Things I learned last night.....

[Tugboat]

Hello all

The clouds parted and I had another go with my Celestron Omni 127 last night, and I learned a few things in the process:

- My mount has a bubble level! I'd never noticed that before..

- My polar alignment scope has a focuser. Unfortunately I didn't work this one out until I was packing away. So my polar alignment was pretty rough as I couldn't see the crosshair!

- I need to increase the height of my mount. With the legs on their shortest setting, and the scope pointing almost straight up in the Vega area trying to locate objects, I couldn't get to the finderscope.

- Dew is my new enemy. After staying up late for a view of Jupiter, it was ruined somewhat by the considerable amount of water at the end of my scope! I will have to attach an old camping mat for the time being, to see if that helps.

- Navigating the night sky by eye is relatively easy. I was quite comfortable finding the location of objects as mentioned in TLAO.

- Actually getting these objects in the finder scope is hard! At least it was for me anyway. The smaller field of view, it showing more stars than can be seen with the naked eye, and directions being reversed confused me somewhat. For example I knew where M13 was, I just couldn't get my scope to point at it.

Hopefully I'll learn from these experiences and it will be 3rd time lucky!

[@@.]

ve got a red dot finder and its so easy with it