first light with the astro-station

[Andrew*]

got my first clear sky this evening and I love this set-up already! :love7:

Took off the cover and observing in minutes. Of course there were a number of minor things like folding up the cover, powering up the mount, quick polar align (only had 50 mins so I just wanted to get cracking!), getting out the EPs, taking off tube covers etc. but these were soon out of the way.

I could see a certain asymetry in the collimation on an out of focus (OOF!) star, but I didn't think this would make such an impairment to the view. M42 was decidedly faint. I could only make out the silhouette of the central dust cloud and a very limited amount of nebulosity. I blame the transparency, which wasn't the best by any means. But it was still odd, because I've seen more nebulosity through visible cloud!

I saw mars, but not a lot on it. Seeing wasn't great either and the view at 333x appeared OOF, although I did check this.

I now moved across the sky to Ursa major, in an attempt to locate M81/2, which even after numerous attempts, I have never succeeded in locating for myself. It wasn't to be this time either :?. I did however see a very curious "star" which was distinctly bluey green in colour - unlike any star I've seen before. When I transferred to the nagler zoom though it appeared orange though :? Any ideas what it might have been? in M81 area...

And then it was time to go. Put the cover back on - no probs. Go home.

Andrew

[jgs001]

Andrew, nice report. It's great that you got to use the new station. Must have been very satisfying.

[Kaptain Klevtsov]

Sounds great fun. It should be even better when you take the filter off the EP that you used first.

Kaptain Klevtsov

[Andrew*]

:oops: You weren't even there!

After being confused about M42 I wondered whether there would be more to see with a filter, so I tried the UHC-S and CLS filters on it, and as you have so rightly worked out, left one of them on while trying to find M81, which of course led to the greeny tinge! D'oh! And there was me thinking I had accidentally found the blue snowball

Now where's that thread with the list of common mistakes....

Ach well.

Cheers for that!

Andrew