Demo session tonight

[Airconvent]

Hi all,
I met up with newbie Kingfisher tonight as he was interested in getting my scope. The sky was amongst the better ones in months with some high altitude clouds. I hope people in good locations especially near dempsey did not waste it! There were quite thick clouds well above the horizon all round but zenith was relatively clear.
As it was not an real observation session, I did not bother to sit down and pick objects to look at but rather went for familiar stuff that my bad memory can recall! Spent about 50% of the time explaining the key aspects of the Meade 105 as well as some basics on astronomy.

Saturn and Orion was already behind a building, so I settled for Jupiter instead. No GRS tonight. Also took a look at Jewel box but did not see any of the nebulosity that Chris mentioned as inspite of the sky looking dark, the background on the eyepiece is reddish which means clouds.
Eta Carina was a wash out and the nebulosity only became slightly apparent with a narrow band filter. Next I tried Omega Centauri. Initially could not see it lower int he horizon but 1.5 hrs later when it was higher, we were able to make out the white spherical structure. With averted vision, could just resolve some stars in the structure.

Also tried M3 but it was just at the threshold of visibility and I was surprised that Kingfisher (Mike) was able to make it out as a first timer....I remembered I could not even see M42 when I first started! M4 was next but it chose to be invisible....sigh...

A pity all the cool objects in sagittarius was still behind a building, or else would have been able to show him M6, M7, M8, M13, M17, etc.
With a poor object database, the number of objects in the clear that I could dig up was meagre....

anyway, glad to have met you, Mike and welcome to singastro.

all: mike is also on the lookout for an ETX90 for terrestrial and astronomy use. if you have one, do let him know. His handle here is "kingfisher".

rich

[chrisyeo]

Hi Rich,

the jewel box I was refering to is the one in Scorpius, not Crux.