[ClaireBaire (Claire)]

Originally Posted by Wavytone

Ah. OK, Mt Lofty. Dim memories as a kid long ago.

Originally Posted by Wavytone

Hi Wavy, thanks for your time so far. I hope you don’t mind a barrage of questions?
If it is blisteringly clear - and I mean 10 out of 10, you might just have a chance of seeing the moon while in the umbra. But - here's the catch - if you don't know exactly where to look you'll easily waste the 6 minutes trying to find it….. correctly aligned on the south pole, and place a marker to set the azimuth of your mount (due north or south) on a fence or building this will help you get set to find it tomorrow in daylight. I have only a 5” Dobsonian, but it nudges easily (if a little clunkily). A check of Stellarium around 5.50pm tonight says azimuth will be about 101 deg. I will use my compass and cross my fingers. To be on the safe side I am taking a quick trip to the “pimple” this morning to check out the lay of the land – there is an eastern view from mount lofty house. Failing that, it will be out near Murray Bridge. It is not so much whether I succeed at getting a great view it is the learning curve that I am after. So far, with all of 2 months astronomy experience under my belt, the learning curve is steep but fascinating.
Why f/15... my first scope was a beautiful 4.25" Thomas Cooke refractor made around 1880 with a superb clockwork mount made of phosphor bronze - a 6" diameter worm with 1440 teeth and circles (sounds like a beautiful smooth movement unlike my little dob) that read with verniers to 1 minute of arc. Yes you had to use an atlas, and do some maths (hmmm, perhaps this will come for me, since I have no computer to do it for me). The views of the planets through this were exquisite and none of the scopes I have used in the past 40 years have dimmed this. Was it the lenses that made the views so good and are our comtemporary lenses crappier (even with coatings etc). The scope is still in occasional use - it belongs to a private school. These days I have an f/15 Maksutov, next best thing (I looked thru a 70mm mak-cass spotter at the Australian Geographic shop, but was put off by the dim view – and yet I sometimes think my reflector and binoculars are just too bright and starry/spikey – in your view is all this reduced using a mak?) Maybe in retirement (I hope to move to Bright in the high country in NE Victoria) I will be able to set up a similar scope again, just for fun (when we are young and own something beautiful and expensive, it’s hard to forget) A 12"-16" dob of course might be more use but I always have a soft spot for long refractors for planetary observing. While work beckons I am stuck in Sydney where observing is definitely a low priority for a host of reasons - starting with crap weather.

…. I want to chuck the city and go and live in outback SA in the dry summer, and for chilly winter I want an observatory with a self-cleaning, highly polished, glass dome ha ha - pipe dreams lol.
Hope I haven’t bored you. Cheers, Claire.