My Star gazing evening with girlfriend, sister and her boyfriend!

[stargazer1980]

Well it was 9pm on wednesday night the 4th of april and i decided to invite my sister and her boyfriend round to my girlfriends for a little star gazing as the night was clear and the moon had not risen round by our house!

All below were viewed through my Celestron SLT 114

So i aligned my telescope and off i went! First was venus! It was extremely bright so on went the filter and .......................beautiful yet small and everyone else was amazed! Next was the pleiades, as nice as it looks in all the photos i didnt really think they were that blue to be honest yet still impressive! Next was M42! I started viewing it through my 32mm EP, then to my 15 so i could see it closer and to my frustration it was not as beautiful as what i have seen in the pictures on the forum! As nice as astrophotography is, i dont think it gives a true depiction of what everything really looks like!

Then i decided to go on to the M81 and M82 galaxies and although not immediately visible, with a bit of patience and eagerness..................there they were in all their glory. Small and smudgy yet still a delight! i focused on the bottom of the 2 as viewed through my scope and looked through my 15mm EP to zoom in on one of them and beautiful still!

Last but not least was saturn............what else do i need to say about saturn! That was viewed through my 6mm EP

The girlfriend, sister and sisters boyfriend are all new to astronomy and were amazed by what they saw! What a delight it was to see their faces light up!

Well thanks for your time and interest in reading my evening out and heres to many more

Darren

[The Warthog]

Sounds like a great time! I enjoy showing friends the view through the scope.

[geppetto]

Nice one Darren..

Can't beat a good session under the stars 8)

[dazza1639]

Nice one Darren. I did the same for my wife's sister & boyfriend during the eclipse. The girls weren't as keen in coming outside as it was bleedy cold that night.

Darren

[FLO]

Way to go Darren

[nitram100]

Nice report mate, you have to love people's reaction when they see Saturn for the first time, my brother saw Saturn for the first time through my 10" newt last night at 300x, his words were "F**K ME!" lol

Martin

[Vega]

LOL I showed a friend Saturn for first time last night... her reaction was "Oh my God, there it is.... that really is it". There's me thinking to myself "well I wasn't lying!".

It's funny, everyone knows what it looks like, but you have to see it with your own eyes. Its as if your sub-consious will not believe it until it sees it, then the shock kicks in when the reality of it is revealed.

Matt

[themos]

I find that children first go "wow" at Saturn and then they say "it's like a cartoon". But that's just my scope, I guess, which shows the shape but not the banding and the ring details.

[SteveL]

Over the 4 day Easter weekend, my house was "invaded" by 18 people with PCs for a LAN weekend (the 5th year I have done this), who then spent most of the time in the garden drinking and eating Most nights seeing was reasonably good (but bad transparency), and although I got a lot of playful abuse from them for having a scope, they all shut up instantly when they saw Saturn for the first time with their own eyes We started collecting the "first words out of their mouths" when they saw Saturn, but they were mostly very rude, and certainly not repeatable here. A couple of the guys got really interested and we went searching for some DSOs, but with the large firepit/BBQ still roaring away in the garden, it was hard to spot anything (M42 as it disappeared below rooftop level, M101 was just a smudge, etc). They asked a lot of questions, then went back to drinking heavily. One of the guys had travelled 60 miles or so, just to look through the scope. He currently has an 80mm refracter on loan from his brother on a GEM mount, but no GOTO mount. I just handed him the hand controller on the NexStar and let him loose. The grin on his face was amazing

[peonic]

The grin on Steve@FLO's face will probably be bigger in a couple of weeks time. I simply HAVE to have something with GoTo on it now.

Peonic