I have been largely MIA for a long time. Lots of personal changes, even preceding the whole, you know, apocalypse thing...
One of the changes included moving into a new house, so I had to explore the new settings for star gazing. It's not great, but the more I go along in this hobby (hobbled as that forward progress may have been recently), the more I enjoy simple, easy observations. Which is good too, because my main viewing site is now my deck, with a small zenith to NE field, dogged by lights from the adjacent townhomes and a big
A couple of really neat things happened yesterday though: first, my first true daytime astronomy experience. I had previously looked at the moon and the filtered sun, but not at anything else. Yesterday, lying on one of the zero-gravity chairs on my deck while my kid was making a sandy mess around me, I gawked at the moon with the Celestron 8x56 binos hand-held (alternating with looks at birds in the nearby trees). After enjoying that for a bit, on a lark I panned over to where I knew Venus would be. I immediately found it, and it looked very impressive! Super-bright in the
Later in the evening, I set up the Oberwerk 25x100s on the parallelogram, with the tripod low, to see how it feels to use them reclining in the zero-gravity chair. It's pretty neat, once I figured out the ergonomics and the way to move my head laterally for x-axis panning. Not much to be seen in my target area in the strong
Hope everyone is well and safe!