Here in DC, it's hard to avoid thinking obsessively about the demoralizing news from eastern Europe. Yet the skies cleared recently, enough for an hour or two of late-night escapism. A few nights ago, I slipped out with the Takahashi. Transparency was really good but seeing was far worse than average, and since it was well below freezing I didn't want to stay out for long. Still, the FC-100DZ performs so well in poor seeing that I still managed to have a nice view of the waning Moon from my new backyard. 

Conditions were similar last night, with good transparency and poor seeing. By 10 PM the Moon was only just beginning to rise, which means that the sky was still quite dark. The Big Dipper was climbing towards zenith, and that gave me a chance to image Bode's Galaxy - M81 - with the EVScope 2. 

I tried imaging M81 with the EVScope 1 on several occasions last year. I have a particular fascination for barred spiral galaxies like M81, which at 12 million light years away is a little smaller than our galaxy. I'm not sure where that comes from exactly, though the shape is certainly aesthetically pleasing. As a kid, I vividly remember admiring a picture of a barred spiral - was it NGC 1300? - that really captured my imagination. Then I found out, when I was a little older, that our own Milky Way was actually a barred spiral, not the conventional spiral it's usually portrayed to be. That was a fun little eye-opener for me. 

In any case, observing Bode's Galaxy with the EVScope 1 was a disappointment for me. The galactic nucleus is bright enough, but the spiral arms are subtle and easily lost in the downtown DC light pollution. I never got much more than a blurry circle. The EVScope 2 allows me to take longer exposures, however, and that plus its higher resolution made me hopeful of a better outcome last night. 

And indeed, this is far better than anything I managed with the EVScope 1. To capture this 26-minute exposure from my backyard in downtown DC, after just a few seconds of setup time, seemed borderline miraculous to me. This time, I also peered through the new and improved eyepiece of the EVScope 2. What a huge improvement! Looking through the eyepiece of the original EVScope was like looking down through a barrel at a tiny, pixelated square. But the eyepiece of the EVScope 2 feels like . . . well, a proper eyepiece. The view is circular, it feels close, and it's noticeably higher resolution. In fact, it looks more impressive than the image above. 

The gallery above shows the difference between unprocessed 9-minute, 18-minute, and 26-minute exposures. The difference is subtle, but it adds up. Note the relative lack of a diffuse glow around the galaxy. With the EVScope 1, that glow used to creep into my exposures after a few minutes, as a result of light pollution here in DC. That's one reason that my views were so much better out of the city. The EVScope is much better at filtering out light pollution, which makes it a far more capable telescope for deep space observing in the city. 

When I ranked the telescopes I'd owned last September, the EVScope 1 came it at number 7. I'd rank the EVScope 2 a good deal higher - definitely in the top five, maybe even the top three. It's that good. 

With a backyard, I'm able to do something I don't think I've ever tried before: observe the Moon before sunset. I just could never imagine doing that in my old home. On my former rooftop, I might have been besieged by my neighbors, and in a nearby park, hounded by dogs. But now, at last, I can relax behind a fence, set up a nice refractor, and enjoy the Moon at my leisure with a beer in hand. It's beautiful. 

During my move, I'd noticed that the focuser on my Takahashi FC-100DZ had a little too much give. The culprit, I realized, was a loose screw. Repairing this little issue led me to consider upgrading other aspects of my grab-and-go setup. I parked the telescope inside to attempt to quantify the vibrations I'd long experienced with the Berlebach Report tripod I'd been using. It didn't take me long to realize that, even in a completely wind-free environment, those vibrations were intolerable at high magnifications. 

I will still need to walk to the parks I've often frequented - my little backyard only reveals so much, and the pockets of sky I can access will close when the trees regain their leaves - so I started wondering: did I need to sell the DZ for a lighter telescope? I hated the idea, but I certainly don't want to haul around the tripod I use with my TEC 140 just to use a four-inch refractor. Uncharacteristically, I wrote a note asking the CloudyNights community for help, and help I received.

Carbon fibre mounts, some of the responses stressed, could yield fewer vibrations than my wooden mount. This seemed counterintuitive to me - wood, I thought, tends to dampen vibrations - but I went ahead and purchased an Innorel RT90c Carbon Fiber Tripod. I was skeptical, but sure enough: the tripod just about halved the vibrations I'd experienced. It's also much lighter and more compact, meaning that I now have a more portable and more stable grab-and-go setup. Best of all, I get to keep the DZ: a telescope I love. 

I took the above picture of the waxing Moon a couple days ago (February 9th), at around 5:00 PM. At the time, seeing was worse than average, but transparency quite good. Note how much lunar detail the FC-100DZ reveal in even poor seeing; it's quite remarkable. 

Observing at 5 PM gave me a chance to, at long last, share my passion with my kids. My eldest is 5, my youngest 2. Both insisted that they could see craters, though my daughter claimed that the Delos eyepiece was a little hard to use. And it's true: it takes a little practice to know where exactly you should position your eye with a big, complex eyepiece like that. I wonder whether a simple Plossl eyepiece would be a better bet for the kids - and for outreach more broadly. It's what's I use with my students (admittedly, partly because I don't want to risk my pricier eyepieces). 

It clouded over that night, unfortunately, so I wasn't able to observe after sunset. Yet when I stepped outside the next night to get some air, I realized to my surprise that I could see the Moon setting in the west behind my building. Clouds were rushing in, and the temperature was falling fast. Before my move, I would never have observed in those conditions. Yet now it took me all of three minutes to pop inside, grab my Takahashi, and set up everything up in the only corner of my backyard that still afforded a view of the Moon. 

Neither the telescope nor my eyepiece had cooled down, and seeing was atrocious: about as bad as it gets in DC. But as the picture reveals, there was still plenty of lunar detail to be seen. The Takahashi excels in good seeing, but I've also found - like others - that it manages to outperform just about any comparable telescope in poor conditions. 

I'm hopeful that, in late fall, winter, and early spring, I'll be able to use my backyard to study the Moon far more consistently than I ever have before. In that effort, I suspect the FC-100DZ will be my most important tool. 

It's really hard to beat autumn in DC, and I'm trying my best to take advantage of every clear night. When conditions took a turn for the better tonight, I hurried out, Takahashi in hand, to the nearby park. Some kids were playing hide-and-seek nearby with flashlights - not exactly what you want when you're tired from playing with your own small children - but I didn't need dark-adapted eyes. I was out early enough to observe the waxing Moon and nearby Jupiter. I thought I'd already had the year's last glimpse of Jupiter; now I was determined to have one more look. 

Jupiter was low enough in the sky to be tinted red by the thickening atmosphere, and in that corner of the sky seeing was mediocre at best. Still: I could clearly make out ruddy Io, just coming out from Jupiter's disk, with its shadow still on the planet. I couldn't believe my luck. I was able to observe such shadow transits for the first time last year, but I never had the chance this year - until the very last night I could view the planet. 

The seeing wasn't good enough to reward prolonged study of Jupiter - and, to be honest, my much bigger TEC 140 has spoiled me a little with its more colorful and textured views of the planet. So I turned to the Moon, then illuminated perfectly around my favorite corner of the lunar surface: the area between the giant craters Plato and Copernicus.

Tonight I was especially struck by the length of the shadows in Plato, which are caused by the crater's mountainous rim. The shadows seem to be caused by mountains that must be higher and steeper than any on Earth. No wonder the Moon was widely considered before the Space Age to be a world of soaring mountains with the proportions of stalagmites in caves.

While the rim of Plato is lined with jagged peaks - remarkable, given that they're nearly four billion years old and would be ground to dust on Earth - they rise "only" around two kilometers above the lunar surface. That's far lower, of course, than Earth's tallest mountains. It's the low elevation of the Sun above the surface that casts shadows long enough to extend the entire 100-kilometer width of the crater. Some nineteenth-century astronomers thought those shadows flickered and thereby betrayed the presence of a lunar atmosphere; not the case, of course. 

As I was disassembling the telescope, I happened to look up just as a fireball briefly illuminated the sky: a meteor quite possibly older even than Plato. It was a marvelous sight. I'm continually amazed at what you see just with the naked eye, if you take the time to occasionally glance at the night sky. 

One last word on equipment. The Takahashi is beautiful and its optical quality is absolutely top notch, of course, but mechanically it is definitely a step below the TEC 140. The focuser and sliding dew shield, in particular, are just not quite as smooth and solid. I don't know that there's anything I'd change about the TEC, but the Takahashi has a few quirks here and there that I might address if given a chance. Still, it's a little powerhouse and once again acquitted itself well tonight. 

We've had a few clear nights this week, with seeing and transparency both hovering near average. It's been a demanding month at work, but I had to step out last night, Takahashi in hand, to catch a glimpse of Jupiter and Saturn. The glare of the rising full Moon, however, discouraged me from going to the park near my house - it would just be too bright, I thought - so I popped up to my rooftop for a quick look. 

That rooftop really isn't suited for serious observing. Somehow the concrete slabs thrum with vibrations from my building, and the warm air boiling from the rooftop always worsens the seeing, sometimes dramatically. Nevertheless I did steal a few clear, stable glimpses of Jupiter and Saturn: enough to make out countless zones and bands on Jupiter, and the Cassini Division on Saturn. The small, orange disk of volcanic Io, I believe, was just about to move across the Jovian clouds; I've been so overworked lately that I didn't bother to check. 

Then I looked over at the Moon, still rising in the east. Like most observers, I always prefer the Moon when it's only partly illuminated - I love the shadows along craters and mountains - and in any case tonight it was clear that the atmosphere along the eastern horizon was just not going to cooperate. Seeing and transparency in that corner of the sky, it seemed, were particularly challenging. Still, the Moon is always - always - a striking sight through a fine refractor, no matter the state of the atmosphere. 

After about fifteen minutes, I packed up and stepped back inside, thoroughly pleased that I'd ventured out despite my fatigue. It's almost always like that: even when tired, there are few things I'd rather do. 

We've had some wonderfully clear, autumnal nights over the past week, with Jupiter and Saturn riding high in the evening sky and the Moon waxing and waning nearby. I'm teaching what may be my favorite course at the moment - about the human history of nearby celestial bodies (what I call "neighboring worlds"), and a special highlight is taking my students out for a night with a telescope. 

I have now accumulated some very fine refractors, however, and I worried about how they'd fare after being handled by twenty students. To that end, I drew on my research funds to buy a William Optics Zenithstar 81. It's a beautiful little refractor, and I figured that it would be more than adequate to give my students an impressive view of the Moon. For their first assignment, they need to find a feature on the Moon and then write a history of how people have understood, imagined, explored, or planned to exploit that feature.  

A few things immediately struck me about the Zenithstar. First, it costs about a third as much as the TeleVue 85 I used to own - less than a third, when you consider it comes with its own mounting rings, dovetail, Bahtinov mask, and carrying case - despite giving up only four millimeters in aperture. Second, its build quality looks to be on par with the very best telescopes I own and have owned, with the possible exception of my TEC 140. Third, it seems to weigh less than the FS-60Q I once owned, and much less than the TV 85, and its sliding dew shield makes it much more compact than either telescope. 

It was really easy to carry the telescope to a darker corner of campus, and there set it up on my DM-4 mount and Berlebach Report tripod. Almost immediately, the Plossl eyepieces I'd decided to use provided beautifully crisp views of the nearly fully illuminated Moon. The students who had started to gather were predictably impressed. When we found we had a few minutes to spare at the end of the evening, I decided to try showing them Jupiter and Saturn. At about 56x, the planets were small, but beautifully sharp and clear. Many of my students were awestruck; they had a hard time believing that they could really see the major cloud belts of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn from downtown DC. 

Experiential learning is always special; it makes the otherwise abstract concepts we discuss in class come alive for my students, and it can provide lifelong memories. I for one was stunned by the performance of the little refractor. It is, by far, the most portable telescope I've owned, and when it comes to performance it really doesn't give up much to the TV 85. I loved my TV 85, but I would have a hard time recommending that telescope as a go-to instrument when the Zenithstar seems to provide so much more value for the cost. 

Last night conditions were even better, and now I resolved to head out with my biggest telescope: the TEC 140. The weight of the telescope, tripod, and mount means that I really can't haul everything to my favorite field. I targeted the little alcove next to a church that I've used over the past year, yet when I arrived as I was dismayed to find that the church had installed a new streetlight that completely ruled out observing there. I wandered about, dragging my heavy gear, until I decided to head down to a little amphitheater near the National Cathedral. There I found a perch that, if I moved around a bit, afforded me a view of Jupiter, Saturn, and the Moon through the canopies of nearby trees. 

When I swung the TEC to Saturn, I was mesmerized. This was only the second time I'd used the TEC, and the first time in good seeing. In those conditions, Saturn looked absolutely stunning, like a beautiful jewel set in a velvet background. Its many moons were brilliant and sharp, and the shadow of the planet on its rings gave me the rare sense that I was actually seeing a world in three dimensions (often, objects in the eyepiece look flat, and therefore two dimensional). Cloud details were obvious on the planet's yellow-white disk. 

Switching over to Jupiter provided an even more spectacular revelation. The TEC provided what may have been my best-ever view of the planet, with more cloud belts and zones than I could count, delicate, feathery structures within those belts and zones, and a perfectly obvious, brown "barge" - an elongated, oval cloud feature - near the planet's equator. There was a contrast and vibrance to the planet's colors that you just don't get with a smaller refractor, and all four Galilean moons were visible as clear disks, rather than points of light. 

Jupiter and Saturn soon wheeled behind the trees, so it was time for the waning gibbous Moon. Once again, I was dumbstruck. The Moon wasn't that far above the horizon, but at 163x there was just such a wealth of subtle, perfectly sharp detail, from jumbled crater peaks to winding rilles and delicate scarps. The terminator was perfectly positioned to throw mountain after mountain in sharp relief, and in exploring them I eventually lost track of time. Then a giant cricket jumped on my pants, I realized in shaking it off that it was past midnight, and I began packing up for the painful trek home. 

The TEC 140, I have to say, is noticeably better than the APM 140 I've also raved about in these pages. I'm not sure it's worth the extra cost; certainly I could never have afforded the difference if I didn't use the telescope for my research and writing (which means I could draw from my research funds to buy it). I realize how lucky I am, and I hope I can keep using the telescope for a lifetime.

It won't be that often, however, until I manage to own a backyard; as wonderful as the telescope may be, it's also hard to transport more than a few minutes from our home. 

After a surprisingly cool spring (in the context of global warming), it's finally getting hot here in Washington, DC, and with summer comes better seeing. It promised to be above average on the night of the 18th. As Brood X cicadas burrowed out of the ground all around me, I walked over to my nearby church, refractor in hand. I might have been tempted to take the TEC 140 had that not been such a chore last time I stepped out, and anyway all I really wanted was a nice look at the setting Moon. The Takahashi was an easy choice. 

It never ceases to amaze me, the endless varieties of turbulence that the atmosphere has to offer. After turning to the Moon, it was clear to me that if seeing was better than average, it would also preclude really detailed iPhone pictures. There was an undulating quality about the atmosphere. Parts of the moon would roll about, as if under waves lazily passing on their way to shore. While it was easy enough for me to see, with great clarity, what was underneath those waves, I knew that my phone would blur the slowly changing view. 

When I increased the magnification - up to 177x, sticking with Delos eyepieces - the view stayed sharp, but those remarkable differences in tint and hue were far less obvious, and turbulence detracted from that spacewalk effect. I took some pictures anyway, and what sticks out to me is that those different colorations are just about visible in them: a testament to the superb color correction of the FC-100DZ. 

After about 45 minutes, the rustling around me became impossible to ignore - was it rabbits, or something else? - and I packed up, content with yet another breathtaking expedition to the Moon, courtesy of the Takahashi. 

You have to strike while the iron is hot here in DC, so when the sky was clear again last night, with seeing and transparency both forecast to be average, I shrugged off my late night fatigue and trudged outside, Takahashi in hand. I didn't have it in me to walk all the way to the park, so I walked over to the (much closer) church.

Unfortunately the bushes that once shielded me have been trimmed, so it's now impossible to avoid the white glare of nearby streetlights. That stops my eyes from fully adjusting to the dark - which means that, when I'm at the church, deep space objects (other than double stars) are out of reach. Luckily the waxing Moon was high in the sky. 

Once glance at the Moon - and the Capitol Dome shimmering downhill - confirmed that seeing would be quite good tonight. I used my Berlebach Report tripod, which can just handle the FC-100DZ on either my AYO II mount, or the DiscMounts DM-4 that I recently acquired. The bigger Uni tripod is definitely much sturdier - I used it last time in better seeing - but heavy enough that I didn't want to bring it out tonight. 

Once again, my first glimpse of the Moon was a little disappointing tonight. Yet after a few minutes, the telescope and my eyepieces cooled down, and everything snapped into focus. If you ask me, the Moon is at its best when (roughly) half illuminated, especially the northern hemisphere. As I've written here before, I get a real kick out of following how the appearance of the crater Plato changes with the coming and going of lunar day; those changes became a fixation for nineteenth-century Selenographers hoping to detect evidence for volcanism - or perhaps life - on the Moon. Tonight I thought I could just about make out a few craterlets in Plato: a classic test for good seeing (and good optics). 

Further south, the huge crater Copernicus is also a pleasure when the terminator is nearby. As Air Force and Army lunar mapping projects competed with one another in 1959, Patricia Marie Mitchell Bridges labored in secret to sketch the crater - and create the finest representation of a lunar environment produced to that point. Thereafter, Air Force maps would pave the way for NASA's expeditions to the Moon. If you ask me, the human history of this corner of the Moon is among the strangest - and richest. 

For me, the view tonight was not quite as crisp and clear as it was on the 20th. Still, the Takahashi acquitted itself well, despite the relatively wobbly mount. After about 40 minutes I hit the wall and packed up, exhausted but satisfied. 

It seems that the cloudy, turbulent days of winter - in more ways than one - are finally coming to an end. In the wee hours of March 20th, the sky was clear, transparency was (supposed to be) high, and seeing was about average. Conditions, in other words, were about as good as we've had in months. 

I trotted out with my EVScope, intent on imaging some of the deep space wonders that are now prominent in the early modern sky. After a lightning-quick setup, as usual, I directed my attention to M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy, which is colliding with (and ripping apart) ​NGC 5195, a smaller galaxy. After a seven-minute exposure, the results impressed me - and for once I noticed that the image looked better when I peered through the eyepiece. 

Two other galaxies beckoned around the same constellation (Ursa Major, or the Big Dipper): Bode's Galaxy (M81) and the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101). Both are much trickier targets. Bode's bright core is easy to find, but its spiral arms are easily lost; the Pinwheel is big, but has generally low surface brightness. While transparency was supposed to be high, the sky was actually remarkably bright, and I noticed clear halos around street lamps. If anything conditions promised to be poor for both galaxies, and sure enough I wasn't pleased with the results. Here's a three-minute exposure of the Pinwheel Galaxy; you'll see it doesn't exactly impress. 

That's the thing with the EVScope, and something I haven't seen mentioned in any review: like all telescopes, it performs much better under a dark sky. While there's a lot of hype about how it will reveal deep space objects in the middle of the city, that promise holds up much better for objects that are already bright. Fainter objects can be lost in the glare of light pollution, just as they are in traditional optical telescopes. I'll try these galaxies again when conditions are better, but I don't expect radically different results. 

By the evening of the 20th conditions had improved dramatically. Both seeing and transparency were now good: a confluence we haven't had here in DC since November, maybe October. Although I was exhausted from waking up early on the previous night, I had to walk out with my Takahashi to catch the Moon while it was still quite high in the sky. 

As I've written, I've been a little disappointed since swapping my FC-100DC for the DZ, which is supposed to offer slightly better color correction. While I had only used it in nights of bad seeing, I was beginning to worry that it might have been knocked out of collimation in transport. After I set up on the night of the 20th and glanced at the Moon, those worries only grew: the image looks distressingly soft, and I started thinking about how to contact Takahashi. 

Yet after a few minutes the telescope cooled down, and then: wow. Suddenly the Moon snapped into crystal clear, razor-sharp focus, with absolutely zero false color anywhere - including along the lunar limb, where the slightest undulations and shadows were totally crisp. No matter which eyepiece I used, the detail was spectacular. What stood out the most? Probably the rilles; they seemed to be everywhere, and so delicate that they looked like veins on a living thing. 

After a little while I concluded that the view seemed best with my 6mm Delos at 133x. At that magnification I could still see the entire Moon, but I was close enough to make out truly breathtaking detail, in every conceivable shape and form. It truly felt as though I was looking out the window of a spaceship, approaching the Moon after a long journey from Earth. ​

There are times when the atmosphere cooperates, and something spectacular is in the night sky, that it doesn't take long for me to have my fill; to feel as though I can't take in any more, because I just want to savor and remember what I've seen. So it was this night. After about 40 minutes, I packed up and walked home. 

So yes, the FC-100DZ is an extraordinary telescope. To me, it has a bit less false color than the DC and significantly less than the TV-85, although both of those telescopes really had very little, and that gives it a small edge in sharpness. The difference is subtle but noticeable - on nights of good seeing. Of course, those night don't come along very often, and I've found that on most clear nights the state of the atmosphere matters far more than slight improvements in instrumentation. The FC-100DZ's bigger improvement over the DC, as I've written, is probably its modest but meaningful mechanical upgrades. 

Still, owing fine refractors has made me a little obsessive about the details, and for me the move from a DC to a DZ appears to have been worth it. That's a relief! 

I've written it before, but wow: Washington, DC is such a feast or famine city for amateur astronomy. We've had bad seeing on just about every clear night (and there haven't been many) for around five months now. At last, this month, the clouds parted - but on night after night, the seeing remained poor at best. I took out the Takahashi FC-100DZ twice, and both times found the seeing well below average. Both times the Moon failed to impress as it otherwise might, and stars shimmered and danced in the eyepiece. Mars had long since set; I won't have another good look at the planet until 2022.

At last, at 4:30 AM on Wednesday morning I stepped out with my EVScope and found the seeing to be . . . okay? It was windy near the ground, to my great frustration, but the stars scarcely twinkled and the internet confirmed it: seeing, it seemed, was about average. Of course that doesn't matter as much as transparency when you want to observe most deep space objects, but transparency was average, too. The sky, in other words, was about as good as it's gotten since autumn. 

It was a little cold, however, and muddy where I set up in the park. I hoped to test the EVscope on the Ring Nebula and the Hercules cluster: two objects I admired last year with my refractors. The scope aligned itself within seconds - why can't other mounts do this? - and I soon found it to be in perfect collimation. Moments later, it had found the Ring Nebula and I began a short exposure. 

As I wrote last year, under urban skies the Ring Nebula looks like a ghostly grey ring with a fine four-inch refractor - a ring you can just, just make out with direct vision. Using the APM 140 with averted vision, the ring was plainly obvious. In darker skies, with a four-inch Takahashi, the ring was equally obvious and appeared a little flattened. Every time I looked, there was a visceral thrill to seeing it, with just a couple lenses between my eye and the nebula. Yet through the eyepiece, the object itself was a subtle pleasure. 

The experience couldn't be more different with the EVScope. That thrill of seeing something with your own eyes is just about gone. Unlike others, I really don't like looking through the scope's eyepiece; it's like looking down a barrel, for one, and at the bottom of that barrel it's clear that you're seeing a screen. Maybe I've been spoiled by fine refractors and fine eyepieces, but it's a letdown. 

So I look at my phone, and for the most part I wait. The experience of observing - of learning how to see - is completely lost with the EVScope. Yet the thrill of seeing deep space objects otherwise barely visible from the city beginning to resemble their true selves is simply something you can't get with a traditional telescope under an urban sky. This time I really was floored when the nebula almost immediately turned green on my screen, and then when its perimeter began to seem orange, and then when its interior started to take on a greenish hue. The breeze pushed on the tube just enough to blur some of the stars, but what a wonder. 

Observing the Hercules cluster was a slightly different story. The cluster is always a highlight for me, not least because it's three times older than Earth - or because we beamed a message there from Arecibo, in 1974. With one of my refractors, it looks like a smudge at first from downtown DC, but after a while the stars come out, like diamond dust on a velvet background. It's subtle - exceptionally so with one of my smaller scopes - but magical nonetheless. 

Again, the experience couldn't be more different with the EVScope. Hundreds of stars are easily visible, but of course they're slightly bloated; they lack that crushed gemstone beauty that you get with a fine refractor. Many of the stars are also clearly red, a testament to their age: again, things are visible through the EVScope that just aren't accessible with a regular telescope. Is the view more impressive? Maybe not to an experienced observer, but it's different, and that's a good thing. 

Some complain that the EVScope delivers the same experience you might get with a much cheaper (and more unwieldy) astrophotography setup. That's just not true. The EVScope is marvelously portable, and I can set it up in about one minute. It needs virtually no time to cool down. It's a joy to use and on most nights there's no fuss at all. In half an hour I can pack up - this takes another minute - having observed at least three deep space wonders as I otherwise never could. The key point is that the EVScope delivers a fundamentally different experience than you'd get with either a traditional telescope or an astrophotography setup - and again, I view that as a very good thing. 

We've enjoyed maybe the best stretch of clear nights with good seeing that I've experienced since moving to Washington, DC, and I was out nearly every night with a telescope in hand. Between work, childcare, and observing, I had no chance to update this blog - but now it's raining, and I have an hour (but just an hour) to relax. 

Roughly two weeks ago, I spotted a Takahashi FS-102 for sale on Astromart. Amateur astronomers will know that this is a four-inch refractor with a well-earned reputation for exceptional optics. It's been replaced by the Takahashi FC-100 series, and I already own a telescope in that line. But the FS-102, while much bulkier than my 100DC, does better at longer wavelengths. And in Mars-watching season, that's what I convinced myself I needed. 

Although the FS-102 was supposedly in pristine condition, when it arrived I was dismayed to discover that the lens cell was loose and the tube was covered - I mean covered - with scratches. Luckily, the owner was mortified when I informed him, and I received a (nearly) full refund. I now had some cash to spare, and at just that moment a new copy of Sky and Telescope arrived. A favorable review of the EVScope convinced me to give that telescope another chance (see a previous entry for my first impressions). Maybe the buggy version I owned before had unfairly soured me on the product? It did, after all, offer me a chance to observe nebulae and galaxies I would otherwise never have a chance to see from the city . . . .

After it arrived, I bundled the telescope into a suitcase and rolled it along to my nearby park. After I turned it on, it just about instantly figured out where it was and slewed (quietly) to any object in the sky, like magic. Clearly, I'd been sold a glitchy version the first time around. This was more like it! And when I tapped on "enhanced vision" (I describe the technology in a previous entry), the effect was really satisfying. After a couple minutes gathering light on the Andromeda Galaxy, for example, dust lanes I'd previously spotted only with averted vision clearly snapped into focus. 

So, how good are the views? Well: although I managed to achieve fine focus, I think I'll need to collimate the telescope when I'm next out. Stars are not exactly pinpoints, as these images attest, and that's also caused by a tendency of the telescope to move too much while it's gathering and stacking images. There's more noise in the pictures than I'd prefer, and after getting used to my wonderful TeleVue eyepieces, the view through the EVScope's "eyepiece" is really cramped. It's like looking through a tunnel. More importantly: no, seeing an image through a grainy screen is just not at all the same as seeing it through an optical eyepiece. An optical telescope feels like an extension of the eye; not so the digital EVScope. 

But damn, it's cool to see galaxies shimmer into view on my iPhone screen. It's simply true that I can see things now that I never would have imagined seeing before, and isn't that what this is all about? 

I mean, the Triangulum Galaxy from an urban sky . . . are you kidding me? 

​I'm still learning how to use this technology, and pictures I've seen online tell me there's plenty of room for improvement. Still, I've noticed that the images look much more spectacular in the app, while I'm in the field, than they do after I get home. Certainly they pale in comparison to even half-decent astrophotographs made with dedicated gear. Now does the technology always work seamlessly. Just a couple nights ago, I had to restart the telescope and reinstall the software before I could get the enhanced vision mode to work, and by then I'd already shivered outside for about 30 minutes. Some objects also look immeasurably better through my optical telescopes. The EVScope is just about useless for lunar and planetary views, and stars look like ugly blobs compared to the beautiful diamonds they resemble through my refractor. 

Yet what the EVScope does so well is find that sweet spot between visual observation and astrophotography, and it does so in an integrated package that's usually a pleasure to use. No, I never had the thrill of seeing something with my own eyes - the thrill I've described often in these pages - but I certainly did get a deep sense of pleasure when I glimpsed the Whirlpool Galaxy from the city. 

One virtue of the EVScope is its weight. If I stuff the EVScope into the suitcase I used for the APM - which, admittedly, does seem to mess with its collimation - then I can easily sling my Takahashi 60Q over my shoulder (and wedge its tripod in the suitcase). I've now used the 60Q twice, including once in the early morning, with the EVScope gathering Orion's light. I have to say: I was more than a little stunned by its quality. To my astonishment, the Moon through the 60Q really didn't look any dimmer than it does through the TV 85, and details were equally sharp. 

Here are three images I took of the Moon over the last week, with the 60Q, the FC-100DC, and the APM 140. A reminder: the 60Q has an aperture of about 2.5 inches; the 100DC of 4 inches, and the APM of 5.5 inches (these are big differences for refractors). The optical quality of each telescope is roughly similar, though I'd say the APM shows the most false color, and the 60Q the least. 

That's the 60Q on the left, and the APM on the right. The comparison isn't quite fair; seeing and transparency differed on each night - it was average when I used the APM, and decidedly better than average when I used the 60Q and 100DC - and while the smaller telescopes had fully cooled down when I took these images, the APM in my judgement had not. Still, it amazes me how slight the differences are. I have a new phone, by the way, with a much better camera, and I think it shows. 

These pictures were taken after the APM had fully acclimated, and I think it's fair to say that now the aperture difference is more easily visible. There's a deeper and more richly textured quality to these images than there is to the 60Q closeup above. Yet it always takes me aback to realize that, when telescopes are of similar quality, differences from night to night on bright objects - the Moon especially - owe more to atmospheric conditions than anything else, including aperture. It's different for dimmer objects. I can usually see at least five stars in the Trapezium using the APM, for example, but I've rarely if ever confidently spotted a fifth with any other refractor. 

Mars was full of detail when I observed it with the APM - wow that south polar cap looks bright and sharply defined right now - but I found that it, and every other bright object, was surrounded by a bright halo that night. This seems to be a common and very annoying optical effect in the skies of Washington, DC. On two nights with the 100DC, however, I had no such problem. Dark albedo markings were wonderfully detailed, and I spent easily an hour both nights just enjoying the view. It's a little sad to think that every night brings us a little farther from the red planet, but the view should dazzle for months to come. 

One last note. My first night out with the 100DC over these past two weeks was November 3rd. I suddenly resolved to stop doom scrolling and instead do something that distracted me. But what a sinking feeling I felt, walking bewildered to the field, with panicked screams - yes, screams - echoing around me. I walked out on the 4th, too, and the mood was lighter. Then, on the 7th, while playing with my kids in the very spot I usually set up my telescopes, came the good news: the networks had called it for Biden. I'll never forget the scenes of spontaneous joy on the streets: the bells ringing, cars honking, crowds cheering.  We may be in for some very dark months this winter, but that was a moment I'll long remember.