2015/05/29
Started with darker post-dusk skies, set up the orions. Little scope aimed at the moon, big scope aimed at planets. Moon came in nicely with the filter, Shelly got some good photo’s I believe. Decided early into it to move on to saturn since jupiter didn’t appear well. Saturn again showed nice focued edges at 167x, but mostly the same milky yellow color. but better. I was able to make out the cassini division, as was my wife. Addy really enjoyed the view as well. On a whim I boosted the power to 333x, and WOW, it just poped out at us. For about an hour we had views like you see from the professionals. The rings were highly contrasted, cassini division easily visible, the outter ring slightly darker than the inner ring, the planet was a totally different color than the ring system. Very nice. Later on I tried for a few DSO’s, m101 and m43 were not viewable. I’m confident I found the right spot, @ 31x I should have seen something fuzzy, but there was nothing. Just the gude stars that got me there. (which were seriously dim). DSO’s are not doable from my house unless they’re mag 4 or less I’m guestimating. 3-4 hours viewing.
On a side note, I started a project I’ll detail later, book binding! I found a nice “free” star atlas, printed it out on 11×17 paper, then tonight started to bind it together. fun stuff.