Finished my first viewing session last night with my little brother. It was the first night of clear skies in a while (nothing but summer thunderstorms here right now). Conditions were not optimal; we didn't have time to drive away from the city lights, and there were street lamps in the vicinity of our spot. We still had a blast.
We got the tripod set up and plopped the binocular down and immediately pointed at the moon. I was truly amazed at how much detail was resolved by the binocular. I was able to see all kinds of texture around the terminator that I had never seen before. A beautiful orange glow fanned out from the crescent into the night sky. We tried to identify some of the craters but this turned out to be very difficult as the moon was waxing at about %5, and we had a hard time locating points of reference.
After the moon set we decided to try our hand at finding some of the brighter stars on our map. There was a lot of light pollution, especially in the southern sky, so it was difficult to make out some of the constellations. Nevertheless, I was able to fairly easily pick out Vega using the handle of the big dipper as a guide. My little brother was able to find Altair, and another star I'm having trouble remembering the name of, Pica I think it was. Simply scanning the star field was great fun as well.
The mount presented some difficulty. Moving the binocular around was not smooth at all, I had to unscrew the various joints so they were loose, get it sighted, and then tighten them all back up while hoping that I didn't throw myself off in the process. We also found that even when we weren't touching the tripod or the binocular at all we could notice some small shaking.
All in all, I was very impressed with what I could see with just a small binocular. I've always marveled at the void, and read books by Sagan and Hawking, but none of it compares to actually looking at a map and figuring out where things are and what they are, and then actually
seeing all the things I've read about. In summation, I feel like a kid again.
