A brief trip to the moon.

[The Warthog]

I went out with the frac tonight, and after I got set up I put in the 24mm wondereyepiece, and pointed at the moon. Oddly, I couldn't come to focus. I tried with my trusty 32mm Plossl, and that didn't focus, either. I had screwed a UV filter and MV filter into the nether end of the diagonal earlier this week, so I took them off, and found that now I could come to focus.

A little closer inspection of the "UV" filter revealed that it is actually a +2 close-up lens. I thought when I installed it that it had a little curvature on it, but decided that was an optical illusion. It wasn't. Anyway, I screwed the MV filter in by itself, and now have a +2 close-up lens for sale. Any takers?

I put the scope on the moon again, and did most of my observing with the 8mm X-Cel (125x) which was more than satisfactory. I cruised up and down the terminator, with less concentration than I did last night, though. Focused mainly on two handsome craters in the north, sitting on a plain with a lovely surroundings of mountains and craterlets. the mountains to the northwest looked like a forest, and very 3D. I started to sketch it, but the sketch wasn't coming up right, and I lost patience and gave up. I mistook these craters at first for Aristoteles and his partner, but then realized they are a similar but smaller pair to the soutwest. If I had my atlas here in the office, I could tell you the names.

The weather was so calm and pleasant, I could have just sat there breathing the air, but I went on to take in Saturn. There was thin cloud moving across the sky, so the transparency ranged from very good to just barely acceptable, but the rrefractor gives a much cleaner view of the Planet than the reflector does, looking more 3D, and the rings much more nicely separated from the planet. There were two moons evident. The Cassoni division showed up sometimes for seconds at a time. There was little else to be seen, so I packed up at about 11:00 and went in to watch the news.

Did look at Venus a little after I started looking at the moon. Again, the view of Venus is much cleaner, perhaps because of the absence of diffraction spikes, than in the reflector. Definitely gibbous, a little more than half phase, but not very exciting to look at.

Accompanied it all with a nice Don Tomas corona, which was good, but a little hard to draw on. Also had a glass of ginger ale, as I never drink while observing. Don't want to risk my expensive equipment.