[Chaos-l] Farrington again tonight

[Michael Hrivnak]

Tonght was a very good night, much like last night.  The only appreciable 
difference is that last night we saw several satellites go overhead, whereas 
tonight I noticed none.  Tonight I had some friends out with me, so I mostly 
just toured the stuff I found last night.  By about 10:30, the humidity was 
going through the roof and having a big impact on seeing.

I have been trying out a new (to me) Pentax 10XW, which I'm finding to be 
ideal for close inspection of deep space objects.  It puts my scope right at 
200x, which seems to be near the edge of safe magnification around here.  
Much more, and you risk some fuzz on even a decent night.  So far, the 
eyepiece is performing beatifully.  Everything is very crisp with good 
contrast right out to the edges.  My only complaint is that it is 
particularly sensitive to having your eye centered on its axis.  If you 
deviate much at all, the whole image appears to go out of focus.  This isn't 
too big of a deal though, and for all I know, it might be a common problem 
even with high-end eyepieces.  It doesn't have that nagler field of view, but 
it's plenty wide for me.  I think this might be the perfect eyepiece for 
viewing globular clusters in my scope.

Michael

On Monday 20 October 2008 14:57:03 Michael Hrivnak wrote:
> Last night was quite nice.  Hit some great globulars, the Veil looked very
> good, found an obscure and faint ring-shaped nebula (NGC 6894) in Cygnus,
> etc.
>
> I'm going out again tonight.  I'll be there as early as I can to setup
> before dark, and we should have until about midnight before the moon gets
> in the way.
>
> Michael


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