Every year or so, I pack up my family and head back east to our family cottage about 2 hours north of Toronto. The skies are dark but not perfect (the nearby city of Barrie does add some light pollution).
Every summer I struggle with what instrument to bring with me. It is a long haul by boat and car, but guaranteed, if I don't bring anything, the skies will be perfectly clear every night.
Last year I picked up a used Bausch and Lomb Criterion 4000 (nee Criterion Dynamax) for a trip to Hawaii. It's a 4" SCT that went out of production about 10 years ago. The optics on these things vary a lot, and this one is not stunning, showing a lot of mechanical astigmatism. This year I decided that this little scope would make an ideal "permanent resident" of the cottage.
The skies have been cloudy about 1/2 the time we have been here, and of course the moon is full. Not ideal conditions. Still, I figured, I could have a look at Mars. The view of mars through the little SCT is not great, showing very little detail. After spending some time there, and visiting some of the simpler summer sights (M57 - not bad, showing a dim but nice ring, M27 - disappointingly dim in the 4", The wild duck - again, not bad, and most disappointing due to its closeness to the moon, the lagoon). I remembered a few things along the way - that table top tripods are terrible for looking at zenith (M13), and that without a right angle attachement, a finder is very hard to use on such a setup.
Coincidentally, because of an ongoing project at work, I also have along with me a Logitech Quickcam Pro. Hmmmm... I thought to myself... how to spice up a somewhat dull observing situation...
Out came the screwdrivers, and pretty quickly the next day I had pulled apart the camera (don't tell the boss!) and removed the little 7mm objective. A lens tube from one of the terrible eyepieces that came with the telescope was quickly gaffers-taped on to the camnera. Daytime tests confirmed that doing prime focus photography with this little guy would be interesting at least. The next clear night, I proceeded out into the mosquito's, quickcam in hand, and managed to take a few shots:
The images below are for interest only - nothing earthshattering here in terms of quality!
http://members.home.com/psantangeli/marsfinal.jpg is a combination of 7 frames of mars. I don't have any astro software with me, so I had to use my work project (Macromedia Flash) to combine them - NOT a standard image processing technique!
http://members.home.com/psantangeli/moon1.jpg
http://members.home.com/psantangeli/moon2.jpg
http://members.home.com/psantangeli/moon3.jpg
are some shots of the moon.
What have I learned? Well, with a real scope, this little camera should be a winner. I did try some deep sky with it (using some downloaded freeware software), but it really doesn't have any kind of grasp. For planets though, it is pretty cool - definitely coming with me to Lassen.
I finished off last evening looking for the Comet, which became visible in binoculars over the lake at about 1:10pm last night. Only the head visible, but still, it was my first look at it. Should be great at Lassen.
