[Chaos-l] Finally a cloudless and moonless night!

[Matt Lochansky]

Believe it or not - Friday night was my first opportunity to use my
new 10" dob on a moonless night.  I know you all have probably been
equally frustrated recently!  Not that I mind the rain - but we've had
clouds more nights than not the past couple months.  Oh, and I was out
of town just after last month's full moon.  There were clouds (and
flashes of lightning) in the distance, but the area over my house was
clear and dark, so I got the scope out and got right into it!

So, keep in mind my experience has been limited to a 90mm
Maksutov-Cassegrain... So going to a 10 inch aperture is a pretty
radical difference.  Things many of you have seen for years are
completely new experiences for me - I'm going to enjoy it while I can!
 I took the advice from the last email and got myself a TelRad.  these
things should come as standard issue on a big scope.  Very easy to
install and use - works great.  Only complaint is that is fogs up very
easily - but can be wiped dry.  My wife got my a copy of "Pocket Sky
Atlas" from Sky and Telescope which I'm using to improve my minimal
star hopping ability.  I would recommend this guide - it shows stars
to mag 7.6.  Also bought some used eyepieces which are a lot nicer
than the Plossls I had (thanks John).  I have the "intelliscope" on my
dob, but still not having luck getting it to hold it's calibration -
I'll call up Orion and get some help on that one.

So, I set out on Friday to look at globular star clusters...  But had
to get a view of Saturn first (partly to test out the intelliscope
calibration).  Perhaps it was my imagination, but the angle of the
rings seems to have changed enough where you could see a small gap
between the rings around the far side of the planet from the front.
As for the globs - I was used to seeing these as very faint fuzzy
greenish blobs - completely unresolved.  So, I started with M3.  I was
amazed at the detail, especially once I pushed the magnification up to
133 or 200X.  I have to say it looked BETTER than the general images
I've found on websites.  The color and contrast was very beautiful.  I
went on to M13 - absolutely stunning.  Definitely bigger and more
resolved stars than M3.. and the core was brighter.  I thought M3 was
easier to find, though.  I then went a little more difficult looking
for M10 and M12 - And even though they are close together, I was only
able to find one of them.  I'm sure I was missing something obvious.
I was getting tired of star hopping, so I hit up a few doubles - car
caroli and mizar.

It had now been about 2 hours and the humidity had gotten to me.  I
certainly enjoyed my evening - and definitely felt appreciative of the
larger aperture!    Even just having a better finderscope led me to
catch more shooting stars and satellites.

Saturday I had the scope out - and allowed my 4 year old to stay up...
And as the sun set, a big cloud seemed to come out of nowhere and
settle right over my house, ruining any chance of  skywatching.  At
least it only takes about 5 minutes to move the scope to the backyard
and have it set up for skywatching!

-Matt