Quote:
Originally Posted by Dog Star
G'day DSB and congrats on the new scope.
I think the previous replies to your questions have pretty well covered the subject but I'm wondering about the obvious - you mention that you're viewing from the balcony of your unit. Are you turning off all the lights in the room behind you? It's not just dark skies that you need for good viewing. A dark environment is essential also. Any stray light around your person will also contribute to degraded viewing.
As I say, I'm probably mentioning the obvious and if so I apologise. Mind you, my first few viewing sessions were hampered by poor viewing and it took me a while to realise that in my eagerness to start viewing, I wasn't allowing time for the mirror to cool down enough. 
We're all newbies at some time.
I'm sure you'll get things sorted eventually. Good luck!   |
Yes - dogstar you are absolutely right. I have all the house lights off and I am blessed with VERY dark urban skies here in my neighbourhood - the only thing apart from horizon light pollution (which kills much of my view to the south and west, but we'll get to that another day!) are a coupe of street lights from about 700 metres away. Not a big deal.
The problems as I see it were:
- I wasn't dark adjusted at all
- The seeing is not great tonight
- I am inexperienced
- Mirrors hadn't had sufficient time to cool
- The mirrors are ineptly collimated - in other words, really quite uncollimated
- the mirrors are a little dusty because mine was the display model in the shop.
However. Seeing the Orion Nebula - even though it didn't blow my socks off - gave me great faith that things will go only up from here!
CHEERS!!!
DSB