A little lunar through a little scope

[Stu]

My group were out observing tonight, but I was grounded due to various home commitments unfortunately. The best I could do was my little 50mm Vixen spotter with trigger grip ball head on a lightweight tripod. Instant setup so I managed about 20 mins in total during the evening.

I must say that at x30 the views were very crisp, the seeing seemed pretty stable tonight (typically). This scope showed some yellow CA around the limb but the terminator was very sharp and seemed colour free.

Stand outs tonight were the triple of Theophilus, Cyrillus and Catharina putting on a fine show near the terminator. Posidonius looked etched on the surface, with a black line within it near the limb side crate edge. Not noticed that before.

Some lovely small peaks visible over the dark side of the moon, and a little bead off the bottom end of the terminator.

Plenty of detail visible even in this small aperture. Having it tripod mounted makes all the difference for a very enjoyable quick session.

[Trikeflyer]

Nice report. Sounds like you got your fix even if it was only 20mins. Sometimes it’s good to get a different view of familiar objects and there’s a lot to be said for quick set up grab and go - you don’t get much quicker than instant.   I also thought it was pretty crisp last night and I decided to get the  revelation 8 inch dob out. Chancing my arm a bit and fearing it wasn’t going to be cool enough I aligned the telrad on the moon. I don’t normally use the Dob for lunar because I prefer bino viewing with the  frac at high mag. Anyway, like you said Stu at low mag - for me that was about 50x -  Catharina et al were the highlight without doubt, very sharp indeed.  I didn’t spend much time looking at the moon as it was disappearing behind the trees.  Managed a good haul of globs though. M3, M53, M13, M92 and just a hint of NGC 5053 very faint and near M53, I chanced upon it whilst scanning for M53 and then after moving on, I couldn’t find it again! Globs might be one of my favourite objects with a decent sized reflector. They are fairly easy to find and identify manually and they look good when you can start to resolve a few stars. I’d be interested to know your favourite object types and with which weapon of choice?

Clear skies

Steve