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My Driveway in San Jose, 8/20/02
I was pleased to see that most of the gunk floating in the Bay Area air had been blown away by the nice afternoon breeze, so I decided to set up my Meade LX90 in my driveway and try to get some pictures of the moon. I live near Piedmont Road and Sierra in San Jose, next to the hills, so there's little city light to the east. Not that it really matters: the streetlights and headlights render all but selenological photography impossible. Good thing that's what I was planning to do!
The breeze died down around 8:30, leading me to think the viewing would be reasonably good. I set up my LX90 with the dew shield (more to prevent stray light from entering the mirror from nearby streetlights than for any concern about dew). The night was warm and pleasant. The sky was completely clear.
After polar aligning my scope, I thought I'd try to find a glob to gauge the clarity of the air. M11 was visible but undistinguished in the 40mm Plössl. I spotted a couple of others, but my current favorites were all obscured by moonlight (wouldn't you know they'd have to be in Sagittarius and Scorpius?). I promptly gave up on stars and focused on the moon, taking care to set the tracking rate on the Autostar to "Lunar". (As a novice, I still have to remind myself of this with great deliberation.)
The moon was brilliant, of course, and the seeing was much stabler than I was expecting. The smoke from the Oregonian fires had mostly cleared away, and the disc was not nearly as discolored as it has been in recent days.
I use a Scopetronix Digiadapt afocal coupler to attach my Nikon Coolpix 990 digital camera to my scope. This adapter works quite well, but it is just barely capable of holding the Orion 40mm Plössl eyepiece I use for my "widefield" images. I put widefield in quotes because the FOV with this eyepiece can't be more than two degrees. Still, it's wide enough for the moon, which is about the only thing I can reliably photograph with the Coolpix. As nice a camera as it is, it is very poorly suited to anything but the moon and the brighter planets. However, with the addition of a new JMI NGF-S microfocuser, I was able to nail down some extremely sharp pictures.
I think I took something like 34 exposures with three different eyepieces: a 40mm Plössl, a 25mm Plössl, and a new 10mm Lanthanum eyepiece I recently purchased from Orion. I posted three of these images on my website.
The detail in the images is startling (at least, it was to me) because the viewing conditions were quite good. (I guess the quality of the scope is also quite good! These are the best images I've captured so far.) The photos were very slightly processed in Photoshop to increase contrast and brightness, with a single iteration of the "Sharpen" filter applied to the final image to bring out the edge detail a bit more.
I also took a roll of Ektachrome 400 slides through a Lumicon T adapter with my Minolta Maxxum 7. I cannot recommend this camera enough for anyone who wants to take astrophotos. The camera has a large LCD display on the back for displaying status information, and can display warning messages when it detects something has gone awry. There is a "lens lock" feature which prevents the camera from taking pictures when no lens is attached. The Lumicon camera adapter does not contain the requisite autofocus circuitry to convince the camera that a lens is attached, and it warned me that I would need to change Custom Setting 16 to defeat the automatic lens lock. Fantastic! Once I did this, I was able to snap away with abandon. More importantly the camera has an SLR mirror lock feature. If you choose a 2 second timer delay for the exposure, the SLR mirror swings out of the light path and the shutter clicks two seconds later, allowing any vibration introduced by the SLR mirror movement to dampen away.
Conveniently, the moon's image on the focusing screen consumed almost exactly the entire vertical field of view. Hopefully the clarity of the air will produce some spectacular slides. It was a bit difficult to focus precisely, given the on-axis orientation of the camera, and I do not yet have a diagonal viewer or a diffuse ground glass focusing screen for the Maxxum 7. The microfocuser is of limited utility when you can't really tell whether the image is in focus. The LCD panel on the Nikon Coolpix eliminates this ambiguity, but again, it's only suitable for bright objects with distinct detail.
After my photo session, I thought I'd track down Uranus and Neptune, which are both near opposition. I was pleased to be able to spot them both in spite of the moon's glare. It was the first time this novice astrophile had seen these planets "in the flesh", so to speak. I was able to just make out the disc of Uranus with the 10mm Lanthanum eyepiece. Fantastic!
All in all, considering the crappy location and light pollution, it was a very nice night of observing.
Also my driveway, August 2, 2003
Oddly enough, it's been almost a year since I last logged an observation. This evening I got the LX90 out onto the driveway again and shot a nice digital picture of the moon. It wasn't as good as I would've liked. There were two confounding factors: the moon is pretty low in the sky this soon after new moon, and the air was pretty turbulent near the horizon tonight. Also, my scope was badly out of collimation. I had just installed a trio of Bob's Knobs, replacing the Allen screws that held the secondary mirror in position. I doubt the focus was particularly sharp as a result, but I was able to clean the picture up to some extent in Photoshop 7. I've posted the picture in my astronomy picture gallery. There was a lot of detail visible in the eyepiece that was missing from the picture, of course. Irritatingly, the central peak of one of the giant craters on the terminator was clearly visible through the eyepiece, but is altogether absent from the digital image.
While I waited for the moon to clear one of the cedars in our backyard so I could take pictures of it, I looked at Albireo, my favorite double: the beautiful blue and gold stars were not particularly attractive due to the out-of-collimation optics. I began to worry a bit about whether I'd be able to get the scope back into functional order. I also looked at the Ring Nebula, which was almost at zenith when I was doing my work. Surprisingly, the sky was transparent enough for me to see it clearly in the 40mm and 26mm Orion Plössls. Since I live in Light Pollutionn Central, with the goddamned supernova mercury vapor lamp from hell on our garage, I was astonished at the level of detail I could make out. It would've been nice to be at a dark sky sight tonight, once the moon went down. Oh well. I also spotted the Dumbbell Nebula and tried to split Epsilon Lyrae. I got one of the doubles but not the hard pair. The mirror was just too far off.
Finally I was able to take my moon pictures and then got down to collimating the scope. I had to grab my laptop and review the section of the LX90 manual PDF file that described collimation, but I got through the process without a hitch. Now I have nice pinpoint star images once again! And I can see why Bob's Knobs are so popular for Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope owners. I can't imagine trying to do that procedure with an Allen wrench in the dark. What fun it would be to drop the wrench onto the corrector plate and leave a nice, permanent scratch that would mar every future observation made with the scope. Fortunately, with the knobs attached, the procedure is very simple. After I finished collimating the mirror I tried to split Epsilon Lyrae again. Success with the 10.5mm Lanthanum eyepiece! That's a magnification of around 200x. Not as good as last week at Fremont Peak, but not horrible, either.
Not much else to report. I tried out my 2" 40mm and 32mm Orion Optiluxe eyepieces, getting a nice fuzzy view of the Swan and Ring Nebulas, but was getting a bit tired and decided to call it an early night. I'm anxiously awaiting the delivery of my first Nagler eyepiece, a 7mm Type 6, and a 2.5x PowerMate (an improvement on the Barlow magnifier design) which I plan to exercise on Mars at the earliest opportunity.
Montebello Open Space Reserve, 8/8/03
Montebello on Friday night, August 8, 2003 was pretty crowded. I don't know exactly how many people were there, but there must've been at least ten scopes set up. I was excited to try my new iSight web camera adapter, but it seemed as if it was going to become rather dewy, so I decided to just look at the sights with my LX90.
My first observation of the evening occurred before sunset. Michael Swartz had set up his lovely Takahashi 90mm refractor with a Coronado solar filter set. I begged a glimpse of the day star, and was rewarded with a beautiful view of the ruby orb through his Tele Vue bino viewers and 17mm Takahashi eyepieces.
It was my first direct view of the sun through one of these filters, although of course I've seen the ads in S&T and Astronomy magazines. The photos don't do the actual images justice. I must say, if you haven't had the chance to observe through a hydrogen-alpha filter, you must track down someone who has one and make them let you look. The Sun is astounding.
To think that the solar prominences erupting from the distinctly granular "surface" arc tens of thousands of miles above the curve of the star, and the ribbons of plasma that swarm around the sunspots are carrying enough energy to burn the Earth to a cinder in a microsecond... to see the actual physical processes at work in the Sun is a majestic and awesome experience. Thank you, Michael. Now of course I lust after a Coronado hydrogen-alpha scope of my own, and will be unable to slake that lust for months or years to come. They're not, uh, inexpensive. Oh well... I'll just add that to the list of goodies I want to acquire. For now I'll make do with the Baader film filter on my SCT.
My buddy Max Pruden joined me just before sunset, and we finished setting my my scopes. Max was using my Orion Short Tube 80 refractor, which I usually piggyback on my LX90, on a video camera tripod. I recently purchased a new accessory tray for my tripod from ScopeTronix, and it was immediately apparent that it was a hugely useful purchase. I strongly recommend that anyone with a Meade LX-model telescope get one. It reduced the number of times I had to go back to the folding table for eyepieces to zero. Very convenient, and very sturdily built (basically it's just a machined plate of aluminum 1/4" thick).
In spite of the Great Obliterator, I was able to get reasonably sharp views of the Ring Nebula and the Dumbbell Nebula. I suppose as a newbie amateur astronomer, I will spend a lot of time revisiting these favorites of the summer sky. It helps that both were pretty close to zenith when I started observing, and they are both spectacular in the 2" as well as the 1.25" eyepieces. I have a 2" O-III filter from Lumicon which I bought for astrophotography with the f/6.5 focal reducer, and I was able to use it to good effect on both of these nebulas. Several people came by to comment on the clarity and brightness of the image, which of course had me preening. I owe most of the clarity to Bob's Knobs, the collimation thumbscrews I painstakingly affixed to the secondary mirror and worked with for hours the other night, trying to make that out-of-focus star absolutely as circular as I could. Seemed to work pretty well!
I also visited Albireo, of course, and was once again pleased at the contrast between these two beauties. I didn't bother splitting the Double Double, because I was already reasonably sure the seeing was only so-so (visible twinkle in Arcturus and Altair), and because I was going to spend the rest of the evening gazing at Mars and the Moon. Max was having some luck with the ST80, which is really a very nice little scope. The tripod I brought for him to use, unfortunately, was not up to it. I should put that one back in the closet and get a nice tilt-pan head for the heavier tripod base I bought for my 20x80 Orion Megaview binos. The Moon was spectacular through the ST80, and the atmosphere was becoming pretty stable.
I put the 2" diagonal on my LX90 and peered at the moon with the 40mm Optiluxe, with moon filter attached. Holy cow! Max said the lunar light on my face from the 50mm spotting scope on the LX90 made me look like the Terminator. And of course, I was looking at a terminator, though of a different sort. The light was unbelievable. Even with the moon filter, I was completely dazzled. I put the 7mm Nagler into the 1.25" adapter and was rewarded with a surreal experience. It was almost as if I were in low orbit of the Moon, peering down from a spaceship, instead of nearly a quarter million miles away. None of my lesser eyepieces provide even remotely similar fields of view, clarity, or sharpness. And the magnification! With the 7mm eyepiece, the magnification is 286x. When I put the 2.5x PowerMate into the eyepiece stack, I was experiencing an unholy 714x magnification. Much of the detail in such a view is illusory, I know, since the atmosphere limits useful magnification to around 300 or 400x, but it still looked great. I was able to clearly make out tiny streaks of ejecta from craters that none of my other eyepieces could even visualize. I now have Nagler Fever.
Eventually I tore my now dark-unadapted eyes away from the Moon and settled down for some serious Mars-watching. (It took me a while to be able to see much of anything. When I finally tore my gaze away from the 7mm Nagler, it was as if someone had stuck a black contact lens on my right eye.)
The fellow who set up his Orion refractor next to my car, Frank, was impressed at the image in the ST80, as was I. Even though there was no discernable detail when we looked through the scope, just after Mars-rise, the disc was easily detectable, and the color was a beautiful ruddy orange. I went back and forth between the Moon and Mars with the LX90 for the rest of the evening. I was able to make out much more detail in Mars this time, owing, no doubt, to the recently collimated optics and the new eyepiece. I could see a narrow V-shaped swash of darkness above the polar ice, which was noticeably smaller this time than it was two weeks ago.
Astounding. It truly is an amazing experience to look at another planet with the aid of a telescope. It's completely unlike looking at a static picture in a magazine or on the Web. While the detail in a published photo or heavily doctored webcam image may be impressive, there is nothing so astonishing as pointing the scope at a particular region of the sky, centering the eyepiece on a shimmering circle of light, and realizing that I am actually looking at the real thing.
That's Mars over there, climbing slowly up the moon-gleaming bowl of sky. That orange-red dot is another world, about half the size of the Earth. It's getting closer, don't you know, closer every day, and in two and a half weeks it will be as close as it has been in tens of thousands of years. It'll be bigger, too, and with any luck the heat of the sun will not have boiled away those glorious ice caps or stirred up a globe-spanning cloud of dust. With luck, we'll be able to haul out the scopes once again, set them up on the dusty hilltop overlooking the Bay, and whistle in amazement as the tiny world arcs into the heavens in rust-colored glory. That's Mars! It's a cold dustbowl now, but in centuries to come, who knows? Men and women will live there someday. The rust may fade away and be replaced by a glittering cerulean, and our descendants may peer up at the Blue Planet looking for reflections of the Sun in oceans of cometary water.
That's Mars! And the best it has to offer is yet to come.
Eventually the long work day caught up with me, and I put my scope to rest. I pried Max loose from the political discussion going unheeded behind me and we packed up the rest of my gear. I kept stealing glances at the Red Planet, wondering if I should just put the scope back on its mount and stay, but I was too tired.
Moon or no moon, with Mars in the sky growing ever larger, it was a wonderful night.
Jeff Kirk
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