New Gear for a New Year
2017 marks the beginning of a new era for Bill the Sky Guy. Because of the success of the Sky Guy programs at the Marriott Vacation Club properties here on Hilton Head it makes some sense to up my game a little (or a lot actually) with some new equipment so after doing a financial review of 2016 and coming to the conclusion that I needed to ‘spend it or lose it’, I have decided to purchase a new telescope.
Out With the Old
While I really like the views through the scope I've had since 1986 and the mount is pretty accurate when it comes to finding things in the sky there are certain disadvantages when it comes to public viewing events. When you are looking in certain areas of the sky at certain heights (less than 45° up in the East or West) the nature of putting a Newtonian design scope on an equatorial mount means the eyepiece of the telescope ends up in some damn inconvenient places, like directly on top of the tube such that you'd have to be seven feet tall to look in there without a step-stool or ladder! Definitely not kid friendly either.
One of the issues with trying to show sky objects to the general public is that there are relatively few ‘showpiece’ objects in the sky. You've got the planets Jupiter, Saturn, Mars (some years), Venus (from time to time) and a few big star clusters, the Andromeda Galaxy, Orion Nebula and that's about it. Also, quite a few people who attend my stargazes have never looked through a telescope before so the skills that I've acquired in seeing detail in ‘faint fuzzy blobs’ aren't present meaning that things that are relatively easy for me to see are barely discernible or even invisible to the novice observer. So what would help in this department? More light of course! And not just a little more light; if I was going to spend real money, I wanted a huge jump in light-gathering not just an incremental improvement.
Gimme a (Light) Bucket
More light means a bigger diameter telescope, the bigger the better but at a certain point the limiting factor becomes portability since I do three stargazes a week at three different locations. The new scope had to be relatively easy to move and simple to set up and tear down. Now your typical refracting telescope, once they get to eight inches in diameter or more are measured in tons, and are usually on some kind of concrete pier mount so I obviously won't be buying one of those.
A Newtonian Reflecting design telescope can be made in large aperture, compact configurations but there is still the issue of how to mount it. At a public stargaze you also need to be able to find objects fast; people usually aren't into looking very intently and carefully at just a few objects for a long period of time; they want variety and the objects need to be easy to see so you need a mount that can be computer controlled and find objects in the sky automatically at the touch of a button.
As it turns out the ‘Truss Bar Dobsonian’ mount design is the answer. A truly large telescope like this can be automated, kept close to the ground so you don't need a ladder to get the eyepiece for most objects, and can be designed in such a way it can be disassembled into easily manageable parts for easy transport.
So I bought a sixteen inch in diameter telescope for 2017 (picture in the header of this article) which has 400% more light-gathering power than my current eight inch scope. It can be set up and computer aligned to the sky in ten minutes and will spectacularly improve the views people will see this year at my stargazes.
Downside
So what's the downside? For strictly visual observing there isn't any! However if you've read any of the About page on this site you'll know that I've always been interested in (and repeatedly come up short with) long exposure, deep sky astrophotography of galaxies, nebulae and star clusters. This big new beautiful telescope will be great for taking photos of planets and other bright objects where you don't need a long exposure. The problem is that the Dobsonian mount design is and up/down, left/right kind of affair which is fine for tracking objects through the sky but over the long term objects appear to rotate in the field because the mount is not aligned with the spin axis of the Earth which is the central premise behind the design of the Equatorial mount design.
So am I giving up on photography? Nope. My current mount is an equatorial, and I have the camera equipment, auto-guider and control software already so all I need is the right photographical scope on the mount I currently have and that should do it.
ENTER THE ASTROGRAPH
I recently became aware of a design of scope called a Ritchey-Chretien Astrograph. It's a scope design that's especially well suited for photography because the images are clear and undistorted all the way out to the edge of the field of view. So I bought an 8-inch one.
I can plop this on top of my existing equatorial mount and begin the process of trying to figure out the software, hardware and procedures necessary to take pictures of things that are forty million light years away.
This thing is much more compact than my current 8-inch Newtonian scope and should be much more stable and require less counterweight on the equatorial mount I've been using.
In addition, it's not only for photography, you can look through it like any normal telescope so for those busy summer months at the resorts I can now field an extra scope to keep the wait times at the eyepiece down.
2017 is going to be awesome; I can't wait to get started!
Bill the Sky Guy
January 1, 2017