A Different View
June 21st, 2003 | by Tony Steidler-Dennison |I spent the first few hours of darkness last night doing something I’ve never done - looking through the eyepiece of a tall homemade Dobsonian telescope at globular clusters, planetary nebulae and other amazements of the heavens.
I do build telescopes for a living. The telescopes we build are, at least in theory, completely robotic. Rather than seeing these objects directly, they’re rendered in .fits-formatted images on computer screens. Until last night, I’d never actually put my eye to an eyepiece and looked directly at the skies with a telescope. I’m humbled all over again.
As the sun set, we set up the 12.5″ Dob in the front yard of my boss’s house - a light-polluted neighborhood just a few blocks from where I live. First up on the list was M57, the Ring Nebula. With averted vision, the Ring Nebula was bright and clear even amidst the light pollution. It’s not really a deep-sky object - it’s only 2000 light years from home. But the effect of seeing it directly was stunning.
Then we moved on to M13, the globular cluster in Hercules. Using averted vision, again, I could see sharp pinpoints standing out from a pattern of stars so densely packed it looked like a solid smudge in the field. There are more than 100,000 stars in this cluster, sending light from 20,000 light years away. To stand in a neighborhood in Iowa City and view this cluster with my own eyes was absolutely humbling.
We found and viewed some other objects over a few hours viewing, but these were the two that really stood out. And, it gave me an entirely new perception of a business I already loved. While robotic CCD-oriented telescopes are the cutting-edge tools of scientists, I found out last night that there’s nothing like looking at the stars with your own two eyes.
3 Responses to “A Different View”
By Chris on Jun 21, 2003 | Reply
If there’s one thing I miss every day as I attend school in Philadelphia, its the chance to look out at the stars at night and relax, defocus, and just wonder. Glad you finally got the chance to see the heavens
By Tony on Jun 21, 2003 | Reply
Me, too. It seemed much more like *real* astronomy to see these object with my own eyes rather than through the interpretation of the camera and computer.
I just never cease to be humbled by our miniscule little piece of it all. It sure puts things in perspective.
By Simon on Jun 25, 2003 | Reply
I hear that! I remember my Astronomy/Physics prof in University telling us a dtory of when he was up on one of the observatories in Hawaii . . . he said that all the observers that go there HAVE to use the instruments that are supplied to do their research — do NOT look through the eyepiece or at least don’t get caught because if you do you could get into serious trouble and lose your funding possibly!
So one night he was piddling around with the telescope (and his spectrometer) and he realised he need to calibrate his instruments. So he decided to use the moon (which happened to be full that night). Well he said he almost fell off the ladder and off the platform when he zoomed to the moon’s coordinates — he was blinded temporarily and realised another reason not to look through the eyepiece of a HUGE telescope — well . . . at least not at something as big and as close as the moon!
We laughed for quite a while on that one — thanks Tony — bringing back some fond memories of school . . . now I’m going to take my scope out tonight — weather depending of course!