Rod molise biography

Wise advice? Both companies have come a long way since the s and early s when it comes to optical quality. And, certainly, credit where credit is due for them introducing improved designs like the Edge and ACF. Their contrast characteristics are never going to be as good as those of unobstructed or minimally obstructed scopes. Also, thanks to their mass-produced nature, these days you will likely get good optics but you will rarely—if ever—get great optics.

Surprisingly, both companies produce great refractor optics and often excellent MCT optics. It seems SCTs are just a little more difficult to get to that level, and it appears they always will be. The SCT is indeed good at many things, but there are often other designs that are better at any one of those things. If you are an astro-dilettante like Uncle Rod, that may not matter, but if you have a special interest area in our avocation, it might.

A Newtonian or a refractor, for example, is a better instrument for planetary observing. A large and portable Dobsonian is better for visual deep sky work. A refractor, an APO refractor, is arguably a better choice for deep sky astrophotography although an SCT can certainly shine when it comes to imaging small DSOs or planets. Even "just" a C11 is a handful Goto on both brands is pretty rock solid now, but, still, sometimes simpler is better, or more dependable anyway.

That is up to you. These days I am perhaps not quite the Schmidt Cassegrain evangelical I once was, but I still use them. I know, Mr. What's the story with SCTs an' me six years down the line? I still love and use them. I love 'em every bit as much Due to the physical limitations facing me in these latter years, I have sold off all the rest. I just can't manage them like I used to.

No more. Now, it's an 80mm refractor. Even the ETX is sometimes a challenge. I still think for many people, including novice amateur astronomers, a Meade or Celestron goto SCT is the best choice. In the beginning, you may not know which "branch" of amateur astronomy is for you. An SCT will let you try out all of them. As for the SCT manufacturers, the water is a little muddy right now.

One company, Meade, is once again American owned by Orion. All their manufacturing is still overseas, of course, and it's not clear to me the direction the company will take. We live in interesting times, I suppose. Comments: Great reading as usual have a nice day posted by Saberonyx : AM. Excellent post with practical advice, historical context and perspective.

Used at countless astronomy outreaches, it has proven to be a robust, reliable and faithful telescope. As long as my degenerative disk disease riddled back can stand picking it up and mounting it to the tripod, I will continue to use it But suddenly, just after midnight, my observing list was done. By the time Moonwatcher had thrown his bone into the air, I thought maybe, just maybe, I had a glimmer of an idea.

I considered the Herschel II a difficult, daunting, and even scary list. Most of its dimmest DSOs are small galaxies with reasonably high surface brightness and thus not much of a challenge for an 8-inch telescope under good skies. It soon became clear I shouldn't have been. That idea was bolstered by my object haul on my next dark sky Herschel observing run.

That in mind, I packed up my Toyota with a ton of astro-gear including my Stellacam-equipped NexStar 11 GPS and headed south for the Chiefland Astronomy Village despite the fact we were dealing with the lingering effects of yes Hurricane Ida. The old Stellacam, which had a maximum exposure of seconds, was purty humble, but man did it pull in Herschel IIs.

They fell to the C11 like autumn leaves before the wild hurricane fly. The grand total after my second big expedition? Over more objects in the bag: down, to go. The former came to me thanks to the wonderful Miss Dorothy. One day there was a rare book sale at the university where she was a Department Chair. One of the volumes on sale was that big, fat Scientific Papers.

She bought it for me, lugged it home, and I was soon immersed in reading the words of The Man himself and learning more about him and his sister and fellow observer, Caroline. That led to me devouring biography after biography of the pair and becoming ever more interested in or maybe obsessed with both Herschel and his deep sky objects.

The latter was a book that brought its author deserved if brief fame. Which, after eliminating the non-existent and duplicate objects left me with targets, some of which were considerably dimmer and more obscure than those in the Herschel II. The details? As I wrote in the blog one Sunday morning:. So, I am on the verge of committing myself to going for the gold.

That will set you up to receive the list via mail. The Mobile Astronomical Society. Membership is open to anyone with an interest in and a desire to learn more about astronomy. You need not own a telescope or other equipment to join us in our explorations of the universe. These meetings normally include both a business meeting and an informative presentation.

Occasionally, we will observe after a meeting, but we reserve most of that for the MOSPs. All those dim stars higher magnification revealed had disappeared, but just as in Urban Astronomer, where I switched from a "big" scope to my old Short Tube 80 mm refractor, I thought it was worth it. With plenty of space around it, M39 it looks more distinctive and just better.

How about the SeeStar, Suzie? Oh, she shows scads of stars. Yes, the bright triangle stands out. Something puzzled me and my BAS buddies back in the day. Who knows , and be that as it may, with M29, it is what it is. I devoted a mere 6-minutes exposure to Messier 29, and that was all it took. The cluster itself looks much the same; it sure stands out from the background.

What helps this magnitude 6. Dare I say it? It was certainly visible with a 6-inch telescope on good nights. As I observe in Urban Astronomer, though, more aperture helps. In pictures, this wee globular is pretty and interesting if not spectacular. Missy Suzy easily resolved hordes of cluster stars set against a very rich background.

It looks amazingly like the Wild Duck Cluster. And that exhausts the Messiers. Very nice indeed for a non-Messier…about 10 — 15 stars visible. As on that long ago night, there appeared to be around a dozen dimmer stars visible. What did I see when I took a gander at with my old Meade This magnitude 7. Suzie did a nice job on this one in only 5 minutes.

Yes, there are hordes of background stars, but the cluster is again easy to pick out. Our quarry is a small magnitude 7. In the inch scope, I see a 5. And yet another good NGC open star cluster glowing softly at magnitude 7. For this one, I again ventured out of Cygnus to another small nearby constellation, Vulpecula, The Little Fox , home of the abovementioned Dumbbell.

Rectangular in shape. Much the same. A vaguely rectangular or diamond-shaped pattern of a fair number of magnitude stars and many dimmer ones. In the Suzie-shot, the cluster is identifiable around a diamond of brighter suns, but, admittedly, it is beginning to recede into the background. What I saw was a rather shapeless sprinkling of magnitude 10 and dimmer stars.

That is what I saw with the SeeStar as well. I do note some star chains that give a vaguely flower-like shape. I ended each chapter of Urban Astronomer with a double star. For this chapter, Albireo was obviously it. So…I saw some cool sights and found I could still fairly easily set up the inch. Indeed, I was. It was crazy hot, even under a picnic pavilion and even with the constant sea-breezes blowing.

Many margaritas cooled me off, and I was soon ready to tuck into my unwavering birthday fare, the famous A little TV with the felines thereafter, and it would be night-night time. In , there was but one new post—and not until the end of December of that year! I got back in the saddle as came in—I found I still wanted to bring the AstroBlog to you—and we are now on the reasonable schedule of one issue per month.

I did make it back to one star party last year and hope to do so again this fall.

Rod molise biography

Not being hither and yon much and having cut back on my astro-gear addiction means the emphasis now is on observing. In part, that is choice. In part that is necessity. And most of my observing is now right back where it began all those decades ago, in the backyard…. This is a better time for me to view the spring deep sky objects than earlier on.

They are across the Meridian, into the west, and out of the trees and the most egregious part of the Possum Swamp light dome. Nota Bene: The imaging was done over the course several evenings, and the visual work on a couple of separate nights…. Do you have to be crazy to do deep sky astronomy in Possum Swamp at the height of a Gulf Coast summer? Me and the girls, Charity and Suzie, did our best, but every evening was plagued by haze and often by drifting clouds.

Sometimes, Charity and I would cool our heels for quite a spell while waiting for the sky to improve. Yeah, yeah, I know, Skeeter. So what? On any night it's above the horizon, I am gonna take a look at the ruler of the spring globs not that it has much competition. The sky was literally milk. One long ago Urban Astronomer observing run, I turned my scope to Messier 3 from the heavily light polluted backyard of the old Chaos Manor South.

As you can see, she delivered a credible M3, even with just 21 minutes of exposure. Despite the icky skies, Messier 3 shined on—yeah—just like some crazy diamond. The image, by the way, is nearly unprocessed. I adjusted levels a bit, but that was it. When Miss Charity stopped her weasels-with-tuberculosis slewing noise and I put my eye to the eyepiece, there the Blackeye was.

Well , the galaxy, anyway. Given the sky and the fact M64 is now getting down in the west, I had to guess at the black eye, the dark spot near the M64's nucleus. I thought I could detect it with the 15mm Expanse eyepiece, but that verged on wishful thinking. It should be no surprise by now that The Suzie laughed at the minor challenge of the Blackeye.

Not only is the feature starkly visible in her images, enlarging the picture and doing some processing revealed surprising detail. Other than cropping, the pic here is, again, purty much as it came out of the telescope. There are some deep sky objects that never look bad. Almost any telescope and any sky will give you something of them. That said, NGC , the vaunted Flying Saucer Galaxy is a galaxy, and no other variety of deep sky object is more damaged by light pollution.

A little averted vision quickly reveals the edge-on disk that forms the saucer. I did know that the higher an object, the more apparent the field rotation, but that isjust the way it is with an alt-azimuth mount. Zooming in even hints at irregularity in the dust-lane. NGC is easy to see. All that in a mere 25 minute of exposure. M53 is OK, it really is.

But it definitely plays second fiddle to M3. That must have been a way above average night. On the night me and Charity were given, the 5-inch MCT required x and some averted imagination to pull some stars out of the soup. They were impossible to hold steady and winked in and out like far-distant fireworks. In some ways I prefer her 4-minute exposure.

Almost as many stars, and a more even background. Lurking near M53 is its little-buddy glob, NGC It really is Gilligan to the Skipper of M It is loose, very loose, looking much more like an open cluster than a globular a quick glance at its color-magnitude diagram, however, shows it to be a glob.