What's Up? Webcast: Manual Dob Starhopping

What's Up? Webcast: Manual Dob Starhopping
(Episode 158)

Sometimes its nice to shut off all the electronics and just explore the night sky with nothing more a dob and charters. We take a look at how to star hop and locate targets without the need of GoTo or electronics.

What's Up? webcast take place right here on the Sky-Watcher USA YouTube channel every Friday from 10am to 11am Pacific.

[FrothGiant]

Star hopping and learning the sky is a must , books and atlases are important for projects and learning astronomy, burhams celestiel hand books are excellent for learning all about astronomy and history and legends about the stars and constelations, his books can be found in digital form, good show👍

[astralfields]

Excellent episode. I have used the same process outlined here since starting to observe last summer. It just felt like the logical thing to do. I do have an admission to make. I enjoy star hopping as much as finally looking at the target object. Last summer I was looking around Cygnus for something and I 'discovered' the Veil Nebula West by chance. I will remember that moment forever. That wouldn't happen with a GoTo. Push a button and observe an object with no context whatsoever sounds pretty boring to me. It is like those travel agencies that drop you in a hotel in the middle of nowhere and then you spend a week inside the hotel. Sure it is 5* but you learn nothing of the local culture and miss on a ton of experiences. I think the reason most people don't do it is because they are missing a nice 2" 40mm eyepiece. Mine offers me over 2 degrees of TFOV in my SW 8", which makes star hopping a real pleasure to do even in a Bortle 6. I use an RDF/Laser combo so the optical finder has zero use these days.. at this point it is more of a design element on my telescope that makes it look cooler 😅

[Astro_Ape]

I'm fairly biased on the subject, but IMO everyone should learn to starhop before using any form of go-to.

I'm talking about this being an enforced requirement. There should be Scope Cops that ride around checking amateurs' Star-hopper License. Get caught without it and your mount gets impounded and you get sentence to 24 hours outreach at star parties...