Good Enough
Bill Pellerin
Houston Astronomical Society
www.astronomyhouston.org
GuideStar Editor
Good Enough
There’s a scene in the book Huckleberry Finn in which Huck and Jim are considering boarding a wrecked boat to see if there’s anything of value to be retrieved. Jim doesn’t think it’s such a good idea and says that the pair is doing “blame well and we better leave blame well alone…”.
An observing friend of mine quoted that passage to me while considering improvements he could make to his astro-imaging setup. His setup was producing very good images and any changes might make it incrementally better but instead he wanted to concentrate on executing his imaging program with the equipment he had. Everything was working ‘blame well’ good enough for his purposes.
A more contemporary writer, Paul Simon, wrote a song that says “Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance. Everybody thinks it’s true”. All of us think about how we could improve our observing equipment – larger telescope, better mount, better camera, better eyepieces, etc. Sometimes, though, we just chasing the train in the distance when leaving your equipment inventory ‘blame well alone’ is the right thing to do.
Bill Pellerin
Houston Astronomical Society
www.astronomyhouston.org
GuideStar Editor
Good Enough
There’s a scene in the book Huckleberry Finn in which Huck and Jim are considering boarding a wrecked boat to see if there’s anything of value to be retrieved. Jim doesn’t think it’s such a good idea and says that the pair is doing “blame well and we better leave blame well alone…”.
An observing friend of mine quoted that passage to me while considering improvements he could make to his astro-imaging setup. His setup was producing very good images and any changes might make it incrementally better but instead he wanted to concentrate on executing his imaging program with the equipment he had. Everything was working ‘blame well’ good enough for his purposes.
A more contemporary writer, Paul Simon, wrote a song that says “Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance. Everybody thinks it’s true”. All of us think about how we could improve our observing equipment – larger telescope, better mount, better camera, better eyepieces, etc. Sometimes, though, we just chasing the train in the distance when leaving your equipment inventory ‘blame well alone’ is the right thing to do.
I have a 8” SCT on a German equatorial mount that I use for CCD photometry. Is this system perfect? No, it’s not. I wish my mount’s pointing accuracy was better; I wish my mount’s unguided tracking was better. Is it good enough for my purposes? Yes, it is. Last Friday night I got data (CCD images) on 10 variable stars in about 3 hours. It usually takes me a few hours to analyze this much data, so for these ten stars I’ll have about 5 hours invested in the results that I report to the AAVSO.
If I compare my setup to a setup that has a large telescope on a high-end mount, mine is kind of puny. But, I get good results and it works for me. I’m getting data on 10 to 15th magnitude stars that sometimes have very little data gathered for them, especially when they dim to magnitude 15; mag 15 stars are difficult to do visually.
My visual observing setup consists of a relatively small refractor on an alt-az mount. The images in the eyepiece from this setup are outstanding. Would I see dimmer objects with more aperture? Sure, I would, but this setup is more than outstanding for what I want to do with it.
Some years ago I was at the Texas Star Party. I was doing a visual observing program and a guy next to me was trying to do some imaging with a configuration of equipment he had never used before. It was a particularly good week, with most nights crystal clear. This guy worked all week, and got no images because he didn’t have enough experience with and knowledge of the system to be able to make it do what he wanted it to do. Another guy, working with a setup he had used many times was able to capture 25 or so images during the week.
One more example. I have an ‘advanced’ point-and-shoot camera that I use for general photography. Recently, I wanted to use the self timer so I could be in the picture and I realized that I didn’t know how to make this work on my camera. I found the manual for the camera and read it cover to cover. I was impressed by the number of features that the camera has that I had never used and that I didn’t know existed. There are settings for the type of lighting (daylight, incandescent lamps, fluorescent lamps, clouds); there are settings that allow me to manually adjust the shutter speed and the f-stop. Wow! This thing has all kinds of capabilities that I didn’t know about. I took a 15 second image of the Gemini constellation with this camera, and captured all the bright stars.
So, here’s the deal. Use what you have. Learn everything you can about how to use the setup you have (you may be surprised about its capabilities). Sometimes, you have to work as on getting yourself up-to-speed. What does this setting do? Why did they design it this way? What did the designer have in mind? Developing competence isn’t always as much fun as getting new equipment, but it can be more rewarding. You and I have had many times when we’ve said to ourselves, “ah, so this is how it works”.
Once you develop the competence you need to operate your system (hardware and software), you need to figure out how to use this skill to work through your observing program. The learning process never stops. I capture new ideas and notes in a text document associated with my observing session. I have, for example, notes that help me understand the relationship between movements of the telescope mount and movements of the image from the CCD camera. That is, if the object of interest is too far south in the image, I know which mount movement button I need to push to move the telescope to the south (which centers my object of interest). It is much better to know this than to have to try to center the object by trial-and-error each time.
Set it up, learn it thoroughly, and execute, execute, execute. You may find that your setup is blame well good enough.