Crumby's Telescope Tomfoolery Notes

All righty then, pictures of prime Wicker Man habitat. And looky there, one of my favorite light poles is identified. All righty then. Way to go, Ray and Raymone.

Last night's Tomfoolery was pre-empted by the Cloudy Curtain. I shall try again tonight. My intent tonight, as last night, is to peruse objects in constellations occurring near Aquila. Two of these constellations, in case you never heard of them, are named Vulpecula and Equuleus, the fox and the colt. I did get started last night, but all I got to do was fix to set up, set up and look at the Dumbell Nebula, which may now be espied in the evening sky, obviously, as opposed to the sky of the wee hours, where and when I had espied the Dumbell, previously.

Vulpecula, like Scutum was named by Hevelius. According to the Golden Skyguide, Hevelius originally called it the Fox with the Goose, Vulpeculae cum Anser. Ha! Cum was about the first Latin spell I learned. In fact, it was about the only one I learned as a schoolboy. Wait a minute. I learned agricola too.

I reckon foxes do get geese. But geese seem pretty big and dangerous prey for such a small carnivore as a fox. In any event, I can not discern any of the zoological characters in this constellation that Hevelius imagined.

Perhaps the drawing of the cloudy curtain was fortuitous, directing me to the Ample Bosoms to save me from some awful fate that would have intercepted me had I persisted in the east pasture, longer. Some awful fate having to do with the mysterious star, Eta Equuleus, more reliably known as 1 Equuleus.

Th Golden Skyguide surmises that Equuleus was contrived by some unspecified contriver to fill up the space between Pegasus, the Flying Horse and Delphinius. It has no mythology associated and one looks in vain for any connect the dots facsimile of a pony or baby horse. But Eta???? Equuleus could prove interesting because it may be a 0.9 arcsecond separation double, maybe.

I wonder what duties devolved on Hevelius as a court astronomer. I need to look that up.
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Later

The clouds are patchy, but more patches than not, boding no good for telescopery. Nonetheless, there's always hope, so I set up the big Lomo anyway. I also did some research on Hevelius. Hevelius, it turns out, was not a bad fellow. At least from the accounts I perused. He was a brewer, to start with, and no brewer can be all bad. Then too, he built his own 150 foot focal length telescope on top of his houses. He had three houses, two of them provided by his second rich wife. Alas, the telescope and the houses, which were adjoining, burned up in a fire. Hevelius died not long afterwards, broken hearted that his telescope burned up.

Actually, it might be wrong to say that Hevelius was King Scutum's court astronomer. Whoa! Dang it. The king's name wasn't Scutum. I can't remember the king's name. Anyway, Hevelius may not have actually spent much time at court. But the king gave him money to help out with astronmical expenses, so that's why Hevelius named Scutum in honor of the king and the king's victory over the Turks, maybe.

Hevelius' second wife was one of the first lady astronomers. Her name was Elizabeth, maybe. Hevelius spent a lot of time fussing with English astronomers over the precise location of stars. He also made a map of the moon. However, Hevelius picked out long Latin names for the different features of the moon. These terms fell into disuse because they were long and tedious, maybe, or because Latin is a dead language outside Romania. So that's what I learned about Hevelius doing research today. There's a facsimile of a portrait of Hevelius on one of the sites I visited. He appears slightly stove up, and even though the picture is black and white, it's not difficult to imagine that Hevelius had a reddish nose.