[Chaos-l] Farrington report

[Michael Hrivnak]

Tonight was a good evening for observing.  Walter Fowler and I were the only 
attendees.

Walter had a new GOTO mount to try with his televue refractor.  We worked out 
some kinks and figured out how to get it working.  Once the mount stopped 
"locating" objects in the mud and conceded that they were in the sky, it was 
quite a lot of fun to use.  It will make an ideal public-observing-session 
setup.

Walter had another new toy: at WSP he picked up a used Televue Powermate 5X 
barlow.  You heard me.  That's 5, as in five.  After I initially dismissed it 
as pure silliness, he talked me into trying it on Saturn with my scope.  I 
dropped in my Pentax 10mm eyepiece, which put the magnification at a whopping 
1027x!  When you could get Saturn into the field of view, it was huge!  All 5 
visible moons were on the same side of the planet, and stretched nearly across 
the entire field of view.  Despite the crapshoots that were focusing and aiming 
the scope, during brief moments as Saturn zipped across the field of view, 
there was a lot of detail.  I saw the shadow of the rings on the planet 
surface and even saw empty space through the rings on either side of the 
planet.

I did a side-by-side comparison of my Pentax 10XW with Walter's Nagler 9.  
They show nearly identical fields of view, but the presentation is different.  
Despite more magnification, the Nagler actually caused objects to look smaller.  
The field of view, however, extended all around in typical Nagler form.

As for objects, I mostly cruised through the highlights of my last observing 
session.  Early on, we spotted the remains of the Cosmos 1939 Rocket moving 
through Cancer at about 3.6 magnitude.  The air was quite still, and I found 
lots of detail in some great objects while the dryness lasted.  Walter left 
around 10:20pm.  By 10:45, I noticed that the sky was glowing more than usual, 
and everything was very wet.  A quick check with my iPhone revealed that the 
humidity in Pittsboro was 90% and rising!  That's way above the forecast, 
which is a shame.  I packed up at that point and headed home.

Michael
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