Saratoga Gap Equipment Testing-Observing-Imaging Run 23rd Jan 2015

My second trip to the new semi dark rural sky at the Saratoga Gap site since moving up north from Los Angeles. I am still getting used to not being in such a bustling area such as LosAngeles-Santa Monica-Malibu. It really is quite quiet up here, which I guess is a good thing for nature lovers (not much else to do up here too). I noticed that they have a much better lighting ordinance here in San Jose, with full cutoff light shields on lights, as well as the use of low pressure sodium (LPS) lamps. as they only emit in one single color at a very narrow wavelength, that are easily filtered out by light pollution filters. As such I had more success using my light pollution filters for imaging here than in LA. The presence of Mount Hamilton's Lick Observatory that overlooks the city of San Jose is the main driving force behind good lighting. This is an excellent summary of the effect of good lighting in San Jose.

"M108 in Ursa Major" 

Anyways my plans for this session was mostly to do some visual observing, just to chillax and enjoy the night sky. I also had plans to try out some new gear that I had just acquired from Orion Telescopes, now only a stone throws from where I live (READ: dangerous lol). I had with me my usual imaging rig, 70mm Celestron Travelscope and NexStar GOTO mount with the Meade DSI II/laptop combo, the 102GT refractor OTA, as well as my C8 with 2" diagonal and the all new Orion VersaGo III Alt-Az mount and Orion 2" 42mm DeepView eyepiece. The reasons for the purchase of the 42mm Deep View was two fold. Firstly I wanted wider and lower powered views in my C8 as it has a very long focal length (2000mm f/l). My lowest powered eyepiece up till now has been my Meade 24.5mm SWA which gives a magnification of 81x, much too high for the larger, sprawling objects. Secondly I had tried a focal reducer on the C8, and while that worked, I just didn't like putting more glass in the focusing train as that impacted on image brightness. Also from experimenting with different scopes, I generally found that my cheap Kellner and MA eyepieces, with fewer elements, tended to give brighter views of faint DSO than there more exotic multi element brethren. Hence I went with the 42mm DeepView 3 element eyepiece with a 50 degree of so FOV, over the 38mm SWA 70 FOV multi element eyepiece.

"M109 in Ursa Major"

The VersaGo III Alt-Az mount was not a planned purchase. I kinda found it while browsing Orion's Red Tag Sale for refurbished items. Always wanting a great deal, I called them up to see if they could deliver it to the showroom here in Cupertino so I wouldn't have to pay for needless postage. The staff at Orion were ever so courteous and made it happen. Now I am the proud owner of a nice sturdy alt-az mount. Although the weight rating had it at 18 lbs as opposed to the 20 pounds for the Vixen PortaMount, from just looking at the mount and carrying it, I could immediately tell that this mount was going to outperform the Vixen. The older PortaMount I had held the C6 f/5 newtonian very sturdily, but was left wanting with the C8 perched on top of it. Even at its lowest height, vibrations was a problem with the C8 (6 seconds or more before dying down). The weak point for me was its stamped aluminum legs. The VersaGo III, by contrast had almost 2" tubular steel legs, plus the hub where the alt-az head attaches to the tripod had a much larger circumference. Of course all these would be meaningless if the mount underperformed in the dark. I was not disappointed. At its lowest height, there was barely any vibrations at all with the C8. With a sharp rap to the side, the jiggling died down in under 2 seconds! Another plus for this mount was the accessible lock knobs (I know, I know it defeats the purpose of a simple alt-az mount). The fact that you can adjust the tension was a big plus. This feature on the PortaMount is only accessible with an allen wrench, and I found the slow north creep annoying when I used it with the C8.

"We woke by red light, a self portrait!"

The 2" barrel 42mm DeepView eyepiece also performed extremely well. No doubt that this same eyepiece would fall apart in my old fast 10" GS dob, I did not have any field distortion, pin cushioning or coma in the C8, thanks to its well corrected optics and long focal length. Also no problems with kidney beaning and the field lens was nicely recessed and not at the edge. And the views were quite expansive and plenty bright, just as I expected. Well I would probably get a much more expansive view in the 38mm SWA, but that is all relative. With this eyepiece, operating at 47x magnification, I could fit the dipper part of the Pleiades, M81/M82 and M65/M66 in one FOV. NICEEEE. Spent a good part of the night just looking at big objects such as the mentioned, M42 (the rusty hues in the outer regions were very apparent tonight!), the double cluster in Perseus, and got some nice deep views of some galaxies. M51's spiral structure was apparent tonight with averted vision, and from playing around with different magnifications, as was dark lanes in M82 and M104. Also spent a nice time galaxy hopping in the Virgo region. In fact I had so much fun just visual stargazing, I almost forgot to view the triple moon occultation of Jupiter's disc, Comet Lovejoy Q2 and my plan to image two objects (yup was planning to take it easy).

"Comet Lovejoy Q2: Can you spot its greenish glow?"

Speaking of Lovejoy, the comet has now dropped in brightness somewhat, but is still a naked eye object from my orange sky site. The coma was bright and defined, but the tail was best seen in my 50mm finder. Yup now I can say that I have seen the tail of the comet visually! Fired off a couple of shots of the comet with my Kodak backlit CMOS bridge camera on Orion Paragon HD F2 photo tripod before breaking out the imaging gear for M108 and M109, two rather bright galaxies close to the dipper in Ursa Major.  The weather started getting cold when the winds kicked in at about 1am. I then decided to pull the switch and started to pack up by 2am. Its only at about this time that the Realm of Galaxies started to climb higher into the skies. Looks like I have my work cut out for me in the next couple of months, going deep into this region......more coming up....