Funny Story, at least to me….
Like many of you, I’ve been looking at the night sky for over sixty years. From a dime store Newtonian to some of the best telescopes made. These days I have very sophisticated equipment, all computer controlled. I can find almost anything in the night sky with The SkyX Pro and run all my gear with SGP to gather photons.
When the weather gets crappy and I’ve run out of data to integrate, I get bored. Often, like now, I start fiddling with my gear and telescopes, ie upgrading, changing, moving, cleaning, etc… This time decided to return to my roots with an Alt/Az setup and a great refractor. I installed my Takahashi TSA120 on my Televue Gibralter HD mount. Works great, perfect for visual only (though I tried imaging with it a couple years ago…). My Televue NP127is is once again out of its case and mounted on my ZWO ASI AM5 harmonic mount and carbon fiber tripod. I was testing the setup today; it could be a very sweet imaging rig for travels to a dark site.
Tonight I thought I would do some viewing, if the sky cleared. I set everything up, no electricity ! Before dark, I realized without a computer I will have to manually sky hop for objects; something I haven’t done in decades. AHA! I will just grab my trusty The Night Sky Observers Guide and do it the old fashioned way; manually. That’s how I did it sixty years ago, it’ll be easy I convinced myself.
Once the sun set I had some clear spaces. The partial moon was beautiful, Jupiter and her moons are lined up and Orion remains high in the West. I broke out the Night Sky Observers Guide and scanned the sky. YIKES, I forgot how hard this can be. My red light in one hand, the Guide in the other trying to figure out what I’d like to see and where it is. I dropped in a 24mm eyepiece and starting viewing. I quickly realized I now wear glasses and have to remove them to use an eyepiece. I scanned around the open sky, noting which constellation I was looking at and where known objects are located in the guide. It wasn’t as easy as I remembered! Back and forth from eye piece, to sky, to The Guide, and back. Glasses on….glasses off…. My red light illuminating the pages. Yikes I was worn out.
My viewing went on for a couple hours; until the sky faded away into the cloud cover. I had fun doing something different tonight, a return to my basics. However, I also discovered that I became more “ONE” with the sky looking through the eyepiece and moving the OTA by hand, Jumping across the sky from one constellation to another while following the guide. No, my views weren’t even close to what I can achieve imaging with my 9.25” HD. Dimmer, changing focus, and fewer stars, hmmmm. All things considered on this short manual run, Ive decide to move this “manual” rig with a great OTA and tripod to my mountain cabin. I’ll use it there for daylight canyon and animal viewing, as well as night constellations, stars, planets and the moon. Perfect.
I remain most interested in imaging the heavens. I’ll continue with those pursuits, computer assisted, from my small observatory outside my home.
This hobby makes me happy, most of the time….. Now is one of those good times. How about you? Have any cool stories about viewing, imaging, equipment? Lets hear them friends!
Clear skies.
