Crumby's Telescope Tomfoolery Notes - The Hunter

Last night at 9 PM it was 90 degrees hot and the wind was gusting to 28 mph according to the weather robot voice. Therefore, two simultaneous circumstances led me to eschew the Newt and pick the Lomo as the telescopery gear of choice. One of these was the 28 mph wind gusts and the other was Lleu Llaw's maggots which had to be applied to his minor gun shot wound. So the Lion of the Steady Hand was not up to helping out with the Newt and I didn't want him getting maggots all over the telescopery gear, anyway. That Lomo on its big German Equatorial Mount can withstand high wind, maybe, hurricane force wind.

But why would a man of any experience at all choose to hunt bunnies with a sword? Yet there hangs the evidence, the sword, at Orion's belt. At least that's what everyone thinks, almost. Actually, that's not Orion's sword. It's his weiner sock. And he's not going hunting, dressed up only in his weiner sock. He's taking the dogs for a walk. The bunny just gets spooked.

Boring Technical Details

Sometimes I like to just pick out a star or group of stars in the Pocket Sky Atlas and hop along. That's what I did last night because conditions were really lousy due to lots of intermittent clouds and haze. One of the stars I hopped to was Kappa Lepus, a double just right of Rigel. I had not looked up any of the information on K Lepus before I hopped. So I didn't know what to expect. I looked at it and looked at it, but I could only see one star, not two. Oh well, I thought, perhaps it's too tight for the Lomo or maybe the secondary is very high magnitude, meaning very dim.

Just now I looked it up. The separation is 2.4 arcseconds and the secondary is Mag 8. That should have been easy pickings in the Lomo at the range of magnifications I was using. Whut the heck happened? Wrong star!