Sky and Telescope - August 2016 - 84

Focal Point

Rod Mollise

The Go To War
Despite recent stirrings, it's over, and happily so - the beneﬁts of Go To are legion.
I thought the "Go To War," the longrunning debate about whether "real" amateur astronomers use telescopes that point
automatically at sky objects, was over. But
this sometimes-heated controversy seems
to be ﬂaring up again in online forums
where amateurs gather and at the clubs I
visit. Me? I'm all for computerized scopes,
since they're one of the few things attracting new blood into our avocation.
I didn't always feel this way. I ﬁrst got
my hands on the technology more than
20 years ago, in late 1992 to be exact. A fellow club member invested his entire IRS
refund in a Meade LX200, the ﬁrst aﬀordable Go To Schmidt-Cassegrain, and one
evening he brought it to our club's dark
site, where I was cruising along with my
6-inch Dobsonian. "Ha," I thought, "that
thing'll never work. Get a horse!"
How wrong I was. My buddy invited
me to give the Go To a try. Punched in

"M13." There it was looking beautiful in
the eyepiece. M5? Yep. M8, M20, M92,
and all the rest of the summer wonders
succumbed to the LX200 as quickly as I
could push its buttons.
That left only the question of whether
amateur astronomers should use Go To.
Early on, when the subject came up at
club meetings, I sided with the curmudgeons complaining about the "coﬀee
grinder" scopes, with their whirring
motors, that were springing up like weeds
on our observing ﬁelds. You had to be
able to navigate the sky to be an amateur
astronomer. Familiarity with the stars is
central to our avocation.
While I believed, and still believe,
learning the sky is beneﬁcial for a number of reasons - especially the feeling of
accomplishment it brings - I've decided
that's not what makes you an amateur
astronomer. Instead, knowing something

about the objects you observe is far more
important than just knowing how to
locate them.
Once I admitted this realization to
myself, I began to see the good the new
telescopes could do for our hobby. Plenty
of people enter astronomy, become
enthusiastic about it, and then drop out.
Once they get past the Moon, bright
planets, and a vivid deep-sky object or
two, they run out of interesting things
to observe. They haven't yet mastered
locating objects with a star chart and
ﬁnderscope and get bored. Go To changes
all that. With just a little help and instruction, novices can see dozens of celestial
treasures from the get-go.
Something else convinced me Go To
is a good thing: the way the blasé faces
of teenagers at our club's public outreach
sessions lit up at the sight of computerized
telescopes. And they really lit up when one
member sent her scope to targets wirelessly with a smartphone. Kids like computers and phones, and if that's a hook to
get them into astronomy - where they'll
ﬁnd that computers are just the tip of the
iceberg, coolness-wise - so be it.
Actually, I don't know why I'm worried whether the Go To debate might be
creating divisions among us again. It's
clear the war is over. Go To is here to stay.
Don't like it? Don't use it. If you enjoy
hunting for objects, by all means hunt.
But stay focused on product, the enjoyment of the sky, rather than process, the
type of tool we use to reach night-sky
nirvana. ✦

S&T: LEAH TISCIONE

Contributing Editor Rod Mollise has two
other articles in this issue: "Visual Filters for
Deep-Sky Observing" (page 28) and "Spacewalking with the Meade MWAs" (page 58).
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Sky and Telescope - August 2016

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