Montebello Tuesday 5/8/2007

by Chris Li

There was a good number of people there.

Lance is trying out his custom build 12 inch dob. Together with his wife Mary, buddy Terry and baby son Cosmo. George has as self build 10 inch dob. Both George and Lance's dob reminds me the Plettstone telescope. Bob arrived with his NexStar 8 inch. Bo has his XT10i with object locater. (cheater :-) I was going to try out the new StarMax 127.

It seeing is about 6/10. Not bad.

Saturn is high and obvious. My best Saturn view is from Geroge's 10 inch. The cassini division is clear visible.

The out of box alignment of the StarMax 127 was reasonably good. It was off by a very small amount. I did not get the cassini devision from this scope last night. Maybe it need more time to cool down.

Splitting of Castor was visible.

The rest of the night was hunting some easy M objects. M13 barely able to see some individual star. But most of the cluster is a big furry ball.

Some other objects I tried: M65&M66. M51, M57, M75, M76 Later of the night Jupiter come up. It was still very low. I could see some bands on it with 4 moons. Not much details.

I left at about 12:30am.

Chris