This past Christmas I got the quite unexpected gift of a telescope. It’s an Orion Go Scope, and while still technically a low-magnification starter scope, it is much better than the other two or three I’ve had throughout my life. You store it in a backpack that’s about eighteen by eight by eight inches in size, and the whole thing weighs less than ten pounds. And it’s all designed for quick setup. Latches and sliding pieces coordinate easily so a guy with two left thumbs, like me, can get from backpack to observation-ready in about five minutes.
Well, we here in the northeast US have been undergoing something of a deep freeze since the end of December. Brutal winds routinely whip around my house, tugging and twisting and beating the power lines coming to us from the telephone poles on the street. We lost power briefly once, and lost our cable for about two hours one morning. There have been three instances of snowfall, in amounts of six, three, and two inches. Temperatures have been erratic, too. It’s seems to be some weird inexplicable Gorian pattern, something like sub-zero for two days, then a balmy forty degrees, then repeat over two weeks.
Anyway, my buddy calls me up out of the blue yesterday and suggests a night-sky viewing session. I go out on my deck, and, yes, for once the skies are crystal clear. I see brilliant white Jupiter hanging low in the southwest, and immediately to my left, facing due east, great god Mars. Forty-five degrees up in the southeast Orion lumbers drunkenly on his side. Directly overhead is the glittering Pleiades, a magnificent inferno of stars which oddly resembles the dipper when under magnification.
It’s a go, I tell him.
I get everything ready: Go Scope, January edition of Astronomy magazine, flashlight, gloves, wool hat, thermal underwear, sweatshirt, big hulkin’ winter jacket, and, yes, even my opera glasses at magnification of three. Steve pulls up at 8:30 (we both had to help our respective wives get the younglings in bed), and we’re off to the mountains. He’s brought two Cokes and a bag of pistachio nuts, plus his own flashlight, a mean metal mace-like thing with the power of a searchlight and the heft of an aluminum bat. About a half-hour’s ride to the north and we’re in the deep woodland regions just over the New York border.
We find a secluded parking area next to a boat launch. The frozen lake before us goes on and out for perhaps a mile or two, an eerie white expanse ringed with trees on the low mountains surrounding us. The main road is about fifty yards above us, at something like a sixty degree angle, so headlights from passing cars (passing at a rate of about one every fifteen minutes) don’t bother us.
The sky above us is a brilliant jewel box that only seems to show itself at wintertime, and absolutely takes my breath away.
From my house, on a moonless, cloudless night, I can see about fifty stars or so. New York City is fifteen miles to the west, so light pollution from the Big Apple effectively kills any amateur astronomy where I live. But here, a mere fifteen or twenty miles to the north, with hardly a streetlight or houselight about, the celestial dome sparkles.
Orion now hunts with a posse of a hundred glittering fireflies. A quarter-sky turn away, at his feet, sits the Great Square, or Baseball Diamond as I’ve heard it argued before. I follow Andromeda zenith-ward and edge over towards Cassiopeia, but still fail to spot the Andromeda Galaxy, the farthest thing most of us will see with our unaided eyes. It’s eluded me for a while now, and despite easy assurances from books and magazines, I still have not been able to spot it, even in skies dark as this. Oh well.
Directly overhead is the Pleiades, and Ares, fat and cyclopedean, shimmering in the heat curtains of the atmosphere, stares down at us from the top of that sixty-degree hill hiding the main road. We have all our targets.
It’s sixteen degrees out – Sixteen degrees! – and I have to take off my gloves to assemble the Go Scope, put on the finder, put in the eye pieces. In a minute my fingers are numb, and a minute after that they’re starting to hurt. It takes ten or fifteen minutes before I’ve assembled it, and Steve has to help.
I have to give up on the finder, though, and after a few game minutes, Steve, much more handy and practical than I ever will be, can’t get it working either. We take turns manning the scope, and, surprisingly, I’m able to find the objects of our search without Steve’s help. Our first target is Mars, and after five minutes of searching we get it in our sights. Despite its red-orange brilliance, however, the planet fails to resolve itself into a disk, and remains a shimmering starlike point in the telescope’s field of view.
Now, I’m not expert on focal lengths and lens diameters and all the accompanying equations, but I expected to see something sphere-ish in form, especially since Mars is now this month the closest it will be to Earth in a 26-month cycle. In one of my previous telescopes I was able to resolve Venus to a crescent, so I felt a little cheated by the great god. So, Mars was the great disappointment of the night.
We turned to the Pleiades, but because it was at zenith the Go Scope had a tough time keeping it in view. The telescope kept moving slowly along its north-south axis; I don’t know, something must not have been tightened properly. Anyway, it’s getting cold, and with the Andromeda Galaxy a no-show, Mars a Betelgeusian imposter, the Pleiades escaping the new telescope’s tracking ability, there’s one more sight in the sky I want to try for.
You know Orion, right? You know his belt, those three stars almost equally aspaced, right? Even if you don’t know it by name, you know it by sight. Below the belt, perpendicular to it, lays his sword, and just fractionally off to the sword’s side sits the Orion Nebula, M42. I never saw it before with my own eyes, so now’s the time to do it, before our toes become gangrenous with frostbite.
Incredibly, I find it on my first try.
Awesome! If it wasn’t subarctic I’d have goose bumps raised along my arms. In the field of view I see two bright points of light, a seeming quarter-inch apart in a diagonal, surrounding by two flaring whisps of grey-white blur: the whisps of the nebula, hot gas in this fertile region of new star formation. I’m really looking at a nebula! The light from this stellar factory that’s now entering my eyes left when Europe was plunged in her Dark Ages and the Muslim conquests were first raging over Arabia. I feel connected with something bigger and deeper than myself, plugged in to something on a scale so great that I truly can’t comprehend it at this moment.
And all thanks to my Go Scope! Go figure.
Well, we here in the northeast US have been undergoing something of a deep freeze since the end of December. Brutal winds routinely whip around my house, tugging and twisting and beating the power lines coming to us from the telephone poles on the street. We lost power briefly once, and lost our cable for about two hours one morning. There have been three instances of snowfall, in amounts of six, three, and two inches. Temperatures have been erratic, too. It’s seems to be some weird inexplicable Gorian pattern, something like sub-zero for two days, then a balmy forty degrees, then repeat over two weeks.
Anyway, my buddy calls me up out of the blue yesterday and suggests a night-sky viewing session. I go out on my deck, and, yes, for once the skies are crystal clear. I see brilliant white Jupiter hanging low in the southwest, and immediately to my left, facing due east, great god Mars. Forty-five degrees up in the southeast Orion lumbers drunkenly on his side. Directly overhead is the glittering Pleiades, a magnificent inferno of stars which oddly resembles the dipper when under magnification.
It’s a go, I tell him.
I get everything ready: Go Scope, January edition of Astronomy magazine, flashlight, gloves, wool hat, thermal underwear, sweatshirt, big hulkin’ winter jacket, and, yes, even my opera glasses at magnification of three. Steve pulls up at 8:30 (we both had to help our respective wives get the younglings in bed), and we’re off to the mountains. He’s brought two Cokes and a bag of pistachio nuts, plus his own flashlight, a mean metal mace-like thing with the power of a searchlight and the heft of an aluminum bat. About a half-hour’s ride to the north and we’re in the deep woodland regions just over the New York border.
We find a secluded parking area next to a boat launch. The frozen lake before us goes on and out for perhaps a mile or two, an eerie white expanse ringed with trees on the low mountains surrounding us. The main road is about fifty yards above us, at something like a sixty degree angle, so headlights from passing cars (passing at a rate of about one every fifteen minutes) don’t bother us.
The sky above us is a brilliant jewel box that only seems to show itself at wintertime, and absolutely takes my breath away.
From my house, on a moonless, cloudless night, I can see about fifty stars or so. New York City is fifteen miles to the west, so light pollution from the Big Apple effectively kills any amateur astronomy where I live. But here, a mere fifteen or twenty miles to the north, with hardly a streetlight or houselight about, the celestial dome sparkles.
Orion now hunts with a posse of a hundred glittering fireflies. A quarter-sky turn away, at his feet, sits the Great Square, or Baseball Diamond as I’ve heard it argued before. I follow Andromeda zenith-ward and edge over towards Cassiopeia, but still fail to spot the Andromeda Galaxy, the farthest thing most of us will see with our unaided eyes. It’s eluded me for a while now, and despite easy assurances from books and magazines, I still have not been able to spot it, even in skies dark as this. Oh well.
Directly overhead is the Pleiades, and Ares, fat and cyclopedean, shimmering in the heat curtains of the atmosphere, stares down at us from the top of that sixty-degree hill hiding the main road. We have all our targets.
It’s sixteen degrees out – Sixteen degrees! – and I have to take off my gloves to assemble the Go Scope, put on the finder, put in the eye pieces. In a minute my fingers are numb, and a minute after that they’re starting to hurt. It takes ten or fifteen minutes before I’ve assembled it, and Steve has to help.
I have to give up on the finder, though, and after a few game minutes, Steve, much more handy and practical than I ever will be, can’t get it working either. We take turns manning the scope, and, surprisingly, I’m able to find the objects of our search without Steve’s help. Our first target is Mars, and after five minutes of searching we get it in our sights. Despite its red-orange brilliance, however, the planet fails to resolve itself into a disk, and remains a shimmering starlike point in the telescope’s field of view.
Now, I’m not expert on focal lengths and lens diameters and all the accompanying equations, but I expected to see something sphere-ish in form, especially since Mars is now this month the closest it will be to Earth in a 26-month cycle. In one of my previous telescopes I was able to resolve Venus to a crescent, so I felt a little cheated by the great god. So, Mars was the great disappointment of the night.
We turned to the Pleiades, but because it was at zenith the Go Scope had a tough time keeping it in view. The telescope kept moving slowly along its north-south axis; I don’t know, something must not have been tightened properly. Anyway, it’s getting cold, and with the Andromeda Galaxy a no-show, Mars a Betelgeusian imposter, the Pleiades escaping the new telescope’s tracking ability, there’s one more sight in the sky I want to try for.
You know Orion, right? You know his belt, those three stars almost equally aspaced, right? Even if you don’t know it by name, you know it by sight. Below the belt, perpendicular to it, lays his sword, and just fractionally off to the sword’s side sits the Orion Nebula, M42. I never saw it before with my own eyes, so now’s the time to do it, before our toes become gangrenous with frostbite.
Incredibly, I find it on my first try.
Awesome! If it wasn’t subarctic I’d have goose bumps raised along my arms. In the field of view I see two bright points of light, a seeming quarter-inch apart in a diagonal, surrounding by two flaring whisps of grey-white blur: the whisps of the nebula, hot gas in this fertile region of new star formation. I’m really looking at a nebula! The light from this stellar factory that’s now entering my eyes left when Europe was plunged in her Dark Ages and the Muslim conquests were first raging over Arabia. I feel connected with something bigger and deeper than myself, plugged in to something on a scale so great that I truly can’t comprehend it at this moment.
And all thanks to my Go Scope! Go figure.
Well, after an hour-and-a-half of observing, we’ve had it. Numb and tired, we pack everything up and head on back home. By 11 I’m out of my clothes and into some sweats and a t-shirt, eagerly scanning through back-issues of Astronomy to find a picture of M42 to show the wife, patiently putting up with her geek of a husband.
1 comment:
Far out, Hopper...sounds like you had fun! You do know they just found 5 more planets! You should take your family and your friend and his family for a weekend to PA with Go Scope...the Girls could hang out in front of the fire while you guys go out on the deck! Happy sky watching!!!! Always
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