You might think those would be the same thing, but they’re not. If there is a posh end of the little tiny scope market, the SV50 is it. It’s a nice instrument–very sharp optics, within in the limitations of a 50mm f/4 optical train, a smooth focuser, and a rugged build. All this comes at a price. It was a price I was happy to pay, to get a scope that fit my peculiar requirements (being able to be stuffed into the bottom third of my backpack for long airplane flights to dark skies in other hemispheres), but for most people the SV50 is build quality overkill and optical underkill. For the same $150, you can get a 3 or even 4 inch scope on a solid mount, and those larger scopes are still nice enough to be all the scope that some people will ever need.

A few years ago the conventional wisdom–which can still be found in quite a few places out in the wilds of teh intarwebz–was that first-time scope buyers should avoid anything under $300. Then the recommended cutoff fell to $200. Then some manufacturers started building very well received scopes for $150, like the Orion StarBlast 4.5 (which is now up to $200, although you can get the tube alone for $150).

It’s not that there weren’t scopes available for less. Depending on your tolerance for plastic and frustration, the low-end department store scopes grade into toys that go all the way down to about a buck. But these were not in any sense “good” telescopes, and between bad optics and shaky mounts, standard department store telescopes have probably driven thousands of potential stargazers away from one of the most rewarding hobbies. For a long time, the minimum buy-in for a new telescope that actually worked as advertised was between $100 and $150.

That changed, bigtime, during 2009, the International Year of Astronomy. First there was the GalileoScope, which originally sold for $15 but nevertheless managed to attract plenty of good reviews and a strong following online. Galileoscopes are still available, although now that IYA2009 is over, the economy of scale isn’t working as well and the price has gone up to $50.

In the same year, Celestron released the FirstScope, a 3-inch reflecting telescope on a one-armed tabletop mount. The FirstScope was an official product of IYA2009 and was heavily promoted and ended up in a lot of places, including electronics stores and even department stores. It originally sold for $50, but the price has periodically been lower. As of this writing they are $45 with free shipping, but I have seen them as low as $36 online and people report finding them in Fry’s and other electronics stores for as little as $25. The box includes the assembled scope, two eyepieces, and a single sheet of instructions. As far as I know, it’s the most inexpensive, reasonably capable, complete telescope ever brought to the market. So naturally I was curious about it, and the combination of a temporary sale and an Amazon gift card put one in my hands for a while last year.

Let’s start with first impressions. This is a sharp-looking scope, right out of the box. It includes dust covers for the end of the tube and the focuser, and the two eyepieces come with plastic caps, and in general it has the same fit and finish of other mass-produced scopes. The tube is printed in spiraling script with the names of famous astronomers from the past, which I think is not only commemorative but also educational, in that people are supposed to read the tube, see names they don’t recognize, and go learn about them. The tension on the altitude axis is easily adjustable with a big knob that turns against a Teflon bearing surface. The mount turns easily on its base, and the base has three big rubber feet widely spaced for stability. No finder is included, but there are a couple of pre-drilled holes with screws for mounting one.

As usual with “tabletop” scopes, observing with the FirstScope may require some ingenuity if you don’t have an actual table handy. It’s small enough and the useful magnifications are low enough–more on this in a second–that you could just hold it by hand or cradle it in your lap. I used to prop mine on the trunk of the car, back when I still had a car with a trunk. The base is a big plus here–the three rubber feet give solid footing with no rocking, even on uneven surfaces, and the mount is small enough and strong enough that vibration isn’t a factor. The altitude and azimuth motions are also very smooth, so once you get something in the eyepiece, it’s generally pretty easy to keep track of it.

So far, so good; most cheap scopes are so wobbly and shaky that finding targets and then tracking them is an exercise in almost terminal frustration. Mechanically, the FirstScope is as smooth, steady, and convenient as any scope I’ve ever used, and that’s an unbelievable achievement in a bargain-basement scope.

Back to the ease of tracking things at the eyepiece: there’s the rub. How do you get the scope pointed at things, so that you can see them in the eyepiece? With most scopes, you point the tube in the rough direction of your target, look in the finder scope, center the target, and then go to the eyepiece. Without a finder, you’re down a step: all you can do is point the scope in roughly the right direction and hope for the best when you look in the eyepiece. With the moon this is almost foolproof; with anything else it can be surprisingly tricky. Admittedly, with the low power eyepiece the scope has a huge field of view, which makes acquiring objects somewhat easier, but I still found that observing anything other than the moon usually involved at least a little faffing about.

Once on target, how are the views? Here’s where you have to steel yourself to some unavoidable facts of optics and economics. First the optics: it’s dead easy to make a mirror whose surface is a segment of a sphere, all you have to do is rub two flat round pieces of glass together with abrasive in between and that’s the shape that emerges naturally. The problem is that a spherical surface doesn’t bring all of the parallel rays of light that fall on it to the same focal point. The shape that does is a parabola, which is not that hard to generate but still takes some extra figuring from the basic spherical shape.

Now the economics come in: for Celestron to produce FirstScopes at their target price point and still stay in business, they could not afford to parabolize the primary mirrors. That wouldn’t be a big deal if the focal ratio were longer. When the cone of light from the primary mirror to the focal plane is long and skinny, the rays converge well enough that past a certain point spherical mirrors perform just as well as parabolic mirrors. The Orion XT4.5 has a spherical mirror and most reviewers have been very complimentary about how sharp the views are. But the XT4.5 operates at f/8, meaning the light cone is eight times as long as wide (or to put it in more technical terms, the focal length is eight times the diameter of primary mirror). The FirstScope operates at f/4, which means a pretty steep light cone. Even parabolic f/4 systems are hard on eyepieces: it’s difficult to gather up that steeply angled light and turn it into a pleasing image. Without some kind of complex and expensive corrective lens, objects in the center of the field will be sharp but those toward the edge of the field take on interesting, compressed shapes, sort of like a photo taken with a fish-eye lens. With an f/4 spherical mirror, the visible aberrations are worse, and even objects in the center of the field may not be truly sharp.

This is in fact exactly what I found. I could see plenty of craters on the moon, but the views were fuzzy rather than razor-sharp. Jupiter would go from being an elongate smear on one side of focus to an elongate smear on the other side, but in between it never really settled down into a nice circle. The best I could get was a modestly flaring egg shape, although the moons on either side were easy to see. Stars went from being vertically elongated dashes to horizontally elongated ones without ever becoming nice round little points of light. And that was in the center of the field. Toward the edge, the stars became commas, parentheses, and seagulls.

Not only were the eyepiece views pretty underwhelming in terms of quality, they were also small. Economics again: a decent, well-corrected eyepiece with a comfortable apparent field, like a generic Plossl, costs about as much as the entire FirstScope package. The included eyepieces are a 20mm Huygenian yielding 15x and a 4mm Ramsden giving 75x. The Huygenian has a tiny field of view, like looking through a soda straw, but the views are at the sharp end of what this scope is capable of. The 4mm Ramsden has a wider apparent field, not as good as a Plossl but not entirely claustrophobic, but unfortunately 75x is really pushing what this scope can do. Orion packages their almost identical FunScope with 20mm and 10mm eyepieces giving 15x and 30x, and I think those are much more reasonable magnifications for this type of scope. Happily, the focuser accepts standard 1.25″ eyepieces so if you can use other eyepieces, and frankly almost any other eyepieces are going to be better than what comes in the box.

Regardless of what eyepiece you use, focus gets critical at fast focal ratios, because the steep angle of the incoming light means that the focal plane is extremely shallow. With a long light cone, the eyepiece travels through the comparatively long region where the light rays are almost imperceptibly out of line on either side of perfect focus, which means that you can adjust focus very precisely with reasonably big turns to the focuser wheels. With a steep light cone, even minute turns of the focuser can throw you from out of focus on one side to out of focus on the other. Sometimes the distance between visibly out of focus in both directions is less than the spacing between the teeth on a rack-and-pinion focuser, so the perceptible ratcheting of the focuser can throw you past focus. I also found this to be the case; the focuser had an almost imperceptible amount of slack which was greater in one direction than the other, so I had to deliberately overshoot the focus in the “bad” direction and then try to sneak up on it from the “good” one. If I went even a hair too far, I couldn’t simply reverse into focus, but had to go way past in the wrong direction so I could start sneaking up again.

Needless to say, this kind of monkeying around gets old pretty fast. It might have been worth it for reasonably sharp views, but not for a fuzzy moon or egg-shaped planets. I used my FirstScope off and on, halfheartedly, for a few months, and then passed it on to someone who was happy to get it.

PROS

• Extremely light and portable
• Solid mount with good motions
• Good fit-n-finish, comparable to what you’d get on much more expensive telescopes
• Visually attractive, commemoration of prominent historical astronomers is a nice touch
• Usable right out of the box
• Dirt cheap

CONS

• Almost zero instructions (in the box; more are available online, but for what telescope is that not true?)
• No included finder
• Included eyepieces are usable, but barely
• No provision for primary mirror collimation
• Very limited magnification potential
• Underwhelming image quality

It may seem mean to bring up these cons on a complete telescope that costs about as much as a cheap eyepiece. After all, fixing any one of them–adding a finder, or better eyepieces, or an adjustable mirror cell, or parabolizing the mirror–would drive up the cost, and then this scope wouldn’t be filling the same niche anymore. In fact, the telescope ecosystem includes a whole array of small reflectors that improve on the FirstScope in some way, so you can see what the upgrades cost. For $60, the Orion FunScope is virtually a clone of the FirstScope, but it adds a red dot finder, better eyepieces, and a socket in the base of the mount so the whole thing can be put up on a tripod. For $100, the SkyScanner 100 adds (in addition to the RDF, better eyepieces, and base socket) a parabolic mirror with twice the light-gathering area (but still no collimation), or the SpaceProbe 3 Alt-az adds (with RDF and better eyepieces) a full-size tripod, a collimatable primary mirror cell, and a longer focal length for more magnification and sharper images. And things go on up from there.

Still, somebody has to be at the bottom of the price ladder. Considering that it costs almost nothing, the FirstScope is actually a remarkable success. It is certainly not useless. It will show a lot of stuff, and I think it is much more likely to pull first-time telescope users farther into astronomy instead of driving them away like most department-store scopes–although the pull may soon be to a bigger or better scope.

Should you get one? Although I’m sympathetic to the design philosophy of the FirstScope, I’m going to recommend against. Here’s the deal: the Orion FunScope currently costs a full third more, but that full third is still only $15. Most people who can afford $45 for a telescope can afford $60, and the addition of the red dot finder alone (which sells for about $36 as a stand-alone item!) is worth the extra layout, in terms of the convenience it will bring to using the scope.

But honestly, I wouldn’t stop there. The FirstScope and FunScope are fine for getting your feet wet, or for having a well built (if optically wanting) small scope to play with, but I have serious doubts about how long they will hold most people’s attention. In my opinion, the next rung up ($100) is where the “keepers” start. What I mean by that is that the SkyScanner 100 and SpaceProbe 3 have good enough optics to be useful for a lifetime, and recently received very favorable reviews in Sky & Telescope. Even if you already have or someday move on to bigger scopes, they’d be worth keeping around as quick-look, grab-n-go, and travel scopes. Bottom line, if I got marooned on a desert island with a FirstScope, I’d grudgingly make the best of it, but if I got marooned with a SpaceProbe 3 I could probably keep myself happily occupied for the duration.

So what’s the final word? I think most people, even casual observers or kids, will be better served with a slightly more capable–but inevitably somewhat more expensive–scope. Nevertheless, I am glad that the FirstScope exists. It serves an extremely useful purpose: providing a rock-bottom entry-level scope that actually works.

Last weekend London and I finally went camping again, and I finally got the scope back out under reasonably dark skies. My  last serious outing had been to Joshua Tree at the beginning of May. There are several reasons for the long hiatus.

• The first is simply heat. We do most of our camping in the spring and the fall because it’s just too darn hot in the summer, at least at our preferred desert destinations. Yeah, we could go up into the mountains and fight everyone else trying to do the same, but I’ve never felt any strong motivation to do so. A big part of going camping, for us, is to get away from crowds of people, which is one of the many reasons we like the desert.
• The second is teaching. My day job is teaching gross anatomy at Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona. The anatomy courses run from mid-June to the end of October, and during this stretch I usually have little time or mental energy for anything besides anatomy.
• The third is research. My appointment at WesternU is half teaching, half research. Usually I do almost nothing research-related during teaching time; I have from November through June to worry about dinosaurs. But this year a couple of big research-related events intervened and kept my head in the research arena even during teaching time. The first was a paleontology and anatomy conference in England in September, which I attended and spoke at. The second, and far more intense and important, is that at the beginning of August I took on my first graduate student. Which has been a lot of fun, but has also eaten up the spare cycles that I would normally devote to astronomy.

So, to sum up, the heat has kept me out of the desert, teaching has had its usual effect of monopolizing my attention, and research has scavenged what little teaching left over.

Until last weekend, anyway, when I was overtaken by one of those too-rare bouts of clarity in which I say to myself, “Why on Earth am I overthinking this? Camping is fun and easy, and packing the car takes less than an hour. We should just go.” And so we went.

Despite the earlier bad news, the Salton Sea State Rec Area is still open, at least for now. Don’t know if that’s because the state backed down of full closure, some community group stepped up to keep it open, or no-one’s gotten around to actually stringing a chain across the entrance (I jest; the lights and water were on, and there was a camp host present). That’s pretty much my default destination: it’s close, reasonably dark, has good horizons, is paved all the way in, and has lots of room for London to roam in relative safety with little supervision (i.e., flat, no cliffs to tumble over, and the water is too nasty to contemplate any sort of activity that might lead to drowning).

We got there right at sunset and quickly set up camp. Which basically means setting out the telescope, camp furniture, water, and food, moving all the other gear into the front seats, and making our beds in the back of the Mazda. I like to have all of this squared away before dark; come 3:00 AM I want to be able to climb into an already-made bed and just crash, and not futz around with making any further arrangements. I also got a fire going, and pretty soon we were roasting hot dogs and the making s’mores, our usual camp fare.

The young crescent moon was setting across the water, and as darkness fell the bats came out and started zipping through camp like little silent stealth fighters. London and I dig this; the bats are fun to watch and it’s nice to know that they’re around and keeping us bug-free.

London’s astro-enthusiasm waxes and wanes, much like my own. On some nights all he wants to do is lay out and watch for satellites and shooting stars, and other times he wants to do his own things. Last Saturday he climbed into his nest in the back of the car and played on his Leapster for about an hour (the most time he had spent playing with it in weeks), while I spent some quality time taking in the young crescent moon. I had the wrong camera along. Whereas my decade-old Nikon Coolpix 4500 is endlessly user-adjustable when it comes to settings, my newer Coolpix L19 has no way to manually set the exposure time, so it’s worse than useless when it comes to digiscoping. And the 4500 was back in my office. So no moon shots this time around.

After a while London was ready for some Daddy time so he crawled into my lap and we took turns telling stories until he got sleepy. Sometimes he’ll actually go to sleep in my lap, which is nice, because I know the days for that are growing short. But this time he recognized when he was sufficiently tired, took me to the restroom for his nighttime ablutions, climbed into his nest in the back of the car, and fell asleep almost immediately.

Unlike my outings this spring, this time I wasn’t attempting a Marathon or working on a big observing project. I just wanted to plink around the sky and reacquaint myself with the craft of observing. As usual, I split my time between telescope and binoculars.

This is a great time of year for observing: the summer constellations are still up right after sunset, and by just after midnight the winter constellations are rising. I started with the Great Glob (M13), the Ring Nebula (M57), the Wild Duck Cluster (M11), and Albireo, one of the finest double stars in the sky. By then Jupiter was high enough to be out of the near-horizon roil and showed about half a dozen dark cloud belts in the XT10, and some finer storm detail. After Jupiter I moved on to some autumn favorites: the Pleiades (M45), Andromeda galaxy (M31) and its satellites (M32, M110), and the Double Cluster (NGC 869/884). I could see some hints of the dust lanes in the Andromeda galaxy, but nothing like I saw last fall at Afton Canyon; the Salton Sea is dark but not that dark.

Those were all telescopic observations, and they had  carried me around the sky to the north, where the winter Milky Way was rising. I flopped into the lounge chair, grabbed the 15x70s, and laid back for some binocular stargazing. Cassiopeia in particular is a fantastic area to explore with binoculars; there are so many star clusters that the trick is not usually finding them, but figuring out which among the dozens you’re looking at. I thought about grabbing the atlas and sorting through it all.

Instead, I fell asleep.

I woke up about an hour later, at half past midnight. Normally, I would have called it a night, but during my reverie Orion had strode over the eastern horizon. Now this was too good to pass up. I went back to the scope and spent some time looking at the Great Nebula in Orion (M42/M43), the Crab Nebula (M1), the trio of Messier clusters in Auriga (M36, M37, and M38), and another cluster near Auriga (NGC 2281). I went back to the Pleiades, and got my best-ever view of the Merope Nebula, one of the many faint wisps of nebulosity that surround this bright young cluster. (In retrospect, the clarity with which I saw the Merope Nebula should have sent me scrambling back to the Andromeda galaxy to look again for dust lanes–the sky had evidently improved in the intervening two hours.)

Pleiades by Rob Gendler, borrowed from APOD

Then it was back to the lounge chair and binoculars to revisit all of these targets and more. And eventually, back to sleep under the stars. I did wake up later on and crawl into the car for some deeper sleep, but falling asleep under the splendor of the Milky Way was one of my favorite experiences in astronomy.

I was away too long. I can’t wait to go back out and do it again.

W00t! #1: Want to have your mind blown? Check out this photographic sky survey “meant to reveal the entire night sky as if it rivaled the brightness of day.” Link.

W00t! #2: Want to see a star blow up? No a simulation, but a real-life supernova? You have two choices: be very patient, or use a telescope. The last 5 naked-eye supernovae in our galaxy were observed in the years 1006, 1054, 1181, 1572, and 1604, although supernova 1987a in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, was also naked-eye visible. Anyway, the point is that if you want to see the light of an exploding star with your own eyes, the best place to observe from is the eyepiece of a telescope. It’s not uncommon for a supernova to briefly outshine its host galaxy–that fact is worth pondering for a moment–and there are literally thousands of galaxies within reach of amateur telescopes, so even a modest telescope will show you supernovae in other galaxies on a semi-regular basis. A good site for keeping track of potentially observable supernovae is this one, which lists them by their visual magnitude (you may also find this limiting magnitude chart and this calculator useful to determine which supernovae are within reach of your instrument).

I bring this up because right now supernova 2011by is at magnitude 12.5 and may get brighter still. It has already been sighted in a 6in telescope (according to a post on Cloudy Nights) and is theoretically observable with even a 3- or 4-inch instrument under very good skies. It’s in the galaxy NGC 3972, which you can find using Stellarium, Cartes du Ciel, or any of a number of other free programs. Right now isn’t the best time to see it, thanks to the nearly-full moon, but hopefully it will still be reasonably bright at new-moon time near the end of the month.

Gaaaah!: Sorry to end on a bummer. The state of California is planning to close 70 state parks for budgetary reasons, and the Salton Sea State Recreation Area is one of those on the chopping block (story here). The Salton Sea is one of my favorite spots for camping and stargazing, and I’m seriously bummed that they’re going to shut down the park. I don’t know who to write to in order to fight this, and even if I did, I doubt if enough people would write to make a difference. One reason I go to the Salton Sea is that it’s a really nice campground that is never empty but never overflowing, either. So it’s a bit of a catch-22: the low traffic that draws me there in the first place pretty well ensures that the park will have few advocates. And I’m not even sure if fighting this would be a good thing. I know that the state can’t afford to keep all of the parks open, and maybe it’s better to shut down a low-traffic place like the Salton Sea park and let the property rest undisturbed*, than to shut down a high-traffic place and drive those folks to the Salton Sea and thereby increase the human footprint. I’ll think about it some more, and look around and see if there is anything to be done. In the meantime, I’m just sad.

*Normally, I’d worry that this was Step 1 in some nefarious plan to sell the land for commercial development, but the Salton Sea is such a commercial black hole that I doubt if such a plan could be put into place even if someone strongly desired it, and there’s no evidence that anyone does. It’s a lonely spot, and that’s the point–I like to get out and enjoy the emptiness.

I started taking London with me to dark-sky sites last summer, when he was about five and a half. Between July and November we went to Owl Canyon, Joshua Tree Lake, Afton Canyon, and the All-Arizona Star Party, so we basically built out from nearby destinations to farther ones. The hardest part for him initially was the long drive. We always pack him a backpack full of books and magazines. I also have a couple of kid-friendly CDs in the car, and I keep a full-size pillow within his reach so he can lay his head down and take a nap while we’re driving.

Once we get to wherever we’re going, London is usually off exploring and looking for bones or cool rocks near our campsite. He is very good at staying withing line of sight and not wandering more than 100 feet or so from me. My first goals are always to get our camping area squared away first, whether we’re staying in a tent or just sleeping in the back of the vehicle, and then to get a fire going for dinner. It helps to arrive an hour or two before sunset; much earlier and we just end up getting sunburned and waiting for dark, and much later and it’s harder to set up in the fading light.

I can’t overstate how useful–nay, critical–it is that I can trust London to mind himself for 30-60 minutes while I get everything squared away. It really drives me nuts when people say how lucky we are that London is well-behaved. It’s true that he has a naturally gentle disposition, but dismissing his good behavior as luck devalues all of the work that we put into disciplining him, and more importantly, all the work that he puts into disciplining himself. It’s precisely because of the effort we all put into maintaining a civil household that we can enjoy ourselves so much when we’re out of the house; good behavior out in the wild is earned by practice at home. I don’t bring this up to be snooty or a tiger parent. I just can’t stand wimps who are too lazy or passive to discipline their kids. That’s a dereliction of parental responsibility and a huge disservice to the children, who will have to learn discipline later on, the hard way, at someone else’s expense. End of rant.

After dinner I make a comfy spot for London to watch for shooting stars and satellites. This might be the lounge chair, if I have it along, or maybe just a sleeping bag and pillow laid on top of a big piece of cardboard on the ground. Or my lap, in whatever seating is available. Usually he tells me when he is getting sleepy and I get him settled in his bed. If we’re sleeping in the back of the car, I make sure a window or door is open so I can hear him if he calls out. He never has yet, but I think the knowledge that he could call for me if he needed is a comfort. And I just don’t want the car sealed up with him inside, even in good weather. I always set up the telescope as close to the car or tent as I can, so I can keep an eye on him and he can know that I’m nearby.

I want London to enjoy these outings as much as I do. I grew up out in the country and the ready access to wide open, semi-wild spaces had a huge impact on me. It’s not really feasible for us to live in the country, so my substitute is to get London out into nature as often as possible, and to try to facilitate his enjoyment of it. Even on the hardcore stargazing trips, I try to make sure that his interests and desires get at least equal billing with my own. I don’t think that’s indulgent–I’d do the same for a camping companion of any age. In the early evening, he mainly wants to run off the cabin fever from the car ride, do a little solo exploring near camp, and look for interesting things on the ground. (I’ve taught him to recognize venomous spiders, scorpions, and snakes. He’s never found any out camping, but when he was four he correctly IDed a black widow spider that set up shop under one of our plant stands in the living room!) I usually grill hot dogs for dinner and then follow up with s’mores. That makes the fixing of dinner something he can help out with, which keeps him engaged and gives him a sense of accomplishment. After dinner, we look for shooting stars and satellites until he conks out. Then I get in a few hours of solo stargazing.

In the morning, we have breakfast and go for a hike. I’m usually running on 3-5 hours of sleep, so having some caffeine available is a must. For the hike, London gets to choose the route and duration (within reason); he’s on these trips to hike as much as I am to stargaze, and we’re both comfortable with the give-and-take involved. If your little one isn’t into hiking, you might see if there is another outdoor activity that they are interested in, that could be their recreational time the way that stargazing is yours. In talking about our hikes, London and I always call them “adventures” that we “brave explorers” go on, and I think putting things in those terms helped inspire him the first few times out. Now he’s so hooked on hiking I could call them “death crawls” and he’d still be eager to get out there.

One last enticement: on the way home, we stop at a restaurant for lunch, and London gets to choose where we stop. This almost always means McDonald’s, but I can live with it. We bring dinner and breakfast fixings with us, so lunch on the ride home is our only extraneous expense. And it gives London a little something to look forward to at the end of the trip, when everything is over but the ride home.

Ultimately, camping with London is so smooth and enjoyable that it’s often the first choice for both of us for passing a weekend with good weather. It’s cheap, too: hot dogs, s’mores fixings, lunch at a fast food joint and 2/3 of a tank of gas usually add up to less money than we’d have spent over the weekend anyway. And it gets us out of the house and at least into some contact with nature. I hope he grows to love wild places as much as I do; I think the best way to cultivate that love is to help him enjoy his time in nature right now. I hope your own family outings are successful, and even when they’re not, I hope that doesn’t stop you from going. It’s worth it.

Evening Rush

It was a much more relaxing start than my beginning-of-April marathon. That evening, I had been running around for about an hour trying to snag a bunch of fuzzies before they dipped below the horizon. This time I knew that some of the objects were just flatly impossible, and they tended to be the faint galaxies that one sweats over in a spring marathon: M33, M74, and M77. M79, the little glob in Lepus, was also out of the running. The only ones that were particularly timely were the nebulae in Orion (M42, M43, M78) and Taurus (M1). I started about 8:20 and in half an hour I had bagged all of the Messiers west of Leo–17 in total–so I could take a nice long break. I set out a lounge chair, London climbed up in my lap, and we spent an hour looking for satellites (we found 3) and shooting stars (9). Then I got him settled in his sleeping bag, had a snack and a big drink of water, and got started on the springtime galaxies.

Methods

I should break here and mention what tools I was using. For speed and ease of use, I made most of the observations with a 15×70 binocular (this one, in fact). Under dark skies, binos that size can reel in most of the Messiers without breaking a sweat, and the point-and-shoot simplicity and lack of stuff to fiddle with really makes the instrument disappear. For backup, and for hunting down some interesting non-Messiers, I had along the XT10. For finding, the Pocket Sky Atlas. To keep track of what I had seen, I used a one-page checklist and a map (both available here), noting the time of each observation and the instrument used (B or T) on the checklist and crossing out each object on the map.

Realm of the Galaxies

The Leo galaxies were a cinch, and I started in on the Virgo-Coma “clutter” at 10:36. Depending on how you draw the boundaries, there are at least 13 galaxies in this small patch of sky, and maybe more. I tend to count M49 and M61 in addition to the core 13 since they’re the next closest targets and also galaxies. I had never made it through the clutter with binos alone. Last year I got all of them but one with both binos and scope, but this time I really wanted to sweep the whole area without using the scope at all. And I did, although M91 and M98 were both devilishly hard. I had to pull my hood up around my face to block peripheral light and use averted vision to get them, but they were definitely there. M91 was my last object in this part of the sky, at 10:52. During my last marathon, the Realm of the Galaxies took an hour and a half. Last time out, I got through in what felt like a blistering 23 minutes, using a 5-inch reflector. This time I dropped my aperture considerably and still got through faster, in only 16 minutes.

(Before anyone chides me for not taking time to “appreciate” each beautiful and unique cosmic snowflake: I know, I know. This has been the perennial criticism of astronomical marathons. And here’s the perennial response: I have the other 364 nights of the year to savor every detail. The marathon is, explicitly, a race. Getting through 15 galaxies in 16 minutes is a personal achievement in celestial orienteering, not visual study. It means that next time out I’ll spend less time finding NGC Umptysquat and more time looking.)

To the Edge of Forever

One of the benefits of doing a “late season” marathon is that so much more stuff is up in the eastern sky. After getting through the Virgo-Coma galaxies I swept through all of the goodies in Ursa Major and Canes Venatici, the globs in Ophiuchus, and the northern reaches of the summer Milky Way. By a quarter after midnight I had 72 objects logged. Sagittarius was just starting to crawl over the eastern horizon and its Messiers wouldn’t be clear of the near-horizon murk for a while, and I had other things to try for. I wanted to see some quasars.

Er, say what now?

Yes, believe it or not, several quasars–the fiery hearts of long ago, far-off galaxies–are within reach of small-to-middlin’ amateur telescopes. Quasars were mysterious for decades, appearing as star-like points of light with highly redshifted spectra and usually massive output in the radio portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. They are now understood to be caused by energy emitted from the accretion disks that form around the supermassive black holes at the centers of most galaxies. As matter spirals into the accretion disk, there is tremendous friction. Imagine rubbing your palms together…at relativistic velocities! Friction in the accretion disk heats it to unimaginable temperatures, and that heat is radiated away as light and other electromagnetic waves.

The brightest quasar as seen from Earth is 3C 273 in Virgo. From a distance of 33 light years, it would shine as brightly as the sun in our skies. A planet in the core of the host galaxy would have at least two “suns”: the star around which it orbits, and the quasar shining equally brightly in the sky. I don’t know if anyone would be around to see it–it seems quite likely that any planets close enough to see the quasar as a sun would be heavily irradiated by it.

I didn’t know any of this just a month ago, beyond having a nodding acquaintance with the nature of quasars. I assumed that they were simply well beyond the reach of my telescopes. But a couple of posts at the blog Washed-Out Astronomy set me straight: “3C 273: Quasars are Easy” and “A Fist Full of Quasars“. Definitely worth checking out!

The aforementioned 3C 273 in Virgo is the brightest and easiest quasar, shining at magnitude 12.8. It’s also quite impressively distant, about 2.5 billion light years away. So the light from this quasar is more than half as old as the Earth itself; when these photons started their journey, our planet’s most advanced life-forms, bacteria, were still working up to producing an oxygen atmosphere, a task they would not complete for another 800 million years. Markarian 421 in Ursa Major and Markarian 501 in Hercules are magnitude 13.2 and 13.9, respectively, but they are much closer at 400 million and 500 million light years, respectively (why, our fishy ancestors had already evolved backbones by then!). Among the easy quasars, OJ 287 in Cancer is the most distant at 3.5 billion light years, but still not punishingly faint at magnitude 14.2. Finder charts for all four of these quasars are available at the links above.

3C 273 was an easy catch, just below an M-shaped asterism of faint stars not far from Porrima (Gamma Virginis, one of the bright stars of Virgo). Markarian 421, in Ursa Major, was even easier to find, since it sits right off the shoulder of a bright, 6th magnitude star. I made both observations with the XT10, but the quasars would have been visible in much smaller scopes; even a 4″ ought to show them clearly. OJ 287 had set by the time I switched from Messier-hunting to quasar-hunting, and I skipped Markarian 501 because the rising wind was visibly rocking my vehicle and throwing sand horizontally through the air. It was time to get back to Messiers.

The Home Stretch

The string of clusters and nebulae that comprise the “steam” from the teapot of Sagittarius were easy prey for the 15x70s; it took more time to correlate the sky view with the atlas and figure out which was which, than it did to find them. The little globs along the bottom of the teapot–M54, M69, and M70, were tougher, and required the telescope, as did the globs and other Messiers just cresting the eastern horizon. At 2:25 I logged the last visible Messier–M15, a very nice glob off the nose of Pegasus–secured the telescope against the very impressive wind howling through the campground, and crawled into the back of the Mazda for some rack. M15 was my 100th Messier of the evening, so I knew that I had at least made my proximate goal of getting into triple digits. But there would be more Messiers up before dawn, and naturally I wanted to see how many of them I could add to the tally. I set an alarm for 4:00 and sacked out.

Knowing that I already had 100 in the bag dulled my ambitions a bit, and I snoozed until 4:30. I was not anxious to get back out in the wind–it was cold and uncomfortable. But needs must when the devil drives, so I dragged my tail out of the vehicle, parked a folding chair right up against the lee side, and got back to work. M30, a glob in Capricorn, was dead easy, as were the Andromeda galaxy, M31, and its satellite galaxy M32. I tried and tried for M110, M31′s dimmer satellite, and a couple of times I suspected a faint glow at about the right place, but it wasn’t good enough to log for certain. I gave up at 4:47–the sun wasn’t going to be up for almost another hour, but the eastern sky was already bright enough to make further observations impossible. So I finished with a total of 103.

Two more that might just have been possible are the open cluster M34 and the planetary nebula M76. Actually, I’m dead certain that M76 would have been possible in the XT10, but I didn’t fancy opening the scope and letting the wind sand-blast the mirrors, so I let that one go. M34 is iffy–it was definitely over the horizon before sunrise, but not by much, and I have real doubts about its visibility, scope or no scope. If M34 was not possible, then there were 105 Messiers visible that night, of which I found and logged 103, missing only M76 and M110.

Of the 103, I logged one with naked eyes only (M44, the Beehive cluster, in Cancer), one with the 9×50 finder on the telescope (M54, a glob in Sagittarius), 12 with the scope only, and 89 with the binos (I did go back and re-observe 19 of those 89 with the scope as well, just because I had time and wanted to see them). Except M74 and M77, I saw all of the Messier objects during the month of April. Also, I believe that M74 is the only Messier that I’ve never observed with binoculars–I should rectify that in a couple of months when it’s up before dawn.

What’s next? I should probably get back to the Herschel 400 one of these days. But part of me is already looking forward to next spring, and my next shot at getting all 110 Messiers. Stay tuned.

MOON PHASES

• May 2 (Mon) 11:50 PM PDT / 6:50 UT (Tues) – New moon
• May 10 (Tues) 1:32 PM PDT / 20:32 UT – First quarter moon
• May 17 (Tues) 4:07 AM PDT / 11:07 UT – Full moon
• May 24 (Tues) 11:51 AM PDT / 18:51 UT – Last quarter moon

MOON CONJUNCTIONS

• May 13-14 (Fri-Sat), waxing gibbous moon passes Saturn (13^th) and Spica (14^th), but not particularly closely.

PLANET POSITIONS

• Mercury waxing crescent to waxing gibbous in the morning sky, greatest western elongation May 7.
• Venus waxing gibbous in the morning sky, following greatest western elongation on Jan 8.
• Mars rises before dawn, but stays close to the horizon.
• Jupiter rises before dawn, following conjunction with sun on April 6.
• Saturn rises shortly after sunset, following opposition on April 3.
• Uranus rises before dawn, in Pisces.
• Neptune rises before dawn, in Aquarius.

PLANET CONJUNCTIONS

• May 7-15, Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter within 5° of each other.
• May 15-25, Mercury, Venus, and Mars within 5° of each other.

METEOR SHOWERS

• May 6 (Fri) Eta Aquarid meteors. Active April 19-May 28. Predicted to be a very favorable year.

I called it “letting the crazy seep out”. I don’t remember where I got that phrase, but it is one of my touchstones. It doesn’t just happen at the seaside (which is good, considering that I only lived next to the ocean for 1/7 of my life). Long drives through desolate country also do the trick, especially at night. Hikes of any length. The desert is a marvelous sponge for the accumulated mental grime of civilized life.

So is the night sky. I usually go out to observe with a purpose in mind–some new target to track down, or an old favorite I haven’t seen this season, or just to stare in awe again at the rings of Saturn or Jupiter with its little entourage of moons. But whatever purpose gets me out there looking up, one of the effects of stargazing for me has always been to let the crazy seep out. As if the telescope is a big syringe, drawing the poison out through my pupils. When I first realized this, back in Merced, I started to think of the night sky as another seashore. Carl Sagan’s description of the surface of the earth as “the shore of the cosmic ocean” resonates for me. If sitting on the cliffs in Santa Cruz brought me face-to-face with immensity, stargazing gives me a brush with eternity. I usually leave more tired but less crazy, and that’s a good trade.

Someone said of E.E. Barnard that he was a true observer because if he was prevented from making astronomical observations for any length of time, he got cranky. I can certainly relate. I am in a similar state right now. It’s been cloudy all week. It was cloudy the week before last. It cleared off last weekend, just in time for the camping trip to Owl Canyon, but the nearly-full moon and unsteady seeing made for one of the least satisfying nights of stargazing I’ve ever had, to the point that I gave up and went to bed at midnight (horror!). It’s not supposed to really clear off until Monday.

I did get out tonight, briefly. I was taking out some trash a little after 11:00 and noticed that the sky was mostly clear. By the time I got some warm clothes on, grabbed all my gear, and got set up out in the driveway, that was no longer true. Clouds from the west had already passed the zenith and were creeping down the eastern sky. Saturn and Virgo were already gone, and the Big Dipper was rapidly getting submerged in the soup. I tried without success to find a double star in Bootes, but it was eaten by the clouds too soon. The only stars I could make out lower in the sky were those of Hercules. I cruised down to M13, the Great Glob, mostly so I wouldn’t get completely skunked. It was barely there, but I swapped eyepieces around until I found the best magnification for this evening (75x; it might be higher or lower on other nights, under other conditions), cupped my hands around my face, and stared until the lights went out, which didn’t take long. Less than 10 minutes after I got the scope set up, the sky was completely socked in.

Needless to say, the experience was the opposite of therapeutic.

I know it’s probably galling for some to have a SoCal resident complaining about a measly week or two of clouds. William Herschel discovered 2500 or so deep sky objects, several hundred double stars, and the planet Uranus from England, where clouds are nearly omnipresent, sometimes even coming into people’s houses and carrying off their children. Herschel earned a post as Astronomer Royal, so stargazing was both his obsession and his occupation. If he could put up with a career of observing from England, I’m sure I can suck it up for a couple more days.

I hope so. The crazy is building up.

This is my “Uncle Rod” shot (if that makes no sense, go here).

Cirrus clouds at sunset. Notice the stripe of rainbow color about 1/3 down from the top. This is sunlight refracted through the ice crystals in the clouds. I’m not sure if it would be considered a sun dog, a tangent arc, or another of the multitude of halo types, but it sure was pretty.

Equipment: Telescope

Required Time: 10 minutes

Related Missions: Ring of Fire

Map to Beta Monocerotis, modified from the Monoceros constellation diagram on Wikipedia.

Hey look, I finally posted a new mission.

I’ve been slowly working away at the Astronomical League’s Double Star Club, and I just discovered this gem last week. It’s not the world’s easiest star to find. As a naked-eye subject, the constellation Monoceros, the Unicorn, is fairly dim and unimpressive. Beta Monocerotis is prominent in the western part of the constellation, just east of Orion and north of Canis Major, making a wide triangle between Sirius and Kappa Orionis (also known as Saiph, which is Arabic for “sword of giant”). I could just make it out with the naked eye from Claremont, hovering in the light dome over Los Angeles.

To fully appreciate this star’s charms, you’re going to want a telescope, but it doesn’t have to be a big one. I made my observation with my 80mm refractor, which has a focal length of 900mm (f/11). Using a 32mm Plossl eyepiece (28x), it was clearly a double star but not cleanly split (seeing was lousy). With the 12mm Plossl (75x) it was clearly split into a nice pair of equally bright gems. I decided to go up to 150x with a 6mm Orion Expanse, my favorite high-power eyepiece. So glad I did–at 150x, the southern member of the “equal pair” turned out to be a double itself, also of equally matched components! It was a nice surprise and a breathtaking sight, the three stars twinkling away at 150x.

I looked at dozens of photos, sketches, and eyepiece simulations of Beta Monocerotis while writing this post, and the image that come closest to capturing what I saw at the eyepiece is this sketch by Jeremy Perez, who kindly gave me permission to include it here. Jeremy is one of the authors of Astronomical Sketching: A Step by Step Introduction, and his website, Belt of Venus, has beautiful and evocative sketches of just about everything in the sky, from the moon and planets to deep sky objects and double stars. It’s definitely worth checking out, both to marvel at his work, and to get ideas for your observing wish list.

A poster on Cloudy Nights had this to say, “I just looked at Beta Mon last night in good seeing. What a neat thing. It reminds me of one of those antique mechanical solar system models.” I couldn’t agree more–it conveys exactly the same sense of mechanical precision and aesthetic appeal as an old-fashioned orrery.

If you’re going to catch Beta Monocerotis, you’ll need to do it soon after dark, because Monoceros is following Orion to the western horizon fairly early these days. Go have fun!

On the evening of Friday, April 1, I attempted my second-ever Messier Marathon. My first was last year, in February of 2010 (observing report here). That one was an out-of-season marathon, and only about 105 objects were visible, of which I observed 98. My goal this year was to break into the triple digits.

Owl Canyon Campground is a BLM public campground about 6 miles north of Barstow. It’s a great place for camping, hiking, and stargazing, but not a site one would usually choose for marathoning. The campground is down in the canyon, and the canyon walls raise both the eastern and western horizons, which cuts down the time available for fishing the early evening and late morning targets out of the twilight. But it’s close by, which was good because I couldn’t leave town earlier than 4:00 on Friday and needed to be to my destination and all set up by nightfall. And the forecast was a bit more favorable there than any of my usual haunts, which had clouds predicted for shortly after midnight.

I was there with my friend Andy, and both of us were using 5-inch reflecting telescopes and 15×70 binoculars. We were each armed with a checklist, a photocopy of the map from the Sky & Telescope Messier Card, and the S&T Pocket Sky Atlas. I also had Harvard Pennington’s Year-Round Messier Marathon Field Guide along, primarily for the detailed charts of evening and morning objects, although it wound up getting used much more than that. Andy got his first telescope last year (reviewed here) and had seen only some of the Messier objects before our marathon attempt; for him the night was primarily about exploration and working on his object-locating skills. My 6-yr old son, London, was also along on the trip, for the fun of camping and our traditional morning-after hike.

We got to the campground well before sunset, made a fire, and roasted hot dogs for dinner. The sun set a little after 7:00 and by 7:30 we were picking out stars and constellations. Our first Messier object, unsurprisingly, was the Pleiades (M45), which we needed as a signpost to get down to the galaxies of the evening rush. We missed M74 and M77–the high western horizon cut them off before the sky was dark enough to see them. We saw M31 and M32 at 8:22, and M110 at 8:38, just before Andromeda set. M33 was another no-show; both of us suspected a glow at about the right place, but it was right on our local horizon and we couldn’t be certain that what we though we saw was really distinct from the twilight skyglow.

After that, things got easier. We nabbed M76, M34, and M79 before 9:00, and then paused for a few minutes to roast marshmallows. We were back in action by 9:20, roaming through the nebulae and open clusters of Taurus, Orion, Canis Major, Puppis, Gemini, Auriga, and Cancer.

We soon fell into a comfortable rhythm. My goal was to find as many Messiers as possible, and Andy’s goal was to see them, and to get some experience using his scope under dark skies. He found many of the objects himself, with either his scope or the big binos, but for some of the less impressive specimens he cadged views through my scope. I set out a lounge chair and blankets for London so he could stay warm while he looked for shooting stars and satellites, and before long he was fast asleep under the stars.

For last year’s Marathon I had used a 6″ f/8 Dob, which I later sold when I moved up to a 10″ Dob. This year I was using a 5″ f/5 Newt on the Skywatcher AZ4 alt-az mount (also sold by Orion as the VersaGo II), and it was a pleasant combination. With a low-power eyepiece, the field of view was about 2.5 degrees, and 5″ is a lot of aperture under dark desert skies. Both of the trios of galaxies in Leo were easily seen in the same field of view, which allowed us to compare them during our brief study. Further to the east, Saturn heralded the rising of Virgo and the Realm of the Galaxies. The jewel of the solar system was spellbinding, as always, and both of spent some time lingering over her charms.

I had been somewhat dreading the Virgo-Coma “clutter” of galaxies. I found them all last year, but it took me about an hour and a quarter to slog through them. This year went much more smoothly–I started with M60 at 11:08 and finished with M100 at 11:31, and that was allowing time for Andy to look at each one before moving on. Later on in the evening he realized that he had forgotten to look at M100. I had already moved on, but was happy to return to M100 by the simple expedient of panning around western Coma until I spotted the broad dagger of stars next to that big, bright galaxy. That fast and lazy approach was my favorite object find of the night, but not my favorite view.

After finishing the Realm of the Galaxies, we turned north, to Ursa Major and Canes Venatici. My favorite view of the evening was of M97, the Owl Nebula, and M108, a distant galaxy, shining brightly in the same wide field. M51 showed hints of spiral structure and its companion, NGC 5195, was interesting for its bright, almost star-like core.

We ended the first session of the night in the east and northeast, sweeping up globular clusters in Hercules, Serpens, Ophiuchus, and Scorpio, and catching the open clusters of Cygnus as they crawled over the horizon. Our final objects were the globs M9, M62, and M19, about a quarter after 1:00 AM. We covered our scopes and went to bed, with an alarm set for 3:30 to get us up for the morning rush.

We rose on time, but so had the clouds. Starting about 11:00 PM we had seen high, thin clouds in the south, but they had not gotten very far overhead nor threatened to interrupt our marathon. By 3:30 it was a different story–the whole sky was fogged over, with only a handful of the brightest stars piercing through the gloom. We crawled back into our sleeping bags, and that was that.

Our total for the night was 80 objects. If we hadn’t gotten clouded out, I think we could have gotten into triple digits, although the high eastern horizon would probably have kept us from nabbing M30. But it was a fine night out under the stars, we both had fun and saw a lot of beautiful things, and we were well-rested in the morning, which almost never happens after a marathon.

Breakfast was pancakes and bacon cooked over the campfire, with the desert staying pleasantly cool as the sun ducked in and out of the clouds. London and I took our traditional morning hike and found many wildflowers, some beautiful volcanic rocks of almost every color, including green and purple, and a brave little lizard who let us get quite close before he rocketed away over the desert floor.

It was a heck of a lot of fun and a fine, rewarding night of stargazing, regardless of our total object count. I had time along the way to bag a couple of new objects for the Herschel 400. I think for Andy it was a bit of a breakthrough evening. He glommed on to The Year-Round Messier Marathon Field Guide early in the evening and was soon zooming all over the sky, not just finding and viewing the Messiers on his own but also calling out their types and distances–one thing we both appreciate about the book is that along with maps and directions on how to find the Messiers, it has an eyepiece sketch, capsule description, and basic astronomical data on each one. It’s nice to know what you’re looking at.

It’s also nice to be reminded as you observe that the sky is not a dome over our heads but an inconceivably vast space, with objects scattered through it at all distances, “in which we float, like a mote of dust, in the morning sky” (in the words of Carl Sagan). The sun is 8 light minutes away; Saturn is about 1.5 light hours away; Sirius, the brightest nighttime star, is 8.6 light years from us; planetary nebulae (the gaseous shells of dying stars), double and multiple stars, and open star clusters are usually only a few hundred to a few thousand light years away in the neighboring spiral arms of the Milky Way; globular clusters are usually tens to hundreds of thousands of light years away in our galaxy’s halo; and the external galaxies of Messier’s catalog range from a little over 2 million light years away for Andromeda (M31) to a mind-bending 67 million light years for M109. And even this incredible gulf only gets us just barely to the edge of our local supercluster of galaxies, one of countless galactic superclusters strewn across the observable universe like stars across the arms of our own Milky Way.

Such is the span of space and time one can experience in one night during a Messier Marathon. I had a blast getting 98 last year, I had even more fun getting 80 this year, and I’m already looking forward to making a run on all 110 next year. Watch this space. And more importantly, just watch space.