ESSAYS
Astronomical Chauvinism: Alive & Well (sigh...)
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lick Observatory came in for a drubbing by astronomers in Europe, whose much smaller and less efficient telescopes were often situated near sea level in smoky cities. In particular, the reports of James Keeler, first Director of Lick, were derided by a celebrated spectroscopist at the Potsdam Astrophysical Observatory, Dr. Julius Scheiner (1858-1913), author of a standard reference work, Die Spectralanalyse der Gestirne. Sheiner derided Keeler's spectroscopic observations, made with the 36" Crossley reflecting telescope in the pristine, dry mountain skies of Mt. Hamilton in the Santa Clara valley of California, near San Jose. The German academic dismissed the exciting new scientific findings of the brilliantly gifted Keeler with sarcasm, as if they were the blunders of the most clumsy undergraduate: his derision and scorn barely disguised, his skepticism suggested the hint that the observations might even be fraud.
My friend Dr. Donald E. Osterbrock, former Director of Lick Observatory and biographer of Keeler and many other remarkable American astronomers, describes this phenomenon as the "not in my telescope syndrome". Don has told me that not only Keeler, but also Edward Barnard, great early astrophotographer, was subjected to this withering criticism by (especially) European astronomers.
This was perhaps to be expected in the days of "visual" astronomy. It was exceptionally hard to photograph spectra, in the dim images produced by long-focus refractor telescopes. The earliest such photographs recorded the spectra of only the brightest stars and nebulae, well into the first decades of the 20th century. So, most reports of unusual spectra were visual ones, with information painstakingly plotted by eye, and recorded only in handwritten notes at the eyepiece of the spectroscope. If an unusual spectroscopic observation could be made only with the gigantic aperture telescopes at Lick, at 4,200 feet elevation in the pure, laminar airflow on Mt. Hamilton -- and never confirmed by observers with (say) 12 inch telescopes in cloudy skies in Europe -- the measurements were considered by many skeptics to be mere assertions, not proven nor confirmed by anybody. When so many of them came in profusion from Lick astronomers, the skeptical rumblings grew into a chorus of contemptuously expressed doubt.
Planetary observers with superior telescopes, too, were subjected to the scorn of those astronomers of the time who had given way to the "standard paradigm", existing for some decades, that the vague markings of Mars, barely seen when the planet was at closest opposition every few years, were "linear", "doubled", and possibly indicative of artificial constructions. It was also widely asserted, and believed, that the Martian surface was rich with vegetation, which grew and subsided with the seasons. These opinions had become almost the norm by the time that Lick astronomers, such as Barnard, turned the mighty Clark 36" refractor telescope, then the world's largest, onto the planet.
But, in the early 1890s Barnard beheld -- to his amazement -- not a fine working of "canals" (or channels, as they would have been properly translated from the Italian) but a plethora of natural surface details: huge gullies, chasms, craters, and formations of a rocky terrain. I once held in my own hand Barnard's drawing, about 5 inches in diameter, made at the eyepiece, which he copied to his astronomical mentor Simon Newcomb, with the report that in clearest seeing, he saw NO "canals" but only ordinary surface details in such profusion as to overwhelm the senses. Barnard was, in fact, so intimidated by Percival Lowell and William H. Pickering at Flagstaff's renowned Lowell Observatory -- founded to study Mars -- that he felt could not publish his "anomalous" observations, so sure were the users of smaller telescopes that "canals" and forests were being accurately spotted. Barnard, who had only a bachelor's degree in mathematics (at the time a junior observer at Lick) felt that he could not sustain the damage to his reputation that would be done by the expected denunciations that would surely emerge from the disputatious and condescending Pickering and Lowell.
With the emergence of reliable astrophotography as the preferred tool for recording data, gradually the geographical and political chauvinism of astronomers died down. Later, when even larger telescopes were set up at Mt. Wilson, and Palomar Mountain -- and after the 1960s in Spain, Hawaii, and South America -- it was not usual for most critics to cast such uncollegial aspersions on hard data (though not entirely unprecedented.) The arguments turned toward speculative cosmology, not merely the mountains of spectral and positional data that were easily confirmed from photographic plates and optical or radio spectral chart recordings.
But, amateur astronomy being still largely a visual pursuit, this writer has been dismayed to see astronomical chauvinism so very much alive and well, and sometimes displayed by observers who live in regions that are not considered the finest venues for achieving the highest number of clear, transparent, dry nights. In a certain forum one reads repeated dismissals of some very fine, skilled, and honorable American amateur astronomers, who use 13 to 20 inch Dobsonian telescopes of high quality to make critical observations at high altitude southwestern United States observing sites, or in Pacific coastal regions such as Mt. Hamilton's environs.
Because I have absolutely no animus toward anyone, and do not wish my opinion about this to be attached to any particular person in a web search, I shall not be more explicit than this.
Yet, may one reasonably draw the line between objective fact about climatic conditions at various geographical locations, and mere unwarranted, pathological skepticism, based on chauvinistic bias? While it would be just as unfair for me, for example to assert that "MY observations are better, because MY skies are better" than (say) those experienced by observers in the UK hinterlands or northern Europe, it is also equally invalid for observers there, who struggle to overcome moisture, low altitudes (generating local seeing deficiencies, and causing many interesting objects to be very low on the horizon), light pollution, and cloud cover, to dismiss observations of faint nebulae -- made by Americans working in superb, pristine, high altitude, and dry skies -- as being "unlikely", or "illusions", or even frauds: merely on the argument that these observations are 'not easily repeatable' in Europe.
Chauvinism about one's own circumstances is a bias to be avoided. But, that does not mean that we cannot honestly know and evaluate and compare differences of locale, affecting astronomical observing. One arch-skeptic supposedly alleged that a planetary nebula in Puppis that he had extreme difficulty seeing with a large telescope, at a latitude higher than 40 degrees, must perforce be only "claimed" by another observer at a different (better and more advantageous) location, merely because the aperture was smaller. One can be forgiven for thinking that the skeptic is projecting: considering himself to represent the "standard" for human accomplishment and sensibility, and then suggesting that anyone else who 'seems' to surpass him to be making a very doubtful "claim", not offering an honest, sincere observation. "Not in my telescope" seems to be the cause of this skepticism, once again.
May not the argument be turned on its head? What is the logical reason for preferring to accept that something is "difficult" while another person finds it "less difficult"? Cannot one be skeptical of the observer in moist, low elevation skies, suffering from bad weather patterns? Skeptical, in fact, about his alleged "difficulty", considering instead that it might well be due to his particular set of conditions, and to his skills?
When this writer made something of that sort of suggestion on the forum, great offense was taken (though none was intended by me.) I merely offered it, as my own hard data about faint, obscure, "challenging" objects seen in Pacific coast and southwestern skies in my telescopes informed me that many of these 'challenges' are not as insuperable as the observers in certain European locales might assert.
What was the last time a comet was visually discovered in Britain? I tried to figure this out by doing a Net search, but found it a tedious affair: has there been another significant one following George Alcock's Comet 1983d? According to this article on Alcock, there was a "a 65 year dearth of British comet discoveries (and not for the lack of people trying)" and that "the discovery of two British comets in a week [in 1959] was, and still is, a fairytale event." Most of the amateur discoveries are done by visual observers in Japan, Australia, and the western or southwestern United States; many more are done by automated imaging surveys. As the British Astronomical Association article about the Edgar Wilson Award for the discovery of comets by amateur astronomers records, most of the recipients in the past decades have made their sightings in Australia, Japan, Croatia, New Zealand, Austria, Brazil, and specifically in the USA: by David Levy, and especially in California (by my friend, astronomer Don Machholz, with whom I spent innumerable hours observing in the mountains south of San Jose!)
So, as far as comets are concerned, UK-British isle skies are simply NOT to be preferred for providing a good chance of making a discovery. Period. This is not an opinion; it is a fact.
There are many other reasons to prefer high altitude, dry mountainous sites for deep sky observing, one of the most important being distance from light pollution, and another being the elevation of interesting, faint objects above the horizon, closest to the zenith. (And, as such, one wishing to study objects in Sagittarius would be advised not to go to Sussex, nor even California: but to Australia!) Seeing can be bad, good, or even sometimes excellent almost anywhere, anytime: at least occasionally. But it is usually better in high, mountainous, dry air in geographical regions that produce, by virtue of their topology, laminar and stable airflow. Such are not the conditions of many sites in northern Europe: again, not an opinion, but a fact.
If one doubts this: then why, pray, have the telescopes at Greenwich Observatory been moved to a Spanish island?
In short, astronomical geographic chauvinism which would lead one to make absurd assertions contrary to natural observing conditions, are to be shunned. They are biases, pure and simple, and as such are unscientific and unsupportable (photons don't care about borders and national pride.) It is no more logical for me, a Californian, to insist that only here can good observing be done -- in the face of contraverting evidence -- than for a northern European to cast pathologically skeptical doubts on observers working elsewhere, in superior weather conditions, because the results are "not seen in their telescopes" under murky, moist skies.
Northern Europe -- its land, culture, peoples, and heritage -- has its benefits. Despite my respect for the art form of jazz, I would gladly trade every piece of music written in the United States for the works of Elgar and Vaughan Williams of Britain, or Debussy of France, or Brahms of Germany. (To tell the truth, it would not be difficult for me to turn in Jack Horkheimer if I could get Patrick Moore in exchange!) But, would I trade the skies of Arizona and California for those of the British midlands? Certainly not.
Thursday, 4 January 2007: Copyright (c) 2007, Stephen R. Waldee - All Rights Reserved
Honor Amongst (Photon) Thieves
My first commentary, above, concerned the assertion that all too many observers were guilty of succumbing to "illusions", made by a particular observer from northern Europe who found certain observations very difficult in his climate and at his particular latitude, and therefore cast an extreme pall of what I'd call "pathological skepticism" about the findings of amateur astronomers working in far superior climates, and at latitudes where many difficult and faint nebular objects are higher above the horizon. The northern European observer's experience with an object was cited as a "difficult observation", but other astronomers, in another hemisphere, had to have their reports described as not observations, but "claims", because the instruments used had smaller apertures.
This set me to thinking about "honor among hobbyists" or, in my little joke in the present title, "amongst photon thieves." For, how do we know that anybody is telling the truth, or exaggerating, or -- at worst -- lying?
Since visual observations are recorded only by the words conveying the impressions of observers, we have only those words to go by, and what the observer has done in the past. In the case of some rather obscure persons (like me, for instance) who don't regularly go to large public star parties, or aren't published in the pages of prestigious magazines, or who haven't written books: how can we tell if they are cautious, sober, and conservative, never prone to exaggerate, or are dissemblers?
The evidence that I've gathered, over the period of years that I have been researching the observations of my amateur colleagues via the Net, suggests to me that fraud is virtually non-existent. I say "virtually" because there are one or two troubling situations that have come my way, out of perhaps thousands of reports that I've read.
One of them was, in fact, discovered by me only yesterday. Since I am extremely cautious about accusing anybody of the slightest wrong-doing, and always want to assume that there is a likelihood of various other circumstances clouding an issue, things that I do not know for sure, to a scientific certainty, I shall be very vague about it. I won't say who might have been involved; what the object was; what the words were. But in looking for reports about a specific object, I was stunned to locate TWO absolutely identical reports, running to several sentences and many tens of words, that were absolutely identical in every way. One of them was printed in a journal, and therefore could be traced to a specific date (which I won't give.) The other was in a web page article about the object; the date of the file was not something I could find out, not being able to read the date stamp on the server by means of my browser. But I did some detective work that finally revealed WHO the guilty culprit was. (I was quite relieved, by the way!)
It turns out that the report of this object was actually prefaced by a specific post by its author to the newsgroup sci.astro.amateur, "plugging" the web article about the object, written several years BEFORE the journal issue was printed. The original newsgroup report had the same words of the opening part of the report: and, predating all subsequent versions on the Net, must therefore be considered to be the ORIGINAL comments. They were in fact written by a quite prominent person, who was a professionally trained astronomer turned entrepreneur. I have had some dealings with him and found him to be a most creative, knowledgeable, and supportive fellow; it was a relief to discover that HE was the abused party, NOT the plagiarizer!
His post, and subsequent article, were apparently plagiarized in a shocking, foolish, and crude fashion, word for word, including personal references (on the order of statements like "I did this" or "I found that"), indicating that the alleged writer was asserting knowledge from personal experience. But since SOMEONE ELSE wrote those very words, at least three years earlier, we know they were plagiarized. BUT...
There is always the possibility that an editor was at fault! It could be that the original copy for the journal article contained a referenced quote, and the text was altered -- improperly -- by someone else, to fit the available space. In fact, that sort of thing has happened to ME. I am quite embarrassed about some things that were cobbled up from my original program notes for a local symphony orchestra, made to look like I was practically illiterate and could not write so much as a proper sentence. Other comments that I once wrote as a broadcasting chief engineer, for a radio station's newsletter, were turned upside down and rendered technically wrong. A caption for a picture accompanying a technical article I once published was altered, making me look either ignorant, or stupid -- or both. My article on the discovery of the Horsehead nebula was condensed and crudely altered by an editor, creating mistakes I never made: I withdrew the article, not being able to force the magazine to print it properly. It happens!
So, one would prefer to think that there really IS no plagiarism; it was all a mistake caused by shoddy editing.
I cannot think of a single example aside from this one that shows the possibility of real deceptive intent: passing off somebody else's astronomical observation as one's own. Of course, even the best of us can make simple human errors (in fact, the NGC/IC project claims somewhere on its website that perhaps about 15 to 20% of all the original object reports and descriptions have significant mistakes.) Furthermore, I have seen almost no PREPOSTEROUS observations (except perhaps the understandable blunders of rank beginners, not offered in a malicious or misleading manner but through simple error.)
The last one of this type that I recall seeing was a post to a discussion about detecting the central star in M-57, made several months ago. Someone asserted it was seen in a three inch aperture scope, which I personally believe to be virtually impossible (well, let's be more definite than that: ACTUALLY totally impossible!) Was the claim made in error? Or was it the well-known optical illusion that occurs sometimes when viewing M-57 at certain exit pupils, where the nebulous glow of the interior of the annulus seems to "peak" in luminance, making one think that a star has been detected in the center? When this happens, the observer should crank up the magnification: like as not, the "star" will probably disappear.
I have in fact seen the M-57 central star only a couple of times in my thirty year history of deep sky viewing, and in both cases it was a very difficult observation, requiring a fairly large aperture and PERFECT seeing. A viewing companion and I once glimpsed it in an excellent 17.5" Dob; I also think, if memory serves, that I once saw it in my old 8" scope (which had a Carl Zambuto primary mirror with a superb figure.) I haven't been so sure of the one time I thought I might have had a fleeting glimpse of it with my C-11. Other observers have had an easier time of it than I have; I don't doubt them. In fact, I really do rather little of that kind of observing: trying to see faint planetary nebulae central stars. I've had some success, on occasion. But it's not exactly my favorite viewing challenge. I am ready, willing, and able to acknowledge that many other people have much more experience and enthusiasm for this task than I: so why would they NOT have more luck of the draw? It's entirely likely, and in fact virtually certain.
Now, let me tell you an interesting story about another of my hobbies, shortwave radio listening and station logging. I'm an avid "DX'er", and have put up a large antenna to capture faint signals from distant stations. When I started doing this as a fourteen year old (when was that? The late 19th century? Seems that long ago...) the accepted practice was to write to each station, giving a detailed report, and to then await a "QSL card" to prove that the station was indeed received. I did this a few times, many decades ago. Then it occurred to me that it was an almost total waste of time and money, and I did it no more. But other avid DX'ers consider it a badge of honor to have a card for each station reception, and NEVER to claim hearing a signal or program without having received a verifying card. Honor amongst listeners!
All this has changed, and only recently. It seems that a certain, err, person in southern Europe decided to exploit the Internet, and to buy QSL card collections. He placed numerous ads, and purchased thousands of them (from the spouses of deceased radio hobbyists, one presumes) and now has more of them than anybody else. Not being content merely to own the cards, he has upped the ante by trolling radio forums and websites, snapping up reception reports, and sending them to stations in his name, only very slightly altered: yielding even more cards, now addressed specifically and appearing to bear weight as evidence. Once again, I demur from being specific, or even from linking to several websites of serious, dedicated, and outraged radio enthusiasts who have chronicled this shocking story of deceit. The end result is that the honorable hobby phenomenon has been turned completely on its head, the QSL card no longer having the cachet it once had.
I can't think of a parallel to this in amateur astronomy: thank goodness!
In fact, the only historical astronomer who was even remotely connected with allegations of deception that comes to my mind is the infamous Thomas Jefferson Jackson See. While Percival Lowell, the wealthy scion of high society turned Mars enthusiast, may be forgiven for his pseudoscientific over-reaching, in light of the good he did to benefit the entire astronomical community, See was considered by many, in his own time, to be an out-and-out charlatan; at the very least a crank. His observations of Venus stretched credulity. And he once claimed the splitting of a 0.2 arcsecond- separated binary star, disputed by "knowledgeable experts who knew better", thinking it an impossible feat: but history has vindicated him, at least in this one instance.
In recent times, I knew about an amateur astronomer (not known at all as an observer but more for his public- relations work with clubs and organizations) who was so anxious to be known as a "Doctor" that he printed up fake business cards, claiming a degree in astrophysics. His "degree" was actually self-awarded: from a religious "school" which sent out 'divinity doctorate diplomas' for (it was alleged) a contribution of fifty dollars. A colorful individual, this person had certain talents and attributes, but they were far overshadowed by his egregious behavior, which cost him a good relationship with a prominent astronomical institution: a very sad case, albeit a unique and anomalous one.
T. J. J. See (perhaps both a skilled practitioner and a nearly unbalanced personality) is one of the rare exceptions in the sober world of telescope observers. Despite the fringe people who hang about in conspiratorial forums, genuine scientific astronomy, whether amateur or professional, still seems to have plenty of honor amongst photon thieves!
Friday, 5 January 2007: Copyright (c) 2007, Stephen R. Waldee - All Rights Reserved
"It CAN'T Be Done!"
How many of us were discouraged when we started up as amateur observers by such "warnings"? I have enough years under my belt that I can recall reading Sky & Telescope magazine back in the 1960s: a thoroughly "mainstream" publication, edited by scientists and educated astronomers, it seldom deviated from the "norm" or covered what one might call, today, cutting-edge techniques. Perhaps in those days a typical amateur observer was using, say, a 6 inch aperture f/8 Newtonian, probably on an equatorial mount (which might even be home-made, crafted from plumbing parts.) There were lots of users of 3 inch aperture f/15 refractors, not given much respect until a fairly recent resurgence of interest in small aperture specialized achromatic instruments for visual observing and imaging. And a few hardy souls had ground their own 10 or 12 inch mirrors: again, most often mounted on gigantic equatorial contraptions. Clyde Tombaugh made his own 16 incher, mounted with about a ton of surplus steel!
The "norm" or paradigm of the day was very different from our time. Nobody had pursued looking at virtually the entirety of the New General Catalogue (as Steve Gottlieb has done, observing in California at especially dark or high altitude sites.) Very little deep sky astrophotography was accomplished; what was published from amateur pictures looked pitifully crude compared to the work of, say, Edward Barnard, a half-century earlier. Aside from the avid comet hunters, relatively few people had encyclopedic knowledge of the sky's "faint fuzzies."
The atmosphere that had created the hobby had developed lots of reductionists: persons who had drenched themselves in the amateur telescope making articles in Scientific American, and the optical textbooks written before World War II, and were founts of optical orthodoxy. An amateur astronomer was largely a workman, one who ground and figured his own mirrors and drilled, scraped, and filed the parts for his mount. There were no star charts comparable to the Uranometria; none even as 'deep' as the Sky Atlas 2000.0. While nuances were indeed important to observers, then as now, their perception and cultivation were not as intensely followed as today.
In that period, practically everybody who knew anything practical about amateur astronomy was full of "don'ts" to warn beginners about too much run-away enthusiasm. "Use no more than 50x per inch of aperture, UNLESS you were doing certain double star measurements, for which 60x is sometimes allowable." "A four-inch telescope has only a 12.1 stellar magnitude limit." And so forth...
Today, one of the main contributing editors of S&T is none other than Stephen J. O'Meara, rembered for his legendary feats of observing (such as using oxygen on Hawaiian volcano domes to view by naked eye stars as faint as, or fainter than, 8th magnitude.) While in the 1990s the observing columns by Alan MacRobert discussed objects that he could see with his 6 inch telescope near light-polluted Cambridge, now in the first decade of the 21st century, deep-sky observer Sue French writes about 15th magnitude galaxies with surface brightness so low that the great 19th century observers, even using huge telescopes, missed seeing them. Cosmology articles talk about speculative notions of the multiverse; astrophysical articles discuss gamma ray bursters. Equipment reviewed includes specialized electronically cooled CCDs, and astrographs designed with some of the optical principles of Ritchey-Chrétien systems. There are regular reports of amateurs searching for extra- solar- sytem planets, or doing parallax measurements. It's mind-boggling!
Where are the stern Cassandras of astronomical correctness, warning readers that "It CAN'T be done!"?
Well, many of them have moved... to Internet forums. There is a new population of astronomical reductionists, whom I perceive to be largely "scientist-manqué types." Often they are engineers in the electronics or computer fields; their hobby is astronomy (or, perhaps more precisely, buying telescopes.) I used to know quite a few of these persons, who worked in the silicon valley technical industries and patronized the four science and astronomy products stores with which I have been associated. It has often been said that "there's no one as dedicated and holy as a recent convert." Well, this is also true of amateur astronomy: there is no reductionist more ORTHODOX and strict than an engineer turned amateur astronomy hobbyist!
I have also noticed that, psychologically, these persons often seem to be terrified of mistakes, loathing to make them, and filled with righteous indignation if they ever spot one made by another amateur astronomer. They tend all too often to be terribly precise, rigid, and cautious. Some of them are positively 'hung up' on brand names, proud of the tens of thousands of dollars they've spent for certain "in" products, and disdainful of those of us who use $60 eyepieces and "ordinary mass produced SCTs". One friend of mine, a good astrophotographer, decided to invest in a nice Meade Schmidt-Newtonian to be able to do short exposure deep sky shots. He told me that he was so intimidated by certain local astronomy club members, with their ten thousand dollar mounts and twenty thousand dollar astrographs, that he had been thinking of painting out the Meade logo on the optical tube of his scope, so that it wasn't immediately identifiable as being a "mass produced product". This admission revealed to me many sad things about both personal insecurity, and the causes of it, in the hobby of "social amateur astronomy."
For, the attitude was "You can't DO that!" with a mass produced telescope; i. e., you can't produce a really good picture, one that other people would find impressive. One that had the right bona fides, the proper provenance.
Certain avid users of big Dob light buckets tell those of us who happen to be refractor enthusiasts that "You can't SEE anything in your LITTLE telescope to compare with MY BIG ONE." Refractor fanatics, who glorify in the star images of open and globular clusters, dismiss SCT's. "You CAN'T get a good one! NONE of them has perfect star images!" (Or, "You CAN'T get good contrast with an SCT, due to the large central obstruction!")
Astrophotographers belittle visual observers: "You CAN'T prove you saw it unless you took a picture!" Visual observers who have never had the "photography bug" will wave their hands dismissively at digital imaging hobbyists, crying "You CAN'T record accurately what is REALLY seen by eye; your pictures are ARTIFICIAL." Film buffs tell CCD guys that "You CAN'T get the color realism, and dynamic range, and wide field unless you use film. You CAN'T get the beauty of film, with digital imagers." The CCD guys shout back, "But, you CAN'T avoid reciprocity failure, and film grain; and developing and printing costs are NOT worth the expense, compared to the simplicity and low-cost, per exposure, of digital imaging."
ATM's who struggle to figure 1/16th wave optics and to machine to tolerances of sub-thousandths of an inch in the trusses and fixtures of their mounts tell those of us who prefer to BUY ready-made telescopes that "You CAN'T get good optics and properly designed mechanics." Deep sky observers who struggle to see faint low-altitude objects in poor skies tell other observers who work in high mountain sites in dry, desert climates that "You CAN'T possibly see things with a 10 inch aperture, if I have trouble seeing them with a 20 inch!" Some will sternly warn small telescope users that "You CAN'T possibly see stars or galaxies or nebulae that faint -- your scope is too small (ahem, smaller than MINE.)" It does not matter what the topic is: the orthodox reductionists are omipresent, warning people that they can't do what they want to do, if they don't "conform to the norm."
As far as I am concerned, sign me up on the side of the unorthodox non-reductionists. I don't want to be discouraged and told I "can't possibly" see a 16th magnitude galaxy with my scope, or in my sky conditions. And, I certainly do not appreciate for a single moment being told that my honestly offered, carefully produced observations are "merely claims, because there aren't other people using the same size telescope HERE (fill in the place) also seeing that object." If you go back and look at the history of viewing reports related to almost any interesting deep sky object, you will see a steady progression of events: increasing frequency of observations, improved reporting of details, and more frequent confirmations. And, unsurprisingly, there are fewer reports from locations with light pollution, moist and unreliable weather, and poor elevations... and more reports from observers in the really pristine skies at rural, mountainous, and desert environments.
Progress is largely made by people who don't believe, or haven't been told, that they CAN'T do something.
Saturday 6 January 2007: Copyright (c) 2007, Stephen R. Waldee - All Rights Reserved
The Madding Crowd
We all know how bad usenet is these days. All we lack is a sociological study leading to a scholarly thesis, covering the sad deterioration of a democratic communications medium into an encounter group for psychiatric cases. (I almost fantasize that I was back at university, but today not four decades ago, so that I could switch majors to psychology or sociology to do it myself.)
Now, almost everybody posts anonymously, with so many virus and Trojan horse programs and nasty pif files being attached to posts and emails; hardly anybody wants to use their own return address unless they have an industrial strength email filtering system. Even I post, when I do occasionally, with a pseudonym: "AstroApp", which is a giveaway since many of my posts -- or those of my wife Regina -- to the amateur astronomy newsgroup sci.astro.amateur contain links to my "astro-app" or my "steve_waldee" web addresses. Anonymity is often decried, but sometimes it's the only way to escape cyberstalking, or direct electronic attacks.
But, when I post this way, I try to do so with just as much fairness and responsibility as when I gave out my email address in the innocent days of yore. Every once in a while, though, people get so riled up and offended by one thing and another on usenet that we have probably ALL succumbed to bad temper and injudiciousness. What's even worse, sometimes we meant no offense, sarcasm, or condescension: but the recipients of our remarks took them that way, and were upset by them. It is far too boring to look them up, but if memory serves, once I was called a fraud "who never even owned a telescope"; on another occasion a person who identified himself as science instructor 'informed' the newsgroup that my astronomical software was worthless and misleading. And, even recently on another forum, I was pilloried by an ATM as being an "anal porfectionist" [sic] and ridiculously silly, when I suggested that it was important to measure the height of a focuser and its drawtube travel to make certain it would be positioned properly and thereby get all one's oculars in focus. (The funniest thing about this was that I discovered, a day or two later, that probably this very same person, apparently -- having the identical and somewhat uncommon name -- had posted some earlier queries elsewhere asking for advice to solve the identical problem: he had trouble getting his own scope's focuser positioned properly.)
"Usenet doth make heroes of us all", to paraphrase The Bard. Everybody is an expert, an old salt, a reliable witness. It is almost pointless now for a beginner to post a query to a hobby newsgroup. The advice given back is often peculiar and narrow, in the extreme. People who do take the trouble to give practical suggestions are shouted down. The more outlying the experience, the more anomalous or weird, the better. Practical advice? Nah. It's too unimaginative.
Thus the 'science guy' railed against me, once, for answering a newbie's questions about using nebular filters, in which I replied, saying that 'the UHC and OIII filters are not for photography'. (This was back in the heyday of chemical film, not today when a few adventuresome people are actually starting to do narrowband OIII and SII wavelength ditigal imaging.) The instructor was sorely annoyed by my statement, which he assured readers was not true! HE did photography that way, all the time, he stated. He even apparently took the trouble to call the company I was associated with at the time, to "prove" that I was dead wrong. Unfortunately, as an employee there told me later, they actually agreed with ME, and told him so explicitly. The "filter factor" of these devices would increase the exposure time, perhaps by an order of magnitude; and the peak response did not necessarily fall on the right portion of color film's individual dye sensitivities. The company agreed with me, and did NOT market its filters for photography. Now, did the "professor" actually post on usenet what he had been told? No. He was silent. He left his actually erroneous criticism of my software to stand uncorrected, even though he knew it was no longer appropriate.
Another oft-repeated syndrome is "denial of the possibility". Someone posts an account of a perfectly plausible situation, but others rush to 'correct' or at the very least to 'explain' that this was not possible -- because the writer hadn't ever had that experience himself. The cause of this is projection: a naive person believing that HIS experiences in life are the only likely ones. Why, of course: we all know how INTELLIGENT and CAREFUL we are; we couldn't make a mistake. No, the other guy is making the mistake! I have had this happen so many times that I know that any impulse that I have to share my own experiences and discoveries -- in the hope that the account might be helpful to others, saving them the time and trouble to tread the same ground -- will be rewarded with such dismissals.
For instance: I had nothing but trouble getting gel cell rechargeable batteries to run my telescope and laptop reliably; after a great deal of experimentation and work I came up with a solution, and wrote an article going into precise detail about the battery system that I devised. My wife Regina posted a notice of this to sci.astro.amateur. Immediately, people started DENYING that I could have had the problems I wrote about; dismissing all my very real experiences with poor battery life and unreliable charging; even insisting that I must have made a hopelessly stupid error. I am still -- a year later -- getting email from readers, doubting me (on the grounds that they have not had exactly the same experience: but they never seem to have the SAME equipment, SAME current demands, SAME batteries.) Let's face it: whoever you or I happen to be, we do not -- as individuals -- serve as the absolute MODEL for all other hobbyists everywhere on the planet, and our own experiences do not cover EVERY possibility. Why waste time picking another person's life apart, when you don't walk in his or her shoes? Now, it's true that sometimes people post absolutely preposterous, absurd things (like, "Last night I saw a giant turquoise space ship the size of a football stadium, hovering over me and sending out radium beams" -- that sort of thing.) But, for goodness sakes: when one amateur astronomer has his or her own personal reaction to an eyepiece, or a battery, or a star chart, LET IT ALONE and do not rush to tell everybody else that "this is NOT so!" based on your own very demonstrably different situation.
Thus, with these sorts of experiences under my belt, I was positively shocked the other day, when I seem somehow to have changed somebody's mind! See this Google archive discussion about using GOTO and PUSHTO scopes, versus star-hopping. I was amazed to see that a gentleman named Larry G. actually seemed to be convinced by my point of view, and reversed himself. It is almost unprecedented! (I felt very proud of that, and almost humbled: my most gracious thanks, Larry.)
Lessons learned from years of posting on usenet:
• Adopt at least a little humility (even if you have to fake it!) Nobody likes "obiter dicta" declarations.
• Try to imagine that you are the one with the opinion you HATE! You've had silly, strange ideas before: ones that seemed logical at the time. Somebody else may look at YOU, oh honest sage, as being a hopeless crank!
• Don't dignify direct personal attacks. You can't "win" and shouldn't really try. When the argument turns from ideas or issues, to personalities, it's been lost by the first one who succumbs to the temptation. We ALL know this; intelligent readers of the discussion will recognize it, too.
• Remember how frequently you change your own mind, or learned something you did not know earlier; or just somehow changed as a person. You actually may not even agree with yourself a few years down the line -- so don't be too dogmatic.
• Skepticism can be instantly turned on its head. When you dismiss somebody else's experience with a withering put-down, he or she might just as likely -- and with justification -- be able to erect a surprisingly effective argument against your point of view.
• If the subject is human experience gathered by means of neurophysical processes (or, to be less pretentious: by what you SAW, or HEARD) then please remember that we're all quite different in many ways. Neurophysiologists know that there is often a bell-curve distribution of sensitivities across the human population. You may fall anywhere on the curve; how do you know that YOUR experience is truly "typical"? And you know virtually nothing about what is going on inside another person's head. In such a forum you have only words with which to gather information and to make a judgment and form an argument; and not everybody is really skilled at accurate self-analysis and expression. Furthermore, you might not even be READING the other person's words accurately: I see this all the time. People get mad about what they THOUGHT they read...
• If the topic is about your hobby: remember that hobbies are for pleasure, acquiring experiences, and for enhancing one's enjoyment of life. Don't turn them into ideological killing fields; you'll be the poorer person for it.
So: let's all help to make usenet a little better than it is now!
Saturday 6 January 2007: Copyright (c) 2007, Stephen R. Waldee - All Rights Reserved
The Assumption of Ignorance
I don't know for certain about you, dear reader, but I, for one, am shockingly ignorant.
I cannot understand a syllable of Urdu. Not only could I not treat gallstones, but also I haven't the slightest idea how to remove an appendix (nor even, exactly, where one might be located to the precision of a centimeter.) I could not, for the life of me, build a transistor if I found myself alone on a Pacific island. I am completely unable to cook a delicate soufflé; never mind kartoffelklosse or even a decent bowl of okroshka. My poésie is sadly lacking in synechdoche; my tercets don't scan; and my use of metaphor is jejune.
I am in fact lacking in so many areas of human knowledge as to be nearly useless with respect to most human pursuits. I have to restrict myself, carefully and methodically, to a narrow path -- or fall off into the abyss.
Of course this is true of all of us. We intuitively recognize this: that is why, when we read a query from someone on a forum or newsgroup, asking advice about the solution to a problem or for general instruction, we assume that it comes from somebody who is ignorant. It's only human nature: somebody who asks for help must, perforce, NOT know something basic or important or relevant.
So, cannot one be forgiven for offering advice couched in the language of the rudimentary, or "dumbed down" to the level of a novice, when replying? Yet, all too often the recipient becomes very irritated, because that sort of advice frequently doesn't fit. More and more, persons of general or even advanced attainment are using forums to find the solutions to very peculiar, anomalous, or esoteric problems, particularly in fields related to electronics, communication, and technology. Because the gadgetry we rely on to perform essential tasks needed in life has now become so complex, the devices have tended to turn strangely inconsistent, context- dependent, and almost humanly perverse: they seem, sometimes, to "have a mind of their own" and to behave erratically, neurotically. Computers and software, especially, have broken through some kind of barrier that seems to separate inanimate matter from intelligent beings. And, all too often our computers act as if they're nuts, having a nervous breakdown!
Thus, even a computer engineer who understands hardware and software simply has to ask advice now and then; and unless he or she prefaces it with a long, detailed explanation that is so stultifying that you'd never want to read on to the question, the reader always assumes that the problem is being reported by a novice: and what's more, by one who hasn't taken any of the preliminary troubleshooting steps to isolate the difficulty.
Therefore, perhaps 50% of the discussion thread in any forum query is devoted to getting out of the way all the things that the questioner already knows, sometimes driving the original seeker nearly crazy with frustration, as each irrelevant proposal has to be thrashed out to get to the crux of the situation. I discuss this syndrome in the followup to my article about the problems with astronomical charting and telescope control software.
But, even I am guilty of the same sins of assumption when I have gone to software forums to ask about, or offer an answer to, an extremely obscure problem. A few months ago a gentleman posted a query to sci.astro.amateur about his bad results when modifying a commercial Celestron telescope: he took it apart and made numerous changes, including the predictably risky process of adding clamps to hold the primary mirror. The resulting optical image was severely distorted -- and I mean SEVERELY -- and the fellow posted a little picture to show the damage (which made me gasp in horror because of its hideousness.) He wondered why.
That was about all the information one had in order to be able to diagnose the problem and to work backward toward a solution (which, obviously, would be to remove the alterations and then properly align the optics!) When I tried my best to go through various issues related to his use of the telescope, the optical alignment, and methods of exposing and processing planetary images, he became extremely irritated with my methodical, starting-at-rudiments suggestions, and could not quite contain his annoyance. He was, he insisted, already aware of the proper way to take a planetary picture. Surely that much must be obvious! (Huh? All the great, accurate planetary observers and imagers have traditionally been persons who were the most adept at understanding, using, and optimizing telescopes.)
My defense for the offense of "assuming ignorance" is that from my own perspective, taking apart a complex commercial Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope down to the disassembly of the entire optical train, from corrector plate to primary, and CHANGING it significantly (without the tools of an optical bench or even a collimator, as he admitted) betokens a rather shocking ignorance of something basic that I'd assume a telescope user would want to overcome. But, no: it would appear that a good many of today's amateur astronomers have leapt past that stage of development. Being good engineers (in another domain) they project their competence onto the field of optics, and then assume that what works for RF design, digital logic ladders, or analogue circuit development also works for OPTICS. Ergo, if you know how to build something technical, you can put this knowledge to work instantly in your use of a telescope.
I don't think this is at all practical, or even possible. A computer engineer can get a ray-trace program and spend an hour with it looking at the reflection paths through a compound telescope. But this passive-experience of information gathering does not give one the slightest understanding or comprehension of the REST of the system: the kinds of light wave signals coming from celestial objects; how they are interfered with and distorted by the atmosphere; and how the myriad of environmental influences cause aberrations that further distort what one can see in eyepiece: nor what the human perception mechanism has to learn in order to develop a skill set that may be used for effective perception and problem-solving. There is a very large and comprehensive background to be absorbed before one is competent, and could be qualified to take apart and modify a Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope. A rank beginner (no matter how brilliant he or she may be with mechanics, computer chips, or algorithms) needs to develop this perspective!
LEAVE YOUR TELESCOPES ALONE until you are quite ready. Or, preferably, make a simple one, from scratch. Take apart an old, broken one: and fix it. Improve step by step a novice- level scope. But, don't rip apart a brand new modern SCT, in a vain attempt to "improve it" -- without understanding how to test and verify your diagnoses of its alleged 'problems'; how to optimize its existing condition; how to make sure you know HOW to use it under varying states of seeing; and, heavens sakes, don't do it without having and using an optical bench and appropriate tools. Just take my word for it: ignore the websites that purport to show you how to "improve" your SCT by ripping it all apart. Trust me about this; I wouldn't steer you wrong.
Sunday 7 January 2007: Copyright (c) 2007, Stephen R. Waldee - All Rights Reserved
Update: I just saw an even more hideous thing on the Net: a step by step review of a process to change the optical tube of a C-11 scope, replacing one of the old original aluminum ones with a new carbon fiber tube (like the one my C-11 came with, from the factory.) Wild horses wouldn't drag the URL for this article out of me; it's a ghastly idea and one which I'd hope to discourage anybody from trying. Even the highly skilled user who did this had all kinds of problems with missing holes; holes that did not line up; dirt and junk getting all over the inside of the tube's flocking: it was -- to me -- an absolute horror story. That job necessitated, of course, dismantling the scope almost entirely. He said absolutely nothing about the job of alignment and collimation that was required afterward. Now, consider MY situation. I have never modified my C-11, which is 20 months old at this writing, and which has been collimated TWICE, the last time months ago. Just a week before I wrote this, I split the double star HR 3701 (which according to my research was at a separation of 1.0" in 1999 per one reference; others place it in the range of 1.18" down to 1.032".) Would one get the same performance after making such modifications; and, if so, how much work would be required to achieve this? -- srw, 3/27/07
In Praise of Anomalies
There is no one more severely conservative, critical, and skeptical than an 'orthodox amateur scientist'. For some reason (which I shall speculate about, further on) there seems to be a drive among many such persons to DENY the experiences of other people, primarily on the grounds that they are anomalous, unrepeatable, and therefore certainly mistaken and spurious, or self-delusions. The poor hapless soul who would be so bold as to describe his or her experience is immediately denounced, sometimes angrily. Others are 'warned' not to believe it, and to be skeptical at all costs, lest they be foolish and credulous.
How much of this alleged scientific conservatism is, rather, merely prejudice or even projection? I can't quantify it, but after reading years of posts followed by arguments in usenet and on private Internet forums employed by amateur astronomers, it seems to me very likely that by the sheer volume of their overheated denials, often the burden is shifted to the skeptics. Why should an observation be false until proven true? And, can proof be obtained easily in most cases? Is the absence of this alleged proof further proof that the observation was false? If so, why, pray tell?
William Herschel catalogued "52 Regions of Milky Nebulosity" across the heavens, using primarily his 18.7" aperture metal mirror reflector telescope; that and his gigantic 48-inch aperture instrument were then the world's largest research telescopes. Despite being located in the cloud-covered skies of England, they could still reveal more -- under optimal conditions -- than any other telescope on this planet. Yet, argument raged for almost a century about his "milky nebulosity": often hard to photograph even by such luminaries as Dr. Isaac Roberts. Ultimately, during the blackouts of World War I, Father Hagen confirmed them all with the refractor at Vatican Observatory; and they are all to be found in one aspect or another on the Palomar survey plates of the 1950s. Today's advanced amateur visual astronomers have no difficulty in perceiving them. Herschel was "probably wrong" until he was "probably right" and then ultimately "right" about it. Why did so many orthodox persons waste so much energy trying to dismiss them as "anomalous claims"?
This seems to be the psychological baggage that has accumulated in the "worship" of our western scientific Baconian tradition. By means of the skeptical mechanisms we've devised for putting things to the test, we avoid "harming" people mentally and physically -- by trying to prevent them from filling their heads with superstition and delusion about 'magnetic cures' and the like, while directing them instead to more productive and practical pursuits that are repeatably effective.
But, I'd ask: "what is the HARM done when somebody claims to have experienced something, using their own personal neurophysical and psychological systems, that is a bit unusual, different, or even unique?" What is the HARM done when, say, an amateur astronomer "sees" an object that another party -- usually just speculating about it -- concludes, mostly by asserting skepticism rather than actually experimenting, was "probably NOT seen at all"?
Let us remove both the proponent, and opponent, from the equation. We are left with all the OTHER people: those who have telescopes, and who can do their own experiments. The worst thing that can happen is that some of them will take the time and trouble to look, and probably many won't be able to repeat the experience. In the case that the phenomenon claimed is actually quite significantly perceivable over a wide set of conditions, some of these others will BENEFIT, because they will thereby achieve a new experience, and learn something significant. Those who fail have also learned, if they care to analyze thoroughly what they've done.
If the observation is shown to be unrepeatable, some would feel that the original proponent has therefore been 'embarrassed'. But, if the observation is repeated, then the proponent is 'not embarrassed' -- if you look at the situation only pathologically.
If, however, you look at it with a neutral attitude, the result is, instead, merely "no corroboration". The pathological analyst might feel a twinge of satisfying schadenfreude when the proponent is "shown up". But the neutral independent observer merely files the data away, for future consideration. If it is an interesting enough proposition, it might bear further study; if it's trivial, it can be forgotten.
The proponent and the skeptic are thus seen to be engaged in a sort of mutual psychological ballet, struggling back and forth: the one trying to avoid "embarrassment" while the other is impelled toward "satisfaction" and a smug sense of vindication. The rest of us, interested in RESULTS and FACTS, may be content with what we learn from the experience, leaving out all the personal emotions and struggle of will.
I'm proposing many of my "anomalous" observations here, hoping to be both the proponent and the detached, independent and unprejudiced observer. If "proved" wrong, my observations may be discounted, and though some persons may thereby find me "foolish", others might be either amused or at least entertained by the way my mind works, and how I have drawn up an account of my investigations. Not all of my observations will be "CORRECT". Many of them won't be "REPEATABLE". Some might well be unsual, and even unique: until somebody else has a similar experience.
Anomalies -- in other words, phenomena that you experience yourself, and which others don't have -- are anathema as far as scientists are concerned. But, when investigating we somehow have to go the distance between the assertion being "an anomaly" to the point where it is considered "real". Many amateur scientists find it more comfortable never to start on that journey. In such a case, I'd consider their attitude to be one of prejudice. Now, we might all be reasonably and practically prejudiced about many things in our lives: we know we can't just "will" things to happen, or make ourselves fly, or find pots of gold at the end of rainbows. Strangely, though: many people actually disagree with us; find "positive mental attitudes", "self-healing", "prayer", and other psychological or mental states to be productive in their lives. I for one am rather empathetic: I'd hate to ruin somebody's day and overturn an important emotional prop that gives them reassurance, happiness, and optimism. Other persons I know, however, take positive GLEE in their mean-spirited attempts to do just this!
Visual astronomy is one of the few remaining fields of endeavor where the "personal equation" of one's own trained perceptions, neural abilities, and cognitive analysis are so bound up in "results" that one can offer virtually no proof, or reification of any of our experiences. It's all well and good to propose something self-evident and obvious to somebody else, but which one has independently experienced without foreknowledge: nobody minds that very much. It's nice to see that, say, Astronomer Y can see the "spokes of Saturn's rings" with their scope under a rare condition and confluence of events, because we KNOW from space telescope pictures that they sometimes DO EXIST. But, if the same observation of the rings was given a few years earlier, it would be laughed at.
So, all we have to fall back on is some tenuous connection with evidence from photographs -- such as the Palomar Sky Survey, which still can be scrutinized to reveal something new or unsual, in little-explored regions -- or with the posted experience of other visual astronomers. It's interesting (to me, at least, living in California) that most of the hidebound skeptics who doubt other peoples' experiences tend to live in northern latitudes with lousy weather, and with observing sites near sea level. There aren't NEARLY as many skeptics among amateur visual observers who work in the high western deserts of the United States!
Years ago I was caught up in being "way too skeptical and conservative" when I was working as a telescope salesman at the Orion store in Cupertino. A partial lunar eclipse was going to occur, and a television crew from KNTV-Channel 11 came to the store to "ask an astronomer to explain it." The news reporter first talked to me. I said, in all "scientific sobriety", that the eclipse was going to be ongoing while the Moon rose, and -- it being very low near the horizon when it ended -- would probably not be terribly obvious or visually exciting. She said, "well, we don't want to put YOU on camera, then! Anybody else here care to talk about it?" The store manager had no such scruples, and he waxed eloquent about it. His clip was shown on that night's newscast, and indeed he WAS so persuasive that I made certain not to fail to see it. And -- you guessed it -- the event turned out to be stunning! The air was spectacularly clear, and the eclipse was probably the most visually satisfying one I've ever enjoyed. It was almost worth losing my "moment of fame" on TV to experience it.
But, conversely, "scientific conservatism and skepticism" almost cost me the chance to see a fabulous, clear view of the collision of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter. Sober astronomers were telling the public that "they weren't sure anything would be visible, and not to be disappointed". Very casually, and with little hope of results, I took outside my cheap little Meade f/11 80mm refractor, not even bothering to set up my 10" Newtonian. What I saw puzzled me: in the smeared, fuzzy image of a setting Jupiter, I thought I perceived something anomalous, at least some kind of dark patch that looked different than a cloud band. I called a friend who owned a huge high quality refractor. He was very orthodox and skeptical, and almost laughed at my assertion. I seem to remember having had to urge him passionately to get out HIS superior scope. Eventually he was persuaded, and took it to "our site" on private property in the mountains, where he, my wife Regina, and I were positively staggered by what we saw: the "dark pockmarks" of the puncture of the upper Jovian atmosphere were as clear as they looked in the Hubble photograph I later downloaded from the Net. It was an experience of a lifetime, and one that I almost didn't have; nor did I entirely trust my first impressions with a little telescope. It turned out that both were true; the restrained doubt was unfounded; and it was well worth the effort to try to experience the event, in the face of "conservative skepticism". (And, as I found out later when comparing notes with my friend Sue Hall, that Regina, my friend, and I saw the collision with much better clarity than even the guests who were permitted the honor of glimpsing it through the 36" refractor at Lick Observatory!)
 Finally: here's a little anomaly that I took the trouble to try to "capture" and preserve. In my bathroom window, I happen to have a particular kind of 'lumpy glass' with a variegated surface, designed to let light in, but not allow clear transparency of vision. At the exterior of the sliding window there is a metal screen. One night I walked in and found that in the EXACT alignment of the sliding window, and the pattern of the metal screen, I could see a beautiful picture of patterns generated by diffraction or some other mechanism, produced by the sodium vapor street light outside my house. It was such an exquisite phenomenon that I ran to my office, grabbed my digital camera, and snapped a few shots. I've never noticed it again. I suppose that if I took some trouble to set up an "identical experiment" with the exact angles, outside luminance, inside darkness, window and screen position, and angle of observation, I could "repeat" it. But I haven't done so; and I have not seen this lovely sight again. An anomaly -- but one which is theoretically repeatable, can be explained by an expert, and which doesn't shake up anybody's vision of the world. I suppose that a "pathological skeptic" who looks at me, based on this 'time wasting activity' and interest in the obscure, can use it as evidence that I am "foolish". So be it.
Friday 26 January 2007: Copyright (c) 2007, Stephen R. Waldee - All Rights Reserved
"You DIDN'T See That!"
This "correction" by a well-meaning, allegedly "more experienced" amateur astronomer is probably being heard more and more often, now that mass produced telescopes of fairly large aperture -- along with filters and wide field eyepieces -- are being owned by more and more observers: in the "old days" when I started, most beginners had small refractors, and nebular filters were nonexistent.
I don't tend to go to star parties; in fact, I have attended only two in the last seven or eight years. But I read lots of forums on the Net, and subscribe to some private ones for amateur observers. It seems to me that it is now a bit dicey to try to make a post of an observation of an unusual, faint, or obscure object in any of them, if one has (a) a smaller aperture scope than the "norm" of group contributors; (b) not a big track record of appearing in public; and (c) if the experience you are reporting seems to run the slightest bit out of the mainstream. If so, immediately there are a number of "usual suspects" who jump to the keyboard to post their "corrections", which can be summarized generally as stating succinctly: "You didn't see that!"
Visual observing has become much more nuanced than it was in the 1980s and 90s. I stopped for a period of a little over four years, beginning in 2001; when I resumed in 2005 I was surprised at the strides that had been made in this brief interval of time. One tireless observer is engaged in checking all the objects in the NGC and IC, and has logged something on the order of 7,000 of them so far. Many websites exist that contain the personal lists and reminiscences of observers, some being incredibly eloquent, fascinating, and original. Groups such as the Astronomy Connection have observing forums that often contain a gold mine of informative reports: written so beautifully that one can only be sad that there aren't more astronomy magazines in print: surely there would be no dearth of skilled deep-sky columnists to fill their pages. Objects that were never mentioned by Walter Scott Houston are now "standards" to be sought by every observer. And in the high-end forums, such as the Yahoo Planetary Nebula group, observations are being done with 17 to 24 inch, and even larger, scopes that are tracking down the faintest of such items: things that are so tenuous as to be hard to photograph!
On the other hand, there is also a reactionary crowd. Often when I look at their posts for clues to where they live and observe, I find that they are near urban centers, in low elevations, and/or in cloudy realms: they may indeed be excellent observers, and do travel occasionally to dark sky sites; but their day-in, day-out astronomy is hampered by suboptimal conditions. But human intelligence and skill being widespread, they are no less clever and capable than the elite observers who have the benefit of fabulous weather, dark skies, and top conditions all the time. One can only base one's opinions on practical experience: so there is no wonder that this second group of persons -- just as sincere, focused, and dedicated as any other -- will look with reasonable skepticism on experiences that they haven't had. Thus, "You DID NOT see that" becomes a frequent admonishment.
But, I don't want to give the impression that such 'warnings' are irrational or not fact-based. They do have good, solid reasons for their opinions. There are numerous ways in which less-experienced observers can make mistakes and THINK they have seen something that wasn't quite accurately perceived, or understood. These are:
• Stars being mistaken for nebulosity: Below a certain angular diameter, point sources of light, especially if crowded closely together, will seem to "merge" and become one luminous mass. Beware of being misled by this! TEST your observation of nebulosity by using several magnifications, low and wide fields, and -- if possible -- confirm with another telescope altogether.
• Almost every optical instrument has some light scatter: So, be aware of the background light smearing artifacts in your OWN telescope. Test it, and try isolated stars over a range of magnitudes. If your mirrors become horribly dirty, the scattter will increase (but, on the other hand, incompetent cleaning techniques will scratch the reflective coatings and increase the problem, so sometimes the 'cure' can be worse than the 'disease'.) And, be sure to check all your eyepieces for evidence of internal reflections.
• Know your own visual limiting magnitude with stars, other objects: If possible, print out some "deep" charts that go down to 15th or 16th magnitude; mark the pertinent stars' brightness and try to determine which ones you can see; do this over several regions of the sky, so that you can use one near the zenith at the time of each test. You must use high power for the faintest ones: the calculations that will guide you are found here. For those who don't want to do the math, it can be generally summarized as requiring the highest power concurrent with your scope's resolution, allowing for the current sky steadiness. I find that I can get to the limit of my visual ability with my C-11 by employing magnifications of 466x and above; sometimes I've gone to 700x or higher to see certain details like faint stars in the center of planetary nebulae. Don't expect to get to YOUR limit with low or medium power. It's harder to estimate your visual threshold with 'extended objects' like nebulae and galaxies; probably the most practical way -- though it's time consuming -- is just to observe dozens to hundreds of the faintest possible ones, and to compare your observations with those of "experts". Smaller, more discrete and homogeneous objects are probably better for this purpose than complex, huge ones. And, of course, extended objects don't necessarily require, or even benefit by, high power: use an appropriate exit pupil in order to gather the needed light. You will learn how to do this when you have come to understand the appropriate magnification for getting the best contrast and detail on extended objects of varying angular diameters.
• Use Filters Cautiously and Wisely: Apparently so many people are now "seeing" faint nebulae that were once thought supremely challenging that the 'reactionaries' have decided that many of the observing reports are spurious; and they blame filters. Allegedly, filters in the hands of beginners are often causing a misperception of "nebulosity that isn't there." Even in the hands of some elite, experienced observers, there have been instances of certain incredibly faint nebulae being reportedly spotted -- which turned out to be objects that were mistakenly plotted years ago, based on faint smudges on one set of the Palomar Sky Survey plates. In a few cases, these nebulae did NOT turn up in the later series of survey plates done in Australia; and don't show up in digital pictures. One or two persons have been "embarrassed" when their observations of nonexistent faint planetaries were debunked, not very respectfully. I personally don't think this is as widespread a problem as has been suggested, and have done my own experiments, which I have related in my article on using filters. For the moment, I'd say that one should always try to confirm nebulae by using (1) no filter at all; (2) different magnifications and alternative eyepieces; and (3) different filters. For instance: both the LPR and UHC type filters will enhance virtually all nebulae, at least to some extent. Often, nebulae that are supposed to be largely HII regions -- consequently enhanceable only by the UHC filter, which diminishes most wavelengths other than the fainter H-beta greenish light that is a secondary component of ionized hydrogen nebulae -- will be enhanced as well by the OIII filter (perhaps because there are also other wavelengths in the nebula, or at least by darkening the sky background to a greater extent.) So don't be afraid to try "inappropriate" filters.
• Be somewhat cautious of "boundary" observations: By this, I mean seeing those things that are right at your very threshold of perception. It is helpful to try to repeat them later. Go to a different object; come back again and see if it's still visible. Try another night. Try a different scope that might have even more light gathering. Try a very wide variety of magnifications. Use alternative methods to see how wide the conditions are that will still allow the object to be detected: the more, the better. Of course, in some cases you may indeed find only ONE special combination of exit pupil and filter to work...but you can't be sure until you've tried others. However, don't DISCOUNT those observations, even if they are somewhat tentative. You COULD be entirely right! Your first impression, if gathered intelligently and not by making some obvious blunder, could very well be perfectly sound. However, most other people will only start having confidence in them if (a) you can report a wide variety of tests confirming your results; and (b) if THEY too can do it. You probably should not worry very much if these observers are not capable of repeating your experience, though, if they don't have access to the same conditions that enabled your achievement. But, on the other hand, if you are observing in mucky, moist, low elevation, light polluted skies and see something that people working for year after year in the high desert or in Spain or Hawaii haven't EVER seen... then you really should go back and rethink your experiment, and do it again.
Now, presuming that you are a skilled, experienced, sincere, and honest observer and chronicler, I wouldn't be in the crowd that would jump all over your reports and throw cold water on them. But, we are all human and therefore are prone to make a mistake from time to time: no shame in that. Sooner or later, if what you've done is REAL, somebody else will do it, too.
Saturday 27 January 2007: Copyright (c) 2007, Stephen R. Waldee - All Rights Reserved
In Praise of Cheap Eyepieces (sort of...)
Apologies for the clumsy title; but despite its grammatical crudeness, this statement is exactly what I intended to say. For, cheap eyepieces (in other words, those models costing less than a hundred bucks apiece) are found in profusion in my own accessory case, despite the fact that I own at least one 'respectable', mildly expensive telescope, with excellent optics. Why?
The reason that I have cheap oculars is that I have a positive aversion to spending as much on one, as a good, useful research telescope can cost. With my 10" Orion Dob, which sold for $529 when I bought it nearly two years ago (just days after the price went up from $499: drat!) I can see many objects that eluded me when I owned an 8 inch instrument that I'd slaved over for nearly a decade, and that had a Zambuto primary and enhanced high reflectance overcoatings. Despite the superiority of almost every single component in that telescope, compared to the Orion store-bought model, I could not see galaxies and nebulae below a certain dimness: things that my friends would easily sweep up in their huge Dobs. Nor was the light gathering sufficient to see faint c.14th-15th magnitude central stars in planetary nebulae; and the optimal resolution on (say) Saturn or Mars did not QUITE touch the experiences I'd had with a previous 10 inch telescope. There was nothing wrong with it; far from it! The only drawback was the inherent limitation of that size of aperture.
"Perfection" in a mirror -- measured only as a parameter concerning its parabolic figure -- is not quite the same thing as "satisfaction achieved" during observing sessions (especially when, nearby, my friend Rich Page's AstroPhysics StarFire 7" APO stood in its stately magnificence, almost always delivering star images in globulars and open clusters that were more aesthetically pleasing than those in my 8" f/5.2 combination photographic- visual reflector, even with my TV Paracorr coma corrector.) I reckoned that if I HAD to put up with Newtonian coma and imperfect off-axis stars, there had better be another payoff: sheer light gathering power. And I "ran up against a wall' with that 8 inch scope after a solid decade of going after the boundaries of its visual performance.
So, starting all over again in 2005, I acquired a C-11 computer driven scope (to relieve me of some of the drudgery of finding faint, obscure objects that are hard to star-hop to), and a 10 inch "backup" cheap Dob. For the Celestron scope, I purchased some fairly costly eyepieces that, with tax, JUST exceeded $100 apiece: several Orion "Lanthanums" (which I was told were actually made by Vixen and would deliver the performance of their current LV line; and they indeed do that.) But for the Dob, I started on the "low" end. It came with a rather mediocre pair of Plössls, a 25mm and a 10. The 25 had rather poor contrast, so I converted it into a cross-hair eyepiece by gluing in some wires near the field lens: it helps me align my Telrad and optical finders. The 10mm just sits somewhere in my case, underneath my other eyepieces; it isn't exactly bad, but has poor eye relief. It is a sad and sorry diminishment of the 'space walk' effect I used to get with an old original TeleVue 9mm Nagler that I sold with my Zambuto-equipped scope.
Those eyepieces kept me going for a few months but I had to increase my window of extremes, at high and low power. And, that's where one is tempted to spend some real MONEY. My dealer was only too happy to direct me to a series of high end oculars that culminated in one stupendous device that weighed several pounds, and which cost considerably more than my 10" aperture telescope. It would probably, in fact, disrupt the optical tube's balance! But, it might likely correct the coma in my "fast" parabolic mirror, and give me that 'space walk' experience again. (I shudder to think about it... with tax, nearly sssseven hhhundred ddddollars...!) I did not even allow the salesman to take it out of the display case and try to show how it would look in the same model telescope, through the big showroom picture window. Why bother? My feelings of guilt and revulsion were too great to allow it. SURE... I'd like it; there was no doubt of that. I'd like any number of things I won't experience in life; we can all draw up our own private (not necessarily very polite) lists of such phenomena.
But my concern has been, since getting my new instruments in 2005, to do research. And one thing I am not researching, while using my scopes, is the degree to which my nervous system quivers with aesthetic thrills. I got plenty of those, looking at hundreds of objects as I bobbed about in the background while Rich Page used his StarFire, allowing me a chance to view his delicious sights when he'd had his fill of each one. I had, in fact, turned down an opportunity of buying one of those instruments, used, when a friend offered to sell me one for a 'paltry' $4,000: it was just too heavy and burdensome for me at the time, and probably still is even now that I have a bigger car and more time on my hands.
And, when I was the Product Development Coordinator for Orion Telescopes, back in the mid and late 1980s, I had the chance to test numerous sample oculars that were under consideration. I can well remember that in a carefully controlled test, my acquaintances and I did repeatably notice that those 8 and 9 element high end, super wide field eyepieces -- not just ONE familiar brand, but at least three different makes -- all had significant light loss. Yes: extremely faint and small angular diameter deep sky objects often looked brighter and consequently somewhat more detailed in CHEAP eyepieces that had (say) 4 elements: good quality Plössls made in Japan that, I'm sorry to say, nobody sells any more. In particular, I remember that my now-obsolete and unavailable Meade 12.5 mm and 20 mm "Research Grade" Erfles gave shockingly brighter images than some of the door-stop eyepieces that the big-Dob users lust after.
Perhaps this is not significant when you have an 18" mirror. Frankly, the optics in my own 17.5" Coulter Dob had been so appallingly bad and fuzzy that not even somebody's borrowed high end eyepiece could help much: I actually gave that scope away to my friend Ron Wood after years of fiddling with it. As an Orion employee I had managed to acquire a couple of Naglers, benefiting from an opportunity to make an employee purchase for use in my testing projects. They were wonderful, but I kept falling back on my cheap ones for "difficult" observations. Once, I spent most of the two days of a weekend in the company of the great man Al Nagler himself, and was given the treat of his private "showing" to demonstrate the superiority of his eyepieces when used in a high end TV scope: one could immediately see, for instance, that the flat perfect focus, the incredibly elegant wide field, and the splendid sense of "freedom" that made them easy to use, reducing eye strain, were palpably true. But, somehow, those things were NOT supremely important... to me.
So, rather than buy, say, ONE of these magnificent, fully worthy, devices a year, I decided to get several cheap ones made in the Orient in a variety of countries (including the big, bad one that we all fear at least a little bit.) I did find that some of them had noticeable deficiencies: for instance, my Orion "Expanses" in the 15 and 20 mm focal lengths showed lots of coma in my 10" and 4" fast reflectors, the 20 in particular being a huge disappointment; but it worked OK in my f/8 refractor. The 9 and 6 Expanse are much better in that regard, having -- I've been told -- a built in Barlow element. But the 6 Expanse is JUST slightly fuzzier than my cheap Orion "Explorer" Plössl that came free with one of my scopes; but the Explorer 6 is somewhat dimmer, not having the best possible coatings. The big disappointment was an impulse purchase I made, when I needed something for very high power viewing: an Orion "Epic" 3.7 mm 'ED Glass' eyepiece, which turned out to have quite irritating internal reflections, rendering it almost useless on the Moon, planets, or bright stars. My solution was to disassemble it; add some flocking paper and a bit of black paint, and to coat the edges of the elements with the ink from a black felt marker; that helped but did not entirely solve the problem: if there is any chance of reflections obscuring or confusing a critical observation, I use an equivalent magnification obtained with another eyepiece, and a Barlow. So, when it came time to get a better eyepiece in the 20 mm range, I chose not an Epic but instead an Orion "Stratus" model (costing, it must be admitted, over a hundred dollars -- but well worth it, and completely satisfying: a wonderful device!)
I do little solar system observing, none of my various telescopes being optimally perfect for the task. So rather than entering into the "Brandon vs. Pentax vs. Abbe ortho" debate, I merely bought one Barlow and let it go at that.
I haven't really satisfactorily grappled with the "low power" issue yet. My own pupil no longer opens to 7 mm, as it did as late as my forties. It's somewhere around 5 mm now. I can use a 32 mm eyepiece in my 10" and soon intend to upgrade from a 1.25-inch barrel 32 mm Orion "Sirius" Plössl, to a 2-inch model. For my C-11 I purchased a 5-element (probably Erfle like) 42 mm oriental eyepiece that I got at a clearance sale; it's bright but has nasty star images off axis. In the back of my mind I have an intent to get at least one "mid price" model that is right on the border of a hundred bucks in the 30-32 mm focal length range. But, not one of those 9 element models that cost more than my Dob; nor even that certain highly-rated Chinese knock-off, in the $300 price range, that I'd have to order by mail.
Can I therefore POSSIBLY do any "good" astronomical observing with this bunch o'cheap oculars? As Rummy might have said, "You bet!" For I have definitely achieved the goal I was after when upgrading from an 8 inch (optically spectacular) reflector, to units that had 2 and 3 inches more aperture. The ultimate "star sharpness across a huge field" is not important when one is seeking 14th-15th-16th magnitude galaxies, or tiny 1-arcminute faint planetaries. These are the objects that are now most important TO ME.
Still, I have to admit that once in a while I get a bit frustrated and wish that the busy little bees on the other side of the Pacific rim who are making all those new cheap and affordable optical gadgets would put just a LITTLE bit more effort into the task: add more internal baffling, better coatings, and lens edge blackening, and do a more consistent job of cutting threads for screw-on filters. You can buy eyepieces that have been made that way -- my Orion Lanthanum models, and my Ultrascopic 25 mm, have spectacular contrast and sharpness and freedom from reflections -- but some of them are now discontinued; other makes of this quality are still available. But you just can't buy them in the "hundred dollar and under" category.
Furthermore, those 8 or 9 element expensive eyepieces can produce uniquely perfect images of certain things, particularly Milky Way star fields and open clusters. Would you like to see both of the "Double Cluster" components in one eyepiece field, perfectly sharp and clear, and with delicate registration of color differences? If so, get one! And if your budget will allow you to purchase such products, they do deliver on their promised performance: the better the scope, the better they look. (And, yes, Al: all those great products of yours mentioned above are certainly "Trademarked by TeleVue Optics, Incorporated, all rights reserved," yada-yada: so,™,™,™, and ™; and that goes for Orion, too.)
UPDATE: 2 new eyepieces. On February 15, 2007, I purchased a new 2" barrel, 32 mm focal length Orion "Q-70" eyepiece, to get a large exit pupil and wide field in my Orion SkyQuest 10" Dob. My first test of the ocular is quite encouraging: it had a flatter field than I had expected with such a "fast" scope, producing reasonably sharp star images over about 75% of the field, although my eye (at lowest power) seems to create rather astigmatic stars with almost any telescope. The filter thread was smooth, and fitted my Orion UltraBlock filter perfectly. The barrel diameter was also a comfortable fit with the new Orion Crayford focuser; but I must warn readers that the eyepiece MUST be moved out about 1/4 to 3/8 inch away from the top of the focuser at full extension, to get perfect focus at infinity with this scope: a small parfocal ring might be the solution, if you can make one for it easily. To read my further comments, which I posted to the sci.astro.amateur newsgroup, click here. My latest new ocular, obtained in June of 2007, filled a magnification "hole" in my collection: an 11 mm ultra-wide (80° apparent field) Knight-Owl eyepiece, which performs beautifully in my high focal ratio scopes (120mm f/8 refractor, 11" f/10 SCT) with a superb, high contrast, flat field with sharp focus to the edge. In my very "fast" f/4 reflector, though, the ocular is sharp only in the exact center of the field, but -- luckily -- in my 10" f/4.7 Dob, the usable field is at least twice as wide, giving a sharply focused view over about 60 to 65 degrees of the 80 degree apparent field. I agree with most of this review of the eyepiece, based on a unit obtained from China in its original maker's name Zhitong, except that to my eye, the field is slightly wider than the claimed 76 degrees. But the ocular has fantastically sharp central-field focus, no astigmatism, and extremely high contrast: a pleasure to use, and a huge bargain if your scope's focal ratio is appropriate.
UPDATE: I have added an article discussing the good and bad points of my eyepieces, in some detail, which you may read here in my new astro-blog.
Does the author have enough eyepieces and filters? "You Bet!" as Rummy would say... but he still believes he needs one more...
Wednesday 20 June 2007: Copyright (c) 2007, Stephen R. Waldee - All Rights Reserved
Competitiveness, and Amateur Astronomy
Maybe I've studied too much biology and psychology for my own good, but I seem to notice pretty well when I'm being subjected to some kind of pressure by another amateur astronomer (or perceive that a certain person isn't very easy-going about their hobby activities.) We, as a species, are no less affected by the biological imperative toward competition than members of rival ant colonies: just look at today's headlines for proof of this. In much more subtle ways, competitiveness -- directed not at the essential need for survival or propagation -- becomes sublimated in our modern, comfortable lives into a new form. Look at newsgroups and forum discussions, and you'll see its not very subtle manifestation: we all seem to be impelled to CHANGE THE MINDS of other people; convince them we're right, and that they're wrong. And some of us crave distinction, and use this need -- which psychologists might often diagnose as being unhealthy insecurity -- to "achieve" something, most specifically: something some other person CAN'T do, or HASN'T done.
How healthy is your psychological life as an amateur astronomer? (Most of my readers, if they are like so many amateurs I've encountered in the past, will have by now become greatly "turned off" by this discussion, derisively dismissing it as "feel good drivel" and "psychobabble." Are you really so sure you are absolutely correct about this?) Has your competitive drive been turned toward personal improvement, growth, education, and gaining wisdom -- or is it directed against some person or persons you've resented, argued with, or disaproved of, in your prior pursuit of the hobby? After reading many articles, reviews, and posts by amateur astronomers -- and watching the jockeying for prominence that sometimes goes on at astronomy club meetings and star parties -- I'd suspect that a LOT of us are misdirecting this competitive impulse.
By no means am I claiming that competition is NOT good for us. Up to a point, it helps individuals, families, groups, and even nations. Beyond a certain point -- one that is definitely undefinable and "in the eye of the beholder" -- it harms. Growth of any body of knowledge of any important human enterprise is fueled by competition, its very engine. Ludwig van Beethoven once became very hurt and shamed by the haughty response of his mentor and teacher Joseph Haydn. When the young composer courteously praised the older man's new oratorio, extolling its mastery, Haydn replied, it is said, with somewhat feigned indifference, replying laconically, "Yes, I am the master -- and likely to remain so." One might then look at the nine symphonies Beethoven subsequently wrote, breaking every rule taught by Haydn and greatly widening the boundaries of the form, as his competitive reply ("We'll see who is the master!") The world is better for this youthful, arrogant competitive drive of Beethoven, and lucky that there hadn't been a modern psychiatrist practicing in the Vienna of 1800, to have counseled Beethoven to "sublimate his resentment" and take a Prozac...
Indeed, some of the greatest achievers in modern astronomy have been... err, somewhat mentally, or at least psychologically, impaired and unhealthy. George Ellery Hale was subject to hallucinations: a little mystical creature would appear on his shoulder. He withdrew from the public, working in solitude lest this compulsion break out and embarrass him in front of others. Donald Osterbrock wrote a long monograph on the relationships that developed at Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton in its early days, when the thoroughly odious, insufferable Professor Holden was the first director: he and the great astrophotographer and discoverer Edward Barnard went quickly from having a teacher-pupil relationship, to an open mutual loathing, driving Barnard -- whom Osterbrock diagnosed as being most probably "neurotic" -- to break out into almost hysterical fits of ranting and raving against his 'enemy'. (Barnard recovered his equanimity when George Hale rescued him, and perhaps treated him with somewhat exaggerated courtesy and deference, knowing of his propensity to be easily slighted.) Edwin Hubble made up stories about his earlier life, pretending to be a greater athlete than he really was, and affecting an accent that was thoroughly bogus. Yet, the somewhat hyperbolic Hubble showed his sincerity and generosity when he went out of his way to mentor and nurture the scientific leanings of his assistant Milton Humason, a former mule driver and roustabout with a hidden, undeveloped, unsuspected genius.
I once formulated a very tentative speculation, in fact -- after my long study of the rise of "big science" in 20th century astronomy, where the center of gravity shifted in America from Harvard to southern California -- that not only personalities but also political differences had motivated some of the competitiveness: to wit, that the "liberal" Harlow Shapley and his Harvard colleagues lost out to the "conservatives" associated with the Carnegie Institution and California gubernatorial and senatorial politics. I once took Don Osterbrock -- an expert in the field of astronomical history -- aside at a meeting, and more-or-less whispered this idea of mine into his ear. "Preposterous!" was his immediate reply, with a wave of the hand. Yet, considering the trouble that Shapley got into with HUAC and other investigations during the McCarthy period, can one be so certain? Science, on the collegial level of large organizations, schools of thought, and projects to build giant new institutions and machines, is quite significantly driven by political alliances.
But getting back down to the relatively inconsequential level of "amateurs and their little ideas", at least as represented by the debates that occur on forums, it seems obvious that more than a few of us are driven to give comments most often in REACTION to what somebody else says. Relatively few people START discussions, and when they do, it's most likely to ask a question. Immediately there will come a few answers, probably well formulated and based on experience and serious judgment. But, then the fun begins. The disagreements with ANY point of view, be it orthodox, logical, practical, fact-based or not, flow like beer at a tail-gate party. Where were these people, BEFORE the subject was brought up? Well, they were lurking in the background, not deigning to offer an original thought or to bring up something new. Were their minds in neutral, triggered into action only by certain ideas -- or do they just relish being competitive, argumentative, iconoclastic, or condescendingly superior?
I just found out from a friend that there is now a forum thread about "object count". Persons are contributing to this with their totals of sightings of celestial objects, no doubt with a certain pride of accomplishment -- understandable! -- but also probably driven to do so with the intent of showing off a bit. I have not yet looked into the discussion, and don't particularly care about doing so. I know of a couple of local SF bay area astronomers who have, in fact, made a point of scientifically and thoroughly documenting all their observing, and who have accumulated many thousands of observations, all well described. If either one of them tallied up a number, you could "take it to the bank": it would represent something real. How do any of us know, however, if even ONE single person who entered into this competitive discussion was sincere, unless we had personal knowledge outside the discussion group? Since that's the case, why bother to look at their claims. Nothing can be verified; and even if true, it might be argued that sheer numbers of observations are not equivalent to knowing a subject in depth. And, minds of individuals work very differently. George Alcock, the great British comet and nova hunter, is said to have memorized the positions and character of 30,000 stars. He was, therefore, a phenom and his productivity naturally flowed from this supra-ordinary skill. Who amongst us can do that? If not, is pursuing amateur observing pointless? Of course not!
Therefore, I'd propose that it is not particularly important to strive to be the "foremost Schmidt- Cassegrain guru", the "leading filter maven", the "only bagger of all the Abells", or the "eagle-eyed observer of the faintest objects", but rather one who has competed against the obstacles: the personal ones like laziness, apathy, or the intimidated feeling that "others can do this better than I can, so why try?" Also one must compete against the weather and the constantly changing sky conditions; against the frustrating tendency of our equipment to go 'blooey' and foil our efforts, or to let us down when we strive to achieve some particular nuance; and against the light pollution that will probably NEVER get any less, but go in only one direction in the future: to become worse than it is at present. A lesson that might be learned from the great educator Don Osterbrock, whom I wrote about earlier on these pages, is to be generous to others: because it advances us all, which is always better than just advancing ONE.
Tuesday 30 January 2007: Copyright (c) 2007, Stephen R. Waldee - All Rights Reserved
Know Your "Equipment"
Visual astronomers: how much attention have you paid to... your eyes? When I read the diversity of reports on the Net about any given celestial object, I wonder if there is any way we can add a control factor to make them more consistent? For, it seems to me that with the increased opportunity to share information easily and quickly that the Internet has afforded all of us, that there isn't very much of a consensus opinion about almost any specific item. What can an observer expect in a new unknown object, based on the previous impressions of others?
Well: not much. Not only is there an astounding variation of equipment being used, but also the experience level, and observing conditions, are incredibly diverse. Furthermore, I suggest that one of the least investigated parameters of individual observers is the performance of their own EYES.
I first began to suspect this when the subject came up in a forum about what color of light to use for illuminating star charts. I've always used red light, dating back to the 1960s when I had my first chances to see deep-sky objects with a friend's 6 inch aperture Newtonian. He demonstrated to me his red filtered incandescent flashlight, and the concept stuck with me from that time forward; I never gave it another thought. But, in a usenet discussion I saw last year, several apparently very skilled observers and astrophotographers insisted that either green, or VERY dim white, light was superior, reducing "night myopia" caused by "the reduced accommodation distance of long wavelength light" (accomodation in this context being defined as "ability to focus on objects at near distances.")
I tried their suggestions. Total failure! For while it is indeed easier to see very fine black against white printing with faint white, than with faint red, light, one's dark adaptation is PROFOUNDLY affected. And WHO gave me that advice? Well: it was an astrophotographer, whose only need was to read a chart, find a guide star, and set the equipment for an exposure. Owning an observatory with tens of thousands of dollars worth of imaging equipment, he does not take out portable scopes to try to discern sixteenth-magnitude galaxies by eye. SOME dark adaptation is necessary for him to do his imaging, but not very much; and not to the level that I have to achieve to be able, for instance, to see the Horsehead nebula (as I've done at least forty times over the years.)
I would imagine, then, that my astrophotographer colleague and I would have very different visual impressions of objects seen in our respective instruments under our expected personal circumstances. I might be able to see "deeper" with my own 11 inch telescope, or even my 10 inch, than he could do, if his eyes are constantly 'biased' by faint white light while he reads his documents and settings.
What other variations are to be expected? For one: age. I simply cannot see colors through my telescopes the way I used to do. The phenomenal color variation in the bright stars of the Double Cluster, which used to impress me when I viewed with a 4-inch scope, are not discernible to me now even in my 10-incher. Back in 1993, I wrote this for my "Eyepiece" program's description of M37:
One of the author's joys to observe in the fall and winter! M37
is beautifully resolved as a broad expanse of faint stars in an 80
millimeter scope, but really shines in apertures of 5 inches or larger.
Then, a red giant star near the center is bright enough to the eye to
register its color in contrast to the pale white surrounding stars.
I looked at M37 a few weeks ago. There was almost no 'red star' even with the light- gathering power of my 10 inch reflector! Fifteen years' time have taken their toll on my lens, cornea, and retina. (Yet, I can still see faint objects, and constantly confirm this in my tests to discern stellar limiting magnitude with highly magnified views with my scopes, having gone to about 16.5 with my 11 inch, and 15.9 or so with my 10 inch instruments on stars, and at least once having confirmed, repeatedly, a small diameter galaxy rated at 16.4 visual magnitude with my C-11.)
On the night of February 16, 2007, I was scanning throught the objects in the little-observed (for northerners, that is) constellation of Lepus, aided by a print-out I'd made of Tom Trusock's article. I was immediately struck by the significant differences between my impressions, and Tom's, of the planetary nebula IC-418. He wrote, "At low powers this one is decidedly stellar. One thing that might help you pick it out - in my opinion, it does bear that fairly distinctive planetary azure. In larger scopes, and at higher powers, some users have reported seeing some pink in the nebula."
The first deviation from his experience is that to me, even the very lowest practical magnification I could use with my 10 inch scope -- 37.5x, with an exit pupil of 6.8 mm -- caused IC-418 to look distinctly fuzzy, and definitely different from stars in the field. I had no recollection of any prior viewing of the nebula (if I had seen it, surely the experience would have been back in the 1990s, a long time ago.) I immediately identified what I thought was the nebula, at low power, by its non-stellar nature. Putting in my OIII filter, I determined that this 'fuzzy star' was the only object in the field that did not significantly darken: the surest sign that you have found a planetary nebula. As I went up in magnification, the non-stellar character became even more apparent: at each step of increased power, the edges became more vague; the disk more obvious; the center less lacking in any distinct brightness peak.
Second: I was surprised -- shocked, actually -- to detect COLOR! It is absolutely rare, and almost unprecedented for me, now (closer in age to being objectively "old" than I'd care to admit) to see color in a telescopic view. IC-418 was BLUISH. Not perhaps quite like the "Blue Snowball" planetary (NGC-7662) and its richly actinic character. The Lepus planetary seemed to me to be rather turquoise in hue, not Tom's "azure" (defined by Wikipedia as being "about halfway between blue and cyan, which resembles the sky on a bright, clear day.") Azure was not at all the shade of color that IC-418 seemed to me to possess: to my eye it was much more like "a slightly greenish shade of cyan" (again, Wikipedia, the definition for the color of turquoise.) Surely it is hard to determine what either Tom or I are actually seeing, individually, from these attempts to fit a word to our neurophysical impression. Even so, there may not be much actual difference of opinion; if you take our words literally, assuming that they mean EXACTLY the same thing to each observer, there is only a slight difference in hue, probably impossible to quantify without having both persons standing together in front of a color chart and making comparative observations -- but, would these impressions accurately match those achieved at the telescope, by now only somewhat vaguely recalled? Probably not...
What amazed me more than this very slight difference of perception between Tom and myself were the widely varied reports given in the Cloudy Nights forum discussion of his column topics. One observer said that IC-418 was "invariably pink/orange in my 16" if I see colour, even at fairly high powers (250x), and *especially* with direct vision. It's a bit bizarre as it changes colour: with averted vision, it's usually a fairly uniform gray disk, shaped like a gooseberry, sometimes with hints of planetary blue green, and with the central star hidden by the disk. Looking at it in more direct vision it becomes pink-orange, with the central star very visible and surrounded by something that looks more like a hollow shell." Another averred that "too high a power can make the faint red color around the outside tend to go away. In my 10 inch, the red is occasionally visible at around 60x, but is better seen at between 90x and 120x. By 141x, the red color is almost invisible, although the nebula itself shows more detail (basically a somewhat annular disk with a fairly easy 10th magnitude central star). The brighter middle portion is more of the standard bluish-green hue, and what red is there is confined mainly to the outermost rim of the object."
I then looked for some other reports, and found that the very skilled observer Greg Crinklaw has created a nice webpage article about viewing IC-418, found here. He includes a Hubble picture, showing the distribution of color wavelengths, with red/orange in the outer shell and a brilliant blue in the nebulosity of an inner shell surrounding a reddish (?) star. Greg commented about his own observation, with an 18" scope: "Gave impression of intense color -- only I could not tell what color it was!" An Australian observer, who was fortunate to have the object high overhead, commented in a post to the IAAC that he and an acquaintance had "observed this Planetary on a number occasions over the last couple of years with a 20cm SCT and a 40cm truss Dobsonion and in all the observations of this object have had strong red colouring." In another post to the same forum, the object was dubbed the "Raspberry Planetary" due to its distinctive hue, and references were given to other observations detecting color, even with a 4 inch telescope. BUT... the same article quotes the experienced PN observer Yann Pothier, whose reports of faint planetaries are very useful, careful, and accurate references, as finding that there was no reddish color, using either 4.25" or 17.5" scopes, although pink was detected with a 22" scope. In that particular post, Yann observes that
"no doubt, this reddish color is caused by the faint OIII and Hbeta fluxes compared to Halpha's: Ha = 4 x Hb..."
During my little tour of Lepus that evening, I spent a long time on the putative color of IC-418, trying a large variety of magnifications. I found that at lowest power, there was little or no color; it increased to distinct visibility -- being very different from nearby stars -- when I raised the magnification from 37.5x to 80x, and became most obvious at 133x. Above that, the color was lost and the planetary became merely pale grey (of course, no filter at all was being employed for these tests.) The results were fairly consistent with what I would have expected by considering the diameter of the object -- 14 by 11 arcseconds -- and the varying exit pupil size. At the lowest power, the planetary was indeed just a small, bright speck of light: a little distinct from the stars of the region by its lack of a defined stellar Airy disk. But the narrow diameter of this speck was just too small to register -- on MY retina, at least -- as having a definitive color; or even ANY color at all. (In Greg's much more powerful 18 inch aperture scope, with more than three times the light gathering of my 10 inch, the image of the planetary would be MUCH brighter, perhaps starting to register on the eye/brain's photopic vision even if the disk size was not greatly enlarged by magnification.) But, when I increased the size of the planetary's disk, at a certain point the color radiation became apparent to me: the weaker H-beta wavelength to which my eye is much more sensitive than the stronger H-alpha.
Looking back over the years to my previous observations of M-42 (which strongly radiates H-alpha in large proportion) I find that I could detect pinkish color using a high efficiency, high reflectance 8" scope, back in the late 1980s when I was doing my studies of the Horsehead nebula. Yet, on the same night I observed IC-418 recently, I found NO TRACE of that hue, using my 10" scope. If a color was perceived at all, even at 37.5x with a maximum exit pupil, it was the palest, weakest blue-green imaginable.
On this same occasion, I tested my TWO eyes on Saturn. The seeing was excellent, and the planet's Cassini division was a crisply-resolved band, with even a trace of radial irregularity perceived in the rings that suggested other divisions, just below resolvability. Many moons were visible in the region of the planet (too many to try to count); and the planetary disk was delicately colored pale gold -- with my RIGHT eye, that is. With my left eye, Saturn was pure white. I can remember this color perception difference all the way back to childhood, more than half a century ago, when I first discovered it as a youngster. Of course, during the day I do see color with either eye; but the left eye is paler, as though the "saturation control" was turned down a bit. That phenomenon has continued to be evident over the decades, during comparative daytime testing that I've done, covering one eye and then the other. I imagine that the degree of difference has changed even more in the weakest daytime light -- or in viewing the almost blinding image of Saturn with a 10" scope, when photopic vision comes into play -- so that now my left eye has a "black and white" telescopic view of the cosmos, like a monochrome photograph. If I live long enough, and stay sharp eyed and physically able to view into my eighties, as did Walter Scott Houston, will my right eye take on a "black and white" view of the planets, too, as the color sensitivity diminishes even more?
Another thing that I have tested, rather thoroughly, is my perception of faint fuzzy objects like galaxies and nebulae at the absolute threshold of perception, alternating between left and right eye. The latter, my preference for telescopic viewing, has a "smooth" perception of the background of a highly magnified region of space. I can sometimes see varying luminance as if I were either detecting faint galactic glow, dust, unresolved and faint stars, or just irregular skyglow: but this "luminous ground" (in Edward E. Barnard's very apt phrase) is generally smooth. With my left eye, it is perceived 'underneath' a constant speckling of visual noise: almost like the varying pattern of movie film grain. This becomes even worse if I have left my eyepatch over my left eye, while viewing with my right eye for a long period of time. If I suddenly switch eyes at the telescope, my left eye has become fully dark adapted to the profoundest level, with so much visual noise grain apparent that any observation is distinctly unpleasant, and confusing (indeed, once I managed to induce this effect in both eyes, experimenting with breathing pure oxygen at a high elevation while trying to view the Horsehead.) I have to stare into the eyepiece for a few minutes until this diminishes, my eye adjusting to the faint light and losing some of its sensitivity: like the 'platform adjustment' of an automatic audio gain control ("AGC") of the type that I used to employ in my broadcast engineering to level out the variations of loud and soft in music.
I have to keep these differences in mind when trying to confirm the faintest observations of difficult nebulae and galaxies. Since I have two eyes, I use BOTH, alternating between my preferred right, and the seldom-used left. If I suspect that a perceived object is an illusion, I change eyes. Allowing for the "grain" and other differences in perception -- including focuser setting -- I try to make sure I can REALLY see the object in both eyes. This also gives me an opportunity to test the differences in the retinal region used for averted vision (as the left and right eye are oppositely complementary.)
No doubt if I had an 18" telescope, like many other advanced deep sky observers, I would not have to struggle quite as much to see the details of faint objects (but, is this quite true? I suppose I would merely shift DOWN and start working on objects that are a magnitude fainter, but equally difficult...)
From all the above knowledge I have of my own visual acuities and limitations, I have a very hard time, therefore, in knowing exactly how to benefit from the observations of others. I don't know much about the totality of what each person brings to a given experience (other than to draw some general conclusions after reading multitudes of their reports of many objects.) The more I read, in fact, the more variations I encounter: and the less I expect to be able to share any given experience of another observer.
You see: I really don't know their equipment!
Update, 2/27/04: My friend Sue French, Deep Sky Wonders columnist of Sky & Telescope, has just informed me that "The red in IC 418 looks turquoise to me with the Traveler [a four inch refractor scope]. With the 10-inch, I see shades of pink, red, or dusty rose. Some people even report pumpkin." And consulting forums I have come up with comparisons to strawberry and raspberry, too.
Sunday 18 February 2007: Copyright (c) 2007, Stephen R. Waldee - All Rights Reserved
My Mistakes and Failures
I was lucky, in a way, to start deep-sky observing in the middle 1870's -- oops! -- 1970s (just feels like the 1870s), before the Internet. For, if I had read such reports as this rather awesome job of describing the obscure planetary nebula NGC 4361, or this observation of Simeis 147, I would have felt like a dunce who would never get anywhere, and probably hadn't a chance of progressing to that point (have I...?)
I did not realize, then, that in twenty years I'd be posting reports to the Internet myself, such as this observation of the faint galaxy Leo 1 (which I recently re-cast as a webpage article, with illustrations, here.) It takes 'burning the midnight oil' -- literally. I have not kept track of the actual number of hours I have viewed deep sky objects at "my site" in the mountains south of San Jose, on private property; but I do have an accounting of all my automobile travel, necessary for tax purposes. The number of trips to that site, since I started observing there, corresponds from the seventies to the end of the eighties with the years I was a self-employed radio contract engineer, and I have made several HUNDRED trips to that area. If you multiply that by the hours of a typical observing session, it's thousands of hours just at that site: comparable to the time spent by a successful comet-hunter.
But, even so: for years I was a dabbler compared to my dedicated, better- organized observing companions Rich Page and Don Machholz. In fact, I wrote (with Ron Wood) the program "Eyepiece" in its original form, in the late 1980s, to make it easier for me to sell telescope equipment and do quick calculations on the spot for customers, who'd constantly ask about magnification and field of view. I did not have all that in my head until AFTER I had disciplined myself to structure the information and arrange it into working computer code (though, of course, I knew the basics of how to do the simple measurements of magnification.) When we finished our software program in commercial form, at last I became much more disciplined about calculating and memorizing the magnification, FOV, and exit pupil of all my oculars, in each scope: and in getting a proper feel for the best use of a nebular filter for objects of diverse size.
By the time I wrote the article about Leo 1, in 1997, I was able to take any star chart and telescope and find my way around the sky, and see what I set my mind to accomplish...almost.
But for those who haven't had twenty-plus years of experience, reading the web reports of innumerable sightings of obscure, challenging objects must cause consternation, a bit of awe, and perhaps (if one might admit it) a trace of envy or even resentment. WHEN do these guys (yes, almost always males, but not entirely, thank goodness!) have the time? Do they "have a life"? Do they have families, regular jobs, responsibilities? Or, do they just constantly "goof off" at deep sky parties, having spent all their money on optics, charts, software, cameras, etc.?
In my own case, regular observing has been pretty easy to accomplish since I was "weird" compared to most normal folks. I was self-employed; did not put in regular nine-to-five hours anywhere; wore a pager and did not absolutely HAVE to go to a workplace until a piece of equipment broke down and an emergency was declared. Otherwise, I'd show up at a radio station or transmitter building when I wanted to in order to perform routine work; or I'd produce radio programming at my own home studio, on my schedule. What a life! After I married Regina Roper, the San Jose piano teacher, we started up a small home "music school" that eventually serves from 30 to as many as 50 students a trimester; my work is often done when Regina is not actually teaching, allowing me to stay up all night if I like. This has been my fortune since about 1975: a schedule that I could arrange to my own tastes and inclinations.
One can then be self-indulgent and not worry about 7 am commute rush-hour traffic; dressing the part of a white-collar worker; mastering office politics. It's amazing how much astronomy you can get done, absent those demands!
But, I am still quite awed by the prodigious work of many other amateur astronomers. I say "work" intentionally, for I'm sure that to them, it IS work, but work they love to do! Perhaps it's not "work for pay"; but it's work, in the sense that one brings to the task of observing all the force of one's focus, intellect, energy, and dedication. For instance: here is a post about observing all the objects in the Index Catalogue. Jay Reynolds Freeman and Steve Gottlieb (two fellows who observe in the same Bay Area that I reside in) exchange their thoughts about "going for" all the objects in this famous compilation (which runs to 5,386 numbers):
Observing the IC?? Naaah
From: Steve Gottlieb (sgottlieb@No-Spam)
Date: Tue May 07 2002 - 18:41:15 MST
In a message dated 5/7/02, Jay Freeman writes:
>>
It's amazing how this stuff adds up. I use smaller apertures than
Steve Gottlieb does, so I have far, far, fewer detailed notes, but
as of the end of 2001, I had observed 6130 NGC objects, mostly
north of 42 south but including a few hundred further south. I
had also observed 576 IC objects...<<
I haven't had an interest to systematically observe IC objects as the
catalogue is really a heterogeneous group of objects distributed very
irregularly across the sky -- some are reasonably bright galaxies that
were missed by the Herschels (particularly in the southern sky) and later found
visually near the end of the 19th century, others are nearly stellar
planetaries, and a few are large, low surface brightness HII regions. But
huge numbers are clouds of faint galaxies discovered by Max Wolf (down the
roughly 17.5 magnitude) in the dawning era of astrophotography which I'm not
enough of a masochist to attempt.
Still, mostly by peering around NGC fields for over 20 years have netted 735
IC objects. Perhaps 10% of these are |