[Chaos-l] Farrington report

[Mark South]

I'll put out a triple-barlow challlenge (3081x) next weekend!
Oops I forgot there are limits...
Sent from my cell

On Mar 20, 2009, at 9:44 AM, walter fowler <walterfowler at gmail.com>  
wrote:

> 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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