If you’re going out to the Maker Faire, be sure to drop by the Hacks booth and say howdy. I’ll be bringing some goodies related to a few of our hacks books, and there will be plenty of toys you can mess around with.
After editing Astronomy Hacks,
I knew I had to get a telescope. I got off to a very false start with
the 4.5
inch Orion Short Tube, a model that Bob warned me about. But I was in the
shop, it was cheap, and it was in stock. I made the purchase, and
thought it would end up working out.
Bob warned me about its poor mount and weak optics. And when I tried it
out, I knew it wasn’t going to work out. I probably could have lived
with the optics, but the mount was very bad. It was jerky and shaky. And
when I looked in the Orion catalog, I saw that indeed, the mount it came
with was their rock-bottom mount.
At Bob’s urging, I returned the scope. The folks at Birdwatcher’s Nature View
were fantastic, giving me 30 days to try the scope out before I made up
my mind. I ended up spending a bit more and getting the $359 Orion
SkyQuest XT8. Unfortunately, the optical tube assembly was damaged
in transit. My replacement came about a week ago, but because I was so
dang busy, I only got it assembled today. A wonderful thing about
buying locally was that I didn’t need to deal with the return: the great
folks at Birdwatcher’s Nature View took care of all that.
Joan and I got back late (10pm, late for me), but she encouraged me to
observe nonetheless. I didn’t have high expectations; the first
time I observed with my original scope, I’d been unable to find anything without the help of my
friend Daten, and the second time I went out, I found nothing. But I’ve
been training. In particular, Stellarium has helped me
get better oriented. I’ve also been using Cartes du Ciel for star
charts, so when I got home, I woke up my computer, fired up Cartes du
Ciel, and printed the default chart that appeared. I can only see a
sliver of sky from where I live, but that sliver coincided with the
chart, and turned out to give us a perfect view of Cygnus, Lyra, and
Draco’s head.
This scope is fantastic, although I do need to add a
Telrad finder, since the default finder is a little annoying. But
(pun intended), the two scopes are like night and day. The XT8 is
really easy to use. In an hour of observing, and with a copy of Nightwatch to complement the printed chart, we were able to
observe: