Last weekend, Saturday Mar 12th, as part of the astronomy club that I belong to, we did an outreach star party with a local non-profit nature preserve with their members. Myself and one other from our club came with telescopes in hand. I stupidly brought my 10″ dob and my refurbished Celestron Nexstar 4GT mak. Packed all items into a folding garden cart and trucked it in by foot down a muddy trail about 1/3mi into the woods where there was a clearing and some buildings. I set up both scopes on the ground and tried firing up the Celestron but ran into issues so I put that off to the side. Got my dob setup. Took awhile to readjust the finder scope and Rigel to what I saw in the eyepiece. This seems to happen every time, but the scope did get jostled around on the trip down. Weather was not cooperating, figured, scattered clouds and lots of moisture in the atmosphere.
Got some views on Orion Nebula which went from poor to good depending on cloud movement. The trapezium looked nice in my new 14mm ES 82deg eyepiece. Looked at the moon briefly through the clouds. Not much to say there, other than really bright (need to pick up a filter to cut down the glare). Looked at the Double Cluster and Pleiades through my Q70 eyepieces, 38mm fit it nicely. After an hour or two, Jupiter finally rose above the tree line towards east/south east. Got average views of it. 11mm eyepiece was the best view, with a blue filter. Could see 2 cloud bands and 4 moons. No spot which may have been out of view or conditions not good enough. Then I switched over to the Leo triplet. Easily saw 2 of the 3. The 3rd needed significant averted vision to pick out. I think I had my 26mm eyepiece in, I don’t recall exactly. Only my 2nd time ever finding it in my dob, after being pointed out in the night sky approximately where it was.
One of the nature preserve members asked if Andromeda Galaxy was up. The northern sky was significantly socked in with clouds and low haze/humidity so I knew I wouldn’t be able to find it easily with my dob. My friend and fellow club member has a Celestron AVX mount and Skywatcher refractor. While he was taking group photos, I borrowed the hand controller and managed to figure out how to go to Andromeda Galaxy, then use fine adjustments to get a view. It was pretty poor but visible. No real defined structure. I don’t think we could see Little Andromeda due to the weather conditions.
Got lots of oohs and aahs from non-astronomers in the crowd. About 20 people altogether I think? I packed up around 10pm and made two trips back down the muddy trail with my gear. And wouldn’t you know that the skies significantly cleared up after 10pm as we were packing up. Figures.
I don’t think I’ll ever bring my dob down a muddy trail again. I was exhausted from all that work. Lost an eyepiece cover too in the night. Hopefully I can get my 4″ Mak working as that is much more portable.
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