Success at Star Hopping

[Merlin999]

You may have read my earlier account of our disastrous efforts to find Albireo.

And you may have guessed from the title of the thread that we found it. Now believe me, I know in astronomy terms it is very easy to find and could hardly be called a challenge, but we really could not find it with our telescope despite knowing exactly where it was in the sky.

But the purchase of a Rigel and a 9x50RACI (both wisely advised by people here) did the trick.

Saturday night, we lined the Rigel up using Jupiter (which thankfully even we can't miss!) Then we turned our attention to Albireo. Using the Rigel, my hubby easily pointed the telescope to the area of the sky where he thought it was. Using the Finderscope he adjusted slightly, looked through the telescope and Bingo! We couldn't believe it, there it was exactly where it should have been. Just beautiful. My girls were impressed with the different colours of the two stars.

We felt a real sense of achievement. The Rigel really is brilliant and the fact you can dim it was very useful. Only downside is it's not Right Angled so he did find it tricky squatting down to look through it, especially as he tore his ACL in his knee a few years ago. So we are going to invest in a little stool so can sit down while using the Rigel.

All in all we had a great night and were really pleased to actually be able to point the telescope at the bit of sky we wanted to. It has certainly given us a real boost and made us eager to go out hunting for more!

In the same night we got fantastic views of Jupiter and clearly saw the shadows cast by one of its moons.

And it is all down to the great advice from all you guys here. Thanks!

Stephanie

[richbyers]

It's great when things just come together. Good luck for future sessions. Rich

[Worzsel]

Glad to hear the RDF has improved things, i LOVE mine!

How are you finding the scope ?

[Merlin999]

Thanks Rich.

Sarah, I love the MAK. It is small and light enough for me to easily move it around, very quick to set up and delivers amazing views plus it has the Auto tracking making it easy to show my girls what we are looking at. I think it is a great little scope.

Am I right thinking I read that you recently had a problem with some dew staining on yours? Did you manage to sort it out?

Stephanie

[Worzsel]

The Dew marks are fine, I dont think they are bad enough to bother about too much. I've got some blumming tree sap on my corrector plate which I need to remove, I've not done anything about it yet as it's payday on monday and i'm too skint to buy the recommended stuff from FLO.. next week I am going to atempt cleaning though, should be fun

Next year the tree is for the chop it obscures my entire western sky anyway so i'll be pleased to see the back of the thing.

[Merlin999]

I've got a lot of trees around our garden, including a couple of very large pine trees. So far thankfully they've not gotten in the way too much, but I do need to move the MAK around the garden quite a bit so I can see what I want to (another good reason for me getting a small portable scope like the MAK)

I hope you manage to get the tree sap off OK. That sounds like a tricky and slightly stressful job!

Stephanie

[Worzsel]

I'm not really looking forward to it

Moving the scopes around is a real pain I find, It's one of the reasons i don't really use Goto.. I can't be bothered re-aligning !

What else have you seen with your mak ? I found andromeda the other day and it literally made my day! I am ashamed to say that was my first DSO i've been mostly planetary, firstly saturn and no jupiter. I just cant pull myself away!

[Rossco72]

Staphanie, Glad to hear you got a solution and a successful one to boot. Best of luck with finding some of the other wonders of the heavens.

Cheers

[Helen]

The purchase of a Rigel completely transformed my viewing too! I also like the fact that if you're just scanning the sky with the scope and find something interesting you can look through the Rigel and see where you are , and then look up on a map to see what you've seen.

Keep making discoveries, and keep telling us!

Helen

[Merlin999]

We don't have GOTO Sarah so all I need to do when i move it around is re-set North again which only takes a moment or to.

So far like you we have been pretty planetary bound. It is very hard to stop looking at Jupiter when there is so much to see! I've yet to see the GRS but it's never been facing us when I've been looking so hopefully soon. Ashamedly apart from the moon (which was fantastic on Saturday, the shaows of the craters were amazing) the only other viewing we have had has been Albireo. But I'm definitely looking forward to spreading my wings a bit now.

Thanks Rssco72. It certainly was a wonderful moment when we found finally found it.

Yes Helen, I am really really pleased with the Rigel. It was so easy to use and made an almost impossible task effortless. That's a good tip to use the Rigel when we're wandering about the sky.

Please do tell me stop though if I start boring you with my stories of finding (easy to find:o) objects! (Too late you say, I know...)

I'll have to pour through my Turn Left at Orion book now to plan my next adventure!

Stephanie

[pvaz]

Great to hear! I experienced the same when I bought my telrad.

Keep up with the reports! Although some of the objects may be "easy" for people with more experience, it's always nice to hear from other's success and reading about the excitement of finding those 1st objects, always gets me more motivated to go out there and then share my findings as well.

PS-> I'm glad your daughters enjoyed it. Must be great to learn about a Planet at school and be able to say "My mom showed it to me the other day."

[Rossco72]

Hopefully now you can tell when you see a naked eye star in the 9x50? It really is so much brighter than all of the others you see....

[Merlin999]

Thanks pvaz. Nice to hear my excitement rubs off a bit. Hopefully I don't just bore my kids silly with astronomy! Still I've raised them to be polite so at least they nod and look interested!

Rossco72: I'm not sure if hubby could tell the brighter stars through the Finderscope as we used the Rigel to guide to the brighter stars and then across to Albireo so we only used the Finderscope once we were on Albireo. I'll ask him to check that next time we are out.

Stephanie