Computerized Telescope

I have a love/hate relationship with computerized telescopes. For me, a computerized NexStar 4se Celestron was the best and the worst thing that happened when I got interested in telescopes again. To explain that, it might be good for the reader to know some of my history with astronomy.

I have had an interest in telescopes for a long time. As a youngster, I had a 2” refractor on a table-top mount. My dad got interested in astronomy for a time and he bought a 4 inch Newtonian reflector which we never really figured out how to use. (We probably had no idea how to collimate it.) I don’t remember seeing anything except the moon and Jupiter with those scopes.

Skip forward 15 years, and I was a father with young school children of my own. I decided that I really should show the sky to my kids. I bought an 8” Meade SCT scope (don’t worry about what that is for now – I’ll cover it in another chapter/blog). It was a great scope, but without any help to learn how to use it, I became frustrated trying to find anything except Halley’s Comet. I remember a particularly painful night twenty years ago. After laboriously orienting the scope, I finally found exactly one globular cluster. I still remember thinking that using this scope was too hard to be practical. If I did not have the patience to spend hours outside on a cold night to see one object, how could I expect them to? (It would have been very useful for me to have joined an astronomy club at that time – clubs are great at helping folks that are clueless to become experts. And my problem was that I was truly clueless.)

Skip forward 25 years, and my youngest child was 19 on our last family vacation before he moved away to school and engagement and thinking of his own family. This was the summer of 2008, and we chose to do some hiking and relaxing at the Ft Davis State Park in the Big Bend portion of Texas. One of the bulletin board announcements in the lodge said that there would be a public star party at the McDonald Observatory on Friday evening – the next night. We went, saw Saturn in Leo, the ring nebula in Lyre, a couple globular clusters, the double double of epsilon Lyre, and generally had a blast.

I came home and decided that I had to get a telescope and had to find some places to see the dark skies of Texas. (Note, I was still pretty much clueless.)

I looked on the internet to try to get ideas and I went to a local telescope shop. I bought a used Celestron NexStar 4 which was about 5 years old. It had a thirty day “no questions asked” warranty from the shop. The scope had no tripod. I took it out into the countryside, about 20 minutes outside San Antonio. I had it sitting on a couple plastic bins. It was not a sturdy mount, but I was fascinated at the way it could figure out where objects were in the sky after I showed it where three stars were. But I knew I needed to get a tripod and some other things if I was going to be able to do much with it. The cost of a brand new NexStar was only $150 more than this used one, and it came with a tripod. So I returned the used scope and bought a new Celestron 4.5 inch NexStar.

The new version of the software was much better at finding itself in the sky. All I needed to do was to point it at three bright objects. I did not even need to know which ones they were. Once that process was complete – taking about 10 minutes or so, I was delighted to find out that the scope would point quickly at many objects that I could not see at all. Finally, I was able to access the many beauties in the night sky!

I remember one great evening of viewing in August. I was thrilled to see a dozen Messier objects in an hour and a half of observing. Really thrilled. I mean, completely overwhelmed and elated and amazed. This was FUN.

I could see Saturn and Jupiter and Messier objects and I began to see how all this might be more than a month’s diversion. It might take me a year or more to see everything in the sky. (Still clueless.)

There was a book written about using the Celestron NexStar telescopes. I devoured it. There was a website where people shared hints about the scopes and what they were doing with it. I discovered that there was a list of 50 objects which were good targets for the scope. Some of them were only visible from the southern hemisphere, but more than 40 of them could be seen from San Antonio, and there was an award for logging 40 of the objects. I set about the process of logging 40 and was able to complete the list by observing summer objects in the evening and as fall approached, to get up before dawn to see many more of the objects that were normally visible on winter evenings.

It was about this time that I found the local San Antonio Astronomical Association and joined its ranks. It had a Yahoo group, and I was able to share my successes and learn from sage comments by others. I could ask questions that had been bothering me for 30 years. I began to grow quickly in my understanding and appreciation of the sky.

That is the love part of my story. But there was a dark side of this relationship with the computer-aided scope. Somewhere along the way, I became aware that I had no real idea where the scope was pointing when it found all these pretty objects in the night sky. I strapped a laser to the scope so I could see where the scope was pointing. I tried to use the red dot finder to see where these objects were, but I realized that the red dot or the laser were pointing toward mostly empty and invisible things in the sky.

I felt a little like I was in a zoo, surrounded by pretty butterflies. I had a guide book that had pretty pictures of butterflies that were kept in the zoo. But I had no idea where all those pretty butterflies were hiding – since I could not see any of them when I looked around me.

The computerized scope had gifted me with the knowledge that there really were a great number of objects to be seen, and it had shown me what a galaxy and a globular cluster and an open cluster looked like. But I was still painfully clueless. I needed to know more about the sky.