THE MESSIER MARATHON - PART 1 FRIDAY NIGHT
There was a Messier marathon tonight, and I'm sure it's still going on. This is where astronomers meet at a dark sky site and try to see how many Messier objects they can see all night long. In theory around this time of the year, one might be able to see every Messier object in the catalog. Over a hundred objects in one night. The key is to have a list of the objects and know the sky and how to find them well or have a really good goto telescope. You have to start with the ones that are just about to set after the sun sets and then work your way up from the west toward the east. In theory there is an opportunity for a break and perhaps a nap in the early hours of the morning and they you resume and try to bag a view of all the objects as they start to appear in the east before sunrise. Only a couple of times a year the sun is in a position where you could see all the Messier objects. This is one of those times.
Of course this isn't something that many beginners would attempt to do. I'm usually at HJRO and I'm not much of a visual search and find astronomer because I'm so accustomed to using the observatory computer now and I'm often there to have it open for others.
I have never done a Messier marathon. It's tempting to think about how easy it would be to do it and the endurance and fairly quick pace one would have to have to find objects. Some being quite faint would require a fairly large telescope and dark skies to easily find.
I have tried a Messier torture test, in other words just tried to see how many I could quickly find one night back in 2010 during a marathon. I was in the observatory with Greg Ozimek from the club and we had a kind of make shift list I came up with, not having a printed up one that is available on the web by those who know better than I on how to construct the list. We were using the C14 goto and found quite a few Messier objects, but by 3AM were pretty tired and we only saw perhaps 45 or 50 objects by that time. We were slowed down a bit because we had three astronomers in the observatory during part of that run and all of us wanted to look at the object and I was trying to take photos of each one with a 30 second exposure. This slowed down our movement from one object to another, but it was still a pretty quick pace to see that many objects.
Rather than try to do that with my newly working old Nexstar telescope, I decided to go to an isolated site away from the other astronomers who are attempting this tonight and perhaps on Saturday as well. I decided I'd try to go out to Dexter and have dinner first and then head over to my friends front yard. He lives outside of Dexter and is about 4 or 5 miles away from Peach Mountain, U of M observing site for the University of Michigan Lowbrow astronomers. It's a pretty dark sky location where my friend lives.
I stopped for pizza but was tired. My car had three telescopes I took out there. Looking up many thin clouds and haze made viewing look like it would be doubtful. This was a bit earlier at about 7PM. I was tired and decided to take a nap in the car before eating dinner. My friend knew I'd be coming out but he wasn't sure what time I'd arrive. After napping about a half and hour I went into Cottage Inn Pizza in Dexter Michigan and ordered a medium pizza with a couple of toppings and a Pepsi.
I quickly ate the pizza and wrote a couple of quick emails to club members. One picked up an eyepiece for me off Astromart and wrote me that the eyepiece was in. I can hardly wait to pick it up from him and pay him and test that eyepiece. But I was pretty far from his location and he was already likely busy or observing somewhere else. I hope he gets a chance to look through that eyepiece with his setup and gets some good use out of it before I take it off his hands. It's a Televue 55mm Plossl, in a 2 inch format. This means it should be great for really wide field views, especially on the C14 at HJRO. It supposedly is okay on rich field telescopes but better for long focal length telescopes from what I've read on the net.
After eating four pieces of pizza I headed over to my friends house. I let him know I was there and started setting up a telescope in his front yard. His son Eli who is 14 came out to help out and made some remarks which were funny and we had a pretty good time setting up the telescope. But I ran into a problem which was I was having problem getting the alignment at first, due to my not wearing my glasses while looking up. A real problem for me, I need to get a string or tether for my glasses for when I'm observing and I always forget to get one. Another big problem was my finder is not working and I didn't fix it. So I knew that I'd have these hassles and it would take some time. But Eli was thinking I'd have this setup quickly. He made a remark that it was warm out and I was over-dressed. He was out in a Sweat shirt early on. I said, you better get your coat, because it's going to be getting cold tonight. I had long johns on and snow pants for snowmobiling on. So I was toasty warm. We were running the telescope off an AC invertor from my Prius. I also setup my binocular telescope and we looked at a couple of objects.
Eli complained I had the binocular telescope set to low. I had it set lower for him, but he's taller than I set it up for, and I could have set the telescope up at a lot higher position.
The Nexstar gave me a few problems. The display seems dim and not as bright as I'd like it. Probably my bad eyes and my need for bifocals. I had problems reading it. I had problems getting the scope polar aligned. I had it setup with the wrong star at first, then realized that's not the north star. Then when I had two stars finally picked as alignment stars and set, which was difficult because I didn't have a finder working, the telescope died on me. Eli had told me that he heard some noise from my car and I dismissed it as some complaint that didn't matter. What happened was I didn't put the Prius into operating mode and it was only in accessory mode. This drained the starter battery and the inverter quit on me. I could start the car and get power back, but my Nexstar had lost it's settings and I had to get it aligned again. I set it up in EQ mode, which requires the tilting of the base with the built in setup that allows this. But I don't have a telescope setup on the base that gives me a polar alignment. So I didn't have a good polar alignment.
The second time I setup the telescope I didn't have it in the correct EQ align mode and wasted more time not getting it setup correctly. So I had to go through the process a third time. By that time Eli was starting to complain, how he was cold and of course we chatted at times about other things.
Another strange thing that happened, was I had a massive amount of gas from eating at the Cottage Inn apparently, maybe it was a combination of the cheeze and the Pepsi. Eli was mentioning that there was a black bear in the area that scared some people in the nearby park as it awoke from it's hibernation. And they saw this black bear. He said, I hope you have your 45 ready to shoot at this if it comes around. I said, I don't have a 45, much less have a 45 with me. And I mentioned that using a handgun on a bear might not be a very good idea, as it might just make the bear angry and not harm him at all. Bears have very thick bones in their skulls and many handgun bullets might just bounce off their heads and not do any damage other than make them more mad at you. I said I heard that if you bark real loud at a bear, they don't like the sound of barking dogs. But perhaps that might be a sign to them that "dinner is ready". We were not sure what we'd do if a black bear came out after us at night looking for dinner. I assured Eli he'd be okay because he could run faster than I could and the bear would probably get to me for dinner first.
We were hearing sounds, but it was not bear sounds. It was the sounds of methane that I was omitting from time to time with loud noises. My stomach was even making fart sounds with internal movement of gas inside my body. It was quite distracting and of course we had all the fart homor one would hear in such a situation. It was like a methane nebula was near. I said, perhaps this smell would keep the bears away and swore these were not SBD stinkers. I don't know if Eli agreed with this or not. The sound of the Prius from time to time would turn on and off. Finally after about an hour Eli said, I gotta go in, I'm getting cold. . . and he went back into the house. About 20 minutes after he was in I had a pretty decent sync for the Nexstar. His dad came out and I said, I finally got the thing setup and it works. I said, "your son had me distracted with all his talk and gas." Trying to blame him for all the fart distraction. But of course my friend already had heard the story and knew I was trying to pass off the blame as well as the gas from Cottage Inn.
The IPad controlled the skifi flawlessly. From time to time the ipad might lose it's WIFI connection and try to connect by default to my friend wifi network instead of the SKYFI network. This was a bit of a distraction, but not a big deal. A bigger problem was I didn't have a perfect alignment with the EQ not pointing at the north star correctly. And my alignment stars were quite close together, so the mount could find objects in one area of the sky pretty well, but further away to the east or west it would be fairly far off in it's positioning and "slewing" to the target. It would be off and the narrow field of view that the Nexstar 4SE has didn't allow the object to fit inside the field of view of a 40mm plossl. So I would have to try to find the object by moving the scope with the hand controller buttons. This added to the task of quickly finding objects. About 40% of the objects were quickly found. I looked at a dozen objects with the telescope.
Another interesting thing was I put the Ipad on the Prius to set it down while looking at the objects through the telescope. When I set it on the trunk lid of the Prius as my friend was approaching the Prius started up to charge the battery. When the Prius started up, a strong EMF field apparently was generated by the Prius motor. It is after all a 41 horsepower generator when it's charging the battery if the main motor is being used. And this 41 horsepower can be multiplied by 660 to find out how many watts this is equivalent to. That's a lot of wattage and a lot of power. And the magnets in that must be pretty strong.
The magnetic field from the Prius motor, played havoc with the display of the ipad. It's display was moving all over the place, as if many fingers were moving the display around and zooming it in and randomly moving the screen back and forth. Totally uncontrollable. And it might cause some to panic and wonder if the iPad was being reset or damaged by the stray fields.
I simply picked up the ipad and pressed on a part of the screen so it would respond to my finger direction. This cleared up the software glitch.
We looked at a few objects and then Eli said, it's 11:30PM as if that is late, and it probably is for a person with a normal school or work schedule. They are used to going to bed early and rising early. I wanted to tell him Astronomers are like Vampires, we like to be up at night and sleep in during the daytime, especially when the sky is nice at night.
He went off to bed and I observed a little more. But by 12:30 I was feeling a little tired and I had complaints from the home front about the need for me to be home and help out. So I decided to pack up the stuff. After taking a few photos of the sky and telescopes there, I had all the telescopes put away and started the trip home.
It was a pretty successful night. The question may be was it worth the trip. If we think about it. I live 1 mile from HJRO. My friend lives about 50 miles away. So I can drive to HJRO 50 times for every trip out to Dexter to observe. Dexter has a nice observing site and I can see a lot. I really like it out there. But I don't get 50 times more quality from viewing in Dexter. The views are much better but not 50 times better.
Well I think I've talked enough like a gasbag. In any event, I didn't float away from all the methane and I never had to fend off the bear out there, so I suppose everything went about as well as it could for a Friday night observing session. Had I not been bothered from home I might have stayed out a little later, but all in all it was a good observing session.
What did I learn.
1. The EQ mode is useless for the Nexstar 4SE for me, unless I can get a really good alignment.
2. I need some kind of Polar scope setup to get that. Second I need a better finder scope setup, one that works. One that is optical not based on some button battery which can go dead.
3. the Ipad is really bright even in it's darkest setting at a dark sky site. It's screen glow was really annoying. I didn't use the built in night vision mode, but I doubt that would have helped much. I would really need a red screen filter that some sell for astronomy to use that much at a dark sky site. I ended up turning the ipad away from the telescope at times, but wanted to leave it's display on, to avoid the app from going to sleep and losing the connection to the telescope. So it would have been really annoying for others at the Messier marathon hunt had I been near them with a bright iPad running and ruining their night vision.
These things would make the Nexstar 4SE a better telescope for casual observing. It's small size makes it a little bit limited compared to a larger sized telescope like a C8. I can say I'm really spoiled with the quick setup and permanent setup and computer at HJRO. I'm much less efficient in the field, because I'm used to the easy and quick setup we have at the observatory. I actually got home a lot sooner than I might from HJRO, because at HJRO I live so close I know I can make it home sooner, if need be.
(Photo below)The two of us looking up through dark Dexter skies, Eli on the left viewing through the Vixen binoculars and I'm (the old fart) on the right looking up through the Nexstar 4SE.
Below: Massive glow from the iPad. As I search for the Ghost Of Jupiter nebula.
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