#17 Gear night

Equipment:

nearly all of it.  Had issues with the goto mount, it didn’t want to work right.  I know the mount was level so something had to be wrong with the calibration part.  I know it’s worked in the past so i’m puzzled why it was off by so much.  Otherwise the old clone EQ5 did great, as usual, but I think the 8″ newt is way too much for Jupiter.  I had trouble getting focus all night, and it kept washing out, even with EP filters.  I reduced the aperture to 3″ and got much better results.   Which correlated to the 102mm Mak & refactor I tried.  Both did superbly even at higher powers.

I need to drill out the old tripod so I can get both Equitorial mounts working together.  I could really use a good EQ5 goto, but….

Seeing:

meh,  it was clear, and I did get more lucky frames than not.  But overall the moon was too bright overall.   the smaller aperture scopes did better.

Observations:

mostly Jupiter.  I did spend some time on the moon, there was still enough relief & shadow to get some interesting high power views of the termination area.  I tried a bunch of dso’s with the goto, but it wasn’t working well, and the only one I found was M5 and I didn’t stay on it long.   If the goto did get close to any other DSO’s, the moon washed them out, although I doubt it was 100% the moons fault.