Venus- just

[Swoop1]

Last night was a bit of a wake up call. After the joy of my first session I thought I would get out for a short stint last night. Venus was visible as I rode home so I set up the scope on getting home then sorted myself out.

Before dinner I went out and lined up on Venus. The 25mm EP gave me a discernible disc so I swapped to the 10mm and managed to centre in the EP. The disc was more prominent but, as I had failed to fit a filter, the magnitude made focus difficult. I thought I would try then with the Barlow so fitted it. After the relative ease in which I found M31 the night before, I thought reacquiring Venus would be easy- more fool me.

One of my problems is that the site I have to observe that sector of sky has a street lamp about 15 yards away and, at 1800 last night, directly below Venus (about 2 palm widths below- not got the hang of degrees of declination yet). Combined with clumsy gross adjustments, I failed miserably.

Hey ho. All part of the learning experience.

[rockystar]

2 hours ago, Swoop1 said:

Hey ho. All part of the learning experience.

Indeed it is, at least you got out

 

[LukeSkywatcher]

Better to have tried and failed rather than not to have tried.

[laudropb]

A properly aligned finder will make locating targets much easier.

[Astro Imp]

You often learn more from failures than successes, as previous post aligning finder scope is key to easily finding targets.