Dave Wallace's Adventures in Astronomy

06/03/2003 0030 UTC

The sky cleared for the first time in nearly two weeks. I decided to bet that the broken clouds we had at 8 PM local time would dissipate after sunset. So I dragged my scope out to the car and drove the three miles to my observing site. It turned out to be reasonably worthwhile.

By the time I got the scope married to the tripod and had done a rough polar alignment using a magnetic compass, Jupiter was clearly visible, about 30 degrees up in the southwestern sky. The crescent moon was about 15 degrees up in the west. The sky was still too bright for stars. So I trained the scope at Jupiter. The moons were lined up three-and-one: Io was odd man out. The GRS should have been on the right side of the planet, but no luck seeing it. But the temperate zone cloud belts were plain enough.

I spent a few minutes adjusting the mount's setting circles. By then, Arcturus was just barely naked eye visible, so that gave me another point. (Nearly the same declination but over 3 hours different in right ascension.) Significant error swinging through 45 degrees of sky -- I had to search to even get the star in the finder scope. Re-zero the setting circles and dial up Jupiter again. Hmm... off by around 5 degrees declination and 30 minutes right ascension. Decided to see if I had missed Polaris, but the sky was still to bright to tell yet.

I recently bought some O-rings so that I could get the 26mm eyepiece para-focal with the 15mm one. So by using Jupiter as the target, I started stacking O-rings on the barrel of the 26mm eyepiece until it came into focus at the same setting as for the 15mm. It took three of the 1/16" thick O-rings to do the job.

Nine fifteen EDT and it's dark enough to sight Polaris. I was indeed off a bit -- maybe four or five degrees azimuth. Corrected that and did the Jupiter-to-Arcturus trip again. Results were now much better: no error to speak of in declination and only ten minutes or so in right ascension. Good enough for hack carpentry. Took a look at the moon. The dark part was dimly lit with earthlight, enough to show the disc but not enough to make visible features. There was plenty of relief showing at the terminator, though. (First quarter is still four days away; the moon's only about 4% illuminated at the moment.)

Nine thirty: Noticed a bright star maybe 10 degrees above the horizon in the northeast. After checking the right ascension scale to be sure it was adjusted for the elapsed time, I aimed the scope by eye at this star. RA of around 18:30 and DEC of about 42 degrees was what the scales read when I finally got this star in the cross-hairs of the finder. I'd spotted Vega, of course.

So I took the opportunity to renew my acquaintance with a favorite target: Epsilon Lyra, just a little to the northeast of Vega. This is the famous double-double. The scope's too small to split the close pairs into separate stars, but it has no trouble with the 208 arc-second separation between the two pairs. Nice to see it again. I'm looking forward to Albireo in a month or so -- another favorite, but Cygnus won't rise high enough to be worth observing tonight until around midnight and I must be to work in the morning.

Ten PM: Time to pack it up and go home. Probably won't get another shot before the weekend, given what the forecast looks like.