Post by Kalvis on Feb 27, 2006 20:15:58 GMT -6
As painful as this is to admit, I thought I'd better share it with my fellow comrads...
Last Saturday Adler telescope volunteers Fred, Arvind and I were on duty from 1-3 p.m.. It was a glorious sunny afternoon so we hauled out the Solaris hydrogen alpha scope as well as the Orion 8" reflector. Fred set up the dob which I assembled the TeleVue. I oriented the R.A. axis toward North (not South, like last time!), plugged the filter into the outlet, selected a 25mm eyepiece and used the perfectly aligned SolFinder to get the sun into view. Not only did the dobsonian fail to show any sun spot activity, but the hydrogen alpha scope was also showing nothing but a red disk. No details of the photosphere, not a single prominence along the edge. I tinkered with it a good while, even selected lower focal length/higher magnification eyepieces to see if at least a meager prominence could be spotted. Nothing! Arvind and I kept cursing this lousy piece of equipment and our very poor understanding of it. We are able to grasp the concept of a hydrogen alpha filter, but not how it relates to this exact scope. Specifically, we don't know what is going on at the front end (red filter) in front of the objective vs. what is going on at the back end (electronically cooled thing-a-majigger). Arvind even called up our expert volunteer Bill to see if he had any pointers. He only said to "turn the knob thing across from where the cord comes in to see if it helps." Well, it didn't.
Then I knelt down next to the outlet to make sure the plug was in far enough. Yup. No problem there. But then I said to myself, perhaps I should press the Test button on the outlet (it has a built-in GFI ground fault interrupter) and afterward push the Reset button. It was then that I noticed that the test button already appeared depressed (i.e. triggered) and the reset button was standing tall and proud. Wholly Toledo! The fumbling amateur (that's me) who plugged in this stupid thing didn't even check to see if we had electrical current. All I did was press the reset button and within minutes a whole crop of prominences showed up on the eyepiece. Glory be! It's just that simple.
There's a lesson fer the rest-o-ya in there somwhere...
Kalvis
Last Saturday Adler telescope volunteers Fred, Arvind and I were on duty from 1-3 p.m.. It was a glorious sunny afternoon so we hauled out the Solaris hydrogen alpha scope as well as the Orion 8" reflector. Fred set up the dob which I assembled the TeleVue. I oriented the R.A. axis toward North (not South, like last time!), plugged the filter into the outlet, selected a 25mm eyepiece and used the perfectly aligned SolFinder to get the sun into view. Not only did the dobsonian fail to show any sun spot activity, but the hydrogen alpha scope was also showing nothing but a red disk. No details of the photosphere, not a single prominence along the edge. I tinkered with it a good while, even selected lower focal length/higher magnification eyepieces to see if at least a meager prominence could be spotted. Nothing! Arvind and I kept cursing this lousy piece of equipment and our very poor understanding of it. We are able to grasp the concept of a hydrogen alpha filter, but not how it relates to this exact scope. Specifically, we don't know what is going on at the front end (red filter) in front of the objective vs. what is going on at the back end (electronically cooled thing-a-majigger). Arvind even called up our expert volunteer Bill to see if he had any pointers. He only said to "turn the knob thing across from where the cord comes in to see if it helps." Well, it didn't.
Then I knelt down next to the outlet to make sure the plug was in far enough. Yup. No problem there. But then I said to myself, perhaps I should press the Test button on the outlet (it has a built-in GFI ground fault interrupter) and afterward push the Reset button. It was then that I noticed that the test button already appeared depressed (i.e. triggered) and the reset button was standing tall and proud. Wholly Toledo! The fumbling amateur (that's me) who plugged in this stupid thing didn't even check to see if we had electrical current. All I did was press the reset button and within minutes a whole crop of prominences showed up on the eyepiece. Glory be! It's just that simple.
There's a lesson fer the rest-o-ya in there somwhere...
Kalvis