Winter is not my favorite time for stargazing, on account of I'm such a wuss. However, the chart that Sky and Telescope had online made it too irresistible. After all, I have to bundle up several times a day to take water to the chickens, cut firewood with the chain saw, carry firewood to the house and take Beau for walks down to the river to check on the ice. One more time couldn't hurt. A comet with such a pleasant name, Lovejoy, called to me through the dark moonless night.
The first night I found it, it was high in the southeast. In order to see through the eyepiece, I wound up kneeling on a cushion there on the front porch.
Last night, before I went outside, I adjusted the tripod legs higher. That made it so I could sit to view from my adjustable office chair. This is the angle it required. It looked like it was ready to launch. The red dot is probably Sirius rising. Not locating my quarry at once, I got in the right neck of the woods (a term not used by real astronomers) and then scanned slowly back and forth and up and down. There it was, Comet Lovejoy, looking slightly dimmer than four nights ago, or maybe just more spread out.
It's hard to explain how finding a fuzzy green object in the sky could be so exciting. It has to do with what a tiny spot is visible through a 4-inch lens. We're not talking Hubble here. The finder scope, a baby telescope that is attached to the mother scope, shows a bit more sky, but even that isn't much.
Over the years since I got addicted to stargazing in 2005, I've learned to point the main scope a lot better. Now, I don't use the finder scope as much.
"First light" is what astronomers call their first time to look through their telescope. I'm afraid my first view was somewhat disappointing: I saw nothing. Taking it back inside the house, I found the focus knob, which made all the difference.
Even so, it took lots of practice to point the blessed thing, due to what you see isn't what's up there. Things are reversed and upside down through the finder scope. To make it more confusing, the view through a refractor telescope is only reversed but not upside down.
I feel it's been a lot more fun to not use one of those Go-To gizmos that get the telescope to turn right to the object. A mere ten years is all it took for me to find my way around the Galaxy. Captain Kirk would have been proud of me.
