Primordial Ooze

I finally broke down and picked a telescope. It’s a mid-range model from Meade, an 8” LX200GPS.

It’s a “goto” scope, which means it has a microcomputer in a little controller that allows you to pick an object and goto it as long as the telescope is properly “aligned”.

When I was looking for a scope, I had a few requirements:

• I could travel with it
• It had a motor drive that allows me to keep an object in my viewfinder
• It had an interface into my computer. More specifically into my astronomy software, Starry Night 4.5 Pro Plus.
• I could make out details of Saturn and Jupiter. Specifially, I had anough light gathering power to make out the individual rings of Saturn and the Great Red Spot of Jupiter.
• I could view most or all of the objects in the Messier catalog. This is a catalog of 110 objects that were viewable with telescopes circa AD 1771–1800. The catalog was originally published in 1771 by Charles Messier and contained 41 objects.
• I could move into astrophotography since this is the perfect kind of stuff to blog about!

The LX200GPS fits all of these requirements, though I’ll probably have trouble finding some of the Messier from my light-polluted backyard skies The LX200GPS seems, from my reasearch, a relatively safe scope and a very popular one. It certainly seems good enough for me.

The scope has an integrated Altazimuth mount. This is not an ideal mount for astrophotography, as the motor has to move in two directions. For long exposures, the two motors are more likely to introduce swirling errors in your exposure than if you had an equatorial mount. When equatorially mounted, a motor only needs to operate in a single direction and there is less of a chance you’ll have smearing errors in long exposures. However, I can add a equatorial “wedge” to my scope when I’m ready and this will make my scope equatorial. This makes setup take a bit longer, but this was a compromise.

Anyway, I bought the scope from a local dealer 5 minutes from my house. He gave me a decent price ($2,200) and I bought a bunch of accessories. These were mainly more powerful optics and the AC/DC transformer which will save me from buying loads and loads of batteries.

I can already see that I’ll need to buy some kind of case to carry the thing in. The original box, while usable, will become kind of beat up if I keep shoving it in my trunk for every dark-sky expedition. Also, I’ll need some high magnification optics for very clear nights (powerful magnifications are useless if the sky is not clear enough).

So, last night I assembled the thing (first in the house and then outside) and went through the initialization procedure. T he scope has a GPS so it knew my longitude and latitude. From there, it took a level reading (to compensate for my tripod tilt) and a True North reading. While all of t hat is well and good, you still need to tell it where two bright stars are located before the scope can be truly aligned. This was kind of a pain in the ass! I suspect it will get easier as I am more experienced. In the meantime, this is the part of the process that is pretty painful… especially when you have a 4 year old kid begging to see Saturn.

So far so good. I’ll likely have more reports on the scope’s peformance over the coming weeks and months.

Clear Skies,
Nick