A very nice relaxed session

[pvaz]

I'm usually an objective driven person. Even on my hobbies I don't often take then as casual as I probably should.

Anyway, last night I went out for a bit over 1 hour without a plan. The night was perfect, the sky was clear and the seeing conditions ware excellent.

I picked M13 to start with. Pointed the telrad there and it was almost perfectly centered in the EP. I used the 10mm Ethos on it and the view was simply magnificent. I lingered for over 15min and my eyes started resolving more and more stars. I even managed to resolve some at the core.

Then I added the big barlow for about ~300x (not sure as the parfocalizing ring moves the EP ~50mm away from the barlow making it a 2.5x barlow by my estimates). The view now was even better. The cluster almost filled the massive FoV and the dim stars moving fast across the FoV almost looked like a disco strobe light, though in a good way as I could resolve even more stars and feel almost as if I was floating over the cluster.

Then moved to M57. It looked huge at ~300x. It's really a fantastic object that illustrates the power of a supernova. It's great to feel like your almost inside it!

To finish off I decided to hop to the Messier globulars in Scorpio and Ophiuchus. The only time I observed them, I used the goto system to save time but since then I had this feeling as if I cheated on an exam... So I picked up a telrad map from my charts and used the telrad to hop around. Went through 7 of them and memorized a few.