A quick session in a very bright garden

[bomberbaz]

Brief garden session last night trying to cut through the murk of a near full moon, although it was low the glow was still very noticeable. For those that don't know I have a hotel to the right of me that kindly uses more lighting than Blackpool illuminations as well as streetlighting to the front and rear which both encroach upon my garden so getting anything from here is a bonus. 

I did also place out the imaging rig to grab another 90 minutes of data from my previous night in the trough of bowland and a quick ten minute process of my Andromeda data is shown below.

Anyway, last night was a mission to do some double stars, so armed with the scopetech F12 80, my (legal) laser and  Skysafari 6 which was pre loaded with cambridge list of doubles I headed for Cassiopeia which was not too low and North so away from the worst of the glow to start.

There were 4 listed doubles for Cas (I know there are many more) but this is all the download brought through, it was the first of these on the list, eta cas that gave me the biggest ooh in this area, a very pretty pairing with a lightly contrasting pair of quite tight stars. 

The other satisfying aspect of the whole of last night is using a laser. It is a legal laser which is collimated to the finder and used in a flash on/find/off type way to get the rig close to the target object used in conjunction with SS6. It is very accurate and far quicker to use than just a finder, for me at least. 

Moving on I went for a couple of globulars, open clusters, several more doubles and even a quick bash at Jupiter which to be fair was too low although nice to get a quick view of it but there was a sting in the tail of my night.

The scopetech will not come to focus at high power using any of my zooms (Baader/OVL/TV). My intention had been to use a Baader zoom/barlow combination but nope. In the end I used the OVL 21-7 but that would go around 2/3 of the way before the focuser bottomed out of inward travel so I had to use my fixed focal length glass for higher power. Currently exploring options for sorting this out but I noticed this recently on my pimped up frac which also ran out of inward travel until I trimmed an inch off the length, something I desperately want to avoid on the scopetech.

So an otherwise very enjoyable night had the gloss taken off by this. Instead I used a Svbony 6mm and BST 5mm for my high powered views. Not as planned but at least the night wasn't ruined.

One last point to report on is the views in the scopetech, they are simply sublime. Well apart from the focus issue with zooms,. At low power it offers a rich and deep view of star fields (using a relatively cheap OVL zoom) and at higher power the fixed focal Svbony 6mm and BST 5mm gave super views of Almach at x167 and x200 respectively. I did a drift for both eyepiece of the double across the full FOV and they remained sharp as a pin with no false colour across the entire fov. Very impressed.