We’ve completely transitioned from the RV lifestyle to full-time residents of Viewpoint Golf Resort. Viewpoint is a gated community for people 55 years old and older. It’s a very active community with two golf courses, a tennis club, pickleball club, four swimming pools and various hobby clubs such as woodworking with a fully equipped wood shop.

Viewpoint occupies over three hundred acres of land in east Mesa, Arizona and I’ve been told there are more than 3,000 park model homes. There’s always something to do here, although activity slows down during the hot summer months.

Donna keeps busy with tennis, golf and pickleball. She also works in the community as a companion caregiver to elderly residents. We were playing indoor pickleball at the air conditioned Red Mountain Recreation Center, but they closed for remodeling for the last three weeks and will re-open next Monday. So, I haven’t been very active lately.

We took an Allegiant Air flight out of Mesa Gateway airport to San Diego on July 22 and spent five days in La Jolla while Donna dog-sat for her sister, Sheila. Flying out of the small Gateway airport was a treat. I don’t think there were more than 400 people in the whole place! San Diego was a nice break from the heat and it’s always nice to be by the ocean. We met up with Gary Stemple at Offshore Grill and Tavern and Rick Miller was with him. I think the last time I saw Rick was 1974. We had fun catching up over a few beers, then I dropped Rick off at the airport for his return flight to Florida.

Donna and I hit the beaches and took a drive up the coast for lunch in Oceanside. We also played pickleball in Pacific Beach and Ocean Beach and saw some of our pickleball friends that we last played with three years ago. Time flies. The flight back to Mesa had us in the air for under an hour and the drive from Gateway airport to Viewpoint was about 15 minutes. Nice!

Last week, Donna and I drove up to Canyon Lake and met up with some of her tennis club friends. Tom had his pontoon boat on the lake and we cruised across the lake and up the Salt River to a point just below the Apache Lake dam.

We saw a group of four Desert Big Horn sheep across the river from where we stopped by the dam. I couldn’t get a good picture of them though.

With too much time on my hands, I’ve taken up a new hobby. Someone once told me that hobbies were my hobby. I always like to learn new stuff and can really get lost in new ventures. I went through a couple of photography phases when I was younger and sold event photos. Later, when my kids were in high school, I took sports photos of the high school sports team – many were published in a local newspaper called the Arlington Times.

I also have an affinity for science – I really enjoy electronics and ham radio. So I kind of combined the two interests and took up astronomy. My longer term goal is to pursue astrophotography. It’s a steep learning curve though and I can see myself chasing this subject for years to come.

After reading up on the subject, I bought a Celestron NexStar 8SE telescope. This is a reflector ‘scope – a catadioptric Schmidt-Cassegrain to be precise. Reflector type ‘scopes were invented by Isaac Newton and utilize one or more mirrors to reflect the light path. This allows a longer focal length in a more compact package than a traditional refractor type ‘scope.

The NexStar 8SE came with a computerized electronic mount, known as an Alt-Az mount. This mount slews the ‘scope in two directions – altitude (vertically up and down) and azimuth (horizontally right and left). You can program the amount by pointing it to guide stars and it triangulates the position and then you can select from a list of targets and it will automatically slew to the target. Some fine adjustment is required to center the target, but it really simplifies things.

The 8SE has an aperture of 8 inches – about 203 millimeters. The focal length is 2032 millimeters. It reaches that length by “folding” the light path back and forth before sending it to the diagonal and eyepiece.

I had a budget in mind as I embarked on this hobby, but I soon found out that it’s hard to stay within the confines of a budget when you don’t have enough experience. I soon went down the rabbit hole and upgraded a lot of the equipment. I bought upgraded eyepieces, a higher quality diagonal, a 9×50 finder scope and an electronic focuser.

Then the mount started acting up. I found excessive play in the altitude axis. I opened up the housing and found a defective bearing.

I sent the photo above to Woodland Hills Camera and Telescope where I bought the unit. They, in turn, contacted Celestron and they sent me a return authorization and shipping label. I sent it to them for repairs.

Meanwhile, I did more research on this mount and found some disappointing information. Generally speaking, you should limit the weight of the telescope and accessories to about 80% of the mount maximum for visual use and only 50% of maximum for astrophotography. The mount Celestron supplies with 8SE has a maximum weight rating of just 12 pounds. The ‘scope itself weighs that much before you add eyepieces, finder scope, electronic focuser or any other accessories. It was overloaded with my set-up. Lesson learned.

I bought a new mount. This time I went with a Sky-Watcher HEQ5 German Equitorial mount. It’s rated for 30 pounds. This design points the ‘scope along two axes – they’re called right ascension and declination. It’s more complicated and hard to describe. Suffice to say it allows the mount to compensate for the rotation of the earth and keep the target centered and prevent background stars from turning into streaks across the image. This is important for astrophotography.

When I started down this rabbit hole, I was mainly interested in visual astronomy. With my assortment of eyepieces, I can vary the magnification level from around 80X up to about 400X. I used 400X to view Saturn under excellent viewing conditions and could clearly see the rings of Saturn with a sharply defined Cassini Gap.

Atmospheric conditions – astronomers call it seeing conditions – are often the limiting factor to what you can see or photograph in the sky. When bands of turbulent air move across your vision, it creates distortions like the heat waves you can see rising from hot pavement. This is what makes the stars appear to “twinkle” in the night sky and can wreak havoc for astrophotographers. High levels of magnification increase this effect.

I used my Samsung Galaxy S22 to snap a photo of the moon through the eyepiece and it wasn’t too bad. This piqued my interest in astrophotography. I bought a dedicated astrophotography camera. There are many to choose from and it’s another learning experience.

With the long focal length of my ‘scope and the sensor size of my camera, I have too much magnification. Even with a focal reducer, which drops the focal length to 1280 millimeters, I get 400X magnification. This makes seeing conditions limit how sharp my photos are. Seeing conditions haven’t been too good lately. Soon though, when the temperatures drop a bit, it’ll improve. Here are a couple of moon shots somewhat spoiled by poor seeing conditions.

I’ll discuss the processing of astrophotography images another time, as it will be long-winded and this is long enough.

Here are a few dinner plates to close this post.

I bought a whole USDA Prime beef tenderloin and cut it into a dozen filet mignons and about a pound of beef tips. Spendy, but it’s delicious.

Donna is heading off to Vermont to visit her parents on Tuesday. Once again it’ll be just me and Ozark the cat for a week.