Hunting for meteorites

Inspired by stuff on the web (e.g., here), I went hunting for micrometeorites. I wrapped a magnet with plastic wrap, and ran it through the dirt under one of our house's downspouts. Apparently meteorites have high iron content so magnets capture them. There was some magnetic dust. I then transfered a couple of pieces of it to a microscope slide and had a look. I saw black chunks of stuff with transmitted light, unsurprisingly, but they became pretty and shiny when I shone a flashlight on them. The two largest ones had rough edges. Micrometeorites are supposed to be smoother due to their hot passage through the atmosphere. But moving the slide around, I cam on a smaller piece with smoother edges and interesting texture that matched what one would expect a meteorite to look like. There was some shiny bumpiness, some small pit-like spots and some interesting rod/wave like areas.

I tried to save the tiny piece for future observations. I tried to stick it to some sticky tape, but the goo made it very hard to observe under the microscope. So I ended up dissolving the goo with acetone to recover the piece. As a side-effect, the piece became cleaner and was brightly metallic under the microscope. Unfortunately, I eventually lost it. It was very small, about four or five times longer than wide, and the width was about that of a hair or maybe a touch more. I lost it when I tried to transfer it with the tip of a needle from a dirtier cover glass to a cleaner one, but somehow it just disappeared--I used a powerful loupe to try to find it, but couldn't. Oh well.

At least the kids got to see it. I don't know it was a meteorite, of course. Too bad I lost it before taking a picture.

70mm refractor project just about finished

And we've almost finished the 70mm refractor.  I may still add some sort of sight for aiming it more effectively, though.

The tripod is made of cherry from a recalled crib that I picked up for scrap wood for free on Craigslist, together with some 1/2" Baltic birch plywood.  I glued two cherry slats side-by-side to form each leg.  The mount is a miniature Dobsonian mount.  The big round cutouts on the mount are to accommodate the oversize focusing knobs.  The azimuth bearing rides on PTFE pads and an old CD.  The altitude bearing uses PTFE pads and a plywood circle.

I had some trouble focusing a GSO 32mm Plossl in it--there wasn't enough focuser in-travel.  I suppose if I want to use that eyepiece with it, I can trim the top of the diagonal a little.

The moon

Here is a great zoomable image of the moon from NASA.

70mm refractor

Finally we finished the OTA of my son's 70mm F/4.3 refractor.  It uses the Crayford-style focuser I described in my previous post.  I will update with build details later.  Personally, I think it's really cute.

A simple wooden Crayford-style focuser

My son wanted to build a telescope out of a mailing tube we had, so we bought a 70mm lens (300mm FL).  The part of telescope making that I like the least is focuser-making.  But I think I now have a Crayford-style design that is very easy to make.  It is easier to make than my previous wooden Crayford and helical Crayford, and has about the complexity of my push-pull Crayford but works an order of magnitude better.

It's a block of hardwood (cherry, from an old crib), 2.75"x2.75"x1" in dimensions.  I used my drill press to drill out a 1.5" hole (A) in the middle for the 1.5" outer diameter aluminum focuser tube.  I then drilled a second hole, 3/8" in diameter, all the way through from one side to the other (B), so that hole A and hole B would meet and overlap by 1/16".  This second hole is for the focusing rod.

Finally, I drilled two more holes from one side to meet up with hole B (C and D) for adjustment screws that press on the focusing rod through PTFE pads, and tapped them to fit the adjustment screws simply by forcing a screw into the wood.  These PTFE pads (E) are small strips of 1/16" PTFE, bent into a C-shape, with the back of the C facing the adjustment screws.

I purchased an 8" x 1" x 0.0045" strip of self-adhesive PTFE tape (F) on ebay from mousetape.com for about $3 shipped.  I stuck a strip along one side of the focusing tube.

I then enlarged the 1.5" hole in the middle slightly.  My method of doing this was to use a sanding drum mandrel in my drill press with a somewhat oversized sanding drum (which would stick out on both sides past the work piece), with the work piece resting on another piece of wood with a hole in it, which was on the drill press table.  As a result, I could keep the work piece aligned at right angles to the sanding drum while moving it about so as to enlarge the hole.  I enlarged the hole until it was about 1.56" in diameter.  I then finished the exposed raw wood with Titebond II diluted with water and sanded.  I stuck another strip of PTFE tape (G) inside the focuser hole, opposite where the focusing rod will go.  Then I put it all together, and it worked just fine.

Update 1: I added knobs.  I had some oak circles from using a hole saw on some piece of oak some time ago, and after sanding them (by putting on a bolt and spinning with a drill against a sanding block), I press-fitted them on the focusing rod.  If it starts slipping, I'll drill a hole through the rod and knob and put in a screw.

Thanks: I am grateful to John Wall for the idea of putting PTFE on the focuser tube.

Update 2: I just had a bit of trouble with the wooden thread for one of the adjustment screws getting stripped. Treating the hole with CA glue helped, though.

And I added a screw on one end of the focuser tube as a stop, and I added a screw to hold the eyepiece. Because the focuser tube is only 2" long, so as not to compromise the length of movement, we drilled little depressions in the main block for the screws.

Update 3: And here is a not-to-scale diagram of what the main holes in the block of wood look like.

Various things

It's been cloudy and rainy for a couple of days.

I'll be building a 70mm F/4.3 refractor with my five-year-old son.  Lens and diagonal have arrived ($33, from Sheldon Faworski).  We have a mailing tube of just about the right size.  I ordered some screws and nuts from Amazon to attach the lens to the tube.  I am working on a simplified PTFE-on-PTFE Crayford variant for the focuser, made out of one piece of wood, plus some hardware.  I'll post details once it's done.

I've spent some of the weekend playing with using a Wii remote with an IR pen.  This might be nice for operating Stellarium at public star parties.

Advanced rubylith uses

Rubylith is a deep red plastic sheet, originally used in the printing industry.  Amateur astronomers now use it for such things as covering laptop or phone screens to make them red and help preserve dark adaptation.  It's a nice product for that purpose, but it has other redding-out uses.  In an earlier post, I described a method for using Rubylith to red-out the backlight on my phone.  That method had two problems.  First, the cyanoacrylate glue melted the Rubylith and gummed up keys, requiring extensive cleaning.  Second, light sneaked out around the edges of the Rubylith bits.

But there is a simpler method that I'll explain after a bit of background.  I bought some Rubylith from Jay, an amazingly wonderful ebay seller.  The one sheet I ordered unfortunately got damaged in transit, but Jay immediately sent me two (!) fresh sheets, superbly packed, at no charge.  Along with these sheets, Jay emailed me with a lot of fascinating information on the material.  The directly relevant part of that information is that Rubylith consists of a thicker clear sheet bound by static to a very thin red sheet, and if one cuts very carefully, one can cut through the red sheet layer while leaving the clear sheet intact, and then peel off the red sheet.  I tried to do this, and failed, and emailed Jay that I failed.

Imagine my surprise when today in the mail there came another tube mailer from Jay.  Inside was another free sheet of Rubylith, with squares of the red portion cut out to demonstrate how to separate the red and clear sheets.  (What a great guy!)  It looks like my initial mistake was that I was trying to peel from the edge.  But the trick is you cut out the red portion you want, being careful not to cut through the clear portion, not near the edge, and then peel.  Jay used a #10 X-Acto knife, while I just used box cutters.  Also, you have to know which side has the red sheet--it's less slick side.

Anyway, the red sheet is very thin and very clingy (my calipers say it's about 0.04mm, versus the clear acetate layer which is about 0.10mm).  And I had a use for it.  My phone had a thin latexy membrane between the dome switches and the keys themselves, probably to keep dust out.  I removed that membrane, and cut a clone out of the red layer on the Rubylith.  I took the occasion to clean out some dome switches, and then replaced the original membrane with the Rubylith membrane.

Result: a very nice and deep red on those keys covered by the membrane.  (Some of the redness is from my previous treatment.)

In case anybody is curious, here is Jay's whole email about the history of Rubylith and gel filters.

Changing the subject to night vision, and your search for a red safelight. I'm thinking I should give you some quick background on Rubylith. Even further back in the day (mid-1960's), I used Rubylith for stripping. It's original use was in the printing industry. It is a product that is actually two layers. The red part is incredibly thin, and is bonded (by static electricity, I think) to a much thicker clear plastic.  They are meant to be separated -- stripped -- apart.  Whenever a magazine or newspaper had a photograph they wanted to insert in an article, someone had to manually cut an opening where the photograph would show.  Using a VERY sharp X-Acto knife, and a VERY light touch, a stripper would cut through the Ruby, but not through the plastic. Usually, the stripper would cut a box or rectangular shape. Then they strip away the Ruby.  Actually peel it up off the plastic, leaving a clear box for the photograph to show through. When you get the two new sheets of Rubylith I sent you, you can check this out by experiment.

Since I cannot show you the two different sides of the Rubylith, try this: Take a piece of tape, and stick it to one side of the Rubylith at a corner. Pull up. Either the Ruby will peel away, leaving clear plastic; or you've stuck the tape to the wrong side. Once you get it apart, now is time to experiment. 

I'm thinking the SuperGlue you used, will dissolve the Ruby, but not the clear plastic. And that is why some of the Rubylith seemed to melt, but some of it not. Depending on which side you put the glue. I would not recommend SuperGlue. The workplace where Rubylith is designed to work, uses Rubber Cement. Very, very rarely, would you use Rubber Cement; and then only on the plastic side. Actually generally speaking, glues of any sort were not used with Rubylith.

It is beyond the scope of this letter to describe how the old-style printing processes worked. But Rubylith was an overlay on top of the photograph. It was held in place by a vacuum frame. Then a composite photograph was made; which, using several steps; put the photograph together with the type; and made the final article.

As to Roscolux. Yep, as you might guess, back in the day (late 60's -- early 70's) I worked with that stuff too. I just wanted you to know that the word "gel" is short for "gelatin". As in JELL-O. Roscolux used to be water soluble. You could eat it. The various colors of gel tasted differently, but all would dissolve in water. I'm thinking now-a-day, Roscolux has changed to some kind of plastic-based formula. [Yes -ARP]  But; just; test the stuff with an eyedropper of water first. Or, maybe suck on it. It will either dissolve, or it won't. [It doesn't. -ARP] As to the obvious question, "why gel?", the answer is heat. Roscolux is a product for Theater.  No, not the local movies where you see "Tron." I'm talking legitimate Theater, where the audience sees -- not celluloid images -- but they see real people, standing in front of a real audience, and giving a real performance, in real time. Those people on the stage, must be lighted. And depending on the color of the costumes; and the color of the background; the lights must have color also. Since a typical Theater stage is about half the size of a football field, there must be a corresponding amount of light (think of a night football game). If all the light is just white light, then everything down there on stage will be washed out, faded, by the light. So we color the lights with gels. They must stand up to a whole lot of heat. At a minimum, we're talking a 500 watt bulb. At a maximum, a carbon arc follow spot, which draws 23 amps (about 3,000 watts). Only gel can stand up to this kind of heat. It does not melt. And with this incredible amount of heat, no one worried about humidity. Just check. I'm thinking Roscolux has updated their gels in the last (*ahem*) four decades. Probably they are now plastic, not gel. Just, check first.

Anyway, as I said, Jay is a great guy, so if you're buying Rubylith, I don't hesitate to recommend him. And if you have questions about the product, he's great at answering them. Thanks, Jay!

(By the way, my son wants me to make a telescope for him and his sister out of the heavy-duty mailing tube Jay sent me the Rubylith in.  I am thinking a nice 70mm lens would fit well.)

Bosch Progressor U234X blade

My super-cheap Harbor Freight jigsaw used to cut horribly crookedly and non-squarely. The recommendation I was hearing was to get a circular saw, but I was scared of kickback. So I decided to try a good blade in the jigsaw.

I ordered a Bosch Progressor sampler pack from ebay, and loaded a U234X blade in the jigsaw. While I was at it, I noticed the jigsaw's shoe wasn't square and fixed it. I set medium speed, and turned off the orbital feature, and made a sample cut of 1/2" baltic birch ply against a guide. It cut very slowly, but once it was done the cut was quite straight and smooth. And only a touch of sanding would be needed. The squareness was off by about 0.3 degrees. (Maybe the shoe isn't quite square enough?)

All in all, it's good enough for me. No need for using a router or circular saw.

In the photo, the test cut I did is the front cut (the photo shows both sides of the cut). The side cuts were done with a friend's table saw. Those cuts are slightly straighter and perfectly square (as far as I can tell), but have a lot more tear-out.

The U234X (T234X is the T-shank version) blade is cool. It's 0.05" thick and has two alternating rows of teeth, one against each cutting surface, which smooth both sides of the kerf.

A 24" and an 8"

I went out last night to our club's observatory, and got to learn a bit of my way around controlling the observatory's 24" Ritchey-Chretien.  My plan was to look at clusters in M31.  I did all the observing in the 24" through the camera, with exposures from 5 to 200 seconds.  I started with a very quick and shapely image of the spiral galaxy M74 that I didn't save.  And M76, the Little Dumbbell, looked like its big cousin.  I tried for a galaxy cluster, but at my exposure times I could barely see anything.

Then I moved on to what I was primarily aiming at: the M31 clusters.  I did see G1, G76, G78, G81 and G280.  The hard part wasn't seeing the objects, but identifying them, as at the resolution of the camera I was using they all just looked like stars, as can be seen in my photo on the right, except maybe G1 (the bigger circles are just brighter stars).  G1 has two stars from our galaxy really close to it and looks like the head of Mickey Mouse, with the stars being its ears, which made it easy to identify.  The others I just had to correlate against SIMBAD images and the M31 clusters catalog in AstroInfo.  Since AstroInfo only goes up to magnitude 12.7 in stars, there were very few stars in each camera field of view to correlate with, but I think I did manage to identify all the objects by their relative positions to these stars.

I also looked at one open cluster in M31 for good measure: VDB0-B195D.  It looked like it had some detail around the bottom edge, though the supposed detail may just be foreground Milky Way stars.  The photo also captured NGC 206, a fragment of M31, and a bunch of prominent dark lanes in the M31 background.  None of these are amazing photos--they're more like quick observing.

I ended up my session on the 24" with a look at Comet Hartley, which I hadn't seen since earlier in the fall.  It was fairly low in the sky, but it was definitely there (see glow to left of center).  I was pleased that 2sky got its position correct.

I then went to the observing field to pick up my Coulter 8" which I had put out in the field at the beginning of the night.  There was ice on the tube, but the scope worked great (except for a problem with the red dot finder that I need to fix).  I had a quick look at M33.  I couldn't see the spiral arms, but I did see hints of detail, and it was quite large.  And then I looked at M42 and it had lovely color: greenish-blue near the Trapezium, moving to reddish-pink in the wings.

Lunar eclipse

I stayed up to watch the lunar eclipse.  It was quite nice.  I took the kids out for the grand finale.

I also took a whole bunch of photos.  I'll be editing them a bit more and trying to write some script to align the frames better (and maybe even de-rotating?), but for now, here is the set.  The animation jumpy because I wasn't taking pictures all the time--some of the time I was indoors watching Starship Exeter.  I used a perl script and ImageMagick to animate the photos, using the exif time stamps and speeding up by a factor of 400.  Some of the shadows are odd--I've had trouble with shadows of clouds, branches and internal telescope structures.  I'll eventually try to clean up the photos and remove the bad ones.

Red backlight keys on phone

Update: Today, I found two of the keys not working.  Peeling back the white plastic showed that there was reddish junk in the dome switch contacts.  I think I must have used slightly too much glue, and it flowed down with melted Rubylith.  Or else the marker ink flowed down.  I cleaned that up with acetone.  But this is something to beware of.  Moreover, some white light spills around the sides of the Rubylith.

My Treo 700P has keys that light up.  One can turn that off, but then it's a nuisance to type things in.  So I ordered a piece of Rubylith from ebay, about 8x11 in size.  The lights come from little white LEDs on the same board that the dome switches are on.  And I reddened the lights, as can be kind of seen in the photo.

Here's what I did.  I disassembled the Treo (not my first time).  My initial thought was to just put a piece Rubylith over where all the lights were, but that would cover up the dome switches as well and that wouldn't be good.  My next thought was just to use red marker over the white LEDs.  But that isn't very effective.  Finally, I cut strips of Rubylith about 1.5mm wide, and snipped them into lengths of about 5mm, and glued them over the LEDs.  The photo on the right shows about half of them done.

I did the gluing with Super Glue (I like the cheap GTC brand [or off-brand] tubes they sell at HEB and Walmart, four for about a dollar).  I held each Rubylith strip with tweezers, very carefully by the very tip, and put a very small amount of super glue on the strip, being careful not to get it on the tweezers.  I then applied it to the LED, pressing it down with a toothpick, orienting it so it wouldn't get in the way of the dome switches.  They didn't all stick as "super" as I hoped, perhaps because of the red marker, but eventually I got them all on.

I had to do two cleanup things.  Two of the Rubylith pieces protruded close to a dome switch (bumps in the white plastic in the photos), and I snipped the ends with nail scissors.  Also, I had accidentally dropped a Rubylith piece with glue on it, and so there was a glue spot on a dome switch.  I was afraid this would harden, so I cleaned it up with acetone.

It all works.  For some reason, the center of the five-way switch is not as clicky as it was, but it works.  Also, the lights are a bit pinkish rather than deep red, but I am pretty happy.  I rarely use a phone at a dark site, but sometimes I need to.

I was also going to make a screen overlay from the Rubylith, and I may still do that, but it blurs the image annoyingly, making small fonts hard to reed.  I may eventually get a sheet of Roscolux medium red gel filter (I tried the small one in my sampler pack, and while it perhaps isn't quite dark enough, and is more fragile than the Rubylith, it preserves sharpness much better).

Red trunk lights on the cheap

I've been embarrassed at star parties by the bright white light trunk light in our Taurus. I've finally done something about it, in my usual cheap way. I made a red LED light. I drilled four holes in a 40mm long 3/8" thick wooden dowel. I stuck three mini red LEDs into the holes, with neighboring LED leads going into the same hole. The last hole on one side also got a lead from a 330 ohm resistor (the values will differ depending on your LED specs and battery voltage). I twisted the leads together for better connections, cut them shorter as needed, taped it all up with electrical tape (OK, I've left out some missteps), and popped it in in place of the trunk's tubular incandescent 12V bulb, in such a way that the unconnected LED lead on one side and the unconnected resistor lead, made contact with the metal contacts. Works just fine. Rather dim in daytime, and I haven't tried it at night time. The old bulb drew 0.7A. The new LED system draws much, much less. So no danger of running out the car battery if I leave it on overnight.

I still need to do this to the dome light. My reading of Texas law suggests that alas I am not allowed to do this for the puddle lights ("running board courtesy lights" must be amber or white--maybe this only applies if they're on while the car is going, but why take risks?), so when I go observing, I'll just put some tape over them.

The cost for the whole project was low.  I had the 330 ohm resistors lying around for years (I think they're 1/4W;  ideally, I should have used 390 ohm).  I got the LEDs for about two cents a piece from Tayda Electronics.

There was one unexpected cost.  I blew a fuse when removing the original bulb.  Lesson: Keep the fuse disconnected when doing this, except when measuring stuff.

Amateur astronomy information from 1894

This is really neat. I really like the descriptions of what can be seen with what size of telescope.

open 2sky release

2sky is a full-featured planetarium application for PalmOS devices. It should work on both the newest PalmOS devices (TX, Centro, Treo) as well as older devices as far back as PalmOS 3.1 and maybe even 2.0. Open 2sky supports standard square screens, as well as the extended non-square screens of just about all devices.

Thanks to Kevin S. Polk's generosity in releasing 2sky to me under the GPL, I am happy to announce that 2sky for PalmOS is now officially released, free of charge. Click on "Download" at:
open2sky.sf.net.

I think the interface of 2sky is a model of elegance. The features include:

• star catalogs up to magnitude 11 (and smaller catalogs for devices with more limited memory)
• NGC/IC catalog
• Solar System objects including Sun, moon, planets, Pluto, moons of Jupiter, major asteroids, bright comets, and meteor shower radiants

This release of open 2sky is essentially the same as the last paid release of 2sky (3.0.2), except that I've:

• updated US/Canada/Mexico daylight savings rules which had changed in the meanwhile
• refreshed the asteroid and comet databases
• added support for Handera and Dana Alphasmart non-standard screen sizes
• removed the white border around the screen on the TX and some other newer devices
• rewritten code that wasn't GPL-compatible and made the code-base compile with prc-tools rather than Codewarrior
• added Waco and Turner Research Station to the locations :-)

The resulting binaries are actually slightly smaller than the last paid release.

open 2sky alpha test

After a number of hours of converting code from CodeWarrior to prc-tools and rewriting GPL-incompatible code, I have an alpha test release of open 2sky. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK and please send me or post any bug reports.

http://open2sky.sourceforge.net/

The database building tools are not yet running (actually, Kevin hasn't sent them all to me yet). The Comets and Asteroids databases thus are out of date. However, all of the star databases, up to magnitude 11 are included.

Note 1: The app by default reassigns all the four hardware keys when it runs. This is a problem on devices like newer Treos which need one of the keys for the home button. So, when you first run 2sky on such devices, just unassign your home button when you get to the screen for assigning buttons (to unassign it, tap on the icon for it, and then choose a blank square).

Note 2: I haven't succeeded in running this under a PalmOS 3.0 emulator (dragging doesn't work, and that's crucial), but I have succeeded in running it under a PalmOS 3.3 emulator. Open 2sky works best under PalmOS 5.x. It should support Palm, Tapwave, Garmin and Sony non-square screen devices. It may support Handera ones. The next release will support Dana Alphasmart.

2sky

Kevin S. Polk, the author of the excellent but now alas defunct 2sky for PalmOS, has agreed to have me release it freely under the GPL.  I will be working on converting the code to prc-tools, as well as replacing the GPL-incompatible CollapseUtils-derived code with PalmResize.

Isn't the screenshot beautiful?

Clavius

I was playing with my 5mm ortho eyepiece on my 13" last night, looking at the moon and Jupiter, but the seeing wasn't good enough.  But I did take a picture of Clavius with my Canon G7 through my Hyperion 13mm.  Not as sharp as I'd like.

In praise of hard fiber washers

I got a pack of a hundred 3/8" ID 1" OD hard fiber washers from Amazon's Industrial and Scientific sale on sale for under a dollar as an experiment (the regular price is about $16).  A significant portion of my do it yourself budget seems to be washers, so I thought it was worth trying these.  They're great.  The ones I got are black and not glossy so they're suitable for use inside a telescope without painting.  They are a bit thicker than steel washers and a bit thinner than nylon.  They are super-hard, lighter than steel and of course don't corrode.  I know this post sounds like an ad, and to alleviate that impression, I'm not linking.  But search for "fiber washer" in the Industrial and Scientific store, and sort by price from low to high.

Home-made fine-tuning rings for Hyperion eyepieces

The Baader Hyperion eyepieces accept fine-tuning rings which increase the magnification.  One unscrews the lens group at the bottom, screws in one or more fine-tuning rings, and screws the lens group onto that.  One can buy the fine-tuning rings, of course, for a modest price.  But cheap as I am, I decided to save.  Instead, I purchased two bunches of 48mm camera filters on ebay.  The latest bunch was a lot of ten Niko skylight filters for $13 shipped.  One then removes the glass from the filters, and screws the filter housings into a tube.  The tube is very rigid.  (Removing the glass destructively is easy.  Put filter in some thick bag, hit with hammer or screwdriver or handle of butter knife through the bag.  If the glass breaks, it is easily removed from the housing, though of course one should wear some kind of safety gloves and be careful not to let the glass out of the bag.  Eye protection and a breathing mask are a good idea.  Surprisingly, a number of the Nikos had the glass survive the procedure.)

The ten Nikos add up to 43mm total, and the three Gemkos I have from an earlier purchase give me 14mm.  I could control the length of the fine-tuning tube in increments of about 4.5mm by adding and subtracting one filter housing at a time.

For a total extra price of about $20, my single 13mm Hyperion varies in increments of under a millimeter of focal length between 13mm and about 7.5mm.  The views are really good, though the focus has to be close in with all 57mm of rings attached.  The apparent field of view increases very significantly, which is nice (at full extension, I need to press the eye into the eyeguard to see the whole field of view).  I guess this is because the field stop doesn't increase.  The eyepiece becomes absurdly long, and maybe some focusers won't be happy with the added torque.  I suppose for added fun, I could put in a Barlow, but then the magnification would be more than I can really use.

Astronomy gear and microscopy

I wanted to show the kids the grooves on a CD.  With the medium magnification objective on our microscope, one could just see shimmering graininess.  And I couldn't get the highest magnification objective to focus in on the graininess.  I think the problem may have been that the condenser light couldn't go through the CD, and so I was lighting it with a hand-held flashlight, and that objective has to go so close to the object that blocked the light.  So I got out my 6mm TMB/BO planetary eyepiece (equivalent to about 40X as a microscope eyepiece), popped it in a 1.25" - microscope adapter, and went back to the medium magnification eyepiece, and while we couldn't see it too well, it was obvious that there were pits, and that they were arranged in a line-by-line pattern.

That "1.25" - microscope adapter" is home-made, of course. I cut a 1" segment of 1.25" poplar dowel. I then drilled out the inner 1" of it with a Forstner bit, making a wooden tube with 1/8" walls. I cut a 1.5" segment of some 1.25" ID aluminum tubing (well, actually, a little less than 1.25" ID--I had to sand it out). I then nested the two, with the wooden tube sticking out of the bottom of the aluminum tube, and the aluminum tube extending on top about 1/2" past the top of the wooden tube. (See diagram: gray is aluminum and brown is wood.) They fit snugly, but I put in a couple of drops of CA glue for safety.

The whole assembly then fits around the focuser tube of the microscope, with the top of the wooden tube being flush with the top of the microscope's focuser tube. Eyepieces then fit in the aluminum collar that sticks out on top. The nice thing about making the adapter fit around the focuser tube instead of the more obvious inside is that it doesn't contribute any vignetting.

Of course, it would have looked a bit neater to make the inner tube of aluminum. But ordering an aluminum tube would cost about $8, while a dowel cost $4, plus I wanted the dowel for another project. Moreover, there is an advantage to using a wood inner tube--it won't scratch the outside of the microscope focuser tube as much as metal would. I suppose PVC could have worked as well, but the closest I could find in PVC was 1.29" OD, and I didn't relish the thought of sanding that down to 1.25" OD to fit inside the aluminum tube.