enjoying the night sky

I have a great fondness for the night sky.  When I was a teenager, telescopes were the best way to see it.  I had an 8" Newtonian that was about the size of a human body and weighted well over 100 pounds with its mount.  It gave wonderful views for years, but portability wasn't a strong suit.

At college the physics department owned two Questars - a 3.5" and a 7".  These were extremely well designed maksutovs with beautiful optics.  The focal length was long and they weren't the best thing for simply star gazing, but that didn't stop me from checking it out many times and hauling it into the mountains.  The 7's tube in a fiberglas packing case weighed about 45 pounds and the mount and battery another 80.  Two of us would distribute things so we only had about 60 pounds each on our packs and off we'd go. 

A 80 pound portable mount with a 25 pound tube isn't exactly the most stable thing in the world, but I discovered a good mount with a 35 mm camera an the right sort of lens is a nice way to capture the beauty of the milky way.   It turns out much of what is really beautiful takes up a lot of sky and a telescope is usually designed to look at a very small area of the sky.  There are still many beautiful things to be had with telescopes but never short change your own eyes, a pair of binoculars or a small wide angle telescope.  

An idea combination is a really dark area (the mountains in the desert southwest are good candidates) and your eyes and possibly a nice pair of image stabilized binoculars (10x50 or 14x50 canons are really nice - I have a pair of 15x50s).  Given a choice of nice equipment or a dark site, I'd take the dark site any day.

Recently some interesting field mounts have been appearing.  Combine one of these with a good wedge, a quality 100 mm f5 refractor, a great objective and you might have the perfect backpack telescope ...  but your naked eye or binoculars and a good lawn chair may be even more fun.

And anyone can learn the sky if you can see at least the brightest few hundred stars.  Try a planetarium program to help out a bit.

But those of you who are in areas where you can easily get to a beautiful night sky - go out and look up.  Try the Pleiades with some binoculars and see if the view doesn't knock the wind out of you.

Comments

[Researching]

some of the best stargazing i have ever done was in the middle of death valley. phew. gorgeous timed exposure, steve.