First Light on the First Day.

[Randoma]

Well today I got my first telescope, a Skywatcher N150/1200 Dob.

It's a work of art, it was easy to assemble and even that was fun. When I put it together it looked beautiful, much bigger than I expected it to be. I aligned the Finder Scope, another easy job. Now here comes the good part. There were no clouds! What a shock! I wanted to go outside for a look, but since I got it late I didn't have time to take it outside. Besides, I don't have a spot where I can stargaze yet, It's not like I would take it in the backyard, I live in a 5 floor flat surrounded by other big buildings. Since I live on the fifth floor I decided to improvise, I have large openable windows, and I saw an oppurtunity.

I put a small coffee-table under the scope so it would be a bit higher, and my first target was Jupiter. No trouble finding it, it's so bright. I first tried on the 25mm. Nice view. Then I put on the 10mm. Jupiter was pretty big, the problem was that it was a little to bright, and I didn't see much detail. No matter. I took it off the table because I couldn't look very high if it was on it.

Next target was Good old M31, I've looked at it before, in a spotting scope. A pain, but I saw it. It was easy to locate, I centered the third star in Andromeda in the finderscope, and just worked my way up it in my 25mm, found it much easier than using a finderscope. I tried using Averted Vision, and it looked pretty nice, bright core and you could see the oval shape. Tried to shake a little more detail out of it, and then went on to my next target. But yeah, It was a good night.

Now, I tried finding the Double Cluster, I've heard it's quite a sight. I worked my way to Cassiopedia using my finderscope, and like before, I used my 25mm to find the cluster. After a few minutes, I found it. It was quite damn beautiful, so many stars, you could clearly see that there were two clusters there, not just one big one. Nicely seperated. After that I decided to just look at some stars and see what there is, maybe a binary. Being the nut I am, I somehow ended up back at M31, no matter, it's still a nice sight. Since I only had a quarter of the sky to look at, and I was quite tired, I put the scope in the corner and enjoyed some Perseids. Just a few small ones, but they were still nice to look at.

That was my first light for my new telescope, hope you enjoyed the read. I had quite a lot of light pollution and my eyes never really got adjusted to darkness, because of some cars and people having their lamps on and no curtains on the windows.

[ColB]

Nice write up, thanks for that. Sounds like you are gonna have a lot of fun with your new scope when you get it outside

Enjoy

Col

[sbooder]

Good stuff Randoma, glad you got to use it on your first night. Do not worry about Jupiter being a bit too bright, It was not good last night, although it was clear here until about 2.30am the seeing was rubbish, Jupiter was very glary.

Also you may find it was worse for you using your scope through a window, especially from a block of flats, the heat coming off of your building would have made the seeing very bad for bright objects.

[Randoma]

I am currently at my grandmothers, it is 21:40 here, I am going for a DSO hunt later, another cloudless night, Woopee. I will post it in the Deep Sky observing section later. My grandmother lives about 3km from where I live, a kilometer or two from the city, much less light pollution here, not that far from the town, but it is a small one. No glaring lights to take my eyes off the dark either.

Going to be great.

[sound]

Sounds like you had a great night