 With my little ETX 125PE, a.k.a. “Charity Hope Valentine,” how are the two of us gettin’ along? I get asked that question a lot of late, mainly because of Meade’s recent huge price reductions on this little CAT, I reckon. Look for a detailed re-review of the ETX in the upcoming Summer issue of Skywatch, but till then, how about some impressions from this past Memorial Day weekend? I’ll admit I haven’t had the scope out much lately, but with Saturday evenin’ looking iffy, but me wantin’ to see something from our club dark site, it seemed like the perfect time to let Charity prove herself again.
How was the weather down here in Possum Swamp? Hazy, muggy, and warm (mid-seventies long after sunset). The 125 is easy enough to set-up and tear-down, though, 5 - 10 minutes tops, that I didn't mind taking a chance on not seein' nuttin honey. It did look as if that might be the result; I drove through a fairly intense thundershower on the way out to the site. By the time I'd arrived, unpacked, and schmoozed for a while with the three bubbas o' mine who'd also had the intestinal fortitude to head to the dark site, the skies were looking a little better--if hardly perfect. While conditions were far from ideal all evening, my dark site getaway turned out to be well worth the trip. Hell, it was worth the trip for Saturn alone. The seeing was very good despite poor transparency.
Some o' the stuff Sweet Charity showed me:
Saturn. As above, the seeing was good, though the transparency was poor. a 9mm Celestron "Circle T" Ortho from way back when did a good job. As always, I was struck by the way disk details stand out. The N/S equatorial belts--and other disk features, too--really are starkly visible in this wee scope. Not only did I see Casini's despite the current ring aspect, I glimpsed the Crepe ring.
M13. Nice. Certainly the 125 didn't give up much to a buddy's NexStar 8 SE. In fact, the view was slightly better in the 125, I thought, with a darker background (even at comparable magnifications) under these poor conditions--lotsa light scatter from the Mobile, AL light dome to the east.
NGC 6210. Well, I saw the Turtle, at least.
M5, again, Charity didn't give up much to the C8, and this big ol' grandpappy of a globular cluster looked amazing.
M92: Hercules' "also ran" glob was nearly as good as Numbers 5 and 13.
M10 and 12 were OK, but both of these Ophiuchus globulars were in a particularly yucky part of the sky all evening, and not as nice as they usually are.
M82. When the haze would thin a bit, I picked up a fair amount of this weird galaxy’s dark-lane detail.
M3 and M53, the spring globulars, both showed decent resolution.
M80: well, it was there, anyway. This small, compact (Shapley – Sawyer Class VII) glob doesn’t often let me see stars with anything less than the C11 if conditions ain’t right.
M4, the Cat's Eye Cluster, did indeed show off its cat's eye aspect.
M68 is not often a standout, and in these skies, it was only a dimmish fuzzball.
M67: This aged galactic cluster has always been one of my faves, and I remembered to catch it before it plunged too far into the western murk.
M65 and 66. I'll admit that under these conditions, I had a look at these Leo showpiece galaxies in the C8 "next door" first. They weren't that obvious in the haze in the C8, and were barely there--but there--in the 125.
M105 and company. During a time when this portion of Leo was in a sucker hole, I was able to easily see not just 105, but the brighter of its two companion galaxies.
Omega Centauri was, by the time I thought to go there, about 10 degrees above the truly icky southern horizon. The Mother of All Globs appeared as a vague but large nebulous patch, not much worse than what was in the 8.
M104: at times the galaxy’s dust lane was visible.
M87. This monster elliptical was visible, sure, but dimmer than it usually is in this scope.
M107: "BARELY there" in the 125 or the C8 on this evening. I had to convince myself I was really seeing this globular cluster in either scope.
Ghost of Jupiter (NGC 3242): this planetary was not only large and bright, but showed off a strong robin's egg blue color.
And so it went until the skies closed down completely at about midnight...
Let me say rat-cheer that every single object I requested wound up in the field of the 26mm Meade Plössl after go-toin' a go-to. I didn't obsess about alignment. Didn't level the tripod; just plunked her down, that’s the grab ‘n go way. Didn't pick special alignment stars, neither. Merely did an LNT easy align and accepted whatever star picks the Autostar came up with (Arcturus and Procyon). I did use a 25mm crosshair eyepiece to center the alignment stars, but that was the only particular care I took. Certainly not everything was dead center in the eyepiece after go-tos, quite the opposite, but everything was, as above, in the Plössl’s field somewhere, from one side of the sky to the next.
Eyepieces? Ah, there's the wonder of the thing. One of the joys of the ETX is that it is not picky about eyepieces. I just slung a box of el cheapo 1.25-inchers in the car. In addition to the supplied Meade Plossl I used a 15mm Orion (Synta) Expanse, a 20mm Expanse, an 11mm Birdseye (80 degree AFOV), and as mentioned above, an ancient Circle T Celestron Ortho. None of these oculars cost more than 50 bucks, give or take, but all essentially offered pinpoint stars to the field edge--one of the benefits that comes with f/15.
To sum up? Evenings like this (and vaction trips) are why I bought Charity Hope Valentine to begin with, and she again impressed me in this role. You know what, though? The images she was turning out were good enough that I began to wonder what she might do at a real DARK site. Maybe someday, you never can tell. So, two and a half years down the road, this little scope is still Uncle Rod's Best Girl--or thinks she is, anyay.
BTW, we had torrential rains Friday, and the result was the skeeters was REALLY out for blood. Didn't just have to douse myself with Deep Woods off, I had reapply every the stuff every 30 minutes as I sweated it off in the still air o' The Swamp.
How was your Saturday evenin', pards? |
