I’ve had great success since I got the telescope, and I thought I’d share a bit with my reader.

Upon receipt of the gift, I proceeded to break the dot finder within five minutes, so finding things turned out to be difficult. Imagine trying to find a face in a crowd by looking through a tiny straw. Now imagine that the image you see is backwards and upside-down –that’s what it’s like looking through my telescope.

Astronomy is difficult.

Ghostly Moon

Originally uploaded by scohen.

But I persevered. The broken sight made it impossible to use the auto-tracking features of my telescope and the cords were getting in the way, so I removed them completely. This allowed me to roam the cosmos without the aid of any computer –a difficult task. At first, even finding the moon in the scope was challenging. I’d try to use the telescope itself as a sight, aligning it with the moon, yet when I looked through the eyepiece all I saw was black sky.

This improved somewhat after a couple evenings out. I found that if I removed the eyepiece and looked at down the tube, finding the moon was much easier. This in turn helped me get a feel for how to sight things without the help of a spotter scope. My primary mistake was overestimating how high an object was. I’d point the telescope well above the actual object. Furthermore, the higher an object was in the sky, the more difficult it would be to find it. The sky, after all is a big place.

I found that by first finding a terrestrial landmark below what I wanted to observe, I could fairly easily slew the telescope ‘up’ and find my quarry with relative ease. In order to find Orion, I’d use one of the bathroom vents of my house to find Sirius, then jump over to Rigel and up into the constellation. It was in Orion where I discovered one of my favorite sights, The nebula in Orion. Just below Orion’s belt is a fabulous nebula lit by a cluster of stars. It’s a breathtaking sight and having found it myself, without even looking, came as a huge surprise.

But my true quest was Saturn.

Saturn is high in the sky right now, frustrating my attempts to find it. However, one night, after about 45 minutes of searching, a bright speck filled the field. When I focused, I gasped. There was Saturn, and though it was tiny, it was breathtaking. As I got better at finding things, Saturn became easier and easier to find, though it still took about ten minutes at worst. It’s clear –I needed a spotting scope.

So I picked one up from telescopes.com, and while I was ordering something, dropped another $80 on a green laser pointer. I felt that could be useful in pointing out stars and nebulae. When the scope finally arrived, it was clear that though it was manufactured by the same company, the mounting bracket would not fit my telescope.

A trip to Home Depot and some backyard engineering were required.

I fashioned a telescope mount out of a seven inch hose clamp, two machine screws, and some minicell foam I had lying around for my kayak. After realizing the futility of trying to drill though stainless steel with titanium bits, I went back to the depot and bought a cobalt bit. The steel had no chance. Everything bolted together without much fuss, and I went outside and calibrated the spotter scope.

Now it’s almost too easy. All I have to do is use the spotter scope to point at a star, and it’s already centered in the main scope. Last night, for instance, finding Saturn took about fifteen seconds. After viewing Saturn, the Orion nebula, Pleiades, Sirius and everything else I knew, I decided to try and take some shots of the nearly full moon. You can see the results here. I’m especially proud of the shot above which utilizes a modified Orton effect to highlight the surface detail. Alas, due to the style of my telescope mount, serious astrophotography is off limits for now, but I’m having such a great time, I can’t imagine that this will be a problem for long.

Don’t you hate those presents that end up costing you more money? I don’t either.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 at 7:08 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.