[wavelandscott (Scott)]

Just got back yesterday morning from a holiday visiting family in the US...

While there, I picked up a 24 Panoptic and a 7 Pentax XW...

Last night my oldest son's astronomy group (Roseville Primary School) had a viewing night...we arrived back in country at 6:00 in the morning Saturday morning...

In spite of jet lag and the fear of sticky fingers I hauled both out scopes (8 inch and 12.5 inch Dobs) to the school for viewing...I had promised I would take a scope and had forgotten that it was the same day that we would return from holiday...

The session only lasted until 8:30 and there were a fair number of kids so I did not get a lot of view time as I spent most of the time adjusting the small dob for Venus and Jupiter viewing for the kids (with the GSO eyepieces of course)...the big one for adults with nicer glass...

I did however get a few minutes to try the 24 Pan in the 12.5 inch...all I can say is WOW! It is a fine piece of glass and I highly recommend it...as a lower power eyepiece it is outstanding. We looked at the Jewel Box and an open cluster in Scorpius...but mostly everyone (the parents too) wanted to look at Jupiter and I was tired enough that it was enough for me too...

I had lots of questions from the parents in attendance. For most, these were the first reflector scopes that they had seen and so I did a fair amount of explaining how things worked...the open truss of the Discovery makes explaining things very easy...

Unfortunately, I did not get a chance to play with the Pentax or the Argo Navis...I was just too tired...

This was the first time that I transported either scope to a sight other than my backyard and it was a learning experience for me...the most important lesson was that I need to develop a "plan" of what I want to see. I had not really given much thought to what to show people and since most had never looked through a scope before they did not have many requests...

For this night the objective was to see Jupiter (mostly) and expose the kids and their parents to a telescope or two and we acheived this.

That said, I will have a viewing plan for the next time of things that I want to see too...I've still got a lot to learn...

Oh, and my son was pretty proud that his Dad's toys were bigger than the other Dad's toys!!