally a
high-value target.)
My little DSL modem has crapped out twice in the last month. I may
need to replace it. And the old, old Dell laptop that the kids are
using (with Debian 8, natch) has started to make squealy squealy
sounds when it shuts down. And if I buy another wireless router
without tcpdump, you can kick me in the head.
I've just put in an order for a new phone: a Google Nexus 5X. Turns
out my current phone, a Samsung Galaxy Core, was something of a poor
choice; it's on Android 4.4 and will not be getting upgraded to
something without a stupid, stupid vulnerability this side of
Doomsday. I am not happy at all about having a computer that I cannot
upgrade easily. However.
I've been at OpenDNS (and now Cisco) for almost a year and a half
now. It's been really wonderful to be there; I still feel like I
really stumbled into something good. But after so very, very long as
a standalone sysadmin, there are some things I have to work hard
to pick up. And one of the biggest is planning.
I should start by saying this is a weak point for me anyhow. In
previous jobs I knew what needed to be done, and I could prioritize
that list -- but mostly it would centre around firefighting or
bootstrapping, because that had been my experience. I've come into a
lot of jobs where there was no monitoring system, no backups in place,
no idea when we'd be running out of space on the fileserver and no
configuration management. In a case like that, prioritizing is simple
and you chew through those tasks as quick as you can.
But what about when you're done? What comes next week, next month,
next year? It's not that I've ignored those questions...but between
limited resources (ie, me) and natural inclination, it's always been
something that's easy to put off. There were enough day-to-day jobs to
keep me busy, and usually one big project sitting on the horizon to
work toward. Budgeting was the sole concession to long-term planning.
Now, though, it's different. I have teammates, as I never get tired
of delighting in. I have a manager who's technical, and a director
above her who's technical, and I'm in an organization with other
technical teams, and we have a CEO (and now new owners) who are used
to thinking out five years. Put it together and you have the
resources and inclination to plan. What's it like?
It's a lot of paperwork and meetings, is what it's like.
There's a standup meeting every day -- fine, it's good to hear what
everyone's doing. Then there are planning meetings for the week. And
for the month, and for the half, and retros at the end of the quarter
to figure out how you're doing. There are tickets and Trello boards
and user stories and playbooks and wiki rewrites. There are town
halls and round tables (two versions!) that eat up an hour each. And
there's the inevitable lossage to interrupts, being on-call, potholes
and blockers, outages and their retros, catching up with the other
teams now that you've both grown enough you don't sit together
anymore, and occasional fiery meteors crossing the sky ("We're being
acquired!"). Put it all together, and it feels like you've got about
15 minutes in every week to do actual work.
That was my impression. But I'm starting to realize I'm wrong.
Surprise, it's the contrast with how I worked that's making this stand
out in my head. That's obvious, of course, once I lay out the
differences, but it has taken a while to fully believe that. The
other thing, though, is the value of detailed planning has not
always been apparent to me.
It's easy to look at something and say "I can see what needs to be
done." We're setting up a Foreman server; we need to have a
Foreman server when we're done. Case closed! But...what's done? When
you can install one machine in a janky way that you can improve next
week? When you can install any OS on any machine in one DC? What
about the rest of your DCs? And shouldn't it be tied to LDAP? Last
thing we want is one more bag of passwords...And privileges would be
good. And how are we going to get $CFGMGT on the thing?
If you're doing detailed planning, then you think about these things.
If you have a team, you can rope in help. If you are thinking out
further than a week, you can decide what needs to be done now and what
can come in the next iteration. And if you are thinking in iterations
-- a regular cadence of work, with a working thing at the end of each
period (for some value of working) -- then you can see the steps that,
in four weeks (say), will get you to Foreman with LDAP and multiple
OSs and privileges...and that multiple DCs will have to wait 'til next
month.
Are there still problems? Of course there are. If JIRA burned in a
fire tomorrow I would dance on the ashes. Meeting creep is always a
problem, particularly when people are working remotely. Things still
pop up and hit you in the face, whether they're fiery meteors or
sudden changes in direction. But I'm realizing, slowly, the nature of
the resources we have at our disposal (not just people but time), and
the value of using them.
I started this blog (checks git) thirteen years ago. Holy crap.
First entry was July 23, 2002 and was posted to my Slashdot Journal.
(Man, I miss Slashdot...) In that time I've switched from Slashdot to
WordPress to PHPWiki to a homegrown compiler to (checks Makefile)
Chronicle. Considering a change to Jekyll or some such...though I
should probably pay someone to actually design this site too.
Suggestions welcome.
What with scheduling and weather, it has been a long time since I've
gone out observing. My interest has waned a bit too, which kind of
worries me. OTOH, this is the usual time of year where it's cloudy 25
hours a day...usually by the time January rolls around, I'm ready to
go out again.
I've been playing with Chef a lot at $WORK recently and I'm really
coming to like it. Between the API the Chef server exposes and the
unexpected sense of relaxation that comes from having an actual
programming language to write in, it's been fun to pick up. I still
want to see a cage match between Mark Burgess and other folks.
Right now I'm watching my 9 year old son type out an email on a
laptop. He and his younger brother have emails set up at one of our
domains, and they've got a hand-me-down laptop running Debian, and
Thunderbird is set up to check their mails. They email their friends,
and sometimes their grandparents, and sometimes -- like now -- me.
But I've set things up a little different with them: I've set up
Enigmail, and set up GnuPG keys for them, and taught them how to use
it to encrypt and decrypt email to me. The passes on their keys are
silly, same as on the laptop, but it illustrates the point and it is
fun for them to have s3kr3t wr1t1ng.
This is all part of a big, sprawling ball of worry in my head that
stretches from now 'til their adult lives: how do I teach them the
contours of the world they live in? And in particular, how do I begin
to explain to them the surveillance they'll be under, what they can do
about it and why they should care?
Being a Free Software hippie, I'm in pretty much complete agreement
with Snowden, Greenwald et al: pervasive surveillance is corrosive and
morally wrong, and fighting back is important. But as much as I hate
to admit it, I think Benjamin Wittes has a point when he says that the
average American (let's lump us in with them for the moment) has more
to fear from
Chinese or Russian intelligence agencies than the NSA. (I don't
think he's entirely correct on that, and he's leaving out organized
crime entirely, but there is a point...buried under a crapton of stuff
I vigourously (read: shrilly) disagree with.) And while we're dealing
with informed POVs, let's not forget
Moxie Marlinspike's impatience/disappointment with GPG.
In the meantime: I make the most of the tools I have. I make it a fun
game, talk about secret writing and the fun kind of spies. And I try
to figure out what in heaven's name we're going to do next.
Tonight I went up to Seymour Mountain, on the assumption that the
forecasted fog would surely come sooner to Boundary Bay. I went
through one of Sue French's columns (Lacerta, pg 249 of "Deep Sky
Wonders") in a semi-systematic way; this is one of the first times
I've done this, despite having her book for a couple of years now.
NGC 6934: Faint glob, but obvious when I looked. The Intelliscope was
pretty much rockin' tonight.
NGC 6928: Maybe might have maybe seen this with averted vision.
Even with a 10" Dob, faint galaxies are still a challenge (read:
you ain't gonna see a mag 12 spiral no matter how small it is.) Spent
a lot of time trying to get this.
NGC 7006: Another faint glob. Lovely, though ghostly.
Uranus: Hurrah, found it! Boy, it's small. Still beautiful,
though. Couldn't track down Neptune.
There were some other objects seen, but those were the highlights.
Tonight I went out with the XT10i for the first time since coming
home. I did get some observing done, but this was really a chance to
get familiar with the new scope. For some reason this feels like the
first time I've really put it through its paces...I guess because it's
the first run-through of my usual routine.
When I was packing up the car, the OTA very nearly did not fit in the
trunk -- I figured out a way to wiggle it in, but it's a very close
thing. My assumption that it would be the same length as Ranger (the
8" SkyWatcher Dob, also 1200mm focal length) appears to be wrong.
This is definitely going to take some practice. The rocker box fit in
the back seat just fine, although I'm still nervous about the encoder
boards. I don't know how I'm going to take a passenger (ie, my kids)
plus this scope...good thing I've still got Neptune, the 8" Meade SCT.
I got to Boundary Bay a little after sunset, which gave me plenty of
time to set up and wait for the mirror to cool down. Eventually
Saturn was visible, so I had a look...gorgeous! Only 100x, and it was
low in the sky, but it was still lovely to see.
Right around then, a couple of Delta police officers showed up. They
were investigating a complaints that some duck hunters had been
shooting over the dyke instead of over the water. They admired the
scope, and when I invited them to take a look at Saturn they were
quite impressed. One asked what the power on the eyepiece was; when I
told him, he shook his head. "I trained as a sniper for the emergency
response team," he said. "We had some cool scopes, but nothing with
magnification like that!"
Finally it got dark enough to do the two-star alignment. I ran into
trouble with this: no matter how much care I took, I kept getting
truly whack warp factors: 17, 34...Finally I broke down and did the
encoder test, and saw that the altitude encoder wasn't registering
any change at all. I checked the encoder disk, and realized I'd
neglected to tighten the tensioning knob on that side -- so when the
scope moved in altitude, the disk didn't turn at all. That was easy
enough to fix, and when I redid the alignment I got a warp factor of
0.2. Yess!
And now to test! First I went for Saturn, since it would be easy to
verify it worked. Set the date, pushed...and right there in the 12mm.
Hm, how about M13? Done. M11? Done. M16? Done. M22? Done. With
all of these, it was right there -- no hunting around, no nothing.
And that was pretty much the pattern for the rest of the night: even
if it wasn't right in the centre (and most of the time it was), it was
still in the FOV of the 12mm (and sometimes the 6mm, when I happened
to have that in). There were a couple of exceptions: I tried viewing
M4, but couldn't see anything -- it was super-low in the sky, though,
so it's entirely possible it was behind a tree or something that I
didn't notice. The other exception was M81; it took me to the right
neighbourhood, but it was noticably off -- by which I mean outside the
FOV, and it took a minute of hunting around to track it down. This
was on the other side of the sky from the stars I picked for
alignment, though (Altair and Arcturus), so I'm not too concerned
about that.
By the time I was through all this, I was dancing around and
high-fiving myself giddily -- I could not believe how well this was
working. I took a moment to breathe deeply, then got to work actually
looking at what I was seeing.
M28: A dim fuzzy blob, low on the horizon. A hint of resolution
with averted vision that came and went. A new Messier!
M17 was obvious right away, even with twilight not yet over (it was
only 9pm by this point) and without the O3 filter. With the O3 filter
it was beautiful.
M23: At this point I switched away from my plan and just started
paging through "Turn Left at Orion". This open cluster looked
best in the 17mm eyepiece: enough magnification to darken the sky,
enough FOV (68 deg AFOV == almost 1 degree true GOV) to show it off
nicely. Two satellites passed through over in two minutes, going in
opposite directions; I followed the second one for shits & giggles
across a quarter of the sky, and the motion of the scope was just
wonderful.
M25: Another satellite passed through while I was looking at this.
I didn't record any other notes.
M8: the dark lane was easy to see, even without the O3 filter.
M20/M21: Very hard to spot the nebulosity in M20, even with the
O3. M21 was very pretty.
M16: Finally spotted nebulosity with the O3 -- haven't been able to
do this before with Ranger. Faint and better with averted vision, but
definitely there.
M31: Went to see if I could spot M110, which I've had a super
hard time with in the past. It was very faint, but it was there.
Hurrah! M32 obvious as always.
Saturn nebula: Obviously non-stellar and squashed shape, but can't
say I could distinguish much detail.
M15 Hint of resolution in 6mm.
By this time it was 10:30pm, and I decided to call it a night.
Teardown was pretty simple except for fitting the scope into the trunk
(again).
Post-mortem:
Alignment/push-to: OMG, it's amazing. Once I figured out the clutch
problem, pretty much everything just worked. This changes EVERYTHING.
Motion; a lot, LOT better than my previous scope. I was able to
follow things easily as they moved across the sky, even at 100X or
200X. I'm not sure if it's the handle that makes such a difference
compared to Ranger, the heavier weight of the mirror, or just better
materials...but man, no complaints at all.
Focuser: I've added Orion's dual-speed focuser. Travel is
smooooooth like butter, and the two-speed adjustment is a dream.. The
barrel extension is a bit of a pain when switching eyepieces.
Optics: Fine AFAICT. Things were fuzzy tonight with the 6mm (200x),
but that may have been either because of clouds or because I'd been
focusing on objects in lower third of the sky. Or maybe the
eyepiece.
The session: You can tell I kinda went crazy; I was definitely
drunk on power. :-) No, I didn't really stop to savour things (well,
except for M11...man, that just gets better and better), but I was so
very excited by how well everything worked.
What needs improving? A few things:
I worry about the encoder disks and circuit boards. Some kind of
cover for transport would be nice.
The size and weight of this scope is significant. I can't get over
the difference compared to the 8" Dob. Getting it in and out of the
trunk is going to take practice.
Someone suggested getting this holster for the hand controller,
and I think that'd be a good idea. My father-in-law should be able
to make something like this.
I want to add a fan or two for the mirror and boundary layer. Not
sure it's needed, but it'd be good.
Haven't done a proper star test yet.
Back still sore. I've got the new observing chair, so what the
hell? Need to figure this out.
Very happy with this scope. Some improvements to be made, but overall
well worth everything.
I've bought myself an Orion XT10i -- a 10" Dobsonian with a push-to
controller. I'm at my parents' place right now, test-driving it under
their incredibly dark skies. The first night was mostly spent getting
used to it, but the second night I managed to get some good observing
time in. I'm going to combine the two nights into one entry.
First impressions: this is a big scope compared with the 8" I have
now. It's heavier and bulkier, and is going to take some thinking and
work to make it as portable as the 8". But it's nicely made, the
controller seems to work well, and once I replaced the RACI finder
with my old straight-through, I could actually find things. The
movement is okay, but it's still going to take some work. A
perfunctory star test looked same inside and out, but I still need to
sketch it. Will need to baffle the mirror end, esp when I get back to
light pollution. The spring-loaded collimation screws are wonderful,
but I wish I didn't get different answers from the collimation cap and
the Cheshire I've got. With some practice managed to get warp factor
of 0.2, but even bad warp facters (5) seemed useful.
And with that, I got set up for first light! After doing the first
alignment, I went right away to the Double-Double. Not sure if it's
the scope or just that it's high overhead, but it was a lot easier to
split this than with the 8".
M13 was glorious. I might have been able to see the propeller.
M92 was utterly charming, even right after M13. I saw what looked
like a kind of lazy looping S of in this glob.
M101 was cool to see, but not the "glorious Catherine Wheel of
fireworks" that Sue French describes in "Deep Sky Wonders". I saw
shadowy hints of structure that might've hinted at spiral arms, but
that was it. (And that was over two separate nights.)
M57 was cool to see as always, as was M11. M51 was also pretty,
but showed no detectable structure beyond the two components.
M109 and M108 were pretty but seemed formless. Sorta kinda maybe
might've seen one eye in M97 but I wouldn't swear to it.
NGC 5985 and 5982 -- lovely, especially for the distance (100
million ly!). Zero sign of NGC 5981, but stats say it's mag 13 so I
don't feel so bad.
Saturday night, I went out again. I started out just laying on the
grass and looking at the Milky Way overhead, sometimes with binos and
sometimes with Mark I naked eye. Amazing. Neat to see early
Perseids. Saw what looked like dark nebula right by Deneb.
M13: Tried for propeller again. Maybe hint of it at 200X, but not
certain. Still gorgeous.
North American Nebula: took some tracking down, but finally spotted
in 18mm with O3 filter by looking for NGC 6997, one of the OCs that
are in this. Found Gulf of Mexico w/o filter, and east coat with.
Neat, but subtle even w/filter. Not like...
Veil Nebula: First words out of my mouth were "Holy shit, you're
kidding me." This is AMAZING. Srsly, I think this may be equal of
M42. Found arcs on both sides but not central portions.
Whatever...my god, this was incredible to see.
Looked for Blinking Planetary; could not track down. Next.
M33: Wow, actually hints of structure plus easy to find. Double
plus, saw NGC 604, a large (1500 ly!) star-forming region in M33. Wow.
M31: WOW. M110 and M32 obvious. Tracked down G1, a glob
orbiting M31...DOUBLE wow. Was not able to separate G1 from the two
stars it's next too, but was obv. non-stellar.
Alpha Persei: Pretty sure I saw nebulosity in this area, just
w/naked eye. Neat.
Wow, so the last time I went out with the scope was May -- it's
amazing it's been so long. I drove up to Seymour Mountain, but there
was some kind of party int he woods where folks usually observe.
Turned around and drove out to Boundary Bay, wondering why I'm not
paying for a RASC membership. There was a beautiful crescent moon
setting next to Venus as I drove out.
Since it's 2.55am as I write this, let's get to the good parts: what I
saw! (Oh, except to say I used the Dob this time.)
Saturn was low in the slop, but still pretty to look at. Cassinni
Division popped in and out iwth the 6mm (100X).
Double-double: coud not split.
Star test: same as always; rings all the way in on one side, hole
in the middle on the other side. Need to figure out what this
means.
Omega Serpentis -- nothing much to look at, but it
holds an exoplanet and that's pretty cool. 1.7x mass of
Jupiter, 277 day period, and 273 light years away.
On a whim, tried for NGC 5990 which was right near Omega Serpentis;
no luck finding it.
Found M5 pretty easily.
Found M80 -- new Messier! Harder to pick out than M4 was. No
resolution -- just a q-tip.
M19 -- easy enough to find in binos. Maybe some resolution at
100X but that's suspicous.
M13 -- oldie but goodie. And I found NGC6202 for the first
time! Seemed fairly obvious -- not sure if that's the night, the
locatiom or getting used to things.
M92: aww, I love globs I can resolve.
NGC 5985, 5982 & 5981 -- took a lot of time with these. I got
5982 w/AV, but couldn't see the other to.
