Learn everything you need to know about how to keep your optics dry and clear on the dampest, dewiest nights using dew heaters and shields.

You can easily make your own foam-rubber dew cap. Sky & Telescope's Dennis diCicco created this one by cutting a sheet of foam with a knife and ruler, butting its cut edges together, and joining them with hot-melt glue. After decades of experimenting with other materials, he calls it the best dew cap he has ever used.

 

You can easily make your own foam-rubber dew cap. Sky & Telescope's Dennis diCicco created this one by cutting a sheet of foam with a knife and ruler, butting its cut edges together, and joining them with hot-melt glue. After decades of experimenting with other materials, he calls it the best dewcap he has ever used.

S&T / Dennis di Cicco

 

The most common equipment hassle that observers face at night is water on the telescope. This comes as a surprise to people who expect things to stay dry in clear weather. Unfortunately, the steadiest, sharpest telescopic views are often had under precisely the atmospheric conditions that cause dew to form. At the eyepiece, you first notice dim stars and galaxies becoming harder to see; then, bright stars develop fuzzy halos—and a check with the flashlight reveals wet haze coating the optics. In severe cases, the whole telescope may be soaked. Wiping never helps; more water condenses the moment you stop. At this point many observers pack up, defeated. However, you can keep your lenses and mirrors crystal clear in even the heaviest dewing conditions. You just need to understand the enemy and take effective countermeasures, such as dew heaters, shields, caps and more.

A Dew Primer

Dew does not "fall" from the sky. It condenses from the surrounding air onto any object that's colder than the air's dew point. The dew point, often mentioned in weather broadcasts, depends on both temperature and humidity. When the humidity is 100 percent, the dew point is the same as the air temperature. At lower humidity, the dew point is below the air temperature. If the dew point is below freezing, you get frost instead of liquid water.

The depths of space: By radiating away heat directly into outer space, which is only a few degrees above absolute zero. The result? Dew on the scope!

 

How can a telescope taken from a warm house end up colder than the air in your backyard? By radiating away heat directly into outer space, which is only a few degrees above absolute zero. The result? Dew on the scope!

Courtesy Akira Fujii.

 

A familiar example of dew physics occurs when you take a bottle out of the refrigerator. If the bottle is colder than the air's dew point, it drips with condensation. Your telescope is the bottle.

"But my telescope can't get colder than the air!" a new Schmidt-Cassegrain owner once told me. "It was warmer than the air when I brought it outdoors. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that can't happen!"

If only life were so simple. Objects do try to come to the same temperature as their environment and then stay there, as the Second Law says. But they don't exchange heat just with the air around them. They also exchange heat with distant objects by radiation. That's why the Sun can feel warm on your skin even though it's 93 million miles from your skin. At night the heat flow goes in the opposite direction. The effective temperature of the dark night sky is just a few degrees above absolute zero, and a telescope in an open field is exposed to a whole celestial hemisphere of this cosmic chill. Correcting this issue involves shielding your optics, dew heaters and caps, and other innovative ways to prevent your optics from 'dewing' up.

Shield Your Optics

The first line of defense against dew, therefore, is to shield your optics from as much exposure to the night sky as is feasible. The traditional dew cap extending beyond a refractor's lens often serves this purpose well enough to keep the lens dry. The longer the dew cap, the more likely it is to work. One of the nice things about a Newtonian reflector is that its entire tube acts as a dew cap, shielding the primary mirror at the tube's bottom. An open-tube reflector, however, needs a cloth shroud around its open framework to gain this benefit. The cloth itself, of course, will get wet on its sky-facing side.

halfway there

 

This refractor's objective lens has an adequately long dew cap (left) but its finderscope does not (right), and so it will dew up rapidly if it cools below the dew point.

S&T / Craig Michael Utter

 

The worst dew problems happen on exposed parts that are thin (or have low heat capacity) and rapidly radiate away their warmth. Schmidt-Cassegrain corrector plates are notorious for collecting dew; so are the (otherwise excellent) Telrad sights with their exposed glass plates. A dew shield is reportedly the first accessory that Schmidt-Cassegrain owners most often come back to buy.

An example of an eyepiece and eye cup that benefits from shielding

 

Eyepieces, too, benefit from shielding. This Edmund Scientific eyepiece came supplied with an eye cup that helps prevent dew and blocks stray light.

S&T / Craig Michael Utter

 

You can easily make your own. A piece of tough 5/8-inch (16-mm) foam rubber — the kind sold in sporting-goods stores to go under sleeping bags — makes a dew shield that's cheap, durable, and very lightweight. As a rule of thumb, a dew cap should be at least 1 1/2 times as long as the telescope's aperture is wide. (An example is illustrated on the first page of this article.) A side benefit is that the cap also cuts down on stray light getting into the telescope. That being said, if you're concerned that the cap might vignette the image (block some starlight near the edges of the field of view), you can cut the foam so it flares open at a slight angle. A mere 3° opening angle should allow at least a 3° unvignetted field of view.

Eyepieces are prone to dewing too. Warmth radiating from your face slows the dewing process, but humidity from your eyeball and breath speeds it up. A tall rubber eyecup — the kind that extends above the eye lens all around — not only blocks stray light while you're observing but acts as a miniature dew cap when you're looking away.

Shield Your Site

The author fights dew in his observatory in two ways: his 12½-inch reflector has an extra-long tube, and his roll-off roof hangs partway over his worktable, protecting charts and accessories from radiational cooling.

 

The author fights dew in his observatory in two ways: his 12½-inch reflector has an extra-long tube, and his roll-off roof hangs partway over his worktable, protecting charts and accessories from radiational cooling.

S&T / Craig Michael Utter

 

The same principle works on large scales. Have you noticed grass in the middle of a field white with frost or dew while grass near a tree has none early on a clear morning? The tree is a giant dew cap, and it can work for you too. If you'll be looking at just one part of the sky, try to have trees around and behind you. Not only will your telescope stay dry longer; so will your charts and accessories.

Trees also reduce wind problems, but a slight breeze is a good thing: it will keep your telescope nearly up to the ambient air temperature, since radiational cooling is slow and inefficient compared to heat transfer with moving air.

Then there's the observing umbrella, not a widely known accessory but one that works. A beach umbrella blocks the chill of outer space the same way it blocks the heat of the Sun. It can help shield all your gear and you too from the cosmic deep freeze. On a still night a thermometer under an umbrella can read more than 10° Fahrenheit (6° Celsius) higher than when it is exposed to the open sky.

Warming Your Optics with Dew Heaters and More

This Schmidt-Cassegrain was wired up with a Kendrick Dew Remover System in four places: the main scope's corrector plate, the finder's objective, and both eyepieces, one example of dew heaters.

 

This Schmidt-Cassegrain was wired up with a Kendrick Dew Remover System in four places: the main scope's corrector plate, the finder's objective, and both eyepieces.

S&T / Dennis di Cicco

 

There will be times and places where none of this is enough. You then have no choice but to warm your optics, usually electrically.

A 120-volt hair dryer (used gently from a distance so it doesn't overheat the glass and warp it) will blow off dew for perhaps five minutes. Then you have to use it again. And again. A 12-volt auto windshield defogger gun is somewhat less effective.

A better way is to apply a little heat continuously. Heated dew caps that run off batteries have been advertised and reviewed in Sky & Telescope. (An elaborate example is the Kendrick Dew Remover System; May 1994 issue, page 52. A somewhat similar system is sold by Orion Telescopes & Binoculars.) If you're comfortable working with electrical parts and a soldering iron, you can make anti-dew heaters to any size, shape, and specification you want.

Warmed optics can have unexpected benefits. Dew works its first subtle evils before you notice anything. The late S&T columnist Walter Scott Houston used electric warmers on both the objective and the eyepiece holder of his 4-inch refractor. When he turned off the power, the telescope could lose a whole magnitude of light grasp before the objective actually looked damp. "Even on nights when dewing is not noticeable," Houston wrote, "the star images seem better with the dew heaters on than without them!" This may be because, contrary to what you might think, gentle heating, such as with dew heaters, keeps a telescope close to the temperature of the surrounding air, minimizing poor "seeing" caused by air-temperature differences near your optics. After all, the whole idea is to stop the telescope from growing colder than the air, so dew heaters are a great option to consider.

Not-So-Cold Storage

Whatever steps you may or may not have taken during your observing session, don't cap up your telescope or shut it into an airtight case while any dew remains condensed on any of its parts (optical, electrical, or mechanical).

 

Whatever steps you may or may not have taken during your observing session, don't cap up your telescope or shut it into an airtight case while any dew remains condensed on any of its parts (optical, electrical, or mechanical).

S&T / Dennis di Cicco

 

The most destructive dewing happens when a telescope is in storage. No telescope should be closed up and put away until it is thoroughly dry. Water that has nowhere to escape may attack optical coatings and ultimately etch the glass itself. So may condensation that forms and evaporates repeatedly in a sealed environment over long periods of time.

How, you may ask, does water get into an airtight space that was dry when you sealed it? The answer is it was there all along. Air contains water vapor, and if your telescope gets colder than what the dew point was when the air was sealed in, water will condense. This is why so many puzzled telescope owners discover water stains on the inside surfaces of their corrector plates and refractor lenses.

Several approaches can prevent this. Don't move a sealed telescope from warm to cold storage. In fact, sealing may be a bad idea altogether. The best telescope covering is cloth, which can "breathe." It keeps dust off while letting water vapor out. And you might want to leave the eyepiece holder covered only with cloth — just enough to keep dust and spiders out.

The worst problems occur when a warm front of humid air blows in after cold weather, as often happens in early spring. Everything cold gets drenched. A cloth wrap may be the best defense here too; it will greatly reduce the amount of humid air that can flow over cold parts.

The usual advice is to store a telescope at the outdoor temperature to minimize tube currents when you set it up. But this old rule may need modification. Keeping the telescope a little warmer will tend to thwart condensation. An enclosed porch or attached garage may provide the extra few degrees you need. Really long-term storage should probably be inside your living space. Never leave a telescope in a damp basement or garage or, as a rule of thumb, any place where tools grow rusty.

You can take active countermeasures too. A 4- or 7-watt light bulb inserted into a blanketed telescope makes a nice low-power heater. Position it just below or right next to the objective, or else it may merely drive off water from other parts of the tube and send it condense onto your cold optics. Running the bulb continuously will cost about a dollar per watt per year. You might turn it on only in the damp season, or attach it to a humidistat switch.

Silica gel desiccant will dehumidify the air in a tightly sealed enclosure. I keep a ¾-pound bag in plastic webbing attached to the inside of one of my 12.5-inch reflector's tube caps. Every month or two, when the bag's indicator slip turns from blue to pink, I heat the bag in a toaster oven in my observatory to drive off the collected moisture. The more tightly you seal your tube or storage case, the less often you'll have to do this. Silica gel is available from many sources. I got mine from Hydrosorbent Products (www.dehumidify.com; P.O. Box 437, 25 School St., Ashley Falls, MA 01222 USA; 800-448-7903 / 413-229-2967).

Water can be an insidious enemy for astronomers, but a little knowledge will keep it permanently at bay, such as dew heaters and caps.


Comments


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FlinnMR

March 14, 2017 at 12:49 pm

How do I know when to use dew heaters? I do not want to wait until dew has already formed ..,

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_me

February 4, 2019 at 3:56 am

I've been thinking a bit about your "2nd law of thermodynamics" issue... it seems to me that the newbie was right.

thermal contact cannot result in one item with a lower temp than the lowest temperature of the two (or more) items in contact...

but he forgets that the reason for condensation in the first place is a dew point higher than the ambient temperature.

thus dew forms on an item that is in equilibrium with the surrounding temperatures--even if we ignore changes in localized air temp, that can tend to further account for dew formation.

dew also requires an "efficient" surface to begin formation... among the more efficient of such surfaces are glassy smooth objects.

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rcwelsh62

December 9, 2022 at 4:44 pm

Hi, The link to "make anti-dew heater" is broken. Could that get fixed so I can see what is described?

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Monica Young

December 12, 2022 at 9:37 am

Thanks for letting us know, this link is now fixed.

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