Hiking with Wallace, ambient impressions from an astronomy walk

I wanted to try a new kind of post, to present Wallace, a 150mm f/2.8 ultra-wide-field telescope that I’ve built last year a bit more, but also try to share the “outdoor” part of astronomy.

I now spend a lot of time outside with running and hiking, and started to wonder how could I share that, the same question that emerged when I started observational astronomy - how can I share the views ? There are people wonderfully skilled at that, with astronomical drawing, like Serge Vieillard and I encourage you to browse his website. Of course we can’t ever share the visual experience, like we can’t share the sensorial experience of hiking or trail running - but we can try to give a few impressions, and I’ve found myself watching trail running content from Kelp and Fern on YouTube who, in my opinion, is one of the best current outdoor content producer, because he removes himself a lot from the process in appearance, and gives a finely-worked raw impression.

So, here is a kind of photo-video dump, with pictures and sounds of the forest, of going to a cliff, setting up Wallace from my backpack, observing for a while, and going back. The fun, and new to me thing, is that I’ve had a lovely evening despite the temperature being in the 36 degrees Celcius, and bearing more hardware than necessary (nearly 3L of water, the telescope, my foldable stool, its 3D printed foldable stool, a DSLR and tripod, batteries, a smartphone tripod) because I wanted to take pictures, and had to concentrate on telling the story of the astronomy-hike I would have done without sharing in mind. But it was enjoyable despite distracting me, and I had the surprise to get “hints” at times of being actually more focused on the environment (wind, insects chirping, sound of my feet on the limestone) because I wanted to actually pay attention to what I should capture.

The result is an “ambient impression”. I hope you’ll enjoy it as I did despite not being a capable videographers/photographer. And sorry for the shakiness of the on-the-path videos. It truly makes one appreciate the work of actual videographers.

I also realize I didn’t show wallace in details on the site yet. It’s my best instrument to date because it has such a well defined purpose and fulfills it fully, it doesn’t try to do anything else than ultra-wide deep sky views. And framing NGC7000 as a whole in a wide-field eyepiece is something magical.

So, here are a few more “technical” pics of Wallace, before it was adapted to work with 2” eyepieces. It has a hand-figured f/2.8 mirror, a dovetail base to be used as a finderscope for a bigger telescope, solid carbon rods, and a small alt-az base to use it standalone.