Re: OR: Titan-sized luck for Titan shadow transit

Starmaster 22" F/3.3? Huh, nice! You must be one of the first
recipients of such a scope, right?

On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 3:36 AM, Greg
Parker<gparker-tac@No-Spam> wrote:
> I had great views of Titan's shadow transit, but only after the good luck
> defeated the bad.
>
> Good luck: My 22" Starmaster arrived last week, two months earlier than I
> had dared hope. It's a marvelous instrument; picking off galaxies in Virgo
> is like taking candy from a baby compared to my venerable 8" Orion.
>
> Bad luck: I didn't get home until after 10 pm, leaving little time for
> collimation and cooling. Collimation is a rather big deal at f/3.3.
>
> Good luck: "Home" is at 2400 feet, on Skyline Blvd not far from Oak Ridge
> observatory. The fog obediently stayed in the valleys until after midnight.
>
> Bad luck: The tracking drive's battery died after a few minutes.
>
> Good luck: The second battery was inexplicably charged.
>
> In the end I had over an hour of observing time across two hours. Seeing
> was good enough, improving during the first hour as the optics cooled,
> then deteriorating again as Saturn sank lower and the fog crept higher.
>
> Titan's shadow was immediately apparent, and lost to bad seeing at 230x
> less than 5% of the time. Over the course of two hours it moved from near
> the "right" limb to somewhat past the center. It took me at least ten
> minutes to remember this was not a transit but rather a shadow transit,
> and that the bright yellowish Titan-like spot nearby was in fact Titan
> itself.
>
> My sketch of the field includes two cloud bands, the rings' shadow cast on
> Saturn, Saturn's shadow cast on the rings, and four moons in addition to
> Titan. Tethys and Dione were "below" the "right" side of the rings; they
> too moved noticeably with that as a reference, towards Saturn and in the
> same direction as the shadow.
>
> As the haze gathered around the Moon I trained my new telescope on it for
> the first time. The unfiltered light from the eyepiece was like a
> flashlight beam; teardown was delayed for several minutes as my vision
> recovered. Looks like the old 8" is still good for something.
>
>
> --
> Greg Parker     gparker-tac@No-Spam
>
> ---
>
> May 30, 2009: TAC Web Page Updated http://observers.org/TAC.cgi/Announcements/
> GSSP is coming - June 20th: http://www.goldenstatestarparty.blogspot.com
> TAC mailing list - to join, manage, or leave: http://nine.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/tac
>

---
May 30, 2009: TAC Web Page Updated http://observers.org/TAC.cgi/Announcements/
GSSP is coming - June 20th: http://www.goldenstatestarparty.blogspot.com
TAC mailing list - to join, manage, or leave: http://nine.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/tac