Hi Bill,
I used a 13" f/4.5 travel scope I built for the trip. You can read about it at http://ultralightscopes.com/MarkIVtravel.htm
No GOTO. 10-15 objects per hour is my typical observing rate during the past few years. The all-nighter at Wirrealpa was my most productive night - I averaged 18 objects an hour for 9 hours. I was exhausted. It's difficult to achieve those rates if the objects are spread across the sky. However, that night almost all of the objects were within the LMC or the Centaurus galaxy cluster, Abell 3526. Within such dense object fields one uses the orientation of the objects themselves to hop to the next one. In fact, GOTO isn't much use in these fields, although tracking would be nice.
I didn't use to be so efficient. And during my observing sessions in New Zealand last year, I didn't come close to that rate. The key factors were:
1) Familiarity with the sky (I observed essentially the same sky last year from New Zealand).
2) Familiarity with good equipment (My scope, my eyepieces, 7X50 RA correct image finder).
3) Preparation (In addition to reviewing published atlases like Uranometria, I spent weeks before the trip making labeled DSS charts showing the locations of over 400 objects. I arranged the DSS images and planned my observing to minimize distance between objects rather than by RA, for example.)
By the way, I now do own a GOTO scope. I added a ServoCat drive system to my 12-1/5" f/5. Although the primary goal was to have tracking for high power observations of planets and dense galaxy fields, I've enjoyed using the GOTO as well.
Albert
>Albert:
>Thanks for the great trip report. The skies down there sound great. You must have had a goto scope in order to bag all those NGC >objects? Some time in the future I hope to make a South America or Australia trip to see the southern skies--it is nice to know that there >are folks on TAC with experience in both areas.
>Your description of the milkyway casting shadows was good. I've experienced that at the Texas Star Party. At TSP the Saggitarius region >was just above the southern horizon. Can't imagine what it must have been like to have it so high overhead "down under."
>Bill Drelling
Received on Fri Apr 15 11:29:46 2005