History of the Twin City Amateur Astronomers

Telescope Troubles: 2001-2003

By August 2001, it was clear that trouble was brewing with the C14 telescope’s declination motor. A suggestion was made to replace Mike Rogers’ personal 14-inch Celestron with a clubowned 12-inch Meade LX200 “GoTo” telescope. With the advent of GoTo capacity it was becoming very easy to find celestial objects using a micro-processor-driven instrument. All that would be required is pointing the telescope at two known stars, centering them in the eyepiece, pressing an “align” button, and from there the telescope would be able to automatically find any object in the system’s database of thousands of objects that currently were above the horizon. This certainly was more appealing than pointing a telescope via finder and then using star hopping techniques to find the object – at least to some members. Few members at this time were sufficiently well informed about the use of setting circles, so a GoTo telescope was a big deal.

Figure 46: William Carney at SGO’s 12-inch Meade LX200 telescope

Given several club members’ previous experiences with Mike Roger’s 8-inch Celestron GoTo telescope acquired in the late 1990s, the membership agreed to purchase such a telescope for SGO. Fundraising for a new telescope began during December 2001. Within a month $1,000 had been raised, and within two months a total of $2,000 had been raised from the membership toward the $4,250 purchase price. A short-term bridge loan was provided by Dan Miller to cover the rest of the purchase price as fund raising continued. The new telescope was ordered in February 2002 and arrived in March. It was installed in the SGO during June 2002, and was returned to Meade the next month due to a problem with the focuser. Michael Rogers’ C14 was reinstalled temporarily so it could be used with the summer public observing sessions. The 12- inch came back from Meade in August and was reinstalled in September 2002. Due to continuous fund raising and a very generous membership, the loan note held by Dan Miller was paid off by November of that year. All tolled, 13 members of the TCAA contributed at grand total of $2,975 to the purchase of the telescope. The rest of the funding came from the club treasury.

With the re-installation of the Meade LX200 telescope, problems were noted with the vibration of the pier. When the telescope was moved, vibrations were clearly visible through the eyepiece of the telescope; nonetheless, the vibration quickly stopped. Despite this fact, efforts were made to stabilize the pier. A network of steel cables was attached to the pier just under the dome floor. These cables were run to the outer wall of the observatory in the hope of reducing the vibrations. They had the unfortunate effect, however, of transmitting vibrations of people moving around inside the observatory to the telescope. The cables were removed shortly after this connection became apparent.

By the summer of 2003 Carl Wenning returned to active participation in the club.⁷⁵ Having used the SGO telescope for the first time during that summer, Carl noted in a September 2003 article for The OBSERVER that the telescope’s optics were not as good as he had expected. Still, it was too late to do anything about it as the initial warranty on the instrument had long since expired. He further noted that for a viewer working alone, the pier vibration, while unfortunate, was not all that deleterious to visual observing. He noted too that once the telescope had reached its intended target, the vibration quickly damped out and that the viewing quality – while limited by the quality of the telescope itself – returned.

Despite these problems, several TCAA members made regular use of the SGO to conduct visual observations. Astrophotography was “out” due to the problems associated with the pier, and the fact that the telescope used an altazimuth mount. This latter circumstance resulted in field rotation during long exposures making anything but the simplest forms of astrophotography impossible. Still, William Carney, Carl Wenning, and a few others observed with renewed vigor as time and sky conditions permitted. It was no longer unusual to see hitherto unviewed objects, or to see many dozens of objects during a single evening. Amateur astronomy had really begun to change again with the advent of the GoTo capacity of this telescope.

This period was beset by yet another “trouble.” Long time club member Eugene Sutton passed away and his death went unnoticed by the club. In failing health beginning in the early 1990s, he contributed a large number of his books to the TCAA library during July 1992. In increasingly poor health, he rarely attended club functions thereafter. He passed away on January 20, 2001, and his death wasn’t discovered until several months later to the great sadness of club members who knew him.

Next Section: Education/Public Outreach and Service: 2005-2006

⁷⁵ In 1994 he took charge of the fledgling Physics Teacher Education program at ISU. From around 1997 onward he was overwhelmed with planetarium work (now including a gift shop and several student workers) in conjunction with running the growing physics teacher education program at ISU. In November 2000, a new planetarium director was hired (Tom Willmitch) relieving Carl of his heavy work burden. Nonetheless, it took Carl several more years to return to regular participation in the club. He did so in 2003.