Astronomy at the Porteau Cove Lookout
After an unseasonably cold and wet start to May in Vancouver, the weather gods finally graced us with reasonably clear skies, with below-average transparency. I convinced my friend Hannah, who’s visiting from the UK, to join me on a night of stargazing (“telescoping”, as she calls it) at the Porteau Cove lookout. We first drove to the Porteau Cove campgrounds to catch the sunset, arriving around 8pm and enjoying views of the Tantalus range, with the setting sun lighting up the distant snow-capped peaks. The Canon 15x50 IS binoculars were perfect for getting some closeups of the views.
Due to the intolerable floodlight aimed at the Porteau Cove campgrounds pier, installed several years ago by the park to the great dismay of astronomers and the members of the UBC Astronomy Club, we set up at the Porteau Cove lookout a couple of hundred meters south. It’s not an ideal location, with mountains obstructing the east and ugly power lines straight overhead, and cars driving up to the parking lot in the middle of the night for no apparent reason. However, it’s close to Vancouver and an exceptionally convenient place to set up the scopes right next to the vehicle. The skies are reasonably dark, at Bortle 4, but it wasn’t a particularly transparent night.
I set up my 8” Antares Dobsonian (named by the UBC Astronomy Club as “Stormtrooper”), a telescope that I’ve had since I was 12, and my brand-new Takahashi FC-100DZ (named “Takurrito”), a 4” fluorite doublet refractor that I was eager to test out under darker skies, and waited for the scopes to cool and dusk to settle in.
Around 9 pm, the brightest stars in the early May skies started to appear, with the reddish-orange Arcturus and the blue Vega blinking into existence. Hannah was off in the corner of the parking lot, taking pictures with her new Google Pixel phone on a tripod, testing out the time-lapse and astronomy modes. We sipped on some hot chocolate and waited for more stars to join us.
A little past 10 pm, my friend Adam joined us; an avid climber, he brought bouldering crash pads, which as it turns out are extremely comfortable to kneel on while looking through the dob. It was finally starting to get dark enough to start navigating the constellations, and I aimed my FC-100DZ to M13, the spectacular globular cluster in Hercules. I still remember when I was around 14 years old being gobsmacked at the sight of M13 under exceptionally dark skies at the Merritt Star Party through a ~20” dob, and while the view through the 4” wasn’t quite as dazzling, at 62x with the 13mm XWA 100 degree eyepiece, it rendered a fine view of the cluster, with a bright central core that at moments of good seeing resolved as individual stars. I navigated to M13 on my 8” dob as well, with the 20mm XWA 100 degree eyepiece, and while it was obviously brighter than the FC-100DZ, I didn’t think it resolved more of the central stars than the FC-100DZ. Adam and Hannah both felt that the Dob showed a better view. It’s likely that under better seeing conditions, the dob would have more obviously outperformed the FC-100DZ.
Next, we turned to M57, the ring nebula, in the constellation Lyra. It’s one of the easier deep-sky objects to find, nestled midway between the bright stars Sheliak and Sulafat, and appearing as what looks like a faint out-of-focus star in low-power eyepieces. Here, the FC-100DZ’s superb contrast was apparent, with the nebula being more defined against a darker background. Both Hannah and Adam thought that the FC-100DZ outperformed the dob here.
The parking lot where we set up is nestled above the Sea-to-Sky highway, and there are several street lamps below us lighting up the roads, and the headlights of the cars driving on the highway can be distractingly bright even from far away. However, neither the streetlamp nor the distant cars are as annoying as the numerous cars that pulled up to the parking lot, headlights blazing. A guy came over to talk to us, and he told us he had come to the parking lot to test the modifications to his car. He stuck around for a while and we invited him to look through the scopes. Another person was set up to do astrophotography in the corner. The most irritating guest was this lady who parked and left her car lights on for a while. The guy who joined us earlier went to ask her to turn off the lights, and she said no, and stayed until she was done scratching through a thick stack of lottery tickets. I hope she didn’t win anything.
We spent quite a bit of time hunting for some galaxies around Ursa Major, and eventually, I managed to locate M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy, in my dob. It was particularly challenging to find because of the power lines that cut straight through the zenith, and I couldn’t locate it in my FC-100DZ, mostly because I don’t have a pier for my tripod, making it hard to point the telescope straight up. The below-average transparency made finding the faint fuzzies all the more challenging.
Finally, we panned around the low milky way. The 35mm Panoptic with the FC-100DZ made a great pair, at 23x with a 3-degree field of view, showing pinpoint stars right to the field stop. I’m looking forward to taking this combo to very dark skies in the summer with the milky way floating overhead.
Around 1:00 am, we called it a night and packed up. Overall, I was really happy with the performance of the Takahashi FC-100DZ, which I’ve named “Takurrito”, and I can’t wait to use it for wide-field views under dark skies and for the planets in the fall.