by Marek Cichanski
I was originally thinking of titling this post "Life Begins at 18 Inches", but I figured that would be a little over the top. More on that anon.
Aperture fever has been part of my life since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. I've been excited about astronomy since I was a young kid in the 1970s. I had a small refractor back then, probably a Tasco of some sort, which I only occasionally used to look at the Moon. (For some reason, I almost always picked the full moon. Go figure.) In 1980, I got an Edmund Astroscan for Christmas, and I did about as much with that as I could, given that it had an extremely wide, low-power field of view. Finding objects, even Messiers, was tough with no finder - this was years before red-dots. The back yard of the family home had pretty high horizons, especially to the south, so most of the things I read about in my Astronomy magazines during the 1980s were never visible. I can recall a family trip in about 1984 when I had a decent view of Sagittarius, and managed to find a few bright summer Milky Way objects. I dreamt and dreamt of one day seeing the elusive Ring Nebula. Since I grew up in the same town as University Optics, I called them up one day, then drove over and bought a much-sought-after "high power eyepiece" - a mighty 3mm Kellner. I was finally going to find the elusive M57! After some epic searching, again without any sort of finder, I bagged it. Life was good! (Why I never joined the University Lowbrow Astronomers, who had renovated a 24" telescope, is a mystery I'll never be able to fathom. Well, I guess it's because I've never been much into formal clubs, which is probably why I love TAC.)
It was while reading those issues of Astronomy in the 1980s that aperture fever first set in. It hit early, it hit hard, it hung on for decades... and it'll probably never go away. I've had a bad case of it for over twenty years now. I can vividly recall looking at a sketch of NGC 4565 and thinking that if I just had a giant 10" telescope, my life would be complete.
With help from my father, I sawed apart and reconstituted the Astroscan to make a travel scope for a trip to New Zealand in 1996. My memory of the Eta Carinae region in that little 4" scope rivals the views I now get through the 18" Obsession. Gotta go back. The Astroscan remains the only scope that I've ever pointed vertically to look at the Lagoon and the Trifid. Really got to go back.
Despite these stories, amateur astronomy was something I never really got into in a big way until 2002, when I met the folks from TAC one day at Montebello. When I made my first deliberate trip to MB, after the first chance meeting, I saw something that blew my mind - Bruce Jensen's 18" Obsession. As I was excitedly setting up my Meade ETX 125, Bruce methodically set up this eye-popping piece of modern architecture next to me. I don't think I'd ever even looked AT a telescope that big, let alone THROUGH one. Bruce pointed it at M3 and invited me to have a look. I stepped up on the ladder. Looked into this enormous porthole-like eyepiece, so different than the ones I remembered on the Tasco and the Astroscan, or those on my ETX, for that matter. Focused. And couldn't believe what I saw. Stars beyond counting, swarming like a hive of bees. Nothing like the little smoke puff that I saw through my scope. Aperture fever scored a major victory at that moment.
So, I've dreamt of big aperture, especially something like an 18" f/4.5 Obsession, for the last two and a half years. Funny, though, those two and a half years have felt as long as the previous two and a half decades of aperture fever. I guess it's from proximity to all these great scopes in the Bay Area. When Michelle Stone put her 18" f/4.5 Obsession up for sale a while back, I wanted it so badly I could taste it, but it really wasn't feasible for me to try to buy it at that time. Mark Wagner bought it, and so it remained with dedicated observers in TAC. I ran into Mark at the Peak this summer, and there we began talking about the possibility of the scope being for sale. The financial end of things fell into place for me recently, and on Tuesday I took the plunge. I took the scope home, set it up, did a quick and dirty collimation, and looked at a couple of objects. (Yes, I first-lighted an 18" Dob on the Moon. Is anyone really surprised by that?) Did the same thing late on Wednesday night after biking home through the frigid air after a night class, and I checked the focus on my eyepieces. Needed a bit of in-focus, so I got a tube cutter and trimmed a quarter-inch or so off of each truss pole. All of my eyepieces, which I'd really acquired with a scope like this in mind, now come to focus.
I went up to MB on Thursday night, and mostly looked at eye candy, or at least such eye candy as the fall sky has. Without an optical finder, though, it was hard to find much. I mounted an optical finder on the secondary cage on Friday, and so Friday night's session was much more productive. On the mirror box, a crudely velcroed-on weight plate made the telescope balance perfectly, to my surprise. I can use the scope with a ParaCorr and a Terminagler, even close to the horizon. Lucky.
As I arrived at Montebello just before sunset on Friday, it was perfectly clear, and essentially still. At first I was worried about dew, but none materialized. I managed to get the scope unloaded, set up, collimated, and all of my other gear ready and clothing donned in just under an hour. I'm calling that good, given how short a time I've had this beast. Collimation seems to be working out well, even with the simple Orion laser collimator and Orion sight tube/Cheshire combo that I have. A Lasermax would be nice, but it may not be all that necessary.
I think that my first object was the Veil Nebula, with an OIII filter and the 31mm type 5 Nagler. A dream fulfilled! It felt great to scan back and forth along each component of the Veil complex, taking in the rich and complex filigrees of nebulosity. It was also fun to share the view, given how many times I'd been given views through scopes like this.
The night's program was mostly bright stuff, sharing views with Dan Wright and his friend Mark, and Dennis Steele and his friend Greg. We looked at M31 and M33, with the latter showing some hints of structure, even in the bright Montebello sky. The big HII region in M33 was bustin' out all over. Naturally we looked at the Double Cluster and the E.T. Cluster. Bright stars galore. The Terminagler nicely frames the Double Cluster, making it a heck of a showpiece. We also looked at M2, which I think gave Greg the same sort of experience that I had looking at M3 through Bruce Jensen's scope.
I also swept up the Saturn and Helix nebulae, which looked great in the big glass. The extensions on the Saturn nebula were readily visible with averted vision. The Helix was still rather dim - not a big surprise, given its low surface brightness, but it showed more detail than I'd seen before. The Blinking Planetary hardly blinked - too bright.
NGC 253 showed a lot of nice mottled detail. I had looked at 253 at Calstar two years ago, when Mark Wagner generously let me drive his other 18" Obsession for a few hours. It was then that I was pretty well sold on wanting one. A year later, Carl Larson generously did the same thing, and I was well and truly sold on the idea.
I tried to bag a few objects off of the H400 II list, but I found an apparent flaw in my copy of the list. I had a spreadsheet of the list, and it had a column labeled "U2000", which I figured was the page number from Uranometria 2000.0. The numbers didn't match the locations of the objects, though, so it's back to the drawing board. I did try bopping around a Uranometria page, though, and found some galaxies that way. I hopped my way over to the Pegasus 1 Galaxy Cluster, and saw four members of it. I came to the conclusion that now that I have the scope of my dreams, I need to start taking it to the skies of my dreams. I think that the sky is just a bit too bright at Montebello to see very many galaxies. Carl Larson and I drove his 18" scope around a Uranometria page at Calstar this year, and it worked great. I think I need fewer magntudes per square arcsecond in the background sky if I'm gonna do any serious galaxy-busting. Albert didn't work on his Birthday Cluster from Plettstone for no reason, after all... Oh, how I can't wait to set this baby up at the Pads!
More eye candy followed, including Uranus and Comet Machholz. Around this time the other observers packed up and left, and I spent a couple of hours alone with my 'new' scope, the sky, and some classical music. As always, the perfect recipe for observing bliss - good company and shared views, followed by solitary observing. I went up to the Messier open clusters in Auriga, and enjoyed some pure luxury. I found that I could sit on my observing chair and put my feet up on my little ladder, and it was very comfortable. I soaked in the views of these big, bright clusters, each of which required the Terminagler for a good view. I can already tell that the 31mm type 5 is going to get a heavy workout with this scope.
Back to M31 and M33. As they started to get past the zenith and into the northwestern sky, they showed a little more detail. The dust lanes in M31 were starting to stand out. A bit more structure in M33 was visible.
I also looked at NGC 1535, a planetary nebula in Eridanus. I had seen it in my XT10 at Calstar 2003, where I said it was "Considerably bright, round, planetary nebula type 2b (smooth disc, uniform brightness). Has a diffuse edge." Last night in the 18", it was a whole different story. It was very slightly elongated E-W, and it showed all sorts of structure. The outer halo was the dimmest part, and had a diffuse edge. A narrow bright ring lay inside this, with a smaller, narrow, dark ring inside that. A very noticeable central star was visible inside the dark ring. Talk about seeing more detail in an object! I was sure that I was looking at the Eskimo Nebula, but it turns out it's not. Wow. Talk about improvement.
M42, of course, was awesome. Can't wait to look at it in a darker sky. There's definitely a greenish color to the bright area around the trapezium, and definite hints (are those like 'jumbo shrimp'?) of reddish-orange color outside of that. On Thursday night, David Kingsley had used the scope to find NGC 1999, which is a really nice nebula, with some dark material that makes it look kind of like M64.
All in all, it was a pretty successful shakedown cruise for this scope. Since I was looking at eye candy for the most part, I was able to enjoy the feeling of astronomical luxury. For me, this idea probably goes back to that view of M3 through Bruce's scope. I love to do a lot of things that involve enduring difficulty or discomfort to achieve some goal, like caving, climbing, or even riding my bike to work. As a teacher, I'm always trying to get people to buy into the ideas of delayed gratification, of striving toward a goal, of experiencing a little asceticism now for a payoff later. Or even of the idea of a challenge just for its own sake. And I also enjoy that kind of stuff in astronomy, such as when we try to hunt down and log dim galaxies, or when we try to tease out as much detail as we can from a challenging object. Plenty of gratification there, for sure. But sometimes, I just crave a nice luxurious view. Swing that big dob over to a bright glob or OC, and see stars popping out all over. For nearly all the Messier objects, there's no longer any straining and averting just to resolve stars or to see nebulosity. Lots of stuff looks big, bright, and beautiful. I've probably used this line before, but as Anthony Bourdain, one of my favorite authors, says: "It's like driving a Rolls Royce naked, in mink underpants." Thus, for me, this idea of 'luxury' is a big part of why I do it. Sometimes I want to plant myself in front of the Mona Lisa and drink in her enigmatic smile, not steal a glimpse of her from the next gallery over.
Of course, I don't want to suggest for a minute that observing with smaller scopes is anything less than valid or fulfilling. This is pretty much a no-brainer. All one has to do is look at the achievements of TAC types using non-monstrous glass: David Kingsley doing the H400 list with a 7" dob. George Feliz doing Messier surveys with small refractors. Ditto for Jay Freeman. Or look at Jamie Dillon, who's turned his 11" scope into a giant-killer. AOL keyword on all of these people: Observing Skills.
For me, when deciding what sort of telescope to lust over, it had to be a big dob. The 18" f/4.5 fits me perfectly, and I hardly ever have to use the ladder. It really does seem to be impractical to use anything much bigger, and I find it easy to believe Mark when he says that he was glad to switch from a 20" to an 18". Notice, however, that I said "lust over", not "buy". If there's one thing that I don't want to do, it's to give the impression that I (or anyone) should go around judging other peoples' choice of astronomical equipment. The simple fact is, this astro stuff is darn expensive, and we've all got a lot of other stuff that we need to spend out hard-earned dinero on. And those greenbacks don't come easily, especially now. For me, the opportunity to get this scope involved a mountain of luck, on both the selling and buying ends of the transaction. This is a scope with a long pedigree in TAC, a scope that's been owned by people who loved it, and I'm privileged to be able to continue that. I'm astonished by my good fortune in so many parts of life. I'm healthy, I managed to find work in the field that I love, and have managed to keep that work so far. I have great friends in TAC and elsewhere, I'm part of the crew that explores California's longest cave, and I live in the mountainous West. I live in the sunlight of freedom that other people fought for, and I enjoy the fruits of a society that I only play a small part in maintaining. I get to talk about rocks for a living. I get to look at the stars under mostly clear skies, and point this big beautiful beast of a telescope at them. I'm a lucky son of a gun who's rollin' more than his share of 7s.
Posted on sf-bay-tac Dec 04, 2004 14:32:53 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Jan 22, 2005 11:27:31 PT