ASTRO: Modest return to the Sky

Hi folks, long time (or so it seems to me). I see that SAA is getting
flooded with uselessness and foolishness, so here's some signal to go with
the noise.

As you may know I divested of all my fancy astro-gear to pursue another
hobby of mine almost a year ago, but being ever practical, I didn't divest
of everything. I kept a modest 6" F5 StarHOC reflector that I had purchased
over the years and mounted it on a cobbled together, inexpensive CG-5 class
mount with RA drive that I assembled from "repair" parts I had gathered over
the years. It works surprisingly well.

Good enough for who it's for at any rate. ;-)

I also picked up an AstroTech 66 ED refractor in trade for an eyepiece and
I've been using it occasionally to look at the moon and as a spotting scope
on a Unistar Light Deluxe. That's it, that's all I've got left. Add in 30mm,
18mm, 12.5mm Ultima eyepieces (really like those Ultimas) and Ultima Barlow,
a moon filter (ND-13) and a Lumicon UHC.

Back to basics.

So, I was passing through the garage the other afternoon and noticed the
StarHOC sitting in the corner and having been neglected for a _long_ time,
so I decided it was time to refresh the memory cells and do some observing,
or at least some poking around.

It was early twilight and Antares was just visible with it's bright seasonal
companion Jupiter, the moon to the south of both looming low on the horizon.
I found the three cat food cans I stomped into the ground out in the back
yard some years ago marking the foot positions for my old Vixen GP mount's
tripod, which gets me roughly polar aligned as soon as I set the mount down.
The StarHOC can be carried on the mount in a single trip so it took all of
two minutes to get setup.

The scope has a simple 6x30 straight through optical finder that works well
enough for finding the moon, Jupiter, Antares and any of the brighter DSO's
that Messier and Company are well known for.

I started out with the moon to get an idea of how bad was the seeing, being
on the horizon. Then I raised the business end higher up to find Jupiter.
Again the seeing terrible that close the horizon, but I was able to achieve
best focus and just make out the North and South equatorial belts, plus all
4 moons of course, and shading of the southern polar region was also
obvious. Two moons to the right of Jupiter in the eyepiece making a tight
diagonal with respect to the other two moons to the left of Jupiter aided in
achieving best focus.

Antares appeared to swim in the eyepiece, glowing red with a dancing halo of
visible spectrum colors brought on by the seeing. I made an attempt at
checking collimation and made some minor adjustments. Seemed to help, but
doing that in bad seeing with dancing diffraction rings is never going to
achieve critical collimation. At best, it can only help with the first steps
of getting roughly collimated. Turns out that was good enough for the
purpose of the night.

Soon I grew a little bored of going back and forth from the Moon to Jupiter,
and noticing that it had begun to darken a bit overhead, I found Polaris
visible enough to be sighted in the center bore of the GEM for a tighter
rough polar alignment. Once accomplished, I then looked around the sky
overhead to see what constellations were visible to the scope. After a few
moments I noticed the Keystone of Hercules was just appearing, and that
means time for M13, a favorite in any scope, but large enough and bright
enough to resolve well in a 6". It took me a minute to search it out since I
couldn't remember if it was between the two stars to the west side or east
side of the Keystone (I can never seem to remember that), but it didn't take
much effort as it is easily visible even in the tiny 30mm finder scope at
6x.

I also noticed that Serpens was becoming visible west of the meridian and
that would mean M5 could be viewed, but I was having a lot of fun observing
M13 with various combinations from my eyepiece collection and the time
passed by quickly. It wasn't long before my 9 year old daughter came looking
for me for her goodnight hug and kiss. Not knowing where I was, and not
realizing that I was observing in the backyard, she flipped on the outside
light and put an end to my dark adaptation. ;-)

No problem though. I had gotten in about an hour of observing, really
enjoyed the view of M13 after a long break, and to boot, the temperature was
low enough that the skeeters were at bay for the most part, and just
beginning to come around.

I left the scope outside anticipating I might go back out later to look at
the Milky Way showpieces, but alas when I did, it had begun to cloud over as
the storms of the midwest were making there way into the area here in the
Northeast US.

-Steve Paul