First Light – Looking Glass

I enjoy the tradition of celebrating the first time that a telescope is pointed to the sky. Yesterday I had the privilege of assembling my new Meade 16 inch Lightbridge telescope and (miracle that it was) the sky was clear during the evening hours.

The scope went together easily. The directions were clear enough and no pieces were missing. It took me a few minutes to discover a way to easily mount the focuser/secondary ring. But once I learned that a case wedged between the base and the light bucket holds the bucket at a 15 degree angle, putting the top ring on was much easier. I replaced the screws in the secondary with a set of Bob’s Knobs.

I made the scope a little welcome home gift while I was waiting for the sky to turn dark. I made a shroud to cover its bare midriff from 1-1/8 yards of black bathing suit liner. The stretchy material was on sale at Hancock Fabrics, so the shroud cost less than $10 and fits better than a shroud sold by the manufacturer – for ten times the price. It took about 10 minutes at the sewing machine to complete the project and thread a couple bungee cords in the hem at each end of the shroud. (Thanks to the Starmaster folks for this idea on the construction of a shroud.)

I discovered that the oversize reflective cover that I bought for my 10” Texas scope at the Texas Star Party fits this larger scope just about perfectly.

Then, finally, it was dark enough to begin to look around the sky. The moon was near full and I was in my semi-dark Helotes (Texas) neighborhood, so it was not a night for deep sky observing. First object was Vega. I wanted to adjust the Telrad and finder scope for this scope. I did not hear any strains Contact or Jodi Foster's voice as I was collecting those 20 year old photons. Next up was Mizar, the visual/telescopic double in UMA.

As it grew a little darker (and several satellites later) I went back to Vega and took a left turn to look at epsilon Lyrae, the double-double. I ran through my eyepieces, including the supplied 2” 26 mm that came with the scope. It was easy to split each of the pairs with all my usual eyepieces except the 36mm Plossel, as expected. I pushed right and found the Lyrae pair at the end of the constellation. I set the cross hairs of the finder scope to the position of the Ring Nebula. Despite the washed out sky, the Ring was quite pretty. With my 10mm Radian eyepiece, it appeared to have some color. In a dark sky this may be a very pretty sight.

Luna finally rose above my neighbor’s roof top and I experimented with a moon filter. At 180X, my view of a number of mountain peaks along the terminator was pretty good. Not great, as the San Antonio heat was still warming the air near the roofs and the view was not steady. After looking around at high power, I put the 2 inch lens in and looked at the whole moon. It looked so pretty that I decided to get my simple digital camera and take some pictures with it, up next to the eyepiece. The photo at the top of this column is one of those pictures.

At 11 PM, Jupiter was above the housetops and the Great Red Spot was turning the bend toward the west. I looked in vain for evidence of the recent comet impact with Jupiter. I went to bed for a while and woke about 1 AM just to go outside and take a look at Jupiter again. Still no sighting of the comet impact. (Well… without taking a look at my computer and seeing when that impact spot would be visible, one can’t expect miracles.)

It was a great evening with a new scope. I woke this morning just a little tired from the loss of an hour of sleep. It was worth it. As I thought about a name for this scope while I was taking my shower, several names came to mind. Big Bertha seemed apt, because I am overwhelmed by the size of the mirror. But I have seen other scopes that REALLY are big. This one is just handy-large. I thought that Big Momma, my name for UMA could be right – after all, the second object I looked at was Mizar. Big Ben or Gentle Ben were good names. But then I thought about why I had ordered this scope – to better see the dim Hershel list objects. It was about this time that “Looking Glass” came to mind. Along with that name came Alice and her Wonderland. Those happy thoughts persuaded me. “Looking Glass” it is.