I mention in my intro to this site that I have had considerable experience observing the skies with a telescope. Most of that was done with my previous telescope, the one with which I have logged the most hours. Here is the original promo sheet that I got with it. I was fortunate in that I was able to use the instrument spring, summer and fall in northern Ontario under pristine dark skies for many years. That scope could pull almost any object out of a dark sky, and served me very well for over 30 years. I recently sold it to help finance my upgrade to a 12" Dob. The Edmund 8" was a thing of beauty, and I instantly fell in love with it at the Toronto shop where it was set up. I was in university in 1978 and barely had a spare nickel to my name. Student grants and loans saved my life back then, and I didn't mind cutting back drastically on food and beer for awhile to help pay for this.
To date I have logged 540 formal observations, encountering over 660 NGC/IC objects, hundreds of variable stars, thousands of double and multiple stars, and many objects not listed as NGC. Quite a few of the observed objects have been sketched, and if I am able to I will soon begin to share some of these remarkable past observations. Scanning a sheet of black paper containing stars and galaxies drawn and painted on it is a new experience for me, and early results are not promising.
The first time I got to use the 8" in a dark sky I thought I would lose my mind. There were stars among stars among stars, and the background just seemed to resolve forever and ever. My family had a cottage on Lake Penage, west of Sudbury, Ontario. I had observed there for years with the smaller telescope I had previous to the Edmund. Naked eye 7th magnitude stars were routine on a good night. Spring galaxies soon fell one after another to the mighty 8" mirror, as did summer globulars, open clusters, and nebulae. Star charts for amateurs had just recently graduated from Norton to the more comprehensive ones of Will Tirion. I was seeing many faint objects not even plotted on their maps!
Alas, the 8" had its flaws. The extreme tension required to hold the mount in place depended on a simple turnbuckle, which frequently stripped suddenly. The telescope could fall over when that happened, and did on more than one occasion. Plenty of spare buckles were always on hand. The 40mm finder-scope was not the greatest, and the main focuser was considerably less than perfect. Balancing the scope was tricky, and when a large eyepiece was plunked down, things went astray quickly. The tube had to be loosened and repositioned when changing sky positions (and rebalanced). But it had a working clock drive for most of its illustrious career, and that really enabled drawing at the eyepiece, as well as meditative viewing. My wife would sometimes sketch for 30 minutes without ever requiring me to re-center the object.
It was decently equipped for astrophotography, but other than some lunar and planetary work I was never interested in that aspect of astronomy (another subject for a future blog). As I have been an avid photographer since the age of 13, this might seem somewhat perplexing. Parting with the Edmund scope was not as hard as I expected. I had it up for sale for about a week last fall. There were no nibbles and I had just made up my mind to upgrade it with a better finder and focuser, and forego purchasing a new 12." Then along came a buyer, who took it after one look (it is awful pretty).
I am eager to revisit some objects logged with the 8" scope, now available to me with the 12", but I will mostly go on to different sights with the new one. In my next post I will talk about those objects and why I gave this blog the name that I did. Hope you come back.
Mapman Mike
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