| Lockwood
Custom Optics at the Winter Star Party 2025 The 12.5" NVT returns to 24 degrees latitude! All images and text Copyright Mike Lockwood, 2025. May not be used without permission. |
Welcome to Florida After a stop in Alabama to decompress, see friends, sip a few beverages and go shopping for some others, I drove south on the Thursday before Winter Star Party 2025. About an hour and a half south of Montgomery I saw something extraordinarily rare - not an eclipse - not a fresh impact crater - there was snow on the ground, and this had surely induced panic and/or drinking instincts for those in the area. Frozen precipitation has a vastly different effect in the southern US than it does in my home state of Michigan or my current home in Illinois, but it's not that different than mud, so if you have a four-wheel-drive pickup and some patience, you will get to work, get to your favorite bar, or get home. The roads were clear due to sun and warmer temperatures, but it was a very odd thing to see in southern Alabama. As I pulled into the Florida Welcome Center just south of Dothan, AL, I had to take some phone photos, because I wasn't sure I'd ever see this again, and it would be fun to include in this article. Oh the irony!   I checked the roads again, and found that unlike the day before, I-10 was closed for some distance west of Tallahassee. I later learned that it was simply to remove all of the vehicles that had become stranded in the snowstorm a few days before, the same snowstorm that had left Jon Talbot with 8"-9" of snow in southern Mississippi! After a detour on a state route where the only delay was from idiots going 35 mph in a 55 mph zone due to a tiny amount of snow on the road, I was able to get to I-10 just west of Tallahassee and I stopped at a rest area for a break and to take more photos, such as the one below.  I drove on, arriving at Chiefland just in time for dinner with Dana and Doris. I spent the night there, and the next day I drove to Orlando, attempted to do a little bit of beer shopping in the insane Orlando traffic, and then picked up Kara in the insane Orlando airport traffic. I mean it was BAD - bumper-to-bumper traffic trying to merge into the proper two lanes to get to the area to pick up people from a massive covered area that had cars parked three to four wide and horns were honking and middle fingers were displayed for no reason whatsoever. I've never seen such chaos at an airport before, with about three lanes of cars stopped or attempting to get close to the pedestrians that were waiting to be picked up, cutting people off, and then trying to escape. Horns were the universal language, and as I have said many times - FLORIDA IS FULL...... and now it is filling up with assholes at the airport! We escaped into more inescapable, incipient, persistent traffic while attempting to escape the city by a back way that clearly everyone else was using. How people live with this is a mystery to me, but my theory is that Orlando residents are used to it, and it was a Friday rush hour, after all. I think they just get home early and start drinking prior to gridlock on the non-tollways. Finally, we made it onto a four-lane state highway and cruised east to my uncle's place utilizing the three-laned drag strip also known as I-95. By that, I mean traffic was moving along nicely, just set the cruise on 80 mph, stay out of the way of the crazy people (especially the motorcycles), because it's five o'clock somewhere and everyone is in a hurry to get there. We were greeted by a delicious meal at my uncle and his wife's place, and the stress of the day melted away. The hot tub was occupied for a bit, and we sat around the fire pit with a beverage or two, burning pine cones and junk mail before turning in for a good night's sleep. Off to see the southern sky After a day of relaxing and some good food, we headed south on Sunday morning to the Keys. For the second year in a row, a miracle occurred, traffic was moving, and we encountered no backups driving south into the Keys. After grocery shopping in Marathon and a late lunch at Keys Fisheries (highly recommended Marathon restaurant), we arrived at the Boy Scout camp and set up camp and my telescope just outside our tent, about thirty feet from the ocean, which, in this particular area is the Straits of Florida. I'm not sure exactly where the Gulf of America and the Straits meet, but this little piece of real estate was just fine with me! The view from the tent porch is shown below after I unpacked and assembled and set up my telescope, the 12.5" f/2 NVT, the only one like it in the world.  We settled in and set up the rest of camp, and decompressed from the journey. Below is another view of the telescope during the day at low tide. The change in ocean level was about two feet as best I could estimate. The telescope sheltered under a cover to keep the sun off and salt spray out. Upon returning home, I rinsed the optics to make sure salt did not attack the coatings.  I did not take any notes on this trip like the previous one, so as I write this I'm just going from memory. I know you might be disappointed in my record-keeping, but I was busy trying to take a little bit of a vacation and get some observing done. Our first night was partly cloudy, and after travel, we decided to relax with a good beverage and talk with our neighbors, John O'Neal and his wife, before turning in around midnight so we could be fresh for observing the next night. It was not a bad night, but we needed rest. Before it got dark, though, we went over to the Girl Scout camp to say hello to the organizers who were setting up their own camps for the week. The camps were in good shape, and vegetation had re-grown nicely all over and between the road and the camp. The next day was Monday, and as I recall the weather was nice. People were let into the camp later than the usual noon opening due to a scheduling mishap, but they were not that late and everyone had time to set up. We headed over the Girl Scout camp to say hello to our friend John, whom we were collaborating with on food. John had an RV and fridge, and I had a car to take everyone to restaurants when we wanted to do that. We all had some good beers to share. John was newly retired, and he was still slipping into that relaxed lifestyle. This week would certainly help with that! The rest of the week is pretty much a blur of nice weather, relaxing, observing visually and with nightvision with the amazing Kara, and trying to stay up late enough to see Eta Carina and the southern cross. With the star party being a bit earlier this year, that meant staying up until about 3am to see the bottom of the cross..... IF it was visible through the haze. I made the point of using the nightvision monocular to show it to Kara late so she could say she had seen the entire Southern Cross, which I don't think we managed the previous year. A trip to WSP is not complete without seeing the whole thing.   I was quite busy the whole week, and I barely managed to take any astrophotos. Above left is a shot of the telescope at night. Kara borrowed my camera on one night since it was similar to hers, and got a nice shot of Orion between the palm trees in the portion of the Girl Scout camp that still had those, which was the western portion near the boundary between the two camps. That photo is above at right. We settled into a nice routine of star party life of relaxing during the day, and then either cooking or eating out for an early dinner. Below at right, Kara enjoys a beverage and some great seafood at Keys Fisheries. We also stopped by the Marathon Steak and Lobster House, as well as another restaurant on the east end of Marathon where we ate later in the week. Charlie Warren joined us for one excellent dinner.   For those that are curious, this is what Keys Fisheries looks like, right on the water next to the dock where the fishing boats come in.  Whenever we had time, we tried to do some walking to get a bit of exercise, and between the bike trail and another trail on the island we were on, there was a nice loop to walk. At the east end of the island there was a fishing area, then the walkway went under the bridge and continued around to a public beach area that is fairly well-hidden and not super busy. It's a nice place to get to the water while avoiding the crowds. This was an old quarry where they probably pulled out fill to build the road, so it went from shallow to quite deep fairly abruptly. We stopped for photos and continued our walk.  Spreading the gospel of nightvision On Wednesday evening I gave a talk about nightvision just as it was getting dark, and then after a short break we all reconvened at my telescope where everyone could experience nightvision first-hand under the sky. This lasted a couple of hours as I found some fun objects and then everyone in line cycled through and got back in line for the next object. It was a lot of fun, and the reactions were priceless. Everyone was of course taking photos with their phones, particularly of the Rosette and Horsehead and Flame nebulas. The telescope and the line is visible below. I think at the beginning we had twenty people or so, and that gradually thinned out. I was definitely ready for a break after I was done.   Soon, somehow a time warp occurred and the week was nearly over. It was time to have the great WSP giveaway. While Kara volunteered at the merchandise tent as she had done earlier in the week, I found a shady spot under a tree and occasionally walked around a bit to take some photos. Of course despite the huge number of prizes, neither of us won anything this year or last year, but that's OK, the car was pretty full!  With quality optics, F/# doesn't matter I believe it was Friday evening that we just wandered around to see what telescopes we could look through. We found Dumitru observing Jupiter with his 20" f/3.0 that I made the optics for, and it actually came from the same set of blanks as my own 20" f/3.0. After a little collimation tweaking, Jupiter looked absolutely outstanding, and I had to summon some of those nearby to enjoy the outstanding view. We decided to wander down the camp to see what Harry was observing with his 20" f/5.0, a mirror that I had refigured a number of years earlier. This presented a great opportunity to compare Jupiter in a 20" f/3.0 and a 20" f/5 with optics of my making. I was quite satisfied to see that the views were basically identical. That's right, doubters, I couldn't see any significant difference between the f/3.0 and f/5 optics under superb seeing, and I tried. This made me smile. No doubt some will try to debate me and call me biased, but they didn't see what we saw, and they have simply internalized unsubstantiated claims and suppositions that they have read somewhere that are quite false. The truth is if you have good optics, f/# does not matter much when it comes to performance. As I always say, central obstruction is one of the most overblown things about a telescope, and quality optics produce quality images regardless of f/#. We packed up my telescope during the afternoon Friday and packed most of the car so we could get an earlier start on Saturday morning heading back north. That morning the humidity had really set back in, and we worked up a sweat finishing the packing. I noted the considerable haze as we headed into Marathon. Luckily we had missed that during observing. It's great for planets, but not so good for other objects. Observing on Saturday night would probably not have been that great for deep sky objects, and fortunately we had had our fill of the southern skies. We stopped at the Wooden Spoon in Marathon for a hearty breakfast, and then escaped the Keys. There was some traffic and one wrong turn, but we made it back to my uncle's place by mid-afternoon. Kara left on Sunday, and I stayed around another day to help out with some work around the house before heading north on Tuesday. I spent Tuesday night in Dothan, AL, then visited another client in Montgomery for lunch on Wednesday. I spent the night just north of Birmingham on Wednesday night, and then drove the final stretch home on Thursday. I'm hoping to have a large telescope to bring next year, more on that later. Clear, dark, steady southern skies, good seeing, and cheers. See you at WSP 2026. -Mike Lockwood, Lockwood Custom Optics |