This was for the neighborhood children; turns out, parents are
interested, too. At sunset I pointed my 5-in. Mak at the Moon.
At 62x it fits well in the eyepiece and does not drift too fast,
and twilight makes moon filters unnecessary. Kids can relate
to the Moon is all I can say!
Naturally everybody was waiting for Saturn, and by 8:30 it was easily
found. A real surprise when seen for the first time and fun to return
to time after time. Now we played with eyepieces going up to 220x,
losing sharpness and gaining wiggle. With an equatorial mount the
children were able to track Saturn manually and had fun doing so--
they were also curious about the finder scope. Saturn's big moon
makes for good conversation: larger than ours, yet looks like a tiny
spark.
We also looked at Mars but saw no detail. More interesting was the
double star gamma o'Lion, a.k.a. Algieba (an obvious misspelling of
Algebra, a multiple seen as a double in the scope), also a good topic
of conversation since the abundance of doubles and multiples is not
commonly known.
Next Jupiter, but we agreed to wait a few months.
Good time was had by everyone.
-Pentti
-- Party time! GSSP is over 250 attendees: http://www.goldenstatestarparty.blogspot.com TAC Stats Tracking: http://tinyurl.com/4fhjhx Mailing list preferences: http://seds.org/mailman/listinfo/sf-bay-tacReceived on Sun May 11 16:51:32 2008
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