Despite threatening daytime clouds over San Francisco Bay, the evening of Saturday, 28 June, 1997, brought the usual collection of telescopes to Fremont Peak State Park, near San Juan Bautista, California. I had my Intes six-inch f/10 Maksutov, and got intensively involved in a new observing program, so did not spend as much time as I might have wished with other telescopes.
In early 1997, I finished a long observing program, of all star clusters, galaxies, and nebulae in Burnham's _Celestial_Handbook_, north of 45 degrees south declination. I had been looking for new worlds to conquer. Recent experiences chasing down very faint galaxies with my six-inch Maksutov led me to believe that I could push on the faint-fuzzy limit without buying a new car big enough to haul my Celestron 14's trailer. So I found an on-line copy of the list of deep-sky objects discovered by William Herschel -- not the "400" list, I mean all 2514 -- at http://www.seds.org/billa/herschel/h2500.txt, and laboriously compared it against my own logbook and index cards. My not quite 3000 objects observed included about half the Herschel list: I decided to try for the rest.
June 28 was my second night on this program. During the first, last week in the hills above Palo Alto, I verified my previous experience that with an exit pupil of 1 or 2 mm, I can use the six-inch Intes effectively to chase down galaxies whose cataloged magnitudes are as faint as 14. The experience at Fremont Peak, with somewhat darker sky, added further confirmation. Visual magnitudes of galaxies are notoriously unreliable, so that fourteenth magnitude bit is not as impressive as it sounds. Still, it puts a lot of galaxies in range.
The main limit to using the six-inch for such dim objects is not so much detecting them as identifying them. Of the forty or fifty that I have looked for so far, at magnifications of 75 or 121, I have succeeded in detecting all but one or two. However, galaxies sometimes come in groups, and the averted vision, tube-jiggling, and other tricks of the trade for finding faint fuzzies, sometimes make it hard to separate two nearly adjoining blobs of lumpy darkness, or to tell one from another in a small cluster.
Fortunately, there are usually plenty of larger telescopes handy, and I have had excellent luck mooching time on them. One friend was very generous with his 12-inch LX200 on the 28th, not only for verification of things at my limit or for separation of things I could not, but also, just for fun, for whizzing through ten or fifteen on the list in less than half an hour.
Computer controlled telescopes are a big win for this kind of work. Let me not be modest: I am pretty good at star-hopping. Nevertheless, except perhaps in very dense areas where the distance from object to object is tiny, even the rather rinky-dink systems that Meade sells can find things several times faster than I can.
I do mean rinky-dink. The deformable-pad keyboard and no-feel joystick of the Meade control paddle make my teeth itch -- things haven't been this bad in the computer industry since the days of the late, unlamented Sinclair-Timex ZX-81. One virtue of the keyboard might be that it is watertight -- and as a friend pointed out, LX200 owners no doubt take great pride and relief in the knowledge that their telescopes will slew accurately and reliably, even when the rain is pouring down or the creek has risen. Setting accuracy is nothing to boast about, either -- for short slews the result is good to a few arc-minutes, but go across the sky and you will likely have to call up a nearby bright star, center it, and recalibrate. And of course, the Meade slewing motors make an atrocious racket, rather like the whir of a coffee grinder, or the call of a raccoon in heat.
Still, the computer-controlled Meade was fast, and my observing lists were binned by right ascension and sorted by declination, so most of the slews were small enough that calibration held. In consequence, the 12-inch, running at 150x or 250x, knocked off Herschel objects about as quickly as we could key in their NGC numbers. Rinky-dink or not, it was a reasonably-planned and workable system, and I was greatful for the opportunity to use it. Oh, well -- disposable earplugs are cheap enough to pass out free to bystanders, and I always bring a thermos of coffee to observing sessions anyway. I might be tempted to buy an LX200, if I could just figure out what to do about those raccoons.