9-15-2007 2nd Night

Finally decided to go out and setup somewhere with great views. The Buffalo Gap Nat'l Grasslands is a spot where you have 360 degree prarie views, and is far enough away from Rapid City, that the light pollution isn't bad. Weather was excellent and moon still young. Milky way felt as bright as the moon tonight!

Spent the first few minutes setting up, and then tried the Auto Align. It claimed "alignment successful", but when I told it to go to the moon (which I could see, although low) it said it didn't rise until 3:0 4 a.m.. I tried the same thing on Saturn and got the same message. For some reason this frustrated me, even though I knew it was my fault for some reason and decided to have a peek around manually.

I am clueless other than the big dipper, so I just looked for a bright objects. Of course, Jupiter was big and bright, and looking through showed me 4 moons on one side and 2 bands! This was super exciting, and I spent the next 2 hours looking at Jupiter. I had my camera along, and tried to take a picture through the eyepiece. The abysmal result is below. First image with LX200R!


Once Jupiter had set, I decided to look at my Astronomy magazine for more info on the planets (I wanted to see Saturn).

Saturn, of course, isn't visible until morning, so I quickly realized that maybe my GOTO wasn't crazy, and the moon was so low it thought that I shouldn't have been able to see it....

Firing up the "Auto Align" once again, I got to say "successfull, although it never gets very close to the star it wants you to align for some reason. Usually for me it isn't even in the finder, and that makes certain stars too hard to guess which it wants (I don't know my stars enough, remember). This time I put in a couple of things to see, but I was getting too cold to even remember what I wanted to see. I put in M51, and was unable (not patient, no averted vision) to see it. I called it a night.

Excellent views of Jupiter made this evening fun...looking forward to trying some more viewing with GOTO next time right from the start. Manual tracking is alot of work and takes away from viewing the objects.