[Chaos-l] Farrington report

[walter fowler]

What might not have come through in Michael's observing report is how much
he got into the 5x Powermate and high mag observing.  I swear I heard him
say under his breath "Why look at anything at less than 500x."  I had to pry
the Powermate out of his hand when it was time for me to leave.  Ah, the
lure of big aperture and high magnification ...    Walter

2009/3/19 Michael Hrivnak <mhrivnak at hrivnak.org>

>  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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