Great seeing in the NE heat wave

Mosquitoes and haze, but great seeing here in Vermont! Mu Hercules B-C (mags
10.2 & 10.7, 1.1") split easily at 250x and 312x in our homemade 10" f/6
dob - two pinpricks hanging in space. With seeing this good I swung the
scope over to Antares, and split that for the second time ever and
better/easier than the first. No color as some folks report but split as
clean as a whistle. I also viewed delta Cygnus and iota Cass at 115x. They
looked as nice as through any high-end refractor! Finally, a surprisingly
decent view of Jupiter just before packing it in. Maybe more excellent
seeing tomorrow night?!

Dennis

On Jul 7, 3:43*am, "Dennis Woos" wrote:
Mosquitoes and haze, but great seeing here in Vermont! Mu Hercules B-C (mags
10.2 & 10.7, 1.1") split easily at 250x and 312x in our homemade 10" f/6
dob - two pinpricks hanging in space. With seeing this good I swung the
scope over to Antares, and split that for the second time ever and
better/easier than the first. No color as some folks report but split as
clean as a whistle. I also viewed delta Cygnus and iota Cass at 115x. They
looked as nice as through any high-end refractor! Finally, a surprisingly
decent view of Jupiter just before packing it in. Maybe more excellent
seeing tomorrow night?!

Dennis

Similarly good here, in western NC; a very rare really clear summer
night. Monday night, I went up onto the Blue Ridge Parkway to Mt
Pisgah to get away from Asheville's light pollution. Got my my old
C-8 tube set up on my new CG-5GT mount (1st time), and tried to do a
two-star align. Found that the mount would slew to the 1st alignment
star, but then the controller would immediately re-initialize, wanting
to start the whole process again... tried it five or six times, no
worky.

Crap. Put everything up and got out my old Bear binocs and did some
freehand star gazing... excellent, despite my disappointment with the
new mount. The nice young guy in the same parking lot was having very
good results with his imaging set-up, tho'.

I set the mount up again in the living room yesterday with just the
mount & tripod with the same result. Awaiting a reply to an email to
Celestron's tech support, but at least figured out how to maybe work
around the problem for now, so going back tonight if it's still good
out.

Thanks... I just needed to vent....

Jim H.

"Entropy never sleeps; do y'all?"