Dave Wallace's Adventures in Astronomy

12/29/2003 2300 UTC

The temperature was a not unreasonable 40 degrees F and the sky was clear. So I loaded up the car and headed over to Roberts Field to check out my latest changes to the mount. I was set up and polar aligned by six PM local time. The "easy" alignment picked Capella and Vega. In both cases, a considerable manual correction had to be applied even though I'd gotten the scope perfectly level and dead on north.

The moon was the first and most obvious target; it was just a day or two shy of first quarter. Mars was just a hand's width away to the north and east. Mars is too tiny now for any detail to show; it simply made a good target for testing the tracking. Tracking was fine, though I was getting "rubber banding" in right ascension. Given that and the fact that the two-star alignment was off by more than was reasonable, I guess I'd better re-do the drive calibration and backlash training.

The next target was Saturn. Again, the GOTO was "get somewhere in the neighborhood of" -- off by more than the field of the finder scope, actually, so I had to hunt around for several minutes before the planet swam into the field of the 40mm eyepiece. Sky conditions were disturbed, at least that close to the eastern horizon. The image was unstable. But I was able to spot Titan (though not any of the other moons).

After Saturn, I set course for M42. Missed by a couple of degrees (it was a short trip from Gemini to Orion, after all). With the 15mm eyepiece, the four brightest stars of the Trapezium were visible. The next of the "usual suspects" was M45. Again, the scope missed by a considerable distance but I was able to bring it into view. It's a pretty cluster, but all the stars look the same color to my eye (maybe ranging from white to blue-white), so it's not all that interesting. I must remember to try for a photograph; the camera may capture color my eye doesn't see.

By now it was nearly 7 PM and the temperature was below freezing. So I called it a night. No new objects seen, but I did at least get to check out the latest changes. The good news is that the scope will now move around without slippage. The bad news is that it doesn't quite go where I want.