Okay. . . here's a update from the walking comatose, me.
Wednesday night, and this morning. . . I had a kind of side goal of attempting a half hearted attempt at the Messier Marathon at the Hector J Robinson Observatory. It's a shorter drive than to an official observing event that the club was putting out in Lake Hudson. Some 2 hour drive. And I'm getting back into Astronomy of course, so I'm not about to set the world on fire at a Messier marathon unless I have a goto scope and plan for it. I really didn't have time to plan for it and just wanted to check the mount and perhaps see what this scope can do, pointing at a bunch of objects.
I thought I could probably coin the term Messier torture test if we were bogged down and ran into a lot of problems with the mount. Or perhaps torture test for testing the mount. Would it pass the test, pull in M objects and keep going. We know it's a great mount and highly regarded. Would the little "six star model" that I (thought) I put in work?
Well it worked. But it's not exactly a six star model. It seems I was putting in depending on how you read and understand the mount a one star model with 5 adjustments or sync points after the fact to the model. I'm not sure technically, programmically or how logically this would be different than having a six star model. The steps I was taking don't even seem to match the steps in the manual. So maybe I'm doing something undocumented who knows. . . someone knows out there. . . but of course they are probably out looking for 110 Messier objects at a nice dark sky site or sanely staying at home and getting up in the morning . . . heading to work. Which really was my goal and plan. . .I really wanted to kind of simulate the 110 object search. But what happened. . . well Greg Ozimek was there with me. He came out pretty quickly to the site and then Dan Barriball came out (another FAAC club member). So we had three members of the FAAC club and things were going along pretty nicely.
Except I didn't plan the actual marathon goal very well, being in a hurry and planning it basically during a break in a very busy workday, I grabbed a chart from the net and manually typed out perhaps most of the M objects and numbers in a kind of east to west manner. Creating a list of objects that might cover most of them, but I didn't even have time to double check all of them. So I had this half baked list of objects. They worked okay for a while, but then a few were out of the way and not in order and Greg Ozimek had a planetarium software program that he quickly loaded and was used to. So we started just aiming in the same general location where the dome was. Then we started talking about tweaking the model and I described how I put the steps in. This didn't mesh with what Greg O had read, so we started looking at the manuals. Greg O and I were pretty tired by this time and Dan looked up the alignment procedure in the manual. I could go on and on with this account, but the end result was we decided to trash and cold start the model and do it the "right way" by the book rather than the hacked way I apparently had put it in. However the button sequences didn't seem to work to add additional alignment stars. I could go on and on. It may be that we had one star alignment most of the rest of the night. It seemed like some additional stars were being added, but we didn't get confirmations and the RA+ key wasn't working at all when we tried to use it. Enter seemed to work instead, but no confirmation.
OKAY HOPEFULLY YOU SKIPPED MOST OF THAT ACCOUNT
TO SUMMARIZE
We started looking at M objects. Went off my half baked plan list. Went free form following the software. Going off the plan was not a good idea in one sense of finding out what you were doing and tracking it later. We were perhaps locked in the fun of finding a lot of objects and just seeing them appear. Then tweaked the scope for perhaps an hour or so, with the manual work discussion putting in the new model. That probably doesn't work any better than the earlier hacked one. But seemed to work okay pretty close and dead on by the end of the night. Then wisely Dan leaves at about midnight. Which is pretty late. But the two Gregs keep going, locked in some kind of marathon obsession. Not necessarily efficient, but one of the drawbacks was, we had to many lights in the building. Okay we had the light from my Canon EOS back flashing and shining, need to turn off that readout. We had light from the great heater that Greg Ozimek had brought. It made it really comfortable in there. Maybe affected viewing a little but was not really noticable for faint fuzzy objects. We had light blasting from the computer screen and at times from my eyephone. Really everything was GREAT. . . I don't mean to sound like I'm complaining. It was very addictive and fun just moving from one deep sky object to another and looking for it. Taking a photo and then moving on. The camera of course caught more than our naked eyes would see in the eyepiece, but gave a pretty good idea what we had looked at. Using the Canon EOS on the refractor matched with the C-14 to document quickly what you looked at is a pretty nice setup. Almost perfect. Perhaps if I took a short exposure of maybe 8 to 10 seconds using ISO 800 I'd get a pretty good likeness to what we were seeing in the eyepiece. Of course in some cases we didn't see anything. The scope was likely on the object, but 10 magnitude objects were difficult to see clearly without using adverted vision and that really didn't help to much with all the other light pollution we were throwing around the inside of the observatory.
A visual observatory should be dark. We don't need much light inside and don't really want much added light when we need dark adjusted eyes. There's not a lot of light coming in the observatory when the door is closed. It's a positive for viewing, but there is a lot of sky glow and perhaps light pollution filters on the eyepieces would help a lot.
Anyway to try to cut this post short, because I should be dreaming right now. . . we stayed up until 4AM in the morning. A true marathon like performance for length of time, but we were pretty out of it by the end. Still excited perhaps and perhaps just going at it each not wanting to be the one to call it quits. Now I would have thought going until 4AM would allow me to see 80 objects easily with the goto mount, but we had delays because I wanted to take photographs, and tweaking the mount and that and some other delays caused it to go slower than I expected.
Later in the evening or early morning one of the group asked me how I would know which photos went with each M object. Well actually since we aren't following a plan and didn't log the order in which we saw them, we don't have a written record. Just some photos that should match the M objects we saw, but not necessarily a label for each. I even recorded some audio clips which of course are long and virtually useless of the session. Audio is probably a good idea to record highlights and narration. Greg Ozimek had the sense to have Brian record by checking off objects from the list. That worked out okay. We each had plenty of eyepiece time. Actually Brian showed a lot more eyepiece constraint and time looking briefly than Greg and I did. So basically it was a half speed marathon, more like a fast walk, not really a marathon.
You have to have a lot of respect for the more experienced star gazer out there some who do the marathon by star hopping, when you try to do it with a goto and see how slow it can be even with a goto. Some other comparisons, between our setup and a good outdoor site.
Our site requires us to move the dome. We can't just aim the scope at a different part of the sky, there is shutter and dome movement involved. Because the shutter can open in one of two sections to open fully we may have to close it to attach the lower section and rotating the dome takes some time as well. The additional slowdown of taking photos of course could not compare with a guy just looking seeing the object and taking a note and moving on. You'd have to be very disciplined to actually complete an marathon and see all 110 (or 109) objects.
We saw 38 M objects. More like a speed walk with plenty of breaks in between than a marathon, but nonetheless fun. We did encounter a lot of strange equipment issues. Perhaps I had a jinx on the computer and the EOS as well. I didn't seem to be able to get the laptop and EOS to sync and work as well as they have in the past. I need to work on that a little better. That wasted some time as well.
Now the biggest problem of course is I was up until 4:30AM and probably didn't get to bed until 5AM. So I had only a few hours sleep. Then I was a walking zombie at work. With a lot of difficult work as well.
So I worked late and had to stay late. I heard Leo took 5 kids and a fellow teacher out to the observatory and they looked through the Lunt Solar Scope at the Sun. But they had a problem. It went to the sun fine. Four kids saw the sun, but the fifth didn't see anything. The mount went dead, lost all power. It turned out something knocked out the circuit breaker to the power supply for the scope. We aren't sure why. So that was a pretty good short event, but there was a problem.
I decided to go to the observatory for a short time. I called up Greg Ozimek, to let him know I'd be there if he wanted to come out and try it. He's sleeping, in an almost comatose state, which I should be in. We chat a bit. I have a device to measure current and wattage flow called a kill o watt meter. I'm thinking about trying it out. Maybe I'll try out my little Celestron and take a peek at the moon. Just for fun then go home. Up walks a guy from the local area. He was at the dedication, he's been calling Leo to see when the observatory is open. We start talking. I offer to show him a few objects. First just through my little scope, but I know the real fun is in the observatory. Okay . . . let's just open the shutter. I know I shouldn't do this. I should be at home sleeping. But this guy has waited and wanted to look through the scope for months now. He has a Celestron and tells me he could actually run home retrieve it and show me the problem he's having with the GOTO. We look at M45 Pleiades, M42 Orion Nebula, Mars and Saturn. Mars is okay I suppose, but I'm never impressed with it, so far. I always want to see more detail and never see enough to be happy, but maybe it's just conditions or maybe I'll never see what I want to see through a telescope. . . it's just that way I feel about it. . . but we look at it. We can see the caps and some faint detail. Perhaps the visitor has better eyes and can see more than I can. Then we look at Saturn. It's nice. The visitor is impressed, but I've seen better in earlier nights. Saturn is only about 18 degrees above the horizon however and there's some thin cloud issues maybe it's the atmosphere. Still the Big C-14 picks it up and brings it in better than most scopes that most people own, so he's happy.
And he's asking me if I want to take a look at his goto scope. After all I have a Celestron too. (He doesn't say it, but we both know it because I pulled it out as I was heading to the observatory.) But I'm tired, and to out of it to really look at manuals and debug his scope at this time. I actually am a new Celstron owner myself and haven't read my own manual much. Just a quick scan. I tell him my suspicion which is the batteries are running low or perhaps it's a problem with the power supply not supplying enough current. It was a problem with my scope and low power can cause the Celestron scopes to lose their star map.
He realizes I'm tired. He admits he is out past his normal bed time, because this visitor gets up early in the morning to go to work. Now it's 10PM. I had arrived earlier at 8PM. So there's another two hours. But we're happy, looked up at the sky. If I was younger and more rested, maybe I could look more, but I have errands to run, and I'm off to grab some dinner at a local Checker drive through.
So there you have it. A pretty long and perhaps poorly written blog entry about the Messier torture test of the C-14.
One nice thing about the session was . . . although I don't have really good long tracking photos . . . I do have photos of practically every M object we looked at.
They are short exposures compared to many and can use a little work. And we of course need to really revisit and take some serious photos of these later. But for now, I have some evidence of the fun and long hour attempt at the Hector J Robinson observatory.
In retrospect. . . there's a lot to learn. And a lot supposedly that could make things better and more efficient. But it's about having fun as well, and we really aren't always efficient. We make mistakes and slow down at times. Brian of course got to experience a little bit of a crazy production-like race to get a bunch of seeing in. During that time we didn't do any requests just for the most part searched for M objects that were for the most part brighter than Magnitude 10. It was really fun to see a lot of objects in a short amount of time. Greg Ozimek summed it up nicely at times, with "we gotta come back and give this some more serious attention later". It was a whirlwind tour to us.
Okay. . . I'm tired and this is becoming to long. Before I waste more time with an edit or rewrite. . . it's time to post here is one photo of one of the objects. I'm not going to tell you which object this is, because frankly I don't remember and don't have notes at this time. But we can find this out later. Who knows I may just post all the objects in some article and let it become a puzzle for some to research and solve. Here's some photos, now determine which object they are. That might be a nice quiz and project for some.
More details to follow perhaps an easier read.
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