I got some good experience with my new telescope over the weekend. I
was out with a Boy Scout troop at with a San Diego Rocketry club. As
a side note before I talk about Astronomy, if you've never seen one of
these clubs launch their big rockets, take the time to do it sometime.
I grew up with Estes rockets but these guys have an FAA Waiver to
17,000 feet (yes, 17 THOUSAND feet). They launched at least 2 rockets
that broke the speed of sound on the way up. Some of these monsters
are 10 feet tall. Truly impressive and a lot of fun to watch.

But, back to Astronomy.

I set up Friday night even tough the Clear Sky Clock had predicted
lousy seeing and only decent transparency. Darn those Canadians!
They were right on both counts.

I set up about 2030 (after we had pitched camp). The limiting naked
eye magnitude was 2, 2.5 at best. Still, I had a line of people at
the telescope so I spend the first hour or so giving tours of Jupiter
(the two dark bands were sometimes visible with my 15mm eyepiece (150x
magnification) but the planet looked pretty good with the 32mm (73x)
and you could clearly see 3 moons (the 4th must have been behind the
planet, more on that later). Saturn was similar and I foolisly tried
to push it up to my nice 8mm Radian eyepiece (294x). Looked like,
well, you all know what it looked like. Everybody got tired of the
planets at about 2200 so I decided to get some practice in at star
hopping. I did my usual and went to Rigel and then star hopped up to
M42/43 (no, M43 wasn't visible even through the telescope). I then
tried to star hope from Sirius down to M41. I had previously found
this on a dark (well, as dark as it gets) night from my back yard in
San Diego. It wasn't more than a smudge with 4 stars. I hadn't
managed it in the telescope but thought it should be an easy find.
The problem is that it was impossible to find the faint stars I needed
through the finder scope. After about 45 minutes, I gave up and went
back to Jupiter. I must have missed the 4th moon comming out from
behind the planet by no more than 10-15 minutes. It was VERY close.
The atmosphere had steadied a little so I observed Jupiter for a few
minutes before shutting down at about 2315.

I spend the next day working up some good Karma by playing Range
Safety Officer for about 50 boy scouts and it must have payed off.

The transparency was much better Saturday Night and I started to set
up about 1830. About 1850, as I was polar aligning the telescope, I
saw a bright object streak through the eyepiece very quickly. It
didn't leave a trail so I assume I got lucky and caught a satellite.
In any case, I considered it a good omen for the night.

The atmosphere was much better (seeing was very good, transparency was
better, full moon was very bad, limiting visual magnitude of maybe 3
or a hair more) and Saturn took the 8mm eyepiece well. Jupiter was
too low on the horizon to take that magnification but looked very good
in the 15mm. I had some visitors early so I showed off Venus, Saturn,
and Jupiter to a bunch of people. I used the GoTo feature alot
because (again, the good Karma at work) my alignment was very good and
the telescope was putting the planets almost dead center in the
eyepiece (I just left the 15mm eyepiece (20 minute FOV) in most of
the time, using the 8mm only on Saturn. The crowd thinned out at
about 2030 (the campfire must have looked good at that point). I star
hopped back to M42/43 again. M43 was visible tonight and I spend
awhile observing at different magnifications.

Then, and this is what I'm excited about, I tried for M41 again. It
was fun in Binoculars, anything I find in Binoculars from my back yard
is fun, but not very spectacular (Nothing like M44). I started star
hopping again and finally figured out that I didn't really know what
the FOV of my finderscope was (see separate post). I had assumed it
was about 5 degrees but began to think that it was MUCH larger. Once
I made that deduction, I put the crosshairs in the location where I
thought M41 should be and...

NAILED IT! My first real find (M42 hardly counts, I could find it in
my sleep). I used the "Identify" function on the telescope and my
position was only 12 seconds (!) from where the computer thought M41
should be. Heck, my alignment error was at least triple that amount.

Well, this was much different than seeing this cluster in binoculars.
I spend at least 45 minutes exploring it. The star combinations were
fascinating. Pairs, some lines, clusters within the cluster. I had
one visitor during this period and did nothing more than show him the
cluster I was so engrossed in (he came back later with his son and I
was more accomodating).

Well, flushed with my success, I decided that I'd try something else,
something I'd NEVER found before. I chose M78, in retrospect a really
lousy choice for a very light polluted night. I worked on it for
about 20 minutes but the breeze started to pick up, the atmosphere
started to degrade, and I started getting a Headache. I decided to
look at Jupiter (now much higher in the sky) once more and pack it in
for the night. It took the 8mm eyepiece this time and I got 3 more
visitors (the gentleman who had been by during my Cluster Obsession,
somebody from the Rocketry Club, and a friend of mine who has wanted
to look through the telescope since I got it) so I gave them a tour of
Jupiter, Saturn, M42, and M41 (OK, I cheated and used the GOTO for
these last 2 as well as the planets). I had Saturn in the 8mm
eyepiece when one man called his son over. The first words out of his
mouth were, "Oh my God!" He couldn't believe it. I'll say that made
me feel good.

I finally packed it in about 2300 and took some Advil.

Sigh. Now I need to find a way to build up some more good Karma.