by Dennis Beckley
Last Sunday I returned to Fiddletown for the first time in many months. The weather looked promising and despite the extensive effort that goes into loading my 18 inch Obsession and Tom O platform and all the other necessary goodies into my old jeep, I was determined to do some deep sky observing and catch the Perseid metor shower.
The first thing I noticed heading towards Sacramento was the yellow haze in the atmosphere which I assumed to be the smoke from the Oregon fires...definitely a bad sign. The road into the Fiddletown site (the last few hundred yards) was in very bad shape with deep ruts that made me fear for my mirror in the back of the jeep. Once I got to the site I was amazed that I was the only person there. Despite the 97 degree heat I got to work setting up my scope and equipment. I met Paula the new owner of the adjacent house and she seems like a very cordial and astronomy-friendly person. The only minor problem during the night was an occasional porch light coming on and off.
Since I hadn't been out in months my goal tonight was to get acquainted with all my new gear including the 18 inch Obsession (quite a jump from my old 13 inch Starsplitter), the Tom O platform, Sky commander DSC, laptop computer with new Megastar 5.0 and comparison of various eyepieces (Naglers, Radians and Pentax XLs. It was also first light for my new Astrocrumb filter slide with my Lumicon filters.
The transparency was definitely diminshed by the smoke particles in the atomosphere. Seeing was fairly steady. Due to heat I ran my cooling fan all night. I started with Comet Hoenig which was amazingly large but no evidence of a tail. I then spent time with brighter Messier objects and some old NGC friends from my Herschel I and Herschel II days. It was not a great night for going deep. I revisited an interesting group - the Pegasus I galaxy group including NGC 7626/7619 and clearly saw 5 galaxies within a small area. I also spent time looking at various globulars and in particular NGC 6760 (large and bright) and it's nearby neighbor NGC 6749 (small and dim) which to my amazement I couldn't clearly identify!
All of my equipment, depite my layoff rustiness, seemed to work well. The Astrocrumb filter slide is a joy to use. It's really neat to blink planetary nebula just by sliding the filter up and down and to compare the effects of the OIII vs. the UHC! The sky commander is definitely better than the NGC Max and works well with the Tom O platform. The platform is really cool and tracks objects flawlessly for several minutes. The real surprise of the night was how great the Pentax eyepieces are in comparsion to the Naglers and Radians. Really pin sharp and with much better contrast. The only thing Televue's got going is a wider field of view. I've got the 14mm, 10.5 mm and the 5.2 mm and I'm definitely going to get the 21mm and probably the 7 mm. The other nice thing was how well the scope balanced with Kreige's lead shot tubes despite going from a 31 mm Nagler to the 10.5 Pentax. My small el cheapo Home Depot ladder while easy to handle definitely needs to have some extra steps added for creature comfort. Megastar 5 with all it's new catalogs (even has Gomez's Hamburger!) was awsome!
All in all a lot fun and good to be back to observing again even if conditions weren't ideal. Whoever said don't let perfect be the enemy of the good!
And the Perseids, a major bust but I heard they were better on Monday night.