learning the Atlas (Etobicoke)

Manuel invited me over for some astronomical observing. He was planning to try out his new CCD camera. Then he offered that I use his new Atlas EQ-G computerised mount under one of his Celestron optical tube assemblies. Cool!

After the football match, we set up the two telescopes in the parkette.

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Upon looking up the latitude and longitude in MS Streets and Trips, I made a short observing list in SkyTools3. Ended up with a selection of about 15 items.

I set up the mount and did a rough polar alignment. It has a small polar telescope. I'd swear it is the same as mine... Did a three-star alignment with the hand controller. It was targeting well.

Tagged Albireo to kick things off. Beautiful.

23:13 PM, 16 July 2011. I just viewed the Blue Racquetball aka NGC 6572, a planetary nebula in Ophiuchus, with a Meade SWA 34mm in the Celestron 8" OTA (so at 60 power). It is very colourful! An aquamarine colour, perhaps. It is small. Almost star-like. No, there is some dimension to it. It is a very small disk.

The colour is striking. Intense blue green. However, like other PN, it changes appearance when you look away. With averted vision, it goes white! Then you look at it and it dims and goes dark blue green. Wild.

There's was a neat little pattern of mag 10 stars nearby forming a crystal shape.

I dug deeper with the 25mm eyepiece, a Celestron E-lux plössl (yielding 81x). I could see mag 11+ stars to the east of the planetary nebula. TYC 00443-2027 1 is magnitude: 11.36 (Tycho-2). TYC 00443-1596 1 is magnitude: 11.80 (Tycho-2). Woo hoo!

A noisy kitty cat joined us. A tabby the size of Nancy. He was chatty. He talks like Soccer. My old buddy Soccer... Astrocat.



11:40 PM. I decided to try the Meade super plössl 15mm (jumping to 135x). Ah. Now the PN had gone fuzzy. It was not star-like. The colour was a bit less intense now.

11:45. Showed Manuel both the hacked USB keyboard lights. He likes them. I loaned him my bright one while I plugged in Deep Red.

Ooh. I found an on-board temperature sensor on the mount. 27.6°. Yikes. Toasty.

12:06 AM, 17 July 2011. Just viewed the Moon. With the low power eyepiece. Lovely. The seeing was bad. But it was pretty low. And we're looking over buildings...

12:09 AM. Met Manuel's charming wife and her sister. They took a few peeks and then headed back indoors.

12:17. Tried to view M51 at low power. No joy.

Tried M81. No joy.

Deep sky objects are not on the menu tonight.

Added some double stars to the working list in ST3.

12:25. Tried to locate the double star HD 197312 in Delphinus. The first snag was that the hand controller did not seem to allow searching by Draper's catalog. But it had SAO numbers. SkyTools said it was 106409. Back to the telescope.

The hand controller wouldn't accept it! It forced me to enter the first 4 digits of the SAO item. Then it took me into a paged mode with limited preset stars. WTF? I can't choose any SAO? Huh. That threw me. Perhaps I could find an object nearby and then just manual star hop... I looked for some nearby stars with SAO numbers in the catalog. When it finally occurred to me that this was dumb.

12:33. The mosquitoes were hungry tonight. Loaned Manuel my Off spray.

12:43. RTFM. I suspected there was a way to make the mount go to a specific location. Looked like I might have to use the User Location feature. That begged the question, which coordinate system epoch should be used. Stupid manual...

12:50. By going to Arcturus, I was able to determine that the hand controller uses J2000 coords. Made sense. That's how I'd need to direct it...

1:03. It worked! I found HD 197312 aka Σ2718 by entering the J2000 RA and Dec numbers. Found a nice little double star. Close together in the low power. Identical brightness. Hard to determine the colour. My eyes were playing tricks on me. At first I thought they were blue and yellow. But then they seemed to flip. Huh. They're dim. They're probably both white.

Not noted in Sissy Haas's book double stars for small telescopes.

1:20. Viewed HD 203380 in Cygnus by direct coordinate entry. Cool! Another close pair (at the low power) aka Σ2789. Equal colour and brightness again (eerily similar to HD 197312). But there's a bright colourful wide pair nearby (Haas calls this S 786, S for James South). A very pretty scene. Perhaps the brighter pair is yellow and orange.

Haas quoted Heckman on S 786: "a wide pair of contrasting magnitudes... yellow and blue." She described Σ2789 as "a pair of twins, like headlights in a sea of stars."

1:39. Tried to view SEI1513A. Cricky. Two mag 11 stars. No thanks.

Went to Vesta using the immediate J2000 coords. Cool. Easily spotted. Easy peasy. There was a very bright, equally bright star, in the field of the low power ocular. Turns out that that was 33 Capricorni. There was a little triangle of mag 9 and 10 stars that helped me verify the alignment. That said, the sky is washed out from the Moon light. Not a lot of other stars to use...

I wondered how fast the nearby asteroid was moving. It occurred to me tonight to use the Motion Trails feature in SkyTools3! I don't know why I didn't think to do that at the CAO...

2:00. Went back down to low power for Vesta.

2:09. Manuel showed me his latest Moon image. Lots of detail. He's enjoying the new CCD camera, the Imaging Source DFK21AU04AS. Very nice.



2:24. I tried viewing Neptune. With the Tele Vue 3x 1¼" barlow, tried to spot moons. But it was mushy. ST3 said that Triton was mag 13.something. So I didn't think it doable.

Viewed the Ring. Lovely. As always.

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What a great evening! I enjoyed trying out and learning new equipment. Stretching the brain. It was fun watching (and hearing) Manuel meet with success. And I enjoyed Astrokitty's company too.