On 18 July, 1998, I went to Fremont Peak State Park, near San Juan Bautista, California, with a telescope I had not observed with for over a decade; namely, my 1981 vintage Celestron 14.

I originally bought a C-14 because it offered immense performance in a small package. At that time my car was a subcompact with limited luggage space (Mazda RX-2 coupe), so it was a lot less expensive than getting a big Dobson and also buying (and insuring, and licensing, and maintaining) the van or pick-up that would have been required to transport the larger instrument. I couldn't get the C-14 into my car, but I could and did buy a light utility trailer -- single-axle, enclosed volume 1.1 x 1.3 x 0.6 meters -- into which neatly fitted the instrument in its carrying cases, as well as the mount and other paraphernalia. All in all, that made an inexpensive and handy observing rig -- I just backed the trailer into my garage and left it there loaded, between sessions.

I used the C-14 extensively in the early 1980s -- my logbook shows over 1400 observations with it, a number exceeded only by my Intes 6-inch Maksutov. Yet my deep-sky observing program petered out for want of interesting challenges, and I kept getting ever smaller cars, so eventually the instrument languished. Amateur astronomy, however, is a hobby full of whims and fancies, and I recently fancied that it would be my whim to use a larger instrument now and then.

There was a problem: My present car is a Geo Metro hatchback, and it cannot haul the C-14's trailer -- there is no structure at the back end of the Geo thick enough to attach a trailer hitch. That gave me pause for a while. I thought about getting a truss-tube Dobson. That had not really been an option in 1981, for the designs and details were still settling down. Modern units disassemble sufficiently well that I expect one could fit into the Geo, but there might be some problems getting it in and out: The passenger seat isn't wide enough to hold very much of a box and rocker, and hauling these units in cargo area (with the rear seats folded flat) would involve a possibly back-destroying leaning lift, to get them in and out over the high lip of the hatch opening, some six or eight inches above the "floor". That sounded like a real pain, in possibly the most literal of senses.

Besides, I already had a big telescope -- the C-14. Furthermore, I like driven telescopes. Don't get me wrong -- I have logged over a thousand observations with Dobsons of various sizes, and they are wonders of compact, inexpensive construction, and Teflon is great stuff. Yet notwithstanding, their inability to track stars as the Earth rotates is part of a compromise which one does not always wish to make. Yes, I know about Dob drivers of various sorts, but that's more money, more bulk, and more stuff to lift.

Besides, I already had a big telescope. So I decided to stick with it, and set about determining how to put a C-14 into a Geo Metro. I figured that it would be like cramming twenty-seven college students into a telephone booth, and that loading and unloading couldn't be worse than stuffing a grand piano through a four-inch-diameter hole, and both of those have been common collegiate activities during my lifetime, so it would be no trouble.

Actually, there was one complication in that reasoning: The grand pianos were not required to be playable upon egress from the holes.

Yet the packing problem turned out to be easy. I recline the right front seat a ways and let the OTA doze upon it, held in place by the seat belt (which fits better with the seat partially reclined) and a couple of stout bungee cords. All else goes in the back, and the "else" breaks down into pieces small enough to fit and light enough to load.

I could probably have used my original mount. The C-14 fork separates into drive base and arms, the wedge is a part by itself, and my short custom pier has legs that attach and detach quickly. Yet I decided to use my new Losmandy G-11 instead -- I had bought it with this project in mind, thinking it would be even more compact, and that the eyepiece would easier to get to when observing between the zenith and the north celestial pole. The G-11 indeed fills the bill in these respects, though it certainly is no more solid than the original fork unit, notwithstanding that with the counterweights, it may even be heavier. I bought some plastic cases to make it easier to transport the G-11 -- one for the legs and counterweight shaft, and another for the equatorial head. The tripod head goes loose in the back, and the three 21-pound counterweights stow under the front passenger seat.

To my surprise, all this stuff fitted into the Geo with plenty of leftover room -- basically, the mount paraphernalia and my eyepiece box occupy only one side of the cargo area, all stacked up. There is enough room left for suitcases or camping gear. I can go to long duration star parties, that require serious traveling, with this rig.

Set-up is pretty quick. I hear there are people who can have a truss-tube Dobson assembled in five minutes, but at Fremont Peak, we all started unpacking and setting up at about the same time, and I was done before most of the Dobson folks were, and they had to collimate their telescopes, too. (The C-14 collimation in 1998 was right on, just as I had left it more than ten years before.)

The hardest part of assembly is getting the OTA onto the equatorial head. Not only is it heavy, but also the clutches will not hold its weight when the mount is unbalanced, which means that OTA and mountings have to be attached at the same instant, or something will start swinging. I can't manage that unassisted, so I cheat: I got a length of light chain with a snap hook that can grab its own links. I set up the Losmandy with the counterweight shaft pointing horizontally east, and the declination axis rotated so that the dovetail slots point straight up. Then I wrap a loop of chain around the shaft at the point where it screws into the head, and around the southeast leg of the tripod at its upper end. (Actually, the wrap is around the southeast-pointing unit of the tripod-head weldment, not the telescoping leg.) The chain acts to keep the OTA from making the right ascension axis rotate, until I can get the counterweights onto the shaft. I use the chain for disassembly, too. It is a heavy lift to get the OTA into the dovetail -- it weighs 52 pounds with finder, Losmandy dovetail plate, and counterweight rod installed -- but it stays close enough to my body not to be unreasonable. (I am only using the counterweight rod -- for sliding-style counterweights -- as a handle. I will probably replace it with some ropework, which may save a little weight and will certainly provide a better grip.)

The assembled C-14 is an impressive telescope. With the OTA pointed vertically, it stands a few inches over six feet tall. The white tube and black mounting make a nice contrast. (I long since sprayed the tube refrigerator white for thermal control. It works -- I set up before sunset, and within minutes the mounting parts were toasty warm, yet even the part of the tube toward the sun stayed cool to the touch.) At that point I realized that I had at long last hit upon a suitable name for the telescope: As mounted, it stands more or less six feet, three and a half inches tall, it's white, and though I talk about it a lot, there hadn't been anyone in my regular observing observing group who had ever seen it. Thus my Celestron 14 will henceforth be known as Harvey, after the co-star of the Jimmy Stewart film of the same name.

(You should all see "Harvey" -- I mean the film, not the character or the telescope. It takes an experienced deep-sky observer to see the character, which you can tell from my telescope because only one of them has long flollopy ears.)

After assembly, I used one of the bright stars in the Big Dipper to verify collimation and to double check that the optics had not rotted, then I moved the telescope to Mizar for a nice view. I left it there for a while, to see whether the Losmandy was going to have any trouble tracking with the weight of the telescope. After an hour, Mizar was still centered in a 252x eyepiece: Thus a C-14 appears to be within the capacity of the G-11.

Celestron 14s are not common, so of course everybody wanted to see what Harvey could do. I decided to demonstrate some of the things a C-14 does particularly well, so I found the Ring Nebula and jacked up the magnification. I tried both a 6 mm and a 4 mm eyepiece, and though seeing ripples were more distracting at the shorter focal length, the central star was more easily seen then, and more often. I had a long line of people, all of whom could see the star, and all of whom seemed rather bemused to find that there were amateur-sized telescopes that could make occasional good use of a thousand diameters magnification (978x, nominally). It is getting to be pretty well known that at least moderate magnification can push the limiting stellar magnitude of a telescope, but I would have expected the effect to taper off at rather less magnification than 4 mm double-ridiculous.

In moments of good seeing, the central star was actually not difficult in Harvey: I could hold it with direct vision on such occasions. The limiting visual magnitude in fine seeing is probably a couple of magnitudes fainter than the M57 central star.

It was also rather interesting to see the Ring Nebula filling half the field of view. Most of the views we get of it are rather smaller. Even at the high magnification, the nebulosity was still easy to see, and there was quite a bit of variation in shading.

Then I looked at the Hercules Cluster, M13, at 652x. The view of the center of the cluster was lovely, with many individual stars showing. I had to back off the magnification to get the whole object in the field at once, though: At 252x, it looked like a globular cluster; the view at 652x more nearly resembled the interior of the Seven Dwarves' diamond mine.

I spent the rest of the session visiting friends in the summer Milky Way. The Lagoon Nebula, M8, was full of detail at 252x; it was crossed with lanes and mottled with light and dark blotches. I viewed the Triffid Nebula, M20, at several magnifications. There was not a lot of detail in this object, beyond the three squiggly dark lanes that give the larger half its name. The view was similar from 98x through 252x. I could see the color contrast between the two lobes of the nebula throughout this magnification range. The Swan Nebula, or the Omega Nebula, M17, showed a great deal of detail at 252x. To my eye, the "Swan" name has always seemed most appropriate.

I moved north to the Eagle Nebula, M16, and paused for a while, admiring the mixture of stars and nebulosity. I noticed a swirl of darkness in one corner of the field, and grabbed my Burnham's _Celestial_Handbook_, to double-check. Using Burnham's line drawing, in his section on M16, I verified that I had spotted the irregular dark cloud that is sometimes called the Star Queen. I had an excellent view at 252x and at 196x. I had seen this object with the same telescope before, but I remember it being much more difficult. Perhaps I have learned something in all that pushing of small telescopes to their limits. The object did not appear quite as flashy as in the Hubble pictures that wowed us all a year or two ago, but then again, I was not using an LPR filter to view it, either. (Actually, it wasn't nearly as flashy as the Hubble pictures: I could see the Star Queen in silhouette against the surrounding luminous glow, with detail not quite as sharp as Burnham illustrates in the drawing.)

I finished up the evening with the Dumbbell Nebula, or the Apple Core Nebula, M27, at 252x. The "Dumbbell" shape was filled out to become the better-named "Apple Core", and there were hints of streaky detail across the nebulosity.

I had gotten tired and put Harvey to bed before Jupiter cleared the trees at the east side of the parking lot, but I look forward to doing some planetary work with this instrument as the season wears on. I will certainly take the telescope out again soon, and often: A Celestron 14 is a compact and powerful telescope that is reasonably handled by a single person, and I am fortunate enough to have a good one. Having it fully operational made me realize how much I had missed it. Harvey will ride the sky again.