Nice seeing in Toongabbie tonight

[Steffen]

A long awaited and way overdue night of fairly steady seeing has arrived! Thankfully I had the scope set up outside all week in anticipation, and thankfully SkippySky was right for once :thumbsup:

Here in suburbia I'm nestled in between houses, of course, so overhead targets are best. Antares was an easy split at 200x just then and Saturn looks gorgeous. Cassini division all the way around and a very obvious display of Encke minima. Good banding on the planet, too.

Jupiter is not quite as good as it could be (being fairly low already, and above some roof), but still good enough to elicit oh's and ah's from the family, who have all seen it many times before. Sadly, the GRS transit tonight comes a bit too late for me to see it.

My wife is fixing me a big pot of Glühwein now and I'm about to go on double-star safari, hoping the seeing will hold (SkippySky thinks it will).

Sadly, the transparency doesn't match the seeing, if you're a faint-fuzzy fan you won't have much luck from around my area tonight.

[MortonH]

Seeing was ok here as well but poor transparency due to a large number of HR fires.

[Steffen]

Yes, transparency was crap.

However, that didn't matter much for my double-star binge. I visited many old friends, some of which I had last successfully observed in 2014 according to my observing notes. Among them were two of what I call the diamond ring class, doubles where they B component sits right on the diffraction ring of A in my 6" Mak.

It requires quite good seeing to get the diamond ring effect, and tonight Rho Cap and Lambda Oph delivered.

All in all it's been an enjoyable night so far, I got the whole family engaged in judging the colours of double stars and counting the bands on Saturn.

I also found that my secondary mirror was pinched a little, so I was able to fix that, too. One mustn't over-tighten the collimation screws on those Intes secondary mirrors...