2nd Night, Proper Alignment, The Moon, Jupiter, Video & Cloud!

[upahill]

Hi,

Reluctantly gathered up the energy to get setup around 6pm tonight despite the cloud cover, one website said it would rain, another said it would be 20% cloud so I thought what the heck.

First task was seeing if the barlow / webcam would work now I had discovered the extension tube which was preventing focus. More importantly I wanted to check that I could use the barlow, and then switch to normal lenses without having to re-install the extension tube each time, it turns out I can.... just.

Recorded a quick 20 seconds of video on the moon and confirmed that the camera was working, then moved onto getting the alignment sorted out. I had to adjust the lattitude thingy but managed to get polaris properly aligned in the polar scope, unfortunately the battery seems to have gone in the little illumation thing so it was trickier than I hoped. Holding a red torch near the top of the polar scope helped out a little though.

3 Star alignment was successful, but it was still out - the Autostar told me I was less than 5 degrees from the pole - but what does that mean? Should I adjust the polar alignment and then try aligning again?

Jupiter looked pretty good again, I started out at 127x with the 4mm eyepiece and then tried the barlow pushing it to 254x, focusing was *incredibly* difficult now, and there didnt seem to be a 'sweet spot' even the slightest attempt to move the focusser would push it too far either way. I spent about 10-15 minutes, but couldnt really discern any additional detail, in fact I prefered viewing at 127x which seemed to go against my best senses.

The cloud was starting to roll in so I had to check some objects which were still viewable, Orion was out of the question so I took another look at the double double, and plieades. The moon was much brighter tonight, so these objects seemed quite washed out - I also tried a couple of galaxies but couldnt see anything - the sky was just too washed out tonight (I think a combination of up high cloud, and moonlight.)

Cold set in after about 3 hours so I came in - but glad I mustered the energy to go out, even if it wasnt perfect!