Like the title says. I rarely take a scope out for a visual spin. But, visual is how I started and even though I want to get out to view more, I rarely do.
I’ve been tripping over my old Nextar 130SLT for this past year. It was my start in astronomy and I was keeping it set up was my idea to get me inspired to get it outside. Yesterday, I set it outside just in case I felt like getting up early the next morning. Since I hadn’t used it in a year, I had no idea how things would work.
My wife turned in early, so I went outside to play.
The rig is challenging to use. The lightweight tripod is very shaky. I do use it with an Orion Accufocus motor which helps a lot.
I tried many moons ago I tried mounting the 5” newtonian tube on a
Tonight is was on the Nextar mount and anything that I accomplished was a plus.
After a couple of attempts, I connected the Celestron wifi module to my ipad.
First pass at star alignment was successful and I was off!
Conditions were very nice, cool at ~55 deg. F, little wind and
First up was the Double Cluster, NGC869 and NGC884. Beautiful view in the 12mm Agena 1.25” eyepiece. Very nicely framed closeup at 54x.
The cool thing with viewing the Double was that I recently imaged this beautiful pair and I could compare the view to the image. The are quite different!
Both are great to look at, but the image is so much more brilliant. I counted over 32k stars in the image (Pixinsight ImageSolver script.
On the visual side though, the clusters look really great. I switched to a 32mm plossl (20x) and the view was so much more pleasing and beautiful.
Also imaged recently, was
The imaged version tells a very different story!
From there a quick trip to visit Jupiter. It has been a year since my last view and even at only 81x (Agena 8mm), the view was breathtaking and crisp.
On to a few doubles. I had no premeditated plan, so I was just looking on the ipad and firing the scope all around the sky.
I viewed Almach (of course), Shedar, Alfirk, and Miram. All wonderful views and with the 12mm eyepiece, they were all somewhat close, but not too close for this shakey mount.
Topped it off with a few more clusters.
Last up was the good old familiar Garnet star. Gorgeous bright orange-red beauty.
That was it for me. Two hours of fun!
Thanks for reading!