Last night, I clambered up on my roof and laid there with my new 15x70 binoculars taking a look at the exceptionally clear night sky in the middle of Sydney.
I imagined that I could just make out the shape of the milky way. Lying down, with the binoculars resting on my eyes, I gazed upwards at a whoooooooole bunch of stars everywhere. It's easy to find the brightest star when there is only *one* bloody star in the sky but man, I was pretty disorientated without the goto.
I can now reliably spot Crux, and from crux, hadar and rigel. And from Orion, bettle juice. With these two on opposite sides of the sky, I can start to orientate myself and learn the other ones as I go. But so many bloody stars....
Binoculars were good. Once I stopped shaking, the chromatic aberration reduced to a point where I didn't really notice it anymore. Still, I could never really hold it still enough to stop the stars from doing little circles, I think the secret is in the breathing... or a little tripod. Even just lying there and looking up was pretty awesome, cept for the damn mozzies. I'm in a townhouse, 10m in the air and there's bloody mozzies up there biting my fingers and feet.
Then I went downstairs and took out the dob for a spin, I've got SkySafari talking to Synscan talking to the wifi board on the skywatcher az mount so goto is really really awesome now. But it actually took me three tries, two spectacular failures, to align it to hadar and spica, maybe I found rigel kent or some other bright star. At home, my view is restricted to NE - S, alt 45 - 90 due to close fences and trees so by 12am, I couldn't even see sirius or copernicus because of trees.
What I really need to do is build a flat aluminium platform on my roof with a retractible roof, so I can get a full view of the night sky, and put some props around the outside so the neighbours and council thinks it's some service tank.
Thursday night is meant to be quite clear, park in north Epping which is supposedly bortle 5, if the weather holds, that's where I'll be with my can of mozzie spray.