Last night I went up to Portsmouth for a little sidewalk astronomy before heading over to the Stratham dark sky site. Tim Mauro who lives in Portsmouth met me there, by the Parking Garage on High St. Luckily Jupiter was visible due south to the left of the parking building so we had good views as it passed over the church steeple in downtown Portsmouth. We had over fifty people stop by, and at one point the lines were long enough that I pulled out the 8" dob and set it up while Tim ran the 3" refractor.
At about 9:15 we headed over to Stratham where we met Tom Cocchiaro and Jim Moe. Tim set up his CPC 925 and it seemed to work like a charm. We saw Neptune as a small blue disc, and with a total of six scopes and numerous EPs to share we had a wonderful few hours of cameraderie until the clouds came rolling in at about 12:30am. M31, the double cluster in Perseus, M13, M92, and many other beautiful sights. I gave the WO 80ED it's head on a tour of the Milky Way and it did not disappoint, either with the 24Pan or 35Pan. Tom put his 13mm Ethos into Tim's C925 and the views were staggering. I also set up the 8" XTi, but did not have the energy to set up the GPD2 and C925. With all the exterior wires, batteries, dew sheild, manual mount, it is a good 30 minutes until things are stable. I know that once it is set up, the views are awesome and the mount is solid as a rock, but I have not been willing to go through that recently. The go-to mounts I see where all the wires are enclosed are starting to look mighty attractive - Tim's CPC 925 for example!
Still it was a great night. We finished with an hour or so of chatting, hoping the skies would clear, but eventually gave up and headed home after sharing the rest of the chocolate donuts. Mmmmm.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
End of season at Hampton Boardwalk
Sunday evening was the beginning of another beautiful night, so I went back to the boardwalk at about 8:30. Lots of people and families enjoyed seeing Jupiter and four moons. I gave out a lot of ISAN stickers to the kids and copies of the one-page "what we are looking at tonight" writeups.
No parking at the beach tonight, way too crowded, so I decided to head down on my bike. I put the scope in a backpack (inside its padded case), AT Voyager tripod across the handlebars and Rubbermaid two-step stool over my shoulder. Easy as pie, in 10 minutes I was on station and ready to go. As I passed one family, a lady shouted "Mike, there's that Astronomy guy we were bringing you to see! I was hoping he'd be here again!" How much fun is that?
Scope was the WO Zenithstar ED II with a Burgess binoviewer with 2 20mm Binolight EPs, plus corrector giving 10mm EP focal length. This gave about 56X, which was plenty to see moons and the two main equatorial cloud belts on Jupiter.
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