Del Valle Sunday night....

by Julius Szakacs


I took all my telescopes to try out at Del Valle lake to look it the comet. I had the 4" f/11 Dynascope, 75mm f/15 Edscorp refractor, 8" SCT with me.

The evening started out with a beautiful sunset, the clouds were orange-red and purple color on the west, just like a painting. Through the binocular it was even more impressing.

After the darkness fell I quickly searched for the comet with my bino, set-up on a parallelogram mount. Finding it, I noticed it has moved quit a bit from it's position yesterday. I saw a small faint star in the comets tail flickering, looks like a tail had a lensing efect over it. It was interesting to observe how fast the comet moved, since an hour later this small star was behind the tail.

I only used the 4" dynascope to browse around the sky, since the seeing wasn't as good as Saturday. Some more clouds were building up from the west, and some scattered around the sky. Also I wanted see how this scope performed under dark sky, on M-objects. Using my 8"SCT most of the time in the past, the 4" was quite dim even on the comet. The 70 mm bino had more detail on the tail, also with the Dynascope, it took me half an hour to find comet, using it's tiny 20mm finder. I think I just found it by pure luck.

Than I switched OTA on my GEM mount, to the 75mm Edscorp refractor. I had the same result. My 11x70 Pro-optic bino was the winer, as they say two eyes can see more than one.

Both telescope performs excellent on planets and I call my Dynascope an APO killer. That's what they were designed for at the first place with long focus length.

It was surprisingly bright at Del Valle, compared to Coe or the peak. I can see everything around me.

I was by myself all night with my wife, the lookers left early. I guess its Sunday night and Monday is the start of the race for another dollar.

I packed up and I went home, it was after 11pm, I never set-up my 8" SCT.