Some Good, Some Bad, Some AWESOME!

[CKemu]

Tonight was briefly clear, between 7 and 8:30ish, though hazy, so decided to not bother trying any imaging, and instead to try my first ever polar align.

This was a rough align to put it mildly, and by rough, I briefly saw Polaris in the view finder, and just went "ahh sod it" and told my scope to align.

Swung round to two bright stars, and was suprised to find that only minor adjustment with the scope was needed. Told it to seek out the Moon, and it was off a smidge, yet bang on M42, the Double Cluster, M47 etc.

The awesome was seeing two galaxies, I forget the second one, but the first was Andromeda, and M47, something about M47 really catches my eye, think I'm in love with that one - swear I saw a faint red star within the core of that cluster...though could easily be my imagination!

Turns out that the LX90 is an incredibly sturdy setup on the wedge and tripod, really solid - even better is the wedge allows me to attach a DSLR to the scope and not wack it into the mount on objects "high up".

So the bad?

Well apart from standing on the power lead briefly, I discovered this setup can get the curly cable between the hand unit and the fork mount snagged on one of the wedge adjustment bolts, when I de-snagged it, the hand unit powered down!

ARGGHHH was my initial response, as even the slightest movement of the hand unit would cause the thing to power down, thankfully swapping the cable ends around fixed this, even after testing it by wigglying the cable - no power downs.

Lesson learnt, now I thread the cable between the two handles so this won't happen again, but the panic did briefly set it, this is an expensive hobby and Meade gear is rare and slow to get hold of!

Sorry for the ramble, but heh the girlfriend doesn't overly want to hear this stuff, and well I need to vent somewhere...though I may get a blog at this rate