I wish I was a Frenchman!

Yep, got a good view of saturn there. Still aiming from the hip, with stellarium telling me where to point

Same here. Can't be bothered to take my scope out. I might just head out for a while with my bins and see what trouble i can get up to.

Well I reached my goal!

Saw Saturn!

Bit of hit and miss with aiming at it, and suddenly popped into view! Although I damaged my scope (Ill post what I did in another thread..... ), I'm well chuffed with tonights observing!

I just stared at Sirius for a while., and as always..........the Orion Nebula (still looks sweet with 7X50 bins). I also heard a bird singing (guess it couldnt sleep).

Well Chuffed with tonights observing session.

Thanks for the Heads-up XULYKS !!

Not so much for what I saw although I was still very pleased but for a few things I learned, niggles diagnosed etc very productive night on both fronts albeit more on the scope side.

The seeing was good I thought and Mars and Saturn were sharp to my eyes. Mars is still pretty white and featureless but I definately could make out an arch of faint darker area from the 11 to 3 oclock position. Assuming stellarium is also programmed to display the correct face of mars then once I mentally reverse stellariums correct view perspective to the reversed and upside down telescope view then the location of the darker areas of Mars corresponds nicely to my view.

Saturn again was white and featureless but very sharp after about 2am when it had gained some decent height. Saw 5 or six of its moons. About four or five bunched tightly around the planet and then Titan way out. Corresponded to the stellaruim depiction nicely.

The reasons for not viewing much else bar the always magnificent M42 were twofold. Skyglow up to about 35 degrees all round and the fact that I still haven't managed to get my Orion Intelliscope DSC and computer working correctly.(Don't know the sky bar 5 or 6 of the constellations yet) Brought the brothers laptop with stellarium out to help me find some stuff but what charge it had didn't last long in the cold. (Must remember to run out an extension cable next time.)

So I figured that the skyglow would hinder any manual scanning, I didn't know where anything bar Saturn, Mars and M42 and a few doubles were, so I decided to use the rest of the session to fiddle diagnose and experiment with the scope.

During the cloudy past week, I had realised part of my wildly inaccurate DSC preoblems were down to setting the vertical stop wrong on the scope. Borne out by a much better 'Warp Factor' tonight but still just out of range for accurate pointing. So I knew I had sorted the Vertical stop issue. Put the Intelliscope computer in diagnostic mode tonight and found the remainder of my problem with it lies in the fact that the aziumuth encoder doesn't read for part of its 360 degrees of rotation. Need to take the base apart to sort it out but I don't envisage any major problems getting it sorted.

I also made a lot of progress re collimation. I discovered my Laser collimator was way out of collimation. Well both were but the orion one can't be user collimated. Good job it was free with the scope or there would be angry emails being sent to Orion. The TS one is user adjustable and thats the one I collimated and ultimately used. Built myself a rig for holding the collimator and tried to follow the step by step I found on the web. Wrecked my head and couldn't really grasp the concepts. Then I tried thinking it through logically myself. Instead of marking a bullseye with 4 compass points from the laser sweep I marked the position on my rig of one of the adjustment screws and marked the laser dot on the piece of paper stuck to the wall. Rotated the next screw to the park and makred he target again. Ditto for the third screw. It just made sense that 3 screws and 3 dots meant that I could logically work out which screws to adjust which way to centre the dot in the triangle. Centre point of equilateral trianlge was from intersection of the three lines from the apex of each side to the midpoint of the opossite line. Then I set the collimator in the rig with 2 screws facing up. Reset the target with 2 points facing up with the laser dot level and between and then I knew obviously which collimation screw to tighten and which two to loosen. To cut a long story short, it worked a treat. Laser dot doesn't move a mm when collimator is rotated in the rig.

Next success tonight was using my newly collimated laser collimator. Used the tip of the cellotape around the 1.25" barrel to stop the focuser slop with the collimator and aligned the secondary. Need to wait till my cheshire sight tube combo arrives to confirm my secondary tilt, in/out, offset etc is correct. Roughly done only, so far with the scopes own collimation cap.

For the Primary I used the barlowed laser method. Absolutely genius!! Used a polishing disc from a dremel and borrowed the girlfriends small make up mirror to see the barlow target inside the focus tube. By golly it works! A shadow of the primary centre ring on the barlow/dremel disc target. Aligned the ring and bingo!! While seeing wasn't good enough as far as I could tell for a proper star test, I could see these difraction rings I heard about but hadn't seen before. Only saw a donut when way out of focus on my first tries at the star test. By no means could I fine tune collimation with these jaggedy difraction rings due to seeing but at least I can actually see them now. I reckon thats how I was able to actually see some dark areas on Mars tonight. I am slowly but surely making progress with this collimation malarkey

Hopefully by the next clear spell I will have good quality collimation down pat and will have the Badder planetary filters and Baader Neodynium Moon and Skyglow filter that I ordered in hand. Might get to see some real detail on mars!!

So all things considered, despite the fact that I didn't actually look at much tonight, I felt it was a very worthwhile session and I accomplished a lot.

ALlmost forgot. The eyepiece case I customised from a toolbox really came in handy with all the EP changing I did tonight. Up till now the E's were ust a big box and in the dark I didn't know what I pas picking out. Now with them all in a line in their slots I can pick out the EP I want by touch alone.

Heres some pics: (Camera phone quality I'm afraid. I even stenciled the Orion Logo on! Kept me busy and sane during the cloudy nights last week! )

Apologies for the huge post :oops: I do go on a bit in my late night/early hours posts!!

I see you have one of the Energizer headlights. I picked one up on saturday. Got to try it out last night. How cool are they!?!.