For the past two days I had been watching the NOAA satellite images, paying
particular attention to a large patch of clearness that was more or less
heading in my direction. By sunset, it was obvious that although the hole
in the clouds was large enough for good viewing, it was passing a bit too
far to the South to uncover the skies at my favorite getaway spot. I
carefully projected its course forward in time and I estimated that it
would reach the southern part of Everglades National Park by 8PM. Since it
is almost a two hour drive from home, I couldn't reach the park myself till
almost 8:30. That sounded like a close enough match, and within minutes I
was speeding South on the Turnpike.
While driving along in my convertible with the top down, I was dismayed to
find that the clouds were getting thicker instead of thinner. By the
time I had negotiated the final toll booth South of Miami, my dismay had
turned to disappointment and found myself wondering what kind of a crazy
quest I had embarked upon. But, being a quitter is not in my basic nature,
so I pressed on into the night. My perseverance finally paid off, because
the skies cleared beautifully just as I was passing the guardhouse at the
northern entrance to the park. The ten dollar entry fee is small potatoes
when you have clear dark skies above you. My final destination for the
evening was Mahogany Hammock, but that was still more than a half hour
away. Feeling a little alone, I stopped at several lesser sites along
the way on the chance that I would meet up with another nighttime
viewer. My search for another wayfaring astronomer proved to be
in vain however, and I arrived at the Hammock at about 9:30,
curiously a full hour later than I had originally expected.
Almost two years had slipped by since the last time I had been that far
South with my scope, and I had forgotten just how dark it is down there.
Part of it is an illusion, caused by the dark tar road and parking lot, the
lush green grass, and the complete surround of forty foot trees. There is
no exposed white sand or anything else light in color to focus your eyes on.
Even the parking stops have been painted dark blue! The only place that I
have ever been that feels darker to me is spelunking inside the caverns of
Wind Cave in South Dakota. I stood there for several minutes, staring up at
the sky in amazement like some mindless beast, all the while telling myself
that I was admiring the view.
After a few minutes of dark adapting my eyes, I could clearly make out a
large band of whiteness crossing the entire sky. I knew that the Winter
Milky Way could not possibly be that bright, so I concluded that it must be
a high-level diffuse cirrus patch, and I waited for it to drift off to the
East, wondering aloud as to what could be lighting up a large cloud so nice
and white when I was so far from civilization. A half hour later the cloud
was still clearly in view. It had not drifted East as expected, and in fact
it seemed to be moving West with the stars. Puzzled by this strange
phenomenon, I went back to my car and
dug out my trusty binoculars to get to the bottom of this deepening mystery.
To my great surprise, there was no cloud to be seen, only stars. Lots and
lots of stars! Feeling a bit foolish that I had just squandered a half an
hour of precious viewing time, I put away the binoculars and quickly set up
my scope.
I know they say that a bad night out with your telescope is better than a
good night home with your television, but little did I know that tonight was
going to put that tired old adage to the test. When I flicked the switch
on the front of my LX200, both the declination and the RA motors started
slewing at maximum speed to who knows where. Frantically pushing buttons
on the hand controller produced no results, and I had to rush to turn
the scope off before it crashed the tube into one of the mechanical
stops. The fork arms were swinging past the power switch just as I
reached for it, and I was startled with a sharp reminder of just out
how soft the skin is on the back of my knuckles. After licking my
wounds (literally), I unplugged and replugged all the coily cords.
This fixed the declination drive, but the problem with the RA motor
persisted. I have heard of "runaway" RA drives, but that kind of thing is
only suppose to happen to other people, not to me. I remembered that I had
recently cleaned and re-greased the RA gearbox, so I thought that just maybe
a small amount of excess lubricant had found its way into the optical encoder
system used to control the servo motor. The encoder wheel spins at motor
speed, and I have read that full slew is over 14,000 RPM on these old LX200s.
I reasoned that sufficient time at that speed should clean the encoder by
centrifugal force, so I unlocked the clutch on the RA drive and let it
run. After a couple of minutes, the motor began to slow down a
bit. Meade's silly little cast plastic and stamped metal gears are
so noisy that my ears make an adequate tachometer. The motor then
abruptly stopped spinning altogether, and I now wondered if I had
burnt the darned thing out. I turned the scope off and back on to
reset the internal computer, and to my great pleasure it now responded
properly to commands from the hand controller.
I would soon find that my problems were hardly over, in fact, they had just
begun. While attempting to point the scope to true north (a task I jokingly
refer to as "polarizing" the scope), I discovered that the spreader on the
tripod was not tight against the legs. The central screw was as tight as I
could crank it, and the legs themselves were not loose, so it had to be that
some very hard foreign object had gotten itself lodged into the clamping
mechanism between the tripod and the wedge (probably a small rock). To gain
access to whatever was in there would require de-cabling and dismounting
the scope, then unscrewing and removing the wedge. I would then have to fix
the problem and reassemble the entire contraption. This seemed like far too
much work for so late at night, so I instead tried to align the scope with
a loose head. It turns out that my own head must had been just as loose as
the tripod's head because accurate polar alignment proved to be impossible.
After what must have been a full hour of frustration, I simply gave up and
said that polar alignment isn't all that important anyhow, or something to
that effect. I was, of course, wrong, dead wrong.
I installed both cameras and got things ready for imaging. I wanted to take
a good long exposure of M65 because I have always been fascinated by how the
central disk is misaligned with the outer dust lanes. The scope's GOTO
system told me that it was on target, but the galaxy was nowhere in
sight. I enabled the "high precision" mode, where the LX200 first
slews to a nearby star for alignment and focus before proceeding to
the designated object. That made things even worse, because there
were so many stars visible in the dark skies that I couldn't even
guess which one I was suppose to center in my field of view. The
message on the hand controller simply said "Center Star #153". How the
heck am I suppose to know which one is star #153??? This is completely
insane!!! There must be two billion stars up there, and they all look the
same to me! On nights like this, I really hate these dark sites where there
are so many confusing stars in the sky.
Nothing that I tried resulted in anything other than further frustration. In
my somewhat hasty setup procedure, I had forgotten to align the primary
and secondary scopes, and I had forgotten to align the finder scope with
anything. All I had left for pointing the scope was my ridiculous green
laser, and it is nowhere near precise enough for imaging. On top of it
all, dew was starting to settle in on me. I ultimately ended up replacing
the camera with a boring old Nagler and simply looking at a few galaxies
before I finally packed it in and went home. Some nights, it seems that
nothing works out at all according to plan. Still, I did have a good
time and I am glad that I took the chance to get out of the house and
into the darkness.
Fred Lehman, March 22, 2003.
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