by Paul LeFevre
Despite the gathering clouds, I *had* to get out and observe Saturday, so I took a chance and made the drive up to Lake Sonoma from San Francisco. It's only a 1.5 hour drive for me, so if the weather messed up the night I wouldn't have as far to drive back home.
I arrived at the usual LS observing site just as twilight was ending and stars were beginning to appear -- or, rather, they *would* have started to appear if the sky was clear, and it wasn't. As I drove up, Santa Rosa was mostly clear, but by the time I pulled into the LS parking lot, dark clouds had covered up most of the sky. There was only one other car in the lot, a nice fellow named Dick (a friend of David Silva's) who was patiently waiting for others to arrive, his 17.5" homebuilt dob still safely tucked into his car. We chatted for a bit and discussed the chances for clear skies, when two more cars pulled in, carrying David Silva and 3 others. As we discussed whether to set up or not, large patches of clear sky floated overhead between the clouds, the stars called to us, and we overcame our pessimism and hauled out the equipment.
This was "first night out" for my 6" f/8 travelscope truss-tube dob. I had set it up in the backyard a few times while building it, but the notorious San Francisco fog had kept me from doing anything more than verifying that I could focus on far-away things. It was also the first time I had set it up in the dark...Setup went quickly, even though I fumbled a bit and required the help of some friendly bystanders watching the entire process and their LED flashlights, and in 10 minutes I had the cutest little truss-tube scope you could ever see ready to go. A few good-natured jokes about comparisons between my little 6" buddy and Dick's 17.5" scope (that's what my travelscope wants to be when it grows up...), and we were off to observing. One thing I noticed right away, that you other truss-scope users have surely known for a long time, was that my scope cooled down MUCH more quickly now that it was relieved of its huge sonotube casing. The mirror was cool and ready to go in less than 15 minutes, while it used to take 30-60 minutes for my tube dob to get to that same point.
Besides the two dobs already mentioned, David had his AP Traveler set up on an alt-az mount with a binoviewer installed; there was an 80mm UO refractor on a small GEM (with a Telrad attached to the top that looked larger than the scope!), and a Celestron C5 with it's fork mount on a tripod...so my little 6" was the second-largest scope in the bunch!
The clouds played tricks on us for the next three hours...there would be wide patches of clear sky, we would all aim that way looking for targets, and as soon as we'd get something in the EP, that section of sky would cloud over. Frustrating, to say the least. I did manage to get good views of M57, M31/32, M13, the Double Cluster, the Pleiades, and some Milky Way sweeping from Cygnus south to the horizon. The good news is that the travelscope is a huge success! Aside from being much more compact than my former 6" dob, this new incarnation boasts much smoother motions (10" altitude bearings that are ebony star on teflon, and ebony star on teflon azimuth bearing as well). The scope stays where you put it, and tracking is much improved over the previous mounting. An additional advantage of the low rocker box and compact size is that the scope is now fully a sit-down telescope -- from the zenith to the horizon, I can keep my behind parked in my chair.
We all spent some additional time looking at Jupiter and Saturn -- the seeing was typical at Lake Sonoma despite the clouds, steady and clear. While viewing Saturn, I not only easily spotted Titan at 120X, but thought I could see two small, faint points of light just below the planet that appeared non-stellar. Bumping up the power to 240X, it was clear that these were additional moons of Saturn (still haven't looked up which ones, working on it!), the first time I had seen more than Titan around our ringed friend.
By around 9:30 PM, we started running out of clear-sky patches, and some low marine layer was creeping in to add to the higher-level clouds. After about 15 minutes of no sky holes at all, we all decided that was it for the night, and started packing up. Dick and I took the longest to take down our equipment, since he had the big scope and I was being very careful taking down my new creation. Apparently I wasn't careful enough, however, since I managed to poke myself in the face with a truss-tube sticking out of my mirror box as I was removing the last three truss tubes -- no damage other than a round scratch on my cheek and some wounded pride, but dang those tubes sure are hard to see in the dark! :) Still, 15 minutes of take-down time, and the scope was back into its self-contained 12"x20"x9" container. The entire scope when packed up takes up less space than David's AP Traveler WITHOUT a tripod, and has 2" more aperture as well (but, admittedly, the optics aren't quite as nice!). I'm really going to enjoy hauling this thing around on business trips and vacations!