My
original plan was to image Saturn with the QHY5 camera, but just as I was
setting up, a girl who lived in a nearby apartment walked by and asked what I was doing. I
invited her to hang out for a few minutes while I got the telescope set up and
aligned. Thankfully, the C8 is so easy
to put together and align. I invited
three other curious passers-by to check it out as well, and they went back and
grabbed some of their friends. It was
awesome! There were clouds overhead, but
thin enough to still view through. This
limited how high I could push the magnification though. So first I had them look through the 8mm
eyepiece, and then the 17mm, which offered a sharper view but smaller. Titan was visible, however, in both
views. I was very happy to share Saturn
with all these people, and they were thoroughly impressed with both Saturn and
my setup (and my credentials), but clouds came over and didn’t clear, so I didn’t
get to image Saturn after all. Oh,
well. Next time!
The girl hung out for a bit longer
than the others, and we looked at Mars too.
It was very bright but also appeared to not be “full,” although that may
have been the eyepiece I was using – the 17mm has some weird internal
reflections that muck things up. It was
bright enough that I had a hard time making out surface features, but my eyes
were also still dilated from my eye appointment earlier that day, so anything
bright had a weird chromatic aberration shadow and was just saturated in my
eye. But yeah, still an enjoyable evening!
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