Hi all,
I got up a bit early this morning (05:30 local time), as I wanted to try and check out M42 in orion, and the missus said she could see mars clearly the last couple of mornings. Well I pulled out the old little 60mm x 700mm tasco refractor
, with a 12.5mm eyepiece. While the little scope is not bad on Jupiter and the moon, etc, I found that the 10 x 50 binos showed a much brighter and wider field than the scope on the Nebulae and star clusters. After checking out the milky way for some clusters, and finding a few which will remain nameless for the moment???, I turned the binos to orion to check m42. Well, it came up pretty clear in the binos, although not that magnified, it was quite exciting
, and was clearly visible to the naked eye. The sun was almost getting up now, so the stars were getting dimmer, then we decided to go to the front lawn and check for venus. After finding it in the little tasco, I thought my focus or something was out, as it appeared as a thin crescent, ala the moon. Then I remembered something about the phases of venus, looked it up on the net, and what we saw was in fact a crescent venus.
Oh, I only managed to check out mars in the binos, and could see it as a pinkish looking star
.
Cheers
