Trying it all out

[Andrew*]

Well, I'm having a fabulous night, despite the constant wretched wind that's probably ruining all my images. I'm trying a little bit of everything. I got the scope out and tried it on a few things, but I think the collimation is still out, and I can't work out how to use slow-mo on the mount. Motors are iffy, and the dec slow-mo cable won't turn, so I loosen the axis locks and get a rough alignment, but this is a time-consuming, exhausting and inaccurate method that I don't like one bit! Unfortunately Saturn wouldn't show any detail whatsoever either in the binos, or at 100x in the scope (and I couldn't get any higher mag in the FOV because of mount and collimation trouble)

Anyway, the sky is crystal, and seeing is great, so I've been looking at a few beauties through my new binoculars. My! Those things have shown me more tonight than my telescope has in months! Partly this is facilitated by easy scanning of the sky. I just looked around and just by common sense and my very limited knowledge of the sky, I found for the first time the double cluster, and I think the three fuzzies all in a line that I found were M34, M35 and M36. Can anyone confirm this? They were in Perseus. It was all really beautiful.

Just gazing up, the meteors just add entertainment to the whole thing. I saw at least 10 more. There must be between 30 and 40 an hour!

I tried out the Neodymium filter, but it didn't reveal much, either in the scope or over the bino objective. It made the sky marginally darker, but that's all I noticed.

I also dabbled with a few imaging attempts. First some widefields with the digi compact to try for some meteors, but they were too grainy to bother with, then I took 8 or so 15-sec subs of orion, but this was obviously too long, as the stars clearly trailed. I'm going to attempt to stack these. With the SLR, I tried M42, but don't expect much, and I've been using it for some really long exposures. I reckon the wind will ensure these images fail , but we'll see!

Anyway, it's all terribly fun. See imaging help if you have any suggestions for my Orion shots!

Can't wait to get out again and see if anything else is waiting to entertain me!

I wish you all as clear skies as mine, but trust me, these are the first in weeks! :stars:

Andrew

[Saso]

It see that you have a wonderful night. I also have one. A little bit of everything. I take some pictures, I look trough telescope a bit and I see at least 20 meteors, mostly in Orion area.

M34 is in Perseus, M35 in Gemini and M36 is in Auriga. I think that you saw M36, M37 and M38 clusters - they are all in Auriga and they are approximately in line.

CS Saso

[Kain]

I saw Mars and Venus yesterday morning while out

First time I have seen ether, though as they were low on the horizon no real details could be seen, but I can say I have seen em!

Kain