Soooooo last night I saw Jupiter! With my naked eye! And 4 moons with the telescope, that was an amazing way to finish the night, but let me start at the start.
I packed the gear and got moving around 11pm after putting the kids to bed, don't know why my kids seems to sleep later than the other kids we know. I'll bring them on the next trip.
Spent the first hour scouting a few sites, eventually settled on a soccer field behind a school that didn't have any flood lights or street lights, only high rises a few ks away and good visibility on the whole sky. Later on, I found that trees blocked anything under Alt 20 ( does that make sense? )
Good thing I bought a dolly, got it all setup in the middle of the soccer field which had a cricket pitch.
The wifi board was awesome, allowed me to search easily, only complaint is the arrow keys for moving the motors do not have tactile sensors and the phone screen is really bright, even on lowest settings.
As this was a new site, I took some time to orientate myself. So Sirius is around Orion and that sets in the west after about 1am, pity, I missed one of the clusters.
I'm getting better at aligning the finder scope with the telescope but actually, after aligning the telescope well, I could actually get whatever target onto a 10mm eye piece and not have to worry about the finder scope at all! Plus, after every GOTO, I've got the option to realign after manually changing the alignment, I don't know whether the Synscan app incrementally improves alignment everytime I do this or I was just wasting time?
I had a blast of a time exploring the sky, started with all the usu big stars, Sirius, Crux, Hadar, Caponicus, visited my favourite Jewel box several times, went off looking at clusters, M, Cadwell.
Running chicken really doesn't look like a chicken to me, let alone running anywhere...
Saw beetle juice for the first time, really red!
Saw the ruby in jewel box, amazing!
Couldn't make out a few nebulas eg thor's helmet/hammer?
Rigil Kent is a dual star! And I could actually see two of them, left one bigger or is that just my zoom being off? If not, then those two stars must be pretty far apart, it sure did look like two dots, the only dual star system that looked like a dual star that I found. Loved it!
Contrasted the blue/red of the Ara stars in the same eye piece, really really cool!
Saw Mars, looked like a red giant, but slightly bigger.
Tuc 47 and all the nebulas looked very faint, like it seems that there's something there but my eye couldn't quite decide what it was, Don put it down to light pollution, I'm in the geographical center of sydney pretty much.
Saw some amazing clusters, M4, 80, 46, 47 can't remember which ones were clusters, the Omega centauri? Very faint but looked like there were a lot of stars.
Actually ended up identifying the stars for Libra and Scorpius, felt like a pro manually panning to trace the Scorpius constellation
Arcturus and there was another red one around N, NE were amazing, so red and bright. Antares!
Orion had a distinctive pattern of stars, 4 in a cluster and 3 nearby in a line, so amazing... in fact, *EVERYWHERE* I looked, there were stars! Stars through the finder that isn't as visible to the naked eye and more through the telescope. I mean, it might sound obvious to everyone else but hehe, I was really amazed.
And then as the moon rose, I saw a bright dot beneath it, jupiter! The moon was really bright, and by that time it was so cold everything was fogging up, telescope was damp from dew, but that really added the icing to the awesome night.
I'm constantly trying to get a good focus, sometimes I think it's my eye that's failing, other times, I need to tweak the focus. I told Don I need an eye patch, he told me to suck it up and look with both eyes open... I'll give it a go but maybe an eye patch would work better for mere mortals like me.
Also, my low camping chair was only good for when I was snacking, browsing to see what to explore next, it was useless for the telescope as the eye piece is at an awkward height for me, too high for sitting but too low for standing. So I just ended up kneeling on the grass pitch for most of the night.
Got back around 4:30am... showed the wife Jupiter, she wasn't particularly impressed: "How come it's not round." was her comment
I think next time, I need to drive out of sydney. Won't lie though, felt uneasy throughout the whole night being in the middle of a dark quiet field by myself. Mozzies kept me company though, overall it was an awesome experience, can't wait to do it again!
Oh and I got the Clear Outside app, that is everything I need, clouds, rain, wind, time! thank you Jenifur for suggesting it.