Antics from Houge

by Jake Burkart

Just a couple of funny moments from last night's Houge Star party.

Antics from Houge:

Seeing wasn't great, so I was going through the list of Asterisms in my Hand Controller (HC) for my Nexstar 11 Goto scope. There's an 'Info' button that you can press to see a text description of the each of the objects. Unfortunately the display is only a two line LCD, so the information scrolls by at tediously slow rate. As I was reading about the "Mini-coat hanger" in Ursa Minor, one ......... word........... at........... a......... time........, a gentleman pipes up and says, "For 3 grand you'd think they would put a third line on that LCD display." No kidding, for 3000 dollars they should attach a nice Palm interface with handwriting recognition!
My wife and mother-in-law showed up after most everybody had gone home (around 22:30). My wife, Mercedes, (yes that is her real name), was disappointed at how washed out her favorite objects looked due to the moon, so we decided to look at the moon. I had 186x magnification using my 15 mm eyepiece, and the moon would not fit in the FOV. My wife slewed the scope around the surface of the moon for a bit then showed her mother how to do the same. My mother-in-law, Fran, had the initial "wow, it's so close!" and "neat" responses. She learned how to do the slewing with the Hand Controller and worked her way around the surface of the moon. After a minute or so, she stopped, looked at the hand controller, and says, "where's the button to rotate the moon?"

I admit that my scope is pretty powerful from the perspective of the general public, but not powerful enough to rotate the moon. ;-)

Hope you enjoyed these Antics from Houge.