300p SW Skyline - small report

[PaulM]

Managed to get out for just over an hour last night, first clear night in over a week and no moon with the 300p Goto SW Skyline so a small report after a very long day on the road visiting family in Cumbria

Firstly I've fitted a low profile dual speed crayford focuser a few days ago. Was more fiddly to fit than expected, bottom two screws are a little akward but overall a 10 minute job to replace the standard focuser. As its low profile I extended the drawtube extension to get focus. This is a great enhancement to the 300p, apart from making the focusing more precise as you would expect it also brought fainter stars\details into view due to being able to finely focus

Used the Synscan hand controller for the first time after the usual star alignment to navigate to objects I wanted to observe and it was consistently miles off, once I connected the tablet and SkySafari 6 Pro via bluetooth (as I have done for all previous observations sessions to date) I was able to navigate easily to objects via SkySafari and objects would be slap bang in the middle of the EP - whats going on here, can anyone shed any light?

NGC404    Mirachs Ghost    24mm EP - was easily visible and relatively close to Mirach itself which I found bright and a little overpowering so moved it out of the FOV and was able to discern NGC404 a little more, circular compact fuzzy getting brighter at its center.

M33    Triangulum Galaxy    24mm EP - had to use averted vision to firstly ensure it was in view. After observing for a few minutes I could discern some very faint fuzzyness and shape but overall very very faint but looking at the worst light polluted part of the sky

M34    Spiral Galaxy    Barely visible in the finder. 24mm EP nicely frames this open cluster. The brighter stars I presume give it its name although I'm not convinced !

NGC869\884    Double Cluster    An explosion of stars in the 24mm quite a sight. Can see most of the two clusters in the 24mm EP. The 15mm and 8mm brought out the fainter stars and more clustered centers.
 

I did manage to observe a few other objects including Mars (bright, getting smaller, higher int he sky and moving westerly now, but saw no detail), Neptune (small pale blue\white disc in the 8mm EP) Andromeda Galaxy and the Pleiades