Posts Made By: Denise Babcock

... Hardin Optical's 8 inch Deep Space Hunter? I'm looking for a good scope at the smallest possible price (yes, I know that's hard to get), and I saw an ad for this scope at a really low price. But it's so low--$299--that I'm a little leery of just going for it. So... anyone know anything?

~Denise

Since nobody where I work gives a rat's behind about astronomy, I thought I'd bring my good news here. Finally, after *ten years* of being without any kind of scope at all, I ordered my very own new 8" Deep Space Hunter today! *doing the happy dance* Thanks everyone who had anything at all to say about this scope, the discussions about it convinced me that the price was just a really good deal and not an indication of hideously bad quality.
Now all I need to do is survive the few days it'll take to get here. Seems like four or five days (the estimated delivery time I got) is nothing compared to ten years, but I'm going crazy already, because I know that there's a real scope out there on its way to me!

~Denise

I tried to post this first thing this morning, only to find I babble too much and the post was too long. So I'm trying again, this time in two parts.
My 8" Deep Space Hunter arrived yesterday morning. It took a while to put together, mainly because I'm easily distracted and spent too much time fiddling with the finderscope and things. But I had no problem getting it all together and was very happy to see that the collimation looked fine. Now, I admit, I'm hardly very experienced at that sort of thing and am going to have someone who knows what he's doing look at it, but for now all is well. So here's what happened when it got dark...


short version:
-the finderscope bracket is cheesy, but works okay
-the 9mm Astrola plossl eyepiece kinda stinks, but the 25mm is very decent
-40-something pounds is a lot heavier than it should be at 4:30am
-cheap it may be, but this scope is awesome!!

longer version:
Due to a certain annoying gas shortage out here in Arizona, I was stuck at home. I set up on my balcony, which has a limited but acceptable view of the eastern sky. Unfortunately, the darker it got, the more clouds moved in. I was barely able to get the finderscope aligned before clouds ate the entire sky. So I pulled a fast one on the Cloud Gods and went to bed, with the alarm set for 3am. That was when the fun began!

on to part two...

Hmm. Labor Day weekend. Three days off. Sounds like road trip time to me! And this time I have a scope to bring along.
Friday was so busy at work that I ignored the first clear sky I've seen in a while in favor of bed. Saturday night found me in the Coronado National Forest, which is in the bottom southeast corner of Arizona, almost to the border. There were three annoying light domes, which I hadn't counted on, but I got some viewing done anyway. Mars, of course, and I watched the tiny sliver of moon for a while (yes, I still like to watch the moon , before I started trying to find something more interesting. Found lots of lightning flickering in the clouds, which gradually surrounded me, and not much else. Bummer.
Sunday I hit the road again, annoyed with my crappy luck, and took a shot at a place with a fantastic dark sky: Kaibab National Forest, just short of the Grand Canyon. Bingo! Here I had luck and found many nebulae, assorted clusters, both open and globular, and at least one faint little fuzzball of a galaxy. I saw the Swan, a favorite of mine, small but beautiful. Really must get some nice EPs... Fairly sure I saw the Lagoon and the Trifid, but not positive. Of course, Albireo was one of the first things I looked at, since it comes out so nice and early. But I was amazingly unable to get the Andromeda Galaxy to show up in either finder or scope, despite the fact that I could see the blasted thing hanging there very prettily. Lesson number one in humility.
Lesson number two in humility followed hard on the heels of number one: it's pretty hard to find your way around the sky without a handy-dandy equatorial mount. I've never used a Dob before this one, and it's driving me crazy and making me determined to figure out how to find things. Hmm, beginner's lab with my club coming up soon...
Anyway, even just looking without knowing what I was looking at half the time was fun. Saw what I'm pretty sure was a supernova remnant, and some cool nebulas. Had a nap and then woke up in time to see the Orion Nebula. Wow! Saw it before, at a slightly less dark site, but this time it was awesome. But then a cloud ate it all up.
In all, not a bad weekend. It'll probably be the last time I cover the entire state of Arizona in search of darkness, but what the heck, not like I had anything else to do this weekend.
Maybe next time I'll know what I'm doing and be able to find and identify objects on purpose, instead of randomly looking and saying "Wow! That's a globular cluster!"

~Denise

I headed away from the enormous light dome of Phoenix to visit my parents up in far NW Arizona for Thanksgiving on Wednesday and naturally brought my buddy Fred, an 8 inch Dob, along with me. Wednesday night I got in a good three hours of observing through the scope, and who knows how long of just staring at the Milky Way 'cause it's been a while since I was at a sky that dark. This was at a location near Burro Creek campground, btw, which is about halfway up to my parents' place.
Anyway, I stopped there again on my way home Thursday night. I was way too tired to do any real observing, but I got to see something really cool. There was a haze over about half the sky, very high thin clouds. The stars were visible through it, and they looked about like what I can see from my patio at home. Looking from Orion over towards Polaris there were very few stars. Then there was a line where the haze ended and the *stars* came out. It was incredible! The contrast had me just staring from the crappy sky I'm used to, to the cloudless section where the Milky Way came out of the clouds and touched the horizon. It was like taking a good sized chunk of a really dark sky and sticking it in the middle of the city. Seeing the difference between the two sections of sky was enough to convince me I need to get out more often. Now if only I could have taken a picture of the whole sky somehow, to illustrate to the city folk what they're missing...

I thought I had a picture of my dog and my scope at a star party, but instead I found one of the cat. Considering some of the... uh, unusual cat pics posted here lately, this may be something of a risk, but what the heck. It's cute. I was in the process of lining my scope with black velvet and Firefly decided I needed her help.

~Denise

Okay, so it's a little early, but I'm ready to go now. Is anyone going to be at the GCSP this year? I sure am, along with my scope and my little dog.

~Denise

I'm starting to look around at larger scopes now, after finding out that it would be nearly impossible to attach DSCs to my 8" dob. I remember hearing good things about Night Sky scopes from their owners, but that was a few years back. Anyone know anything current? Good, bad, indifferent--I just want to hear what people think. I'm interested in the 16" in particular. Another possibility is ordering a Swayze mirror to put in the scope instead of their Pegasus Optics mirror. Opinions? Will it be worth the year or more of saving every spare penny I find?

~Denise

I was poking around in the vast number of pictures waiting to get printed on my computer, and found one of my cats. Cyrus is the darker, stripey one, Firefly is the fluffy one. Both of them have expressions that fit pretty well with their general opinion of being disturbed in the state between Bath and Nap.

~Denise

Work has been very demanding since last December, and the clouds have been consistently arriving just in time for the new moon for months now, so my chances for observing have been hovering somewhere between "slim" and "none". But last weekend there was an opportunity too good to pass up. One of my clubs had a star party at Mt. Graham, AZ, with a tour of the Mt. Graham Observatory.
Friday I'd asked to keep my schedule light at work so I could leave early. Naturally, there was a screw-up and my workload doubled, meaning my husband and I didn't hit the road until 6pm. We reached Treasure Park, a big meadow located at 9000 ft, at some time after 11pm, under beautiful clear skies. I decided to take a nap until 3am, when Orion would be visible.
When my alarm went off, unfortunately I was still extremely tired, but the stars got me up and out. I only looked at a few old friends: Collinder 69, a funky-looking open cluster that I like a lot; M42, naturally; the Double Cluster; M31, through a friend's scope; and of course I took a peek at Mars. Then I gave up and went back to bed. Too many 10+ hour workdays lately.
Now for the good part: at that high altitude, my little 8" Hardin Dob, with 20mm widefield EP giving 60x, was amazing! I've looked through a lot of large scopes at lower altitudes, and my humble inexpensive scope was beating the pants off them, thanks to the lack of light pollution and the thin air. I must have spent twenty minutes staring at the Orion Nebula, watching more and more structure emerge. I saw five stars in the Trapezium easily, with the sixth wavering in and out of view. Even my husband admitted that it was "Special", which, coming from him, is like an ordinary person jumping up and down squealing with joy.
The Double Cluster got nearly as much attention. The stars in the middle of the clusters were resolved! And there was color! Wow. The drive was definitely worth it.
The next day was the tour. We got to see the Vatican's Very Advanced Technology Telescope, affectionately known as the "Pope Scope", the submillimeter radio telescope, and the Very Large Binocular Telescope, whose second mirror had just arrived the week before. Interesting bit of trivia: the Pope Scope really is very advanced technology. They replace every bit of computer equipment every two years. Another bit of trivia: it takes roughly $55,000 worth of electricity to move the radio telescope and its building. (I hope that was a monthly figure, and not per move...) If you're interested in these scopes, here's the website: http://mgpc3.as.arizona.edu/
Of course, by the time we finished pestering the tour guide with questions about the VLBT, the sky was pretty solidly clouded over. So much for the second night of the star party. But the brief time I got to view, along with the telescope tour, made the whole trip very worthwhile... even with these gas prices.

~Denise