After several nights of trial and error, interspersed with inevitable weather scrubs, I finally had an observing session when everything seemed to come together. From previous adventures in astronomy, I knew the hobby was as much art as science, and that’s why I named the beginner’s series I’m writing
One Day At A Time. You have to learn and remember a lot of little details, and practice helps. I certainly don't claim any special knowledge or experience. But the experience I do have comes from mistakes, and I hope others might be able to learn from mine.
An $80
Meade refractor arrived yesterday and I mounted it on
El Cheapo, my
$139 Orion reflector. Both are so-called rich field telescopes because 1) they cover a relatively big swath of sky, and 2) they're optically fast (
f/5 and
f/4, respectively) so they make capturing rich details in dim deep-sky objects possible with an inexpensive tripod and mount. Hours-long manually guided exposures are replaced by dozens even hundreds of seconds-long stacks of images, combined to show fine details. You certainly can get better detail with stacks of long exposures, but when trying to capture deep-sky objects with low-cost equipment, quick is good.
Each scope came with a tripod and mount, but for those bargain-basement Amazon Warehouse prices (you may find them literally for more or less what I paid), the accessories are essentially junk. The scopes themselves, surprising, are widely regarded as pretty good, even for the price. A good refractor such as the Takahashi 85mm, for comparison, is $3,850! My Meade Adventure Scope ($99 MSRP) certainly isn’t in the same class optically, but for 1/50th the price I can forgive a lot of aberrations.
Click to enlarge, click again to enhuge.
The weather last night was reasonably clear and dry so marine fog, coastal clouds, and dew weren’t an issue, for once.
I found a new spot on the patio to put the scope that had views of Polaris to the north (used for alignment) and Orion (to the south) my target. Two nights ago after trying to do an alignment but fussing with a balky mount for an hour, I found M42 had moved far enough that it was blocked by a beam that holds up the patio cover.
Last night, after setting the scope so it pointed toward where I knew Polaris would be (a little
app told me so), after making sure both scopes and the finder all pointed to the same place, after leveling the scope, and after waiting for the sky to get dark, I found Polaris in the polar scope’s field of view. The iPhone
app (Polar Scope Align Pro) showed me where Polaris should be on the polar scope’s rings, and I used the mechanical declination and right-ascension screws to put the star there. (Polaris isn’t exactly at the north pole and travels in a circle around it every 24 hours. The
app tells you where on the circle it is for your location and time. It was at 4:30 on the ring last night. Twelve hours later it’s at 10:30, just like clockwork,
Next I used the mount’s
GOTO computer to do a 3-star alignment using Sirius, Alioth, and Capella, each picked from a list offered by the program. The scope slewed to where it thought each star should be, I centered it using manual controls and an illuminated crosshair eyepiece. After completing the process I told the mount to go to Orion's Nebula, and there it was right in the middle of the scope’s field of view.
I enjoyed the view through both the refractor and reflector scopes with my Mark I, Mod 2 eyeballs, rediscovering that averted vision really does allow the more sensitive part of your eye to see things at night that you can’t see looking directly them.
But my goal was to get a decent image of M42 with a camera, so I cranked up SharpCap on my laptop and connected the Svbony SV305
CMOS camera. Using presets I’d saved from reports of other people’s success, I was momentarily stunned when I saw nothing. Then I remembered that I need to refocus when I mount the camera, and I need to buy a parfocal ring so my eyepiece is at the same focus distance as the camera.
And wow! I was delighted to see not just stars but nebulae! SharpCap went to work and started building stacks of images for me, a once I got the focus right a few results were pretty good, if I do say so myself.
I’ve spent the morning trying to find good, free software that will let me combine all the frames I collected, with different exposures, in hopes of pulling detail out of the bright center.
Meanwhile, here’s a quick and dirty look at the Great Nebula in Orion (M42). Lots more to learn, and lots more work to do to extract every bit of capability from my bargain-basement equipment.
