• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-15397-3 - Turn Left at Orion: Hundreds of Night Sky Objects to See in a Home Telescope – And How to Find Them: Fourth Edition Guy Consolmagno and Dan M. Davis Excerpt More information 4 How do you get to Albireo? A while back I spent a couple of years teaching physics in Africa, as a volunteer with the US Peace Corps. At one point during my service I had to return to the US for a How do month, and while I was home I visited with my friend Dan in New York City. We got to talking about the beautiful dark skies in Africa, and the boundless curiosity of my students about things astronomical … and so that afternoon we went into Manhattan you get to and, with Dan’s advice, I bought a little telescope to take back with me to Kenya. Dan was far more excited about my purchase than I was. He’d been an avid amateur astronomer since he was a little kid, something of an achievement when Albireo? you’re growing up in the grimier parts of Yonkers and your eyesight is so bad you can start fires with your glasses. And he was just drooling over some of the things I’d be able to see in Africa. I didn’t really understand it, at first. You see, when I was a kid I’d had a telescope, too, a little two-inch refractor that I had bought with trading stamps. I remembered looking at the Moon; and I knew how to find Jupiter and Saturn. But after that, I had sort of run out of things to look at. Those glorious color pictures of nebulae that you see in the glossy magazines? They’re all taken with huge telescopes, after all. I knew my little telescope couldn’t show me anything like that, even if I knew where to look. And of course I didn’t know where to look, anyway. But now here was Dan getting all worked up about my new telescope, and the thought that I’d be taking it back to Africa, land of dark skies and southern stars. There were plenty of great things to look at, he insisted. He gave me a star atlas, and a pile of books listing double stars and clusters and galaxies. Could it be that I could really see some of these things with my little telescope? Well, the books he gave me were a big disappointment. At first, I couldn’t make heads or tails of their directions. And even when I did figure them out, they all seemed to assume that I had a telescope with at least a six-inch mirror or lens. There was no way of telling which, of all the objects they listed, I might be able to see with my little three-incher. Finally, Dan went out with me one night. “Let’s look at Albireo,” he said. I’d never heard of Albireo. “It’s just over here,” he said. “Point it this way, zip, and there you are.” “Neat!” I said. “A double star! You can actually see both of them!” “And look at the colors,” he said. “Wow … one of them’s yellow, and the other’s blue. What a contrast.” “Isn’t that great?” he said. “Now let’s go on to the double-double.” And so it went for the next hour. Eventually it occurred to me that all of the books in the world weren’t as good as having a friend next to you to point out what to look for, and how to find it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t take Dan back to Africa with me. I suspect the problem is not that unusual. Every year, thousands of telescopes are sold, used once or twice to look at the Moon, and then they wind up gathering dust in the attic. It’s not that people aren’t interested – but on any given night there may be 2,000 stars visible to the naked eye, and 1,900 of them are pretty boring to look at in a small telescope. You have to know where to look, to find the interesting double stars and variables, or the nebulae and clusters that are fun to see in a small telescope but invisible to the naked eye. The standard observer’s guides can seem just incom- prehensible. Why should you have to fight with technical coordinate systems? All I wanted to do was point the tele- scope “up” some night and be able to say, “Hey, would you look at this!” It’s for people who are like I was when I was starting out, the casual observers who’d like to have fun with their telescopes without committing themselves to hours of tech- nical details, that we decided to write Turn Left at Orion. — Guy Consolmagno (Easton, Pennsylvania; 1988) © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-15397-3 - Turn Left at Orion: Hundreds of Night Sky Objects to See in a Home Telescope – And How to Find Them: Fourth Edition Guy Consolmagno and Dan M. Davis Excerpt More information How do you get to Albireo? 5 Introduction to the Fourth Edition: A lot has happened in the quarter century since Dan first showed me Albireo. Back then, we would have to tip-toe when coming in late, so as not to wake up his kids; Dan and Léonie’s babies are grown up now, almost as old as we were when we first started working on this book. In 1983, I had given up a research job at MIT to join the Peace Corps; in 1989, I gave up a professorship at Lafayette College to enter the Jesuits, who assigned me to the Vatican Observatory in Rome. For the last 20 years I’ve been doing full-time research again … and still traveling. I also still have my 90-mm scope. But now I get to observe with the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope on Mt. Graham, Arizona – a 1.8-meter reflector whose optics and controls, including the world’s first large spin-cast mirror, are test beds for the telescopes of the twenty-first century. And I’ve gotten to use bigger tele- scopes, including the 10-meter Keck in Hawaii. Dan, more modestly, has upgraded to a Schmidt–Cassegrain 8" and a 10" Dobsonian. It’s not only our personal lives that have changed. In the last twenty-five years, major developments have occurred in the world of amateur astronomy. Amateur telescopes have changed: the Dobsonian design has put 8" mirrors in the price range of nearly everyone. Meanwhile, computer-controlled production techniques have made small catadioptrics better than ever, while holding the line on prices. So why settle for a little three-incher any more? Personal computers, and the astronomy software that runs on them, have changed the way most of us find objects in the nighttime sky. For the first edition, we drew our star charts by hand, in ink; now we are also guided by Voyager and Starry Night for finding star positions. You can use your PC to look up the positions of comets, asteroids, and the outer planets and print out customized finder charts for your ob- serving location. In fact, you can buy a computer-controlled telescope; just punch in some numbers, and the scope slews itself to the pre-programmed object. With all this convenience, who needs a book? And finally, if you really want to see spectacular astronomical sights you can just log on to the Internet. So, for that matter, who needs a telescope at all? And yet … there we were last night, peering at double stars with both an 8" Dobsonian and my old 3" Cat. The Dobsonian showed us some glorious sights; it’s no wonder they’re so popular. Still, for the sheer fun of the hunt, not to mention portability to dark sites, it’s hard to beat a three-incher! With that in mind, we’ve taken advantage of this new edition to completely revisit our favorites from twenty-five years ago. Everything in this book has been re-observed, with both a small Cat and a Dob. We include a number of additional objects for people with Dobsonians, telescopes larger than we had envisioned in our earlier editions. This includes many new “neighborhood” objects, including objects that are beyond the typical 3" but within the range of a Dob. And we’ve added telescope views oriented for how they’d look in a Dob, with more detail and in the mirror image of our original telescope views. To accommodate the extra images, our editors at Cambridge University Press have given us bigger pages for this edition, not to mention a spiral binding. Now your grass stains can extend across the entire page! We’ve re-ordered the spreads, and re-written the finding directions … in twenty- five years, light pollution has gotten worse (and my eyes, older) – I find it’s harder to see some of those dim stars we used to use for star-hopping. We’ve updated the planet and eclipse tables, of course; and we’ve noted new posi- tions for double stars that have moved in their orbits since the first edition came out. And we’ve gone back to the southern hemisphere to re-observe and expand our list of deep-sky objects visible only from that part of the world that it would be a crime to miss for anyone living or visiting there.

Load more

  10

Copy Link