Christmas Trash
Posted: Mon Oct 31, 2022 4:08 pm
Christmas Trash
Years ago my wife gave me a telescope. It came in a swell black box with hinges and hasps and felted cradles. It is a scope of the terrestrial species and has enough magnification that it is difficult to hold still. You have to hold it against something solid or the image will jitter too much.
I tired of using this instrument in the Creedmoor position and was keeping an eye out for a tripod to mount it on. I found one at a flea market. It is a dandy, too, but it came with its own fitted box and its own astronomical telescope. I didn’t especially want another telescope but the tripod was worth the price of the whole shebang, so I took the plunge. The outfit came complete with eyepieces, spotting scope and an equatorial mount. It was in serviceable shape but had been neglected for many years and was grimy with dust and dead spiders. Made in 1962, it was considered to be a good beginner’s scope for $147. Today, amateur astronomers call telescopes of this ilk “Christmas Trash”. The instruments are (or were) given to children because they look “sciency”. You gave one of these to the kid who already had the Gilbert chemistry set, the microscope kit and the crystal radio. Well, it may be Christmas trash to many but, by hell, it was now my Christmas Trash and so I cleaned it up and had a peep at the sky with it.
Now, the sky hereabouts is not at all good for peeping. Of all places in the Midwest, northeast Ohio has the most overcast days each year (this is one reason the Army built an arsenal here in the ‘40s). Add to that, the air pollution and light pollution and one would have to be daft to take up astronomy as a hobby in these parts. I live surrounded by two car dealerships, a fire station, and a highway intersection, all of which were designed to turn night into a paranoid’s artificial day. On a “clear” night I can stand in a shady place and only see a dozen of the brightest stars around my zenith. (I have grouped them into anasterism I call the “Armpit of Noshabkeming”.) The North Star is completely invisible; I have to align the scope’s polar axis with a clinometer and a magnetic compass.
The moon and planets are bright enough to punch through the interference. They look fantastic! I can look at the lava flows and rubble piles on the moon. I can see the serrated edge its mountains make against the nearly black background. The planets are colorful and crisp hanging in the near dark.
I have been asked why I put up with the expense of buying better lenses and the aggravation of waiting for a few nights of good seeing per year. Why don’t I just download some Hubble Space Telescope pictures and have done? Well, theHST pictures certainly are crisp and detailed and complex and wonderful, but they are composites made sometimes of dozens of exposures made through filters of different colors, then digitized and sent to Earth where they are processed by computer, have false colors added, and finally are displayed on my uncalibrated computer screen. With my pipsqueak telescope, however, I am looking at light as it left a heavenly object, traversed a godzillion miles of space and polluted atmosphere and was focused by a couple of pieces of glass. But this was all done in my back yard by my Christmas Trash telescope and that makes it a one-time event and I own it. The image will never happen exactly this way again (as our town sage might say,) “until pi ain’t no more’n a skanky digit”. That makes it a real deal, be it ever so trashy. So I will continue to chew my thumbs, waiting for another clear night. Like Pratchett’s Nac Mac Feegle say, “We dree our weird nonstop.”
Years ago my wife gave me a telescope. It came in a swell black box with hinges and hasps and felted cradles. It is a scope of the terrestrial species and has enough magnification that it is difficult to hold still. You have to hold it against something solid or the image will jitter too much.
I tired of using this instrument in the Creedmoor position and was keeping an eye out for a tripod to mount it on. I found one at a flea market. It is a dandy, too, but it came with its own fitted box and its own astronomical telescope. I didn’t especially want another telescope but the tripod was worth the price of the whole shebang, so I took the plunge. The outfit came complete with eyepieces, spotting scope and an equatorial mount. It was in serviceable shape but had been neglected for many years and was grimy with dust and dead spiders. Made in 1962, it was considered to be a good beginner’s scope for $147. Today, amateur astronomers call telescopes of this ilk “Christmas Trash”. The instruments are (or were) given to children because they look “sciency”. You gave one of these to the kid who already had the Gilbert chemistry set, the microscope kit and the crystal radio. Well, it may be Christmas trash to many but, by hell, it was now my Christmas Trash and so I cleaned it up and had a peep at the sky with it.
Now, the sky hereabouts is not at all good for peeping. Of all places in the Midwest, northeast Ohio has the most overcast days each year (this is one reason the Army built an arsenal here in the ‘40s). Add to that, the air pollution and light pollution and one would have to be daft to take up astronomy as a hobby in these parts. I live surrounded by two car dealerships, a fire station, and a highway intersection, all of which were designed to turn night into a paranoid’s artificial day. On a “clear” night I can stand in a shady place and only see a dozen of the brightest stars around my zenith. (I have grouped them into an
The moon and planets are bright enough to punch through the interference. They look fantastic! I can look at the lava flows and rubble piles on the moon. I can see the serrated edge its mountains make against the nearly black background. The planets are colorful and crisp hanging in the near dark.
I have been asked why I put up with the expense of buying better lenses and the aggravation of waiting for a few nights of good seeing per year. Why don’t I just download some Hubble Space Telescope pictures and have done? Well, the