Telescope Tomfoolery
Ha! It just occurred to me, Crumby Ovate, that this is as good a place as any to keep my Multiple Star Notes. Keep everything together, that way if you lose it, you lose it all. Ha!
Last night, to keep entertained while I was keeping the deer out of the pastures, the plan was to espy the mutiples in Hercules, then one or two in Ophiucus, then wait for Cepheus and Cassiopeia later. But I got to sleepy to wait so I'll do those later ones tonight.
The moon was very bright last night so about the only star I could actually see near Hercules was the always reliable, this time of year, Vega. So I used Vega to find four of those multiples in Hercules, to whit: Alpha, Delta, Rho and 95, all fairly close together and up and to the right of bright Vega.
The moon being so bright didn't seem to bother much, oddly, in Hercules, but She bothered a bunch when I tried to move over to Ophiucus, so I gave up on that. The southeastern sky was just a big white glow. Besides 70, the one I wanted to espy was in the Austink light glow to boot.
Those Hercules ones are all pretty cool, as suns go, but my favorite of the group is Delta. That's because you have a great big one next to a little bitty one and the little one is orangish violet and the big one appears great big and is sort of a greenish white. All these Hercules doubles are easy to split in the 1250 reflector using a 2x barlow and either a 7.3-22mm zoom or the barlow and a range of orthos 25mm - 12.5 mm. That Ultima barlow helps a lot with coma. Surprisingly, that goofy Apogee zoom is quite handy on multiples and does a good job. I needed to find something for it to do, since it flunked out on terrestrial in the Maks.
95 is interesting too because the two stars are very nearly the same size but one is greenish and the other one is orangish.
Goofing around I also looked at Jupiter low on the horizon with 3x TV barlow and a 9mm ortho. My mount can't actually handle that kind of magnification pointed that way, in that light, but it was interesting. A big stripedy fuzz ball at 416x.
Last night, to keep entertained while I was keeping the deer out of the pastures, the plan was to espy the mutiples in Hercules, then one or two in Ophiucus, then wait for Cepheus and Cassiopeia later. But I got to sleepy to wait so I'll do those later ones tonight.
The moon was very bright last night so about the only star I could actually see near Hercules was the always reliable, this time of year, Vega. So I used Vega to find four of those multiples in Hercules, to whit: Alpha, Delta, Rho and 95, all fairly close together and up and to the right of bright Vega.
The moon being so bright didn't seem to bother much, oddly, in Hercules, but She bothered a bunch when I tried to move over to Ophiucus, so I gave up on that. The southeastern sky was just a big white glow. Besides 70, the one I wanted to espy was in the Austink light glow to boot.
Those Hercules ones are all pretty cool, as suns go, but my favorite of the group is Delta. That's because you have a great big one next to a little bitty one and the little one is orangish violet and the big one appears great big and is sort of a greenish white. All these Hercules doubles are easy to split in the 1250 reflector using a 2x barlow and either a 7.3-22mm zoom or the barlow and a range of orthos 25mm - 12.5 mm. That Ultima barlow helps a lot with coma. Surprisingly, that goofy Apogee zoom is quite handy on multiples and does a good job. I needed to find something for it to do, since it flunked out on terrestrial in the Maks.
95 is interesting too because the two stars are very nearly the same size but one is greenish and the other one is orangish.
Goofing around I also looked at Jupiter low on the horizon with 3x TV barlow and a 9mm ortho. My mount can't actually handle that kind of magnification pointed that way, in that light, but it was interesting. A big stripedy fuzz ball at 416x.
posted by ray pistrum at Saturday, June 10, 2006
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