lost with a GOTO

I felt kind of lost or confused. Or something...

With Ian D and Phil off to bed, and having the entire Geoff Brown Observatory to myself, I didn't quite know what to do!

I considered "constellation hopping." That's my term (perhaps a bad choice of words) for working through all the interesting objects in a constellation. After looking at one object, say a galaxy, I look at what is nearby, a short hop away. Perhaps a double star. Or another deep sky object.

On one hand, this doesn't matter any more... I've learned to appreciate that while not using a GOTO 'scope, you don't want to jump all over the entire sky. You lose time. But with a GOTO system and a mount with really fast slew rates, pfft, who cares! Go anywhere! The entire sky is your oyster.

Still, I tried it. And I kept to targets within a few degrees. I tried to split some tight doubles. I went for a couple of galaxies.

Maybe it was the chart I was working from. As I referred to the Pocket Sky Atlas, it suddenly seemed to me not detailed enough! It only goes down to magnitude 7.6 stars. When I turned off the stars in TheSky6 and turned on the deep sky objects, is was mind boggling. The database was showing me thousands of objects on the screen. With a telescope that can go well beyond magnitude 15, it was very intimidating. What do you choose?

I didn't even think to bring my Tirion charts! Then again, they are the first gen. Only go to 8.0 magnitude stars.

I was using a loaner ThinkPad for my notes and planning. I only had Stellarium on it. And I'm not convinced it is accurate beyond magnitude 12 or 13. I should install Cartes du Ciel on it...

Before the weekend, considering I was only going to use the C14, I pondered some targets:

• M33 in Triangulum
• M31 briefly (just to see what a difference aperture would make)
• Uranus
• the moons of Uranus
• Neptune
• the moons of Neptune

Now, looking on it, a pretty small (pathetic?) list for such powerful equipment.

Sunday during the day, I considered new targets, having ticked off a few earlier in the weekend. I expanded the list using the RASC's Finest NGC certificate as a starting point. That tripled the size of the list.

And, all things considered, it was still lame. I finished it in minutes. (With my C8, it would have taken all night probably!)

I didn't sketch anything. I should have done that perhaps. I had my new pencils. My new stump. My brand new pink eraser. Did I grab a piece of paper? No. Why?! Why didn't I do something other than rip through this list?

I felt without direction. Without a plan. And couldn't move.