FM 2276 In-laws house (A)

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Last night Amy and I loaded up the kids (and telescope stuff) and went to Henderson to do some gazing in a decently dark area :)



Conditions: Clear and quiet, no wind. Temp 50° or so and only slightly humid. Spent about 3 hours outside.



Around Leo

Beehive Cluster - looked with binos and scope... this is one target best seen through binoculars and the problem is... showing other people is hard because I don't have a bino tripod and they sometimes had trouble finding stuff.

M65, M66 - two 9th magnitude spiral galaxies (translated... little blurry clouds that are hard to see unless you use averted vision to make them pop out). These are what dark skies and a big aperture are for!




Around Orion

M78 - 8th mag nebula, almost looks like a scratch on your telescope

Orion Nebula - Enjoyed looking at it with real darkness, the wispiness was much more apparent than in the backyard.




Mars

At the zenith we've been observing with about as good of "seeing" as we can expect, but I'm convince we just don't have enough magnification to see any detail. I can't wait to get a 5mm eyepiece so we can get really "up in the sky", but the one I want is wide view (70° as opposed to 40° traditionally).


Saturn

We ended up looking through some trees so that knocked down our brightness some, but it's always fun to hear someone's reaction to seeing Saturn for the first time. Everyone knows it's up there technically, but almost no one expects to actually see it with their own eyes and nothing but pieces of glass making it possible. Saturn is 746 million miles from us. To put that into context (a bit) go around the Earth 30,000 times. The only reason we can see it is because it's big (about 10 times larger than Earth).


Anyway... it's fun to see people react :) and Amy's dad is no exception.