At around 10:00 PM on April 17th, I waited beside a railroad track that winds along the banks of the Susquehanna River in rural Pennsylvania. I had found a nook of open sky between trees and telephone wires, and in the darkness I could barely make out the glow of the Milky Way. I booted up a Dwarf 3 electronically assisted telescope. Readers will know that I’ve tried the EVScope 1 and 2, and then the Vespera 2. The Dwarf 3 is more compact than those telescopes, it’s much cheaper, and it promises comparable performance to the Vespera. I had to try it out.
 
As I waited, a distant rumbling intruded on my thoughts. It occurred to me that the rumbling might have started some time ago. The ground began to tremble, ever so slightly. And then a shaft of blinding light slashed through the night. I grabbed my telescope, halfway through its exposure, and ran. I made it to the front yard of my cottage, about 15 feet from the tracks, when a freight train thundered by. Car after car after car passed as I stood, gawking. Then it was gone, and darkness returned.

​It took me a while to regain the courage I needed to set up the telescope a second time. Since there was still no better place to observe than beside that railroad track, I tried again. I attempted two ten-minute exposures, one of Bode’s Galaxy (M81), the other of the M3 globular cluster. Both were high in the sky. I didn’t dare stay out any longer, and when I packed up, I counted myself lucky to have avoided a second train. These are the images that I acquired at such peril:

​Okay . . . nothing to write home about. I know for sure that it’s easy to improve some of the problems in this picture, namely the star trailing caused by inadequate tracking. But I also think that the small aperture of the Dwarf 3 – just 25 millimeters! – may add more noise to its images, and no doubt requires longer exposures to bring out subtle details in nebulae or galaxies. I was impressed by the Dwarf’s software, which is incredibly easy to use, but my first experience with the telescope underwhelmed me.
 
I had sold my Vespera to try the Dwarf 3, and now I can’t say I was very happy about the swap. Fortunately, I found a second-hand Vespera Pro on sale for a fair price. I decided to get that telescope, and sell the Dwarf, admittedly before I had a chance to experiment with that telescope’s full abilities.

​As you can see . . . there’s a difference. The Vespera is bulkier than the Dwarf but much smaller than the EVScope, and on some objects aperture does make a difference. A ten-minute exposure of the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51) in the light-polluted sky, for example, didn’t look quite as good as the images I’d acquired with my EVScope 2:

​And then there’s the setup time. The Dwarf and EVScope are ready to go within a minute or two after setup. The Vespera requires about five minutes. Then again, it tracks stars more effectively than the other telescopes, and it focuses automatically.  So, on most objects, I judge the Vespera Pro to be the best electronically assisted telescope on the market – and I’m not sure it’s close.
 
My plan now is to try the Vespera next month under the truly pitch-black skies of Riding Mountain National Park, Manitoba. With any luck, there won’t be much wildfire smoke in the atmosphere, and I won’t be attacked by a cougar or coyote.  We’ll see!

It's been a while, but my lack of new posts has a good cause: I finished my next book, and it's just about ready to debut later this year (October 28th, to be precise). The book tells - as my publisher says - "the untold story of how environmental change throughout the cosmos shaped human history." I hope it's a good read! It certainly took me long enough to write. And one interesting aspect of the book is that it draws not only on my research as an academic, but also on my experiences as an amateur astronomer - experiences I've chronicled in this blog. 

Another reason for my silence is that the weather has been pretty bad here in Washington, DC. Either it's been cloudy, or the atmosphere has been turbulent, or (lately) it's been smoky, owing to the fires in Canada. Now, on November 8th of last year, I did manage to step outside with my TSA 120 on a glorious night for astronomy. I wanted to write about that - until I was swamped with last-minute editing work. 

Had I had time to publish here in November, I might have had more to write. But I do still remember the look of the Galilean Moons that night. The seeing was so stable - and the TSA 120 is so good - that the moons resembled not points of light, but hard little discs, each with a different color. At a magnification of about 150x, I experienced the illusion that if I magnified just a bit more, I'd be able to see surface detail on a couple of those little moons. Unfortunately - as is typically the case here in DC - cranking the magnification beyond 200x did not produce a better view. 

A few months ago, I also experimented with a new "smart" telescope: the Dwarf 3. I intend to write about that at greater length in a forthcoming post, when I'll compare the Dwarf to the Vespera and EVScope. I'll say for now that I was nearly run over by a train in rural Pennsylvania while imaging M81 (Bode's Galaxy). 

In any case, a couple nights ago the wildfire smoke mostly drifted away, the atmosphere was mostly stable, and I stepped out with my TSA 120 to do one of the things I love most in life: exploring the infinitely complex landscapes of the Moon when our neighboring world is halfway illuminated. I set up my telescope in the courtyard of my building, and as I started peering through the eyepiece I could just hear a neighbor beginning to play soothing - and actually, slightly eerie - melodies on his acoustic guitar. It made for a perfect soundtrack as I worked my way from the enormous gash of Vallis Alpes in the Moon's northern hemisphere (it always looks to me like someone grazed the Moon with a giant knife) to the tidier and more diminutive straight line of Rupes Recta in the south. 

As usual, I took pictures by holding my iPhone up to my Delos eyepieces. I've become pretty good at holding my phone with a steady hand, but amateur astronomers know that, in any snapshot of the lunar surface, the inescapable undulation of the atmosphere tends to blur the fine details that are visible with the naked eye. So it is in the pictures, above. They may look pretty impressive - especially when you consider that I took them with an iPhone - but the view was actually that much better. Limitless detail, and endless complexity. 

One of my weaknesses is that I like to compare and rank things - it must be genetic, because my eight-year-old daughter has developed the same trait. It also seems to be a common affliction of amateur astronomers. Naturally, after having had a particular good observing session with the TSA 120, I began to consider how the telescope measures up to others I've tried - when it comes to lunar viewing, at least. 

In short: I think it measures up to anything I've used, and that includes the Mewlon 210, the TEC 140, and the APM 140. Actually, that might not be going far enough. On the Moon, aperture matters, of course; so does the overall optical quality. But two characteristics that really stand out are a lack of false color (a common affliction along the lunar limb in all but the finest apochromatic refractors) and crisp detail to the edge of the eyepiece (not usually a strong point of a catadioptric or Dall-Kirkham design).

This is where the TSA 120 excels. Any false color or softness in my pictures is an artifact of my iPhone camera. In reality, the view is totally color-free and sharp to the edge of the eyepiece. This is why I'd have to conclude that the TSA 120 might just be the best lunar telescope I've used. It's amazing to have so much capability in such a relatively light and compact package. 

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