Observing with a spotting scope

[mdstuart]

Trying out an old bushnell 60mm skymaster spotting scope last night.

Lovely optically! Seems to be 22x magnification.

M13 showed up as a fuzzy ball, Albeiro split easy and the blue and orange stars were nice. Managed to split various other doubles down to 14 seconds of arc. Saturn was an oval shape with the rings and planet body almost evident.

M57 the ring was there. M81/2 were easy to see. M51 was also very obvious. NGC2841 was very small but just possible.

And the moon was awesome with very sharp features.

So a good little vintage scope.

Mark

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[Schorhr]

Great little observation report!

It's amazing what even the smallest scope will show in the night sky. I wish more people would be aware of this... My 20€/18gbp 76/300 dobson shows amazing things for it's value as well, if one replaces the plastic 1" eyepieces...

[damnut]

On the odd occasion when the car was too full going on hol to get the st120 (usual grab & go) into the roof box or boot, had an 80mm spotting scope on sturdy camera tripod. It was great, you accept the limitations to be able to view in tremendous dark sky locations, usually for us the Northern Highlands or rural South Wales.

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Nice report. People may frown on spotting scopes for astronomical purposes, but they are leagues ahead of the optics Galileo and several other famous astronomers used to discover many objects in the sky.