Me the Astronmer

Last week I was at a meeting. It was for an astronomy group that is specifically interested in the Meade line of ETX or any type of "Go To" telescopes.

The last time I went to this group was in September. When I was there I set a record. I was the person who had the longest gap between attending two meetings. The earlier meeting I attended was in 2003 or 2002.

I was one of a dozen people who gathered at a home in Mission Viejo. We were meeting to see the telescope of a person who managed to get magnifications that defied conventional wisdom. He could achieve 500x or 1,000x magnification and still have good images. He had an impressive setup. The house was on a hill so there were no obstructions to the south. There was also a permanent mount in the back yard so the scope would always be level and on firm ground.

My Telescope
I have a Meade ETX-70AT. The 70 means the main lens is 70 mm wide. Like all ETX scopes, it has a Go To feature. When the scope is first set up each night, I have to align it. I turn on a hand box that is attached to the scope. After entering the date, time, and location, this hand box will calculate what bright stars should be easily visible to me. It will than use motors to point the telescope to where in the sky it thinks one of these stars is. After I center the star in the eyepiece, I will press a button on the hand box and it will point the scope at another bright star in the sky. After I center the scope on that star, the scope's computer will have a fix on the sky. It will begin slightly moving the scope to keep up with the rotation of the Earth. This way when I center the scope on an object at high magnification I do not have to keep moving it to keep it centered in the eyepiece.

That is the alignment procedure. With the Go To capability I can pick an object from the controller's catalog and the scope will immediately move itself to point at it. If I want to look at Jupiter, I select Jupiter and the telescope will move to point at the planet. If it is not currently visible from my location it will say so and tell me when it is expected to rise.

While this is wonderful, my scope is ten years old and the company does not even make that size anymore. The smallest they sell is now an 80 mm.

Now back to the meeting last week. At the start everyone said what telescope they were using. Everyone there had a telescope that was better than mine. A couple of people there had my model of telescope, but they also had two or three bigger ones. I go to these meetings because I want to be encouraged to use my telescope more often, but instead I feel outclassed because my telescope is puny by comparison.