What an awful, hot, buggy day, followed by such a splendid, warm, still night!

I did manage to acquire the SJAA 12" Dob for the night, and bought a Telrad to add to it from Crazy Ed. My main goal for the evening was to become accustomed to finding objects in a Dobsonian after five years with an equatorial mount.

One of my favorite starhopping methods in the old C-8 clearly doesn't work in the Dob -- and that's to find landmarks on the same R.A. or Dec as my target and slow-mo in a single map direction to find it. I'm still having some difficulty orienting the finder and eyepiece views with a map. To exercise, I spent some of the evening choosing some moderately obscure double star targets.

I had some success, but occasionally I was stymied by lack of practice at identifying the actual target. I'm not sure what a 3.5" separation looks like in my eyepiece, for example. A couple of times I thought I could split the pair, but thought I might also be seeing things. Oh well -- it was fun trying.

I had a good time looking at the other cool stuff there was to be seen, but the totally new experiences for me of the evening came from the awesome satellite list that Craig Cholar put up on the web.

I viewed about eight satellites from the list, all of them that I actually looked for. The instructions and timing made it very simple and easy to find all of the satellites.

The tumblers that started the evening were cool, but I was totally unprepared for one of the Disco Ball satellites. It was a startling view in the binoculars. One of the other satellites had spikes of brightness reaching 0 mag, and it was quite impressive. Finding a trio of NOSS satellites flying formation in the binoculars was a real thrill.

And the tether! What an amazing site! A tiny ribbon of hair flying across the sky ...

It was fun to cap the evening with a -3 Iridium flare too. :)

Thank you Craig!