9PM -1AM
Oakwood, not so dark site.
Bonnie and Mark braving the coyotes and the neighbors nasty barn lights.
Transparency poor.
Seeing poor.
Humidity high.
Temps 55-60
CG4 mount
Pentax 7MM
TV 22 Panoptic
12.5 Doctor
Leica Microscope
M80
M5
M4
Venus
Moon
I posted a photo of the moon that Bonnie helped me capture in the Moon picture section.
We also took more pictures of Venus, but none were as good, relatively speaking, as the ones we captured the last time we were out.
Bonnie chilled out pretty quickly and her joints were starting to hurt so she walked back to the house and left me to wander in the sky for a while alone.
I began my clumsy method of sky hopping and star stoping.
I scanned around, literally driving the telescope by hand with both clutches released, enjoying everything that passed the
I began last night at Antares and moved to M4 which was easy and not really a random move as most everything else was on this outing.
After M4 I was all over the sky east and west of Scorpius. Mostly I hovered close.
I rolled into Sagittarius a bit to find the Butterfly and Ptolemy Clusters. I had to dig for those two as they were nearly on the horizon. The sky was so bad they revealed only a small portion of their resident stars. But I did notice that the Leica
I slid back over to Antares and M4…I used Antares as my reference point.
Performing my scan again I hit upon M80 which resolved as a little cotton ball with maybe a few revealed stars but mostly a defuse ball of light. From there I wandered around quite a bit. It may seem fruitless, but for me it was a pleasure. I simply enjoyed viewing the stars. Sometimes I was able to see some color, but mostly the atmosphere killed that joy. I saw quite a few of what seemed to be doubles. I am not at all sure. They may have just been very close stars.
Eventually I stumbled upon M5. This one is hard to misidentify. It was a fine view. Even with only the 4 inch
It does not seem like I had much of a harvest, but I had a lot of fun. I spent about 4 hours out there. It was gooood !
Peace and Strength to you all.
Mark