Bill's Sky

 Went out at about 22:00MDT. This was just a relaxing night of viewing. I didn't feel like setting up a telescope, and wanted to spend some time with the binoculars. These are the 12x50 Nikon. NELM is just a little better than 4. I can make out all 7stars in the Little Dipper, but the 4.4 magnitude and 4.5 magnitude stars are just barely visible. Sky is pretty bright. The Milky Way runs NE-SW. I set up the zero g chair facing east. The Pleiades are naked eye visible as a hazy area about 20 degrees above the horizon, which puts them just under 10 degrees above the Sapphires. The stars appear almost jewel like. I count nine bright ones and several lesser ones.  From there I moved to M31, the Andromeda Galaxy. It is just visible to the naked eye. In the binoculars I can see a bright core. The rest is fainter, fading out more as you move outward. It takes up over half of the 5.5 degree FOV. Cassiopeia is about 75-80 degrees above the NE horizon. About halfway between Cassiopeia an...

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...