After a really looooooong time away and having sold all my equipment in the process, I finally got myself a Celestron Nexstar 8 SE and it arrived this week.
The skies over at my place (Sengkang) cleared up briefly around midnight so I decided to try my luck and see if I could get the scope aligned...indoors!
First, I looked south and could see Alpha and Beta Centauri, and Crux. So I tried to do a Sky Align (any three bright objects) on Alpha and Beta Centauri and Acrux and it was successful. I eagerly keyed in NGC 4755 and the Nexstar 8 SE was almost spot on. The views were really awesome at around 150x magnification through a 17mm plossl with 2x barlow and drew a 'WAH' from my wife who was seeing something like that for the first time in her life.
Next, it just had to be NGC 5139. Strangely, the Nexstar 8 SE didn't nail this one. I moved the scope around to hunt for it, part of me wondering if it was too faint to be seen from where I was. Eventually, I found it. It was off slightly to the right, just outside the FOV at 40x magnification on a 32mm Plossl. I told my wife to take a look and she remarked "I don't see anything, but you seem to have a 'fingerprint' on your lens"
I increased the magnification to around 75x and she could start to note a granular structure. I tried some of the other open clusters in the neighbourhood but none were as interesting as NGC4755. After one last look, I moved the scope to another bedroom that was facing east. I could see part of Scorpius and Saturn. I tried the 1 star align method on Antares and it worked beautifully. Views of M6 and M7 followed, and we concluded the session with views of Saturn at about 315x magnification before the clouds came back and covered the sky.
Looking forward to more sessions ahead!
![[smilie=ahaaah.gif]](./images/smilies/ahaaah.gif "ahaaah")