2023-05-16

9:30PM

Took dad and Cheri about 20 minutes east of town tonight to setup the telescope and give them a good taste of some of the things to look at. We setup in a field of wind turbines not sure if the clouds were going to disperse.

Started off viewing Venus, was able to push to 300x again. Cheri was able to pick up on chromatic aberration even though the pale yellow color of Venus came through nicely.

I then moved to Castor, to show them what a splitting a double star is like. We started at low magnifications and worked up until they were able to detect a split.

Dad wanted to see Mars. We were able to get close enough at 300x to see the medium red surface. The color was pretty intense.

By this time, it was dark enough to move on to DSO’s, so I moved on to M44. Once Cheri looked through the eyepiece at 30x, she said “oh shit!”, surprised by how many stars where there.

With Canis Major overhead, I then moved to M81 and M82. I was able to fit both of them snugly in the FOV at 30x. I had Dad and Cheri take extra time at the eyepiece and practice a little AV to get more detail out of the galaxies. They both said that M82 was easier to see than M81.

We finished by looking at M104. Located δ Corvi, found the “blowing pine tree” Asterism just above and used that to locate M104. Once again, had both dad and Cheri take a little extra time.

By this time, Cheri was getting cold and it was getting close to midnight. With my continued ISA training this week, we decided to pack it up for the night. It was great to be able to share that experience with both dad and Cheri. They both got really excited as we were looking at things. Cheri, being used to the light pollution in San Diego, was shocked at how many stars there were and how clear they looked.