mbo
01-08-2010, 04:59 AM
Thought I might share my beginners tale.
Thursday Night - Many weeks of meticulous research have come to a head, though budget estimates have red shifted, products have at last been chosen. Plan Finalised. Shopping list printed, Andrews Communications address entered into car navigator, they will have my GSO 12" delivered from the warehouse and waiting at the shop. A mate has a boat lined up to buy at The Entrance, the wife and I will go along for the run, we can wander down to Greystanes in the morning, grab our opticals, and dawdle north to collect the boat. Time to sleep and dream of Andromeda.
Friday Morning - Head out the door, phone rings, Andrew's have bad news, they were checking over my new scope and the mirror has a water mark on it, no more 12"'s in stock, they were great to deal with, I could tell they made a lot of effort, but they were unwittingly entwined in the inevitable fate of all of my most carefully considered plans - they never work.
OK, we go to Sydney anyway, my mate says he has another boat to look at in Blacktown. I hammer my mobile phone's Internet for option B (not calling them plans anymore), check these forums, someone says they have seen a review article on Dobs - Meade vs Skywatcher vs GSO, in a British Astro mag, we waste some time trying to find it in newsagents along the way (It's a pity I'm not into cookery or dirt bikes). A deal is struck for a boat in Blacktown and we head on into find Bintel in Glebe. Unfortunately Tom Tom car navigator maps have missed the last 27 changes to traffic flow in central Sydney since April and it sends us into a sort of endless loop. The Loop is finally broken by one of our patented 'R turns' that always seem to make Sydney siders honk in appreciation. The bloke at Bintel is very helpful and knowledgeable, the rare sort of salesman who really wants you to go home with gear that you will be happy with. Selecting our scope was easy, we asked the bloke what was going on behind the event horizon in the middle of the showroom, he informed us that it was the Bintel 12 inch Dob, it was greedily raking in all available light.
We Now Own A Scope!, Back to Blacktown to hook up the boat, then while away the afternoon westbound traffic as head for home. Rains all the way back to Dubbo as seems traditional when a new scope is involved. Home at 1:00 a.m., put it all together, admire it and collapse.
Saturday - Wife wakes early, I sleep in, awake to the sound of her delivering telescopes 101 (what not to poke) to our kids. Many visitors see the scope during the day, all are in agreeance that "It's big!". I drop in the collimator, ready to apply my arduously googled expertise, decide it looks pretty good, then decide it looks miles out, then decide to leave it alone. We carefully balance the scope on it's fancy adjustable pivots, carefully choosing a typical load of eyepiece and barlow. Pop it back together and it's swinging like a set of scales, then we take off the front dust cap ...
Took the scope out the back about 5:00 pm to align the finder and generally try things out. Roughly lined the scope up towards power poles I can see over my back fence, probably about 250 meters away. Loaded up the 32mm Bintel eyepiece and took a squiz, saw a power line crossing the field of view so focused in. My Deity!, I can see the individual strands of wire twisted in a helix around the cable!, nice and clear. Call everyone outside to take a look, all suitably impressed. Follow the wires to an insulator on the pole, centre it in the scope, twiddle and fiddle with the adjusters on the sight scope. Pick a new target to test the aim (studiously ignoring Venus, out of bounds till my wife can get outside to peek too), find something that looks like a lump on another power wire, set the cross-hairs on it, check through main scope, it's a gullah sunning itself in the last available light, he's a bit off centre though, more twiddling, mmm, he flew away.
First Light! - Way ahead of schedule the clouds are blowing away! The sun is just fading, Kirk and I look in on Venus with the 32mm on, it's distinctly a ball, actually more like a flat tyre, it had a squared of edge on the bottom. We see mars higher in the sky, stars are starting to peek out all around. There is a bit of confusion about where Saturn is, I consult Stellarium and pass on navigational data to Kirk (my wife, her real name is Kirsten, and no Alex, she prefers Admiral) suddenly she jumps back from the scope, sort of shocked, didn't expect it to be that recognizable in a 32mm eyepiece. We pop on the 15mm and everyone gets their first look at Saturn, kids on step ladders, all oohs and aahs, this is the moment that all the concerns and doubts about what we would be able to see, and what we should buy, dissolve, we can see more detail than we expected in a 15mm standard issue lens, the rings, though edge on, look magnificent, we can see them curl around the back of the disk, a thin but distinct dark strip divides them from the body of the planet. There are colour graduations on the planets surface. The night turned out to be great, the skies were clear after the rain and I could see the milky way better than I have for weeks with the naked eye. Kirk had the top rated find (on degree of difficulty) with the butterfly cluster, the butterfly shape was quite apparent, though it reminded me more of a bee. Venus in higher magnifications surprised is with how large it was (always thought it would be just a dot) and how distinct it's phase was, it looked like a tiny moon just past half way in it's phase. We checked out Mars but it was a bit too tiny to see anything significant. I found a gorgeous cluster south of the Southern Cross, but I'm not yet sure which one it was. I split the alpha centauri double for fun. We believe we found M7, a big cluster with a lot of straight lineish star patterns in it. By 9:30 Kirsten was starting to go bleary from the long couple of days and headed off to bed. The instructions were to wake her if Jupiter turned out to be pretty special. I woke her up. I checked it out in every eyepiece combination I could, I couldn't believe the sight. It stood out to me like it was 3D. The banding was distinct, the four moons bright and clear, the 15mm with the 2x Barlow let me even glimpse the swirls between the bands. I thought I saw 6 moons! till I checked with Stellarium and found two were stars in a flukey alignment (HIP1127 and HIP968, about mag 8.6). I've got a 9mm Nagler coming via ebay, and I can't wait to point it at Jupiter. Try as I might I couldn't find any of the nebula in Sagittarius, but that will hopefully improve when my navigation improves. (and I get the Telrad fitted). When the moon rose I still had the barlowed 15mm on so I swung it over. Again, stunned. The texture and detail blew me away, it looked almost like a clay model, big smooth flat basins and an incredibly rough and mangled top end, a couple of craters were sitting just at the edge of the shadow line and they appeared to sort of hang out into space, black shadows in their depths, and amazingly intricate detail in their sunlit rims. this was when I noticed the seeing deteriorate, a weak mist was rising over the town and the moon started to look sort of liquid, like a perfect reflection in an almost still pond, it was a very beautiful 'aberration'. The dew finally beat me (How do you keep the stuff off eyepieces!) but it was a very special night for us all.
Thanks to everyone here who has helped me, it's a fantastic forum.
Thursday Night - Many weeks of meticulous research have come to a head, though budget estimates have red shifted, products have at last been chosen. Plan Finalised. Shopping list printed, Andrews Communications address entered into car navigator, they will have my GSO 12" delivered from the warehouse and waiting at the shop. A mate has a boat lined up to buy at The Entrance, the wife and I will go along for the run, we can wander down to Greystanes in the morning, grab our opticals, and dawdle north to collect the boat. Time to sleep and dream of Andromeda.
Friday Morning - Head out the door, phone rings, Andrew's have bad news, they were checking over my new scope and the mirror has a water mark on it, no more 12"'s in stock, they were great to deal with, I could tell they made a lot of effort, but they were unwittingly entwined in the inevitable fate of all of my most carefully considered plans - they never work.
OK, we go to Sydney anyway, my mate says he has another boat to look at in Blacktown. I hammer my mobile phone's Internet for option B (not calling them plans anymore), check these forums, someone says they have seen a review article on Dobs - Meade vs Skywatcher vs GSO, in a British Astro mag, we waste some time trying to find it in newsagents along the way (It's a pity I'm not into cookery or dirt bikes). A deal is struck for a boat in Blacktown and we head on into find Bintel in Glebe. Unfortunately Tom Tom car navigator maps have missed the last 27 changes to traffic flow in central Sydney since April and it sends us into a sort of endless loop. The Loop is finally broken by one of our patented 'R turns' that always seem to make Sydney siders honk in appreciation. The bloke at Bintel is very helpful and knowledgeable, the rare sort of salesman who really wants you to go home with gear that you will be happy with. Selecting our scope was easy, we asked the bloke what was going on behind the event horizon in the middle of the showroom, he informed us that it was the Bintel 12 inch Dob, it was greedily raking in all available light.
We Now Own A Scope!, Back to Blacktown to hook up the boat, then while away the afternoon westbound traffic as head for home. Rains all the way back to Dubbo as seems traditional when a new scope is involved. Home at 1:00 a.m., put it all together, admire it and collapse.
Saturday - Wife wakes early, I sleep in, awake to the sound of her delivering telescopes 101 (what not to poke) to our kids. Many visitors see the scope during the day, all are in agreeance that "It's big!". I drop in the collimator, ready to apply my arduously googled expertise, decide it looks pretty good, then decide it looks miles out, then decide to leave it alone. We carefully balance the scope on it's fancy adjustable pivots, carefully choosing a typical load of eyepiece and barlow. Pop it back together and it's swinging like a set of scales, then we take off the front dust cap ...
Took the scope out the back about 5:00 pm to align the finder and generally try things out. Roughly lined the scope up towards power poles I can see over my back fence, probably about 250 meters away. Loaded up the 32mm Bintel eyepiece and took a squiz, saw a power line crossing the field of view so focused in. My Deity!, I can see the individual strands of wire twisted in a helix around the cable!, nice and clear. Call everyone outside to take a look, all suitably impressed. Follow the wires to an insulator on the pole, centre it in the scope, twiddle and fiddle with the adjusters on the sight scope. Pick a new target to test the aim (studiously ignoring Venus, out of bounds till my wife can get outside to peek too), find something that looks like a lump on another power wire, set the cross-hairs on it, check through main scope, it's a gullah sunning itself in the last available light, he's a bit off centre though, more twiddling, mmm, he flew away.
First Light! - Way ahead of schedule the clouds are blowing away! The sun is just fading, Kirk and I look in on Venus with the 32mm on, it's distinctly a ball, actually more like a flat tyre, it had a squared of edge on the bottom. We see mars higher in the sky, stars are starting to peek out all around. There is a bit of confusion about where Saturn is, I consult Stellarium and pass on navigational data to Kirk (my wife, her real name is Kirsten, and no Alex, she prefers Admiral) suddenly she jumps back from the scope, sort of shocked, didn't expect it to be that recognizable in a 32mm eyepiece. We pop on the 15mm and everyone gets their first look at Saturn, kids on step ladders, all oohs and aahs, this is the moment that all the concerns and doubts about what we would be able to see, and what we should buy, dissolve, we can see more detail than we expected in a 15mm standard issue lens, the rings, though edge on, look magnificent, we can see them curl around the back of the disk, a thin but distinct dark strip divides them from the body of the planet. There are colour graduations on the planets surface. The night turned out to be great, the skies were clear after the rain and I could see the milky way better than I have for weeks with the naked eye. Kirk had the top rated find (on degree of difficulty) with the butterfly cluster, the butterfly shape was quite apparent, though it reminded me more of a bee. Venus in higher magnifications surprised is with how large it was (always thought it would be just a dot) and how distinct it's phase was, it looked like a tiny moon just past half way in it's phase. We checked out Mars but it was a bit too tiny to see anything significant. I found a gorgeous cluster south of the Southern Cross, but I'm not yet sure which one it was. I split the alpha centauri double for fun. We believe we found M7, a big cluster with a lot of straight lineish star patterns in it. By 9:30 Kirsten was starting to go bleary from the long couple of days and headed off to bed. The instructions were to wake her if Jupiter turned out to be pretty special. I woke her up. I checked it out in every eyepiece combination I could, I couldn't believe the sight. It stood out to me like it was 3D. The banding was distinct, the four moons bright and clear, the 15mm with the 2x Barlow let me even glimpse the swirls between the bands. I thought I saw 6 moons! till I checked with Stellarium and found two were stars in a flukey alignment (HIP1127 and HIP968, about mag 8.6). I've got a 9mm Nagler coming via ebay, and I can't wait to point it at Jupiter. Try as I might I couldn't find any of the nebula in Sagittarius, but that will hopefully improve when my navigation improves. (and I get the Telrad fitted). When the moon rose I still had the barlowed 15mm on so I swung it over. Again, stunned. The texture and detail blew me away, it looked almost like a clay model, big smooth flat basins and an incredibly rough and mangled top end, a couple of craters were sitting just at the edge of the shadow line and they appeared to sort of hang out into space, black shadows in their depths, and amazingly intricate detail in their sunlit rims. this was when I noticed the seeing deteriorate, a weak mist was rising over the town and the moon started to look sort of liquid, like a perfect reflection in an almost still pond, it was a very beautiful 'aberration'. The dew finally beat me (How do you keep the stuff off eyepieces!) but it was a very special night for us all.
Thanks to everyone here who has helped me, it's a fantastic forum.