Bill's Sky

  The night is mostly clear with a few passing high clouds. Transparency otherwise is probably about a 4/5. Seeing is average, about Antoniadi 3.5 when Saturn was about  30 degrees above the horizon, improving to A3 as it rose higher. Moon is 96% waning, NELM about 3.5. I could only really make out Polaris, Kochab, and Pherkad in the little dipper, mostly due to sky glow. This is the first time I've actually taken time to set the Orion up properly.I have replaced the screws for the accessory tray. Like most telescope tripods, the tray serves as a spreader and brace for the legs. Having this in correctly helped with shakiness. I also tightened up the bolts holding the legs to the base of the mount. They were loose enough that the joint would flex when moving the telescope. The focuser is very stiff and needs to be reworked. The slow motion controls work well but OTA started bumping the azimuth knob at certain elevations. Initially the view wasn't much better than I had last yea...

Tonight was clear enough that I set up my telescope. Set up at 21:00 MDT, and aligned using Altair and Polaris. GoTo was still consistently off to the left in the east part of the sky, but was able to use the RDF to get on target. I am obviously missing something in set up. The most obvious suspects are date and time entry.  Transparency isn't real great and the sky was pretty bright, so I decided to just try some easy observing to relax.  I hadn't done any planet observing in a while, and Saturn was up. I started with the 25mm eyepiece and progressed to the 8mm. The rings are almost edge on, just a little tilt to them. Seeing wasn't real steady, but there were moments when it steadied. I could make out a very thin dark space between the rings and the planet on either side of the planetary disk, And could easily make out the rings in front of the planet. The north atmospheric band was occasionally faintly visible. There was no real discernible color. The planet appeared whi...