by Jamie Dillon
Here's an instance of optically enhanced astronomy. On 11 January, Liam and I rolled up to Livermore to commune with the dudes at Lumicon and came home with an 11" Starhopper, f/4.5, with a 7x50 finder, two Plossls and a Kellner, an O-III filter and a Telrad which Liam wouldn't want to live without. The scope of our dreams.
On 21 January we finally had some stars in the Salinas sky, with just terrible seeing, waves of wet air at all levels. Was big huge fun. We could discern 4-5 bands on Jupiter and spent the bulk of the time, after Jupiter simply washed away, gazing at M42 with the 25mm, 17.5 mm and 7.5 mm eyepieces, up to 170x. Had heard that M42 holds up under high magnification - sure enough. We saw lovely resolution with a several lanes of dust.
In between, Mintaka went and split cooperatively, if with a trace of condescension (what the hell, my first binary) and with beautiful colors, blue and white. Then we stared at lambda Ori, Orion's head with its chain of stars.
Liam showed off for his Mama and lined up Sirius in the finder, got it into the eyepiece on the first try. Dazzling on several levels. We all still share a naive fascination with single stars and close pretty asterisms. Probably will for a good while. Then we looked at the quarter moon for the first time for any of us under magnification.
Consumer report: the daytime collimation worked out well on star check, with a nice even spread inside and outside of focus. Still waiting for a good clear night, but in odd clear moments, the diffraction rings on individual stars have looked good. All this was extremely exciting after years of fantasizing and months of reading, asking and planning. That night was literally first light, seeing as how we had ourselves lowered the tube over the primary.
The only functional issue is of balance with the big finderscope. Honestly not a big surprise; we're fixing to go get one of Orion's balance slides so the tube'll hold still at less than 45 deg up.
On the sociological issue of spousal astronomy, I was intrigued that Jo has not only been intrigued at our burgeoning interest, but she surprised me weeks ago by saying, "Get an 11-inch, I wanna see shapes of galaxies!" Dickinson's pornographic descriptions of the Whirlpool Galaxy had gotten us both going. Liam's plenty satisfied to find stars by name, sky's the limit for him.
Now all we need are clear skies.