Redshift: Six Years with Astronomy

My wife and daughter bought me a telescope for my birthday in 2014. Today, I reviewed by notebook. It was disappointing. Overall, I made very little progress in observation, even though encouraging entries do exist. I first saw Mars on 17 June 2016. I sketched it two years later on 17 August. I spotted the Andromeda Galaxy 1 December that year. I attended some good star parties and a lecture by Dr. Steven Weinberg. This past June, I became an assistant editor with the History of Astronomy Division of the American Astronomical Society. In six years (2162 days), I have 195 pages with ten colored flags for wins. Flags aside, the latest entries since April are more informative. 

Community Outreach is important to the mission
 of the Austin Astronomical Society.

Several factors contributed the present plateau of success. 

• Practice helps. I did not view the stars for an hour a day for six years, but an hour (or more) for one night a month (or less). It took a while to build some experience. 
• Sketching and drawing improved with trial-and-error. 
• I found helpful websites and online discussion boards. 

• Instrumentation helps. I borrowed two Meade LX 200 Classic Schmidt-Cassegrain catadioptric instruments from the Austin Astronomical Society, an 8-inch and 10-inch. I did not need to fight the instrument and the work was rewarding. The German fork mounts were easy to use. The finder scopes were 8x with crosshairs. So, just targeting Jupiter, I could see its moons. The images in the telescopes were large and bright. Even the setting circles were large enough to be practicable and practical. I noted the actual positions of stars and planets.

I may unpack the Celestron EQ-130 (5-inch reflector) and use it again, but it is not my favorite. 

The Celestron telescope came with a lot of trade-offs.
The Celestron Lens  & Filter Kit is popular with many amateurs
and has served me well with all of my telescopes.

In many ways the abused National Geographic 70mm (2-3/4 inch) refractor that I bought served me better. It has a longer focal length and a higher f/stop ratio. And it is a simple altitude-azimuth XY mount.

  

Top: What their uncle gave them for Christmas.
Bottom: In July I repaired it well enough for myself.

My time in the Austin Astronomical Society has been a ledger of gains and losses. Laurel gave us a family membership with my telescope in November 2014. When the club had the Canyon of the Eagles dark sky site and observatory, I completed a certificate in telescope operations with their classic 12.5-inch Newtonian and 16-inch Cassegrain instruments on March 15, 2015. 

Five months later to date, at a COE members-only star party, when he was serving as the Outreach director, Jim Spigelmire spent an hour with me getting me oriented to more stars than I had seen in my life at one time and place. 

When she was serving as the newsletter editor, Joyce Lynch assigned me to interview the club’s stalwarts for a series of articles in 2016. I learned a lot. I interviewed Terry Philips (now serving as the president), on May 27; and thanks to him, on June 17 I first viewed Mars with my EQ 130. I interviewed astrophotographer Mike Shaffer and learned that a telescope is composite of different assemblies: an objective lens system in an optic tube, oculars (“eyepieces”), a mount, and a tripod. When you buy them all as a package, you buy someone else’s trade-offs in price and performance. As a mechanical engineer, he preferred to write his own requisitions. 

After one club meeting on the University of Texas campus, we held a star party on a walkway over MLK Boulevard and one of my colleagues lined up Albireo for me in his telescope. 

The downsides reflect the fact that we prefer to be alone in the dark focused on objects very far away. Everyone is on the autism spectrum, often with obsessions, compulsions, and other disorders. One of the affiliated social clubs is “Astronomy on Tap” and I served on a committee with a mean drunk. 

After a star party, I put the telescope back in its shipping cartons for five months, devoted more attention to my military service, and let my membership lapse. I re-enrolled in 2019 and volunteered as a member-at-large on the executive committee. This past June I ran unopposed for vice president. 

My newest is an Explore Scientific 102-mm
 f/6.47 refractor "First Light" series.
Typically a beginner scope, it is easy to use.

For those of us who do not work and play well with others, online discussion boards can substitute for warm body interactions. I subscribe to Cloudy Nights and The Sky Searchers, writing and reading more with the latter. 

I also subscribed to Sky & Telescope and Astronomy. I leaf through them, but they don't speak to me. Purchased from their bankrupt holding company Sky & Tel is now published by the American Astronomical Society. Astronomy maintains a database of past articles that was not as  helpful for research as I had hoped. I bought their CDs of past issues, but unfortunately, the disks are no longer compatible with Mac OSX. So I sent them back and told them to keep the $129 because it was not as important to me as knowing never to buy from them again. Then, Astronomy caught me with an automatic renewal this year, so that was fifty bucks out the door, but I was able to cancel it for the next time around. 

 

I like to go out at night, observe the universe, and satisfy myself that it is pretty much as described. The heavens are orderly and predictable, made of the same stuff as I am, yet made astonishingly different from mundane, secular experience. The stars are pretty at any magnification. Viewing them bigger and brighter only reveals their surfaces. As pleasurable as observing is, my greater passions are for the history, the theory, and the history of the theory. 

Ultimately, for myself, astronomy is about the mathematics and science and the people who discovered them by creating methods and instruments. The invention and improvement of the telescope, the discovery of the spectrum, the application of radio to astronomy, and then launching those telescopes and radios into outer space are all very grand. That it can be expressed as a small set of symbols that I can understand is at once humbling and ennobling. 

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Austin Under the Stars 

Measuring Your Universe: Alan Weinberg's Astronomy Activity Manual

The Drunken Astronomers 

Physics for Astronomers: the Works of Steven Weinberg

Burnham’s Celestial Handbook 

Turn Left at Orion