MB, 3/15/2007: Dialing 'em in

by Marek Cichanski

Last night at MB there were only a handful of us, which makes sense, given the weather. There was a fair amount of high cirrus streaming over us, and that probably kept most of the usual suspects at home. I was joined by James Turley, Phil Terzian, and a couple of other fellows who, I'm embarassed to say, I didn't introduce myself to. Sorry, guys! Normally we're more social than that! Yikes, I'm gonna get a bad rep.

At any rate, it was mostly sucker holes for a while, and not even many of them. But I was mostly there to work on an equipment learning curve that I'd wanted to ascend for a while. I put my 6" f/10 MCT on the Losmandy G-11, and I decided to finally try using old-school setting circles. It was nice that Phil was there, because he's Mr. G-11, and he was able to give me the lowdown on the verniers.

With careful polar alignment, it worked pretty well, and now I'm all about old-school setting circles. In a way, it's even more impressive than encoder/DSC systems, at least to me, not sure why. You just look up these coordinates, push the scope until the little vernier ticks are lined up just so, and voila! In most cases, it's in the eyepiece field. (If I'd remembered the battery pack for the polar-scope finder, it probably would have been even more accurate...)

So, I had a nice time being Monk-ish, looking up coords and working the verniers to within an inch of their lives. I stuck around after everyone else had left, natch, and had a lot of fun. Even before then, when it was just James and myself up there, the sky got pretty clear. We had a nice time looking at various Messiers, the Double Cluster, Saturn, etc... Seeing was at least journeyman-quality. We made a couple of stabs at Sirius, but it didn't seem to be in the cards.

I found that a great source of coords was, you guessed it, Deep Map 600. In fact, you can take the lists on the back of DM600, do a 'commuter fold', and hold the thing very conveniently at the scope. You've got your DM600 folded back on itself like a guy's paper on a commuter train from Long Island into the city, and it's all quite handy.

I also had fun using Sky Atlas 2000 and its little plastic overlay to get coordinates. It was really neat to go from the chart and overlay to the setting circles, and then to the eyepiece.

I also experimented with Sissy Haas's new double-star book, and that was quite nice, too. I probably dialed in a dozen or so nice doubles.

DSOs last night included M42, the Double Cluster, M35, 36, 37, 38, 76, 84, 86, 65, 66. I finished off with looks at M3, M13, and M92... nice harbingers of summer.

I won't be out on Friday or Saturday nights, but if it's clear on Sunday, I might head up. Hope y'all have clear skies for the Marathon!

Marek