The Joy of Small Aperture

Now don't get me wrong. Large aperture is a good thing! You need fairly large apertures to see faint nebulae, faint planetaries, faint galaxies... well, faint anything. It helps to have a lot of aperture if you're trying to split a very close double, or to see fine detail on the Moon. No question there.

But... sometimes, a small aperture telescope does have its advantages.

First of all, there's storage. If you live in a 2-room apartment like I do, your telescope basically sleeps with you. Or at the least, it does share bedroom space with you. And if you live on the 3rd floor with 5 doorways (I've counted) between you and your car, size and weight become truly serious elements in one's calculations as to which scope to drag out on a given night. My 60mm refractor is so compact that it never leaves the trunk of my car, and yet it has never interfered with whatever else (e.g., groceries) I want to stick back there.

Secondly, you can set up a small telescope in a fraction of the time it takes your fellow observers to assemble and align their 15-inch monsters, and you're merrily taking in the crescent phase of Venus, or the rings of Saturn, while they're still cursing over this or that piece of equipment. If I happen to notice on some random evening that the skies are clear and the Moon is up, it takes literally less than a minute to be at the eyepiece taking in the view, soaring over the craters.

And thirdly (and in some respects most importantly), a small telescope can be the best way to actually connect with the sky in a very personal way. I have found over the years that too much magnification and too much narrowing of the field of view results in a rather dissatisfying detachment between observer and observed. I might be seeing dust lanes in M51 through an 18-inch Dob, but somehow the overall effect is not that different from perusing a Hubble image on the internet. But through some mysterious mechanism, when I cruise the star clouds of Cygnus or the cheek by jowl nebulae of Sagittarius with my "puny" 102mm refractor, I can feel my place in the galaxy in my bones. I am no longer sitting on a flat Earth looking up at the dome of the sky, but I am an inhabitant of the universe, stuck to the side of a spinning orb, looking out to my stellar neighbors. The Orion Spur of the Cygnus Arm of the Milky Way of the Local Group, at the edge of the Virgo Supercluster, feels like Home.