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I'm Back!
Some of you will remember me gracefully bowing out of astronomy last year. My Obsession telescope had become a difficulty for me after I suffered a hernia and I was spending less and less time at the eyepiece and more and more time making excuses not to go outside. The end result - I sold the lot and decided to move on with other interests.
That lasted a number of months, but as it turned out, being an amateur astronomer is like visiting the Hotel California (you can check out, but you can never leave). I started looking for a smaller rig that could be used for casual observing, and spent quite some time researching. Finally, much to my wife's dismay, I bought a whole new setup not long ago. We welcomed a brand new Explore Scientific 5" refractor to the family, a Baader clickstop zoom eyepiece + barlow , some 2 inch filters, RACI, RDF etc etc.
Interestingly, this Wednesday night just gone by, I decided to grab my freezer suit and get out and do some observing for the evening. I couldn't believe how good the conditions were - rock steady seeing like I've never seen in the last 10 years from my location. I locked onto Saturn at 230x and could have easily given it more (if only I had an extra eyepiece...hmm). It was without a doubt the finest view of Saturn that I've ever seen in 30 years of viewing through quite a variety of scopes / eyepieces. I actually woke my 7 year old daughter up and said, "You're not going to believe this view". She spent the next 30 minutes at the eyepiece with me in awe of the view. It was probably about 4 degrees out there too. I'm not sure if any other Sydney siders were taking advantage of the seeing on Wednesday night - it was spectacular.
Anyway, enough rambling. I'm back and loving it with renewed excitement.
Dean
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