March activities

It's been a busy month and I've missed a few posts so I'll try to summarize.

In early March I set up the XT8 in front of Barnes & Noble in Newington. About 20 people on their way in or out of the store stopped by for a look at Saturn and the Moon. I heard several people say "that can't be real" and "you can't see Saturn from a parking lot can you?" I was very impressed that several people immediately suggested that they might be seeing Saturn's moons (in fact they were!). The moon was almost full but there was still some area where the terminator provided some grazing illumination so people could see the craters and mountains in more relief.

Mall security eventually suggested I needed approval from the mall management to be on the sidewalk so I packed up and went inside to speak to the store manager. She was very nice and gave my name to their Customer Relations Manager who called me the next day and asked if I could present an astronomy talk to the home schooler group which meets at the store once a month. I agreed of course, and that is scheduled for May 29th. I'll bring a scope of course, and the mall has given permission for us to go out on the sidewalk afterward for some observing. Weather permitting that's just what we'll do.

Since then, I've been over at the Hampton Beach State Park several times with friends Patrick and Jim. I've just gotten a new telescope, the Celestron C9, a 9.25" Schmitt Cassegrain design. This scope has already given awesome views of Saturn, but it has a long focal length (2350 mm) so magnification is fairly high - even with my 30mm EP I cannot fit the entire Pleiades into the field of view. I am practicing the procedure for collimating the optics, and while not too difficult it is best done at high magnification, which requires if not perfect seeing at least calm air. Calm air has been in short supply around Hampton Beach this year - more typically we have 30 mph winds than not, and gusts to 50 have not been uncommon. (I'm thinking of laying in a supply of Dramamine for when I work in my 3rd floor office!)

Patrick is new to amateur astronomy. He has a CR6 refractor and a C9 carbon tube so we are working on getting him familiar with the operation of his go-to mount and scopes. He lives down in Mass. so it's a bit of a drive up to Hampton, but he says the skies are much darker here. Of course, I look at the Boston light dome and imagine how the sky must look farther North also!

Jim is an experienced observer with a Mak-Cass and a parallelogram binocular mount. He brought this binocular setup over the other night and let me try it out with his 20x80's. What a pleasure to lay on a reclining chair with your head on a pillow and have the binoculars floating right above your eyes. It really is like floating in space and a completely different experience than looking through a telescope, even with a nice observing chair like my Stardust chair.