Wednesday evening was a beautiful, clear, calm and fairly warm night so I decided to try something new - set up two telescopes myself for some sidewalk astronomy - one for the Moon and one for Saturn.
Normally this would be difficult because I'd have to be bouncing back and forth between scopes, but I recently purchased (at NEAF, the North East Astro Fest) the Vixen SkyPod. The SkyPod is a neat little alt-az mount with tracking and it's own built-in computer, the Vixen Starbook-S.
Over the weeks since NEAF I worked a bit with the SkyPod and its manual, and got the basic functions down. I also tightened up the backlash on both axes using instructions from Mike Fowler at Vixen Optics. This reduced the play in the azimuth axis quite a bit.
How did it work on the sidewalk? Just great! I put a William Optics 80mm refractor on it, aligned it to the moon and did an "align" operation, then it kept the moon in the field of view pretty much all night, almost three hours. I tweaked it a bit about once an hour, or moved it to focus on a new part of the terminator, but it was a very helpful piece of gear. I could just point people to it and say 'take a look at the moon' while I operated the 8" Orion XT dobsonian and kept it pointed at Saturn. (I have a platform for the XT8 but I was too lazy to set it up.)
I had over fifty visitors in the three hours, including a little girl of about 4 years just recently adopted from Russia, who spoke no English but could certainly understand that beautiful view of the moon. I will never forget her big eyes when she saw it.
To top the night off, my first visitor came back with some Pizza just as I was packing up. That made a nice snack on the way home.
2 comments:
Hi Ted,
My name is Jennifer Benn and my husband Jim Burns and I were the high bidders on your donated charity auction item for the seacoast rep theatre - a Star Gazing Party night with Ted.
We live in Stratham and I have a Galileo Telescope I would love your help in figuring it out - OR - if you were amenable - we are renting Jim's mom a house on the beach in Wells - for her 75th birthday - the week of June 20-27th [we leave sat the 27th at 11am] and if you think the light pollution might be better there-and you are willing to drive about 25 min from portsmouth- we'd love to have you there. Either way - please email me and lets begin discussions on setting up a date for your program. thanks much,
Jennifer Benn 603-778-2315
also,
i proposed a bank of telescopes as public art for last years portsmouth art round town. not accepted. yours looks like it went Great! congrats. maybe we could team up to offer it again if the art grant comes around again. also, check out my space related artwork at www.jbenn.com small world. big sky. 8') jb
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