[ekendra]

We had a good night.

It was short and sweet because the boys have school tomorrow.

First I collimated using the cool new laser thingy-ma-bob. Pretty straightforward although the secondary seemed to have a mind of its own. We got it close enough and then worked on getting the TelRad in synch with the scope. Not hard either;especially since Jupiter was distinguishably bright in the sky and we could use that as a reference.

At first we observed Jupiter. What a beautiful sight. The lines were clearly detectable with the 10mm via 2x Barlow. We're not sure if the three tiny dots close by were a few of Jupiter's moon or just stars that happened to be in the viewfinder. We spent quite a while checking it out.

Then we turned eastward towards the rising Orion. Finding the Orion Nebula was a bit harder but eventually we located it. Even the non-coloured image our 10" Newtonian provided it was still quite a sight. If I was alone I would've scoped it for a long time but the kids needed to get to bed. I guess that's something to look forward to for next time.