Thanks, guys.
This one turned out to be a lot easier than I expected.
At first I was planning to just do the test live, look at the result, and report back in words.
But I got a good result in just a couple of minutes of playing around with various positions, and when I saw how obvious it looked through the 'scope, I thought "Heck, I can just record this as video."
So I set up a point-and-shoot camera to look through the eyepiece, held there by an Orion SteadyPix, pressed the record button, and went through the exercise a few more times. Just under two minutes later, I had an avi file containing several good snippets of action, and then it was just a matter of plucking out a few representative frames and making an animation of them.
In addition to being larger than life, what you see above is also about 10X slower than life. It's about 1/3 second of actual activity, represented by 7 frames at 0.5 second each.
Here's the same sequence at closer to live speed (0.03 second per frame).
Mike, as to my apparently superhuman steadiness, well, that's some combination of careful bracing, years of practice, lucky genes, and proper choice of dietary liquids, plus a
hefty boost from post-production special effects.
Bear in mind that this repeating loop looks a good deal more controlled than the original movements were. At 200X through the eyepiece, the end of that handheld pin does wander around quite a bit.
It's also true, though, that magnification does wonders. At least for me, my hands get a lot steadier (in absolute terms!) when I'm working under a scope than when I'm using just eyes. It's no problem at all making controlled movements at 20X that I wouldn't stand a chance at 1X. And it seems like the more of it I do (over a period of weeks), the steadier I get. I've actually come to think of it as some sort of physical therapy for minor tremor. How many other people work the same way, I have no idea.
--Rik
