Short night out...

[The Warthog]

I set up the reflector yesterday evening, and turned it to the sun, just long enough to be sure there were no sunspots on the disk at present. Too bad.

Then I carefully collimated the scope. It's a bit of a pain because of the wierd system they use for the screws, but it only took me about 15 minutes to get it into very good collimation. I tried to pick up Saturn and Venus while the sun was still up, but didn't catch them.

With the sun down, I hunted up Saturn, and spent a while looking at it with various eps. I got a similarly 3D effect with it as I did last night with the refractor. Best view was with my 8mm X-Cel, barlowed 2x. The view wasn't bad with the 5mm barlowed, either. I could only see two moons tonight.

Went to the Moon, next, and grooved on the mountains and craters along the terminator, especially in the southern regions. I didn't bother to name anything, I just gawked. Went over to the M42 area again, and looked around in the 24mm Speers WALER, at 32x. The nebula and its surrounding are nicely contrasty in this ep, and the stars are crisp, but not quite as crisp as they were through the f/9.5 frac. Also looked through some of my other eps, as I enjoy looking at M42.

Last I turned to beta Monoceri, which I had missed the night before. It is a triple star, with all thre elements between 5 and 6 magnitude. I was able to spit two of the elements in the 8mm X-Cel and 9mm Ortho, and to barely split the third element in the barlowed 8mm. It's a nice object, and more challenging than I had expected after seeing its write up. Oh, went and saw M41, too, just for fun.

It was about zero, with a little breeze, but not uncomfortable.

[Andrew]

Nice report WH.

You always take in a good variety of objects. I keep forgetting to look at mutiple stars - I must have a go at this, especially when the moon is up and I might otherwise not get out