Miserably Cold, But Clear Night

 I rolled Big Bertha out to find M57, the Ring Nebula:

Trust me, you need a really big scope and a time exposure to see this.  If your eyes and brain do time exposures, we need to meet. :-)

In 8" aperture telescopes you will see a faint off-white smoke ring from a star that did not get the memo about smoking being bad for your health.  It blew off its outer layers long ago, producing a several trillion mile diameter bubble.  At the edges directly perpendicular to our line of sight, that dust layer's thickness accumulates forms an apparent ring.

In Big Bertha, it is has a greenish tinge.  This is both because this an emission spectrum of oxygen and our eyes are about 10x more sensitive to light in the green part of the visible light spectrum than red.   (This is why a green laser is brighter at the same wattage as a red laser.)

Big Bertha gathers a lot more light than my 8"; about 4.78x as much, so there is enough light to excite the cone cells in your retina, which tell your brain that this is color.

Anyway, the problem is that the Ring Nebula is part way between beta Lyrae and gamma Lyrae, both of which are third magnitude stars and thus invisible where I now live.   (I miss the dark sky I enjoyed until 2020.)  

There are two ways around this problem:

1. A finderscope that gathers enough light to bring these into view.  I have two devices on Big Bertha.  One is a zero magnification finder called a Telrad that projects some red rings on the glass.  This works very nicely and intuitively for planets, the Moon, and other naked eye objects.  I also have a 9x60 finderscope that gather 144x the light of a dark-adjusted old eye.  This is enough to make beta Lyrae and gamma Lyrae easily visible.  Plop the crosshasirs just about half-way between them and M57 is now in the eyepiece of the scope.  

Unfortunately, the mounting bracket that DobStuff made to hold that nice Celestron finderscope wore out.  Birch is not durable enough.  My first and second attempts to make replacements failed.  The third attempt is a superior design, but the mill's spindle motor is at Sherline for repair so this is waiting.

2. The other soluition is digital setting circles.  Big Bertha has Sky Commander.  This requires aiming the telescope at two stars in its catalog for alignment.  Unfortunately, the user interface is less obvious than I would like and trying to find the manual when my hands were so cold was not sufficiently interesting.