Hi Everyone,
I just came inside after what promises to be a
very cold night started to freeze my hands off.
I was all set after dinner to rush outside, set up and connect the laptop to my shiny new 3x ED barlow and take some Joop shots and wouldnt you know it......I left the power supply for the Lappy at work!
Just as I was about to fire off a few avi's of the beast, the battery goes flat!
So, after cursing etc, I decided to check my collimation as the Jupiter images were a little bit muddy looking and after (wait for it!) a GRAND total of 3 minutes, I had tweaked my scope's collimation to what it seems is near perfection!
Well, what was I going to do now? I decided to slap in a 20mm original eyepiece from Skywatcher and take a tour of what I could see from my front yard.
Saw Jupiter's Galilean moons moving about, 2 in the middle were "hugging" for a while. Watched the waning moon rise through the clouds in the east and tried out an orange filter on it just for kicks. Nice!
Had a squiz at M4, M20, M8, M17, Omega Centauri and my personal favourite at the moment, the open cluster of M7 just off the tail of Scorpius!
Had another quick look at Jupiter again before packing up and heading in to warm up a bit and then realised I had spent 2 hours "surfing" the sky with my 20mm eyepiece, no changes, no barlows, no tracking, no filters, no charts, just me and the scope and the sky and the
cold!
Sometimes I forget just how nice it is up there, even when you get disappointed with being an absent minded fool and not bringing the power supply home, you get rewarded with some really nice seeing and some peace and quiet to really soak up the beauty of it all.
Just thought I would share...
Cheers for now,
Chris
