The Little 'Uns Square Off
Planet and Stargazing Through Various Scopes
Argo's Excellent Adventure
Chicken Little Was Right

The Little 'Uns Square Off

Pulled up at the SCAC Bonny Dune observing site last night just as the sun set. Gate was locked. Above, the sky was less than promising. High thin clouds formed a backdrop to lower, more opaque banks of "nebulosity" below. Resigned myself to an evening of chasing sucker holes from backyard Boulder Creek.

Little did I know that behind those clouds the production crew was preparing the stage for the main event. The backdrop of the heavens was being unfurled from the raftors. Props assembled and erected. Something was a stir...

Waited at the entrance gate half an hour or so. No sign of other SCAC club members. More importantly, no sign of anyone bearing that special, four digit code needed to open the gate. Made a quick run down the road. Idea was to find somekind of alternative viewing locale (should anyone else turn up but the site remain locked). On return, SCAC observing buddy Dan had arrived. Thankfully, it wasn't too long afterwords that we greeted a local resident bearing the "magic numbers" needed to open the gate...

A thin crescent Moon, partially obscured by variable thin clouds hung in the fading glow of sunset. Dan had his 70mm Televue Ranger setup on Gibraltar altazimuth mount before I had the 80mm Pup locked down on the Skyview Deluxe equatorial. Dan and I planned to have a bit of a "shootout" with the small 'uns. Dan got the first point of the evening for quicker setup time.

We turned both scopes on the Lunar crescent at about 70x. The limb trembled for lack of sky position. A hugely concave terminator divided Mare Crisium. A large, contrast-endowed "frozen wave" broke in a crescent shaped swath between the seas western frontier and terminator. Within that, a second dak wave broke closer to the terminator. And between these two, a faint subtle crescent shaped rise caught the lunar sunshine. There was nothing in the scene that neither scope couldn't share.

We traced the terminator south looking for "on the edge" details. A group of three larger craters (joined by a more junior fourth member) formed a parallelogram. (The largest of the four is believed to be Crater Vlacq.) Dan caught a very faint, luminous prominence almost on the point of visual extinction through the 70mm. I could not locate it - only a larger, more obvious "apostrophe" of light in that general location. Dan could make out the apostrophe too, but was unable to see the same prominence using the Pup. Score another point for the Ranger.

The lunar limb showed a faintly perceptible "magenta" glow in the 70mm. In the Pup, chomaticism was more obvious at F5 than the 70mm at F6. By installing the 67mm aperture stop, color correction became more evenly matched between the two scopes. Still, to my eye, the Ranger was very close to apochromatic. Dan expressed some pleasantries concerning the degree of color correction in the much less expensive 80mm. He also felt the two were of a kind when the Pup was stopped down to F6.

Both scopes were directed to Vega for a startest. Stacking up the barlows, both scopes achieved something around 150x. The Ranger showed very clear, concentric, evenly balanced, well color-corrected fresnel patterns both sides of focus. The particular ease of visibility in the pattern was striking to me. Very little false color obscured the pattern. While the Pup's fresnels were very similar - but not of the same degree of contrast. Telltale greens and magentas between interference rings made ring perception much more difficult. Based on my limited knowledge of such things, the little Ranger manages to pack 90-95% of its light into the ring structure - while the achromatic Pup does well to pack in 80-85%. This pretty much explained why the 70mm caught the faint glow of that low prominence near Vlacq while the Pup did not.

Both scopes gave nice views of Vega in focus (color included). The sky was quite stable overhead. It was easy enough for me to train the Pup on the Double Double. Dan's Ranger lacked a finder and the altazumuth made high power centering and tracking of the paired pair very difficult. Both scopes resolved the Double Double as four little "balls of light" at similar magnification. But the extra 10 millimeters shrank the airy disks visibly. And the extra light was helpful in terms of contrast.

So score one point for the Pup. As long as two scopes are both diffraction limited in terms of optical quality, 15% more aperture can't be argued with in terms of resolution. (If you are keeping track, add two more points to the Pup for ease of target acquisition and high power tracking ability. But these points are just a way of "padding the score" a little...)

I felt that the Ranger fell down on the "ease of focus" score. Although the construction of the focuser is very nice, the use of a drawtube adds unnecessary complexity (astronomically). The whole picture is complicated by the mount and short OTA length which made scope redirection difficult - for you see, the tendency is to "push-pull" such a short OTA (at both ends). This frequently caused the drawtube to slip. It was also too easy to migrate the fine focus to an extreme of travel. Then everything has to be reset and focus re-aquired.

Overall the Ranger possessed the superior optics, but such optics can not be fully and conveniently exploited without an equatorial mount. (The drawtube arrangement would be fine if RA and Dec could be accomplished using some kind of slewing mechanism.) Meanwhile, the difference in optical quality was not great enough to offset the Pup's superior aperture. There would be no stars the Ranger could resolve that the Pup couldn't, while the reverse is not true.

And this was born out on Delta Cygni - breaker of scopes and collimation. Under the fine stable skies (8/10) both Ranger and Pup were just able to show the 6.4 magnitude 2.4 arc second companion as a persistent brightening near the first diffraction ring to southwest. Of the two, and due only to its extra aperture, the Pup came closer to revealing it as a "pinpoint", while the Ranger gave a nicer view of the 2.8 magnitude primary's first diffraction ring.

By this time the sky was quite dark. Large gaps of sky opened up at various times overhead. Stars to magnitude 5.0 could be held direct. Turned both scopes on M57. Again those 10 extra millimeters of aperture were a boon. Both scopes could show the 11.6 magnitude star in the Challice of the Ring. But the Pup turned up the 12.3 mag star direct, the 12.8 on moderate aversion, and the 13.0 on eye movement. The Ranger was outgunned here. Meanwhile, the Ring itself was more visibly present at 80mm's than 70. (Although both scopes showed the annular nature of the ring plus well-defined frontier.)

So as you might suspect, excellent optics of lesser aperture can't beat good optics of greater aperture at the light gathering game - even if higher quality optics does a slightly better job or organizing what light it collects...

The sky began to seriously sock in by this point. Saturn had yet to clear the treeline. There would be no opportunity to compare views of the ring system. But my sense is the Ranger would have given views of Saturn and Jupiter very comparable to that of the Pup - if not slightly better. Why? Because on low contrast studies that 10 percent of light improperly channeled by poorer optics just gets in the way. In this case "less can be more"...

The comparo was over for the evening. Dan had an early Sunday and departed (after a number of views through Dwight's 200mm SCT. Goto is perfect for the "sucker hole chase" game.)

The 70mm Ranger's superior optical qualities were undisputed between Dan and I. The Pup's deeper magnitudinal reach and deepsky contrast also remained undisputed. The main difference between the two scopes was the mount. The Ranger is not well served on an altimuth mount - no matter what the quality. Had Dan mounted the Ranger on his other scopes Losmandy, this would not have been at issue. Finally throw in a decent finderscope, and the Ranger would have been a hot ticket. But 10mm's is a lot to overcome - especially amongst small aperture scopes of diffraction limited optics.

But let's get real here. Should I possess absolutely no emotional attachement to the 80mm Pup. And market price were not a consideration, would I trade even for Dan's Ranger (on Gibraltar mount)? No! A better question however is: Would I trade one OTA for the other? You bet! And here's why: The 70mm is very nicely color corrected. For lunar-planetary studies, the 70mm gives the finer view. Meanwhile, its short focal ratio makes for a fine deepsky sweeper. And its mechanicals are clearly superior to those used on the Chinese 80mm achromat.

Planet and Stargazing Through Various Scopes

By the time Dan and the little refractor had departed, SCAC club president Dwight and club member Michele had set up a pair of 8 inch SCT's. One was a fifteen year old C8 and the other a newer LX-200 Meade with goto. Both scopes belonged to Dwight - who had generously made the C8 available to Michele for the evening's adventure. As Michele toured the season's finest manually, Dwight, Dan, and I turned the LX-200 on Mars and Saturn.

The amazing thing about Mars is the fact that the "Incredible Shrinking Planet" is still hanging around in the night sky. And not only "hanging" but "hanging high". The planet took up a position some thirty plus degrees above the south southwestern horizon - well higher than the thin crescent Moon Dan and I had turned the little 'uns on earlier in the evening. With the planet at less than eight arc seconds in apparent size, we stacked up all the magnification we could get on the 200mm Meade. Despite passable edge focus, there was just nothing to be seen beyond the planet's gibbous phase presentation. This surprised me - but only a little. Earlier I had viewed the planet at 150x through the 80mm and seen obvious darkening along the central meridian. But I'd seen this phenomenon on many other occasions and like always ascribed it to "contrast effect".

Saturn however, was another matter. The Ringed Wonder actually lay lower to the east than Mars to the west. But its 20 arc second disk and broad ring system showed quite a bit of detail. At 400x all you need do was spend a few "quality minutes" at the eyepiece and during the time you could literally follow the improvement in the planets presentation (as it gained altitude and seeing improved accordingly). Cassini's Division was evident from the beginning. Later on, as the planet approached the Zenith, we also make out the Encke Minima and hints of the Crepe Ring. On the planets disk, the broad patch of yellow which is Saturn's Equatorial Zone (EZ) surmounted by South Equatorial Belt (SEB) was a given. The SEB itself blended nicely into the temperate and this to the south polar region. The attractive "blue gray mottling" texture was visible throughout this transition.

But the 8 inch did not give the best view of Saturn seen that evening. One attendee had brought along an Orion Apex 127mm MCT. The MCT was definitely "in the zone". Its 300X view of Saturn (and later Jupiter) was superior to that of the 200mm in every respect. (Dwight and I both agreed the SCT needed collimation. Traversal of focus showed visible coma - even at magnification. Such ill-organized photonage is the bane of planetary observation.)

During the course of the evening, we used the Meade to track down several deepsky studies. Edge-on galaxies NGC7331 in Pegasus and 891 in Andromeda gave decent views - despite limited transparency. Globular cluster M79 showed at least a dozen outlying stars. Bright nebulae M41 (The Great Orion Nebula), nearby M42, NGC2024 (The Flame Nebula near Alnitek), cometlike M78 and the shall-like Eastern Veil (NGC6860) were all visited through the scope. The view of the Great Andromeda Galaxy (M31) was hampered by clouds (at the time I saw it) and an excess of magnification (the SCT can at best get down to 50x.) Surprisingly, the northern extension of the Eastern Veil was quite visible - even without the use of a nebula filter. The Ring, Crab, and Orion's NGC2022 planetary nebulae were also viewed - this last took 400x quite nicely and showed hints of pinpoint annularity with a visible condensation toward the frontier. I also made a run on face on spiral NGC1300 (in Eridanus) but had no luck detecting it in the resulting 50x field of view.

With Orion still rather low to the southeast, we dropped in on the Trapezium repeatedly. None of the members showed airy disks, and I was unable to track down the E and F components. This latter was true regardless of scope in use - 80mm Pup or 200mm SCT.

After a while, Dwight and Michele retured to a spread out a ground tarp to begin their Leonid vigils. Before this Ryan had setup his eight inch "shorty" newtonian. Together we took up the Andromeda Family Challenge. M31, 32 and 110 were duly noted - the low power newt grabs great gobs of sky and makes short work of capturing all but the very largest galaxies and nebulae in a single field. Ryan and I centered on M110 and, using his properly oriented Skyview Deluxe equatorial, made the shift about five degrees due north. After which we had no trouble picking up low surface brighteness irregular galaxy NGC147. Under the moment's less than favorable sky conditions, NGC185 was just detectable as a faint scratch of light another degree to the west.

The shorty newt also showed some nice blue gray coloring within Orion's Great Nebula. That nebula was quite expansive and even at 40x, you had to sweep the field to take it all in. Low magnification however, is not well suited to making out the many folds and rifts possible within the Great Nebula. That kind of view waited for later in the evening...

Unfortunately, and like all very short focal ratio scopes, the newt experienced some collimation issues. Significant coma was present mid-field. Ryan had arrived late and did not have a chance to tweak the scope. So once again, the Trapezium remained just that - four stars, E, and F completely lost to sight.

It was about this time that meteor activity stepped up a notch. And the floodgates of participation opened. On our arrival, Dan and I had positioned the club's "star party" signs outside the front gate. By 10pm the sky moved toward overcast and the only thing that kept the handful of amateurs present was the prospect of seeing the Leonids. By midnight, all this changed. The sky was almost completely free of opacity. (High thins remained however.) Saturn lay high overhead and offered superb views through the 80mm Pup, the 127mm MCT, and the 200mm SCT. Jupiter was now well above the eastern treeline and showed considerable detail. (The Pup actually showed irregularities along the NEB plus hints of the faint equatorial belt! The 127mm MCT was giving rajor sharp views of both gas giants. And the 200mm gave almost comparable views while needing a green filter to prevent loss of dark adaptation.) Dozens of cars had pulled in (some headlights blaring unfortunately). Numerous visitors swamped the various scopes. Most simply lay out blankets and ground cloths. The chrous of "uhhs and ahhs", "wows and wohs" began.

Meteor activity earlier in the evening was sporadic. Every few minutes someone somewhere would have there back turned to one part of the sky or another while their interlocator would break off in mid sentence with an exclamation followed by the inevitable: "Too bad you missed that one!". Of course turn about is fair play, and any partner in conversation would sooner or later take up the same line...

But again by midnight the sky had cleared and the amount of activity increased perceptibly. The crowd grew and the energy level climbed - even as the air temperature dropped.

Meanwhile, the view of the gas giants was so fine and the call of the "Great" and Flame Nebulae was so strong that I could here Argo calling from the hatchback; "I want to play too."

So the 80mm Pup was retired from the mount and Argo took up the vigil...

Argo's Excellent Adventure

It was about midnight. Saturn had culminated and Jupiter was well up to the east. Like Jupiter, Orion was well clear of the horizon and as was Auriga. Many plumbs dangled from the celestial tree. Though the sky was now free of clouds, it remained gauzy due to the high thins that still lurked high above - and to every direction. The night sky was also visibly afflicted to the north by the San Jose light dome. To the southeast, Santa Cruz threw its own luminous aura skyward.

Offsetting all this was the incredible stability of the sky. At 80mm's the Pup had shown some superb views of the gas giants. Open clusters such as the Double Cluster in Perseus, and the three Aurigaen Clusters also showed splendid and numerous pinpoint jewels of light. But to my way of thinking such a sky begged views of the two gas giants and the Great Nebula in Orion. I also wanted to revisit Globular Cluster M79 - one of those "on the edge" clusters that should reveal something of resolution but had failed to do so in the past.

Since Dwight's scope happened to be turned on M79 and I had just seen the 8 inch view, I turned Argo there as well. Had the usual problem turning up the cluster through the finderscope. I had made no reference to charts throughout the evening, nor did I intend to do so now. In the end I abandoned my usual approach of projecting a line off Alpha and Beta Lepus and simply "line of sighted" off the Meade. A little sweeping around showed a faint fuzzy in the finderscope a degree or so east of a 5th magnitude star. Switching to the main tube gave me a 120x view comparable to the one seen through the Meade. Brightish, "scruffy", 3 arc minute core surrounded by a randomly distributed group of maybe a dozen 13th magnitude stars (most caught with mild to moderate aversion). Frankly, I was struck with how well presented this 8.0 magnitude 9 arc-minute sized cluster was. More importantly, it has never been made so clear that so many dim outliers could be seen so very far from the core of a 12.4 average surface brightness globular cluster.

I had also had a view through the Meade of M1. Followed the usual trick of sweeping the field north of Zeta Tauri through Argo. Unlike Globular M79, the views through the two scopes were distinctly different. No question, even somewhat misaligned aperture is a big boon on nebulae. But collimation IS an issue with globulars. Thus the gulf between a six and eight inch scope closes where enough light is available, but widens considerably where it is lacking. In retrospect this same phenonemon revealed itself early in the evening during the small scope comparo. In a way, the Pup was to the Ranger what the SCT was to the MCT. One caveat however, when Dwight's scope is well collimated, the "optical quality gap" closes and the 200mm again proves that "aperture rules" - in most every way possible.

But this night, the Gas Giants were best seen through MCTs. Argo was throwing up the usual superb views of a razor sharp Cassini, easily detectable Encke Minima, traceable Dusky Ring, and perfectly rendered blue gray mottling surmounting a well defined SEB. Nothing really new here - a recap of the splendid features possible through an "optically correct" 150mm scope irrespective of archetecture.

It was Jupiter that offered up the truly "slack jawed" view of the evening. Both the NEB and SEB went beyond the usual belt edge irregularities usually seen. On this night, under 8+/10 stability, and despite high water trapped in thin cirrus clouds well overhead, both equatorial belts showed internal structure of such complexity that I would have despaired at even attemting any kind of sketch. Now mind you, none of this intrabelt detail was "obvious". We are not talking Hubble Space telescope view here! We are talking persistent, and directly viewable variations in contrast and luminosity. Features of a type that could be counted (if I had so chosen) - if not accurately labelled.

Meanwhile, between the two belts, the gossamer thin EB stretched across the width of the EZ. (Curiously however, less of the "white curdling texture" usually seen under steady seeing was present.) North of the NEB the NTB traced a very slim, but high contrast dark line across the planets considerable 210x girth. (Again curiously, 210x was preferable to 360x on this particular occasion - perhaps due to atmospheric water.) Beyond the NTB, the NTTB held a sharp line while its northern frontier blended into the NPR.

South of the rifted SEB, three belts were seen. Both the STB and STTB stood alone and isolated - darkish lines across the planets disk. While a third belt blended into the SPR just as the NTTB had done within the planets northern hemisphere.

All eight belts (the enumeration includes the two polar region conjunct belts but not the SEBn and SEBs rifted "belts") showed variations in texture (and sometimes thickness) across their lengths - even as the SEB and NEB had shown intrabelt features in their midst. Truly an extraordinary view of the planet and one that was only approximated by that seen from Fremont Peak during the Millenium change...

But this view of Jupiter was not necessarily the highlight of the evenings telescopic experience. For you see, Orion had culminated in a part of the sky just outside the Santa Cruz lightdome. Turning Argo on Alnitek (Zeta), easily resolved the bright 2.4 arc second pair. The more distant tenth magnitude come, easy direct in the bright pairs luminous aura. East northeast of Alnitek and within the same 70x field, the Flame Nebula revealed a "bowl of light" split asunder by a large dark bar - very similar to the view seen through the Meade earlier in the evening. And dropping due south to M41, many fine tenuous rifts, and billowing folds were seen at 120x. The Grand Nebular Cloud of Orion was complete with four brightish stars joined by a faint fifth. This 11th magnitude confrere was effortlessly and continuously held direct and formed a low triangle between the dimmer, closer Trapezium pairing of stars.

But of the sixth, "F" member, I had only the vaguest of intimations. Inwardly, I was grateful. The season of the Hunter is still early. There would be other opportunities to experience the kind of view seen of its kindred fifth member on some even finer night of transparency and stillness in the future...

There remained but one other telescopic quest of the evening: My old nemesis Aldebaran had begun its western descent. The sky was still. Would I be able to make out its reputed 11.5 magnitude 32 arc second distant companion?

On several occasions recently I have suspected such a faint star between Aldebaran and a more distant star of similar magnitude. Again, all I could make out was a vague chimera. Aldebaran's first magnitude glow is simply too overpowering to confirm the existence of such a companion. But on this occasion I had the luxury of a second scope of greater aperture to test the pair against. With a quick tutorial from Dwight to guide my hand, I entered Aldebaran into the handset and sent the Meade slewing north and west. Peering in the eyepiece, no sign of anything other than the 2 arc-minute distant come was seen. The mystery still remains. Surely I am not on a fools errand? Is it possible that this more distant 11th magnitude come is really Aldebaran's companion?

Chicken Little Was Right

By 2am, Sunday morning, November 18, in the Year of Our Planet (According to the Occidental Calender) 2001, I started disengaging my right eye from Argo's eyepiece long enough to begin paying attention to certain rather unusual goings ons in the sky above me. It would seem that our planet (the Earth as reckoned by some) had entered into a rather concentrated portion of the remnant tail of a particular comet. Materiel associated with that tail, trapped by happy coincidence of trajectory, and the endearing entrities of our Earths gravity well, had been drawn inexorably toward the Blue Planets, "not so blue" surface.

By far, however, the far greater proportion of that cometary material was not destined to make land fall. For you see, as the ice, stone, and metal comprising these tiny discrete "corpuscles of cometary fragmentation" plunged toward the Earth they first made contact with that planets gaseous envelope. Said results were as devastating to said corpuscles as they were spectacular to the eye.

For as you might suspect, these fragments, upon entering this dense gaseous medium, began to heat rapidly (to the same degree as they lost velocity). Now, as you may know, rarely is such heating evenly accomplished. And often such cometary fragments bear a significant amount of frozen fluid. When occasionally this was the case, and particularly should said fragment be of the stoney (rather than of the metallic) type, the effect was devastating to said fragment - and a delight to the eye.

News FLASH: "Multiple Objects Explode Midway Cross the Heavens". "Blue Flashes Seen Emanating From Skies Above Santa Cruz Mountains", "Long-lived Vapor Trails Seen By Numerous Spectators", "Entire Ground Lit Up By Several Mid-air Explosions".

Yes Ladies and Gentlemen, it was the Meteor Event of a Lifetime. The Night the Stars Fell Pale and Their Domain was Usurped by the Atmospheric Antics of the Greatest Roadshow Off-Earth.

And I along with dozens of other late night denizons got to watch. The only price of attendence was a few hours lost sleep...

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