Hello:
Since it says observing conquests should go here, I will do so. A I just had what was easily the best night of my life. A friend of mine and I were observing with a pair of 12.5" scopes from the 9,300 foot level of Mauna Kea. The sky was very dark and transparent, and the seeing was quite good. My goal for that night was to check the optical quality of a 12.5" f/15 cassegrain I had just put together. I did not yet have a primary baffle tube, so the sky background in the cass was bright, making faint galaxy largely impossible.
The real fun started when the moon came up around 1am. We broke down, and a call to the summit found that there was no wind, it was warm (4C), and the seeing was 0.3" or better! It didn't take long for us to head to the summit and set up the cassegrain between Gemini and the UH88" observatories. Due to the above mentioned moon and baffle issues, we stuck to planets, the Moon, binary stars, and a few planetaries. Most of our observing was done at 710x, which works out to about 56x per inch. In many cases, we could have used more magnification since the image wasn't about to break down.
Looking at the Moon and Mars had that "out the window of a space ship" feel. If there was any seeing, I couldn't tell. Even though Mars is far from opposition, at 710x it's pretty big and full of detail. On the Moon, crater chains and rilles just popped out everywhere, or so it seemed. Copernicus (I think) took up about half of the field of view on its own.
We knocked off as many close binaries as we could think of, which brings us to the conquest part, All the way up to the summit, I figured our first target would be gamma Andromidae, since that 0.4" companion to the B star had eluded me so far. Once set up, we went to the star and put in the 710x eyepiece. We were greeted by a pair of textbook diffraction patterns that wavered only very slowly. I had never seen a 12.5" scope be diffraction limited, until that night. Close inspection of B showed it to in fact be elongated, though not cleanly split. My friend saw it before I did, but I definately saw an elongation in the B component when compared to A. So, I'll mark it off in my book as resolved. In other news, the trapezium in M42 easily showed 6 stars, and the eastern most belt star of Orion was cleanly split without puting up much of a fight.
Towards the end of the night, we looked at Saturn. Though only about 20 degrees up, it was still very steady, with shadows and belts easy to see on the planet, and the Cassini division also easily seen (no Encke gap unfortunately). Mercury, about 5 degrees up, was also very steady, and we could see a phase, though we mostly saw a low resolution spectrum of it! Needless to say, the telescope itself passes muster, and is a definate keeper. Good observing nights for amateurs on the summit of Mauna Kea are few and far between (no wind, not too cold, etc.), and we were very fortunate to be up there on a really good night. At sunrise, we were very tired, but also very happy.
Cheers
Mike Connelley
Since it says observing conquests should go here, I will do so. A I just had what was easily the best night of my life. A friend of mine and I were observing with a pair of 12.5" scopes from the 9,300 foot level of Mauna Kea. The sky was very dark and transparent, and the seeing was quite good. My goal for that night was to check the optical quality of a 12.5" f/15 cassegrain I had just put together. I did not yet have a primary baffle tube, so the sky background in the cass was bright, making faint galaxy largely impossible.
The real fun started when the moon came up around 1am. We broke down, and a call to the summit found that there was no wind, it was warm (4C), and the seeing was 0.3" or better! It didn't take long for us to head to the summit and set up the cassegrain between Gemini and the UH88" observatories. Due to the above mentioned moon and baffle issues, we stuck to planets, the Moon, binary stars, and a few planetaries. Most of our observing was done at 710x, which works out to about 56x per inch. In many cases, we could have used more magnification since the image wasn't about to break down.
Looking at the Moon and Mars had that "out the window of a space ship" feel. If there was any seeing, I couldn't tell. Even though Mars is far from opposition, at 710x it's pretty big and full of detail. On the Moon, crater chains and rilles just popped out everywhere, or so it seemed. Copernicus (I think) took up about half of the field of view on its own.
We knocked off as many close binaries as we could think of, which brings us to the conquest part, All the way up to the summit, I figured our first target would be gamma Andromidae, since that 0.4" companion to the B star had eluded me so far. Once set up, we went to the star and put in the 710x eyepiece. We were greeted by a pair of textbook diffraction patterns that wavered only very slowly. I had never seen a 12.5" scope be diffraction limited, until that night. Close inspection of B showed it to in fact be elongated, though not cleanly split. My friend saw it before I did, but I definately saw an elongation in the B component when compared to A. So, I'll mark it off in my book as resolved. In other news, the trapezium in M42 easily showed 6 stars, and the eastern most belt star of Orion was cleanly split without puting up much of a fight.
Towards the end of the night, we looked at Saturn. Though only about 20 degrees up, it was still very steady, with shadows and belts easy to see on the planet, and the Cassini division also easily seen (no Encke gap unfortunately). Mercury, about 5 degrees up, was also very steady, and we could see a phase, though we mostly saw a low resolution spectrum of it! Needless to say, the telescope itself passes muster, and is a definate keeper. Good observing nights for amateurs on the summit of Mauna Kea are few and far between (no wind, not too cold, etc.), and we were very fortunate to be up there on a really good night. At sunrise, we were very tired, but also very happy.
Cheers
Mike Connelley
