by Paul LeFevre
I must, to get up this early.
I was looking forward to a little backyard observing last night, but I forgot what warm weather does to San Francisco...the fog rolled in about 7:00, and stayed. Sigh.
My only alternative was the early one -- get up at 3:00, and bring the scope into work -- set up above the upper parking light before the lot lights come on at 5:00. Sleep? Who needs it!
Mars was lovely this morning, just wonderful. I got a new EP over the weekend, a 4mm Vixen Lanthanum I picked up from Orion's SF store, and wanted to try it out on Mars. That's 300X on my 6", officially "the limit" for my scope. Folks, this EP is one nice piece of glass. It took me a few minutes to get used to 20mm eye relief on a 4mm EP, but it's a good thing to get used to! Mars at 300X was sharp and clear, and I saw more surface detail than I ever have. Syrtis Major looked like the horn of Africa spreading across the surface, and Hellas' bright spot was very obvious. Wonderful.
I decided to be bold, and tossed in the 2X Barlow behind the 4mm -- 600X, way too much for this scope, right? Hmph! Not on bright Mars it isn't! It was definately not as sharp as the EP alone, but cutting down the brightness actually made things easier to view, and the disk was HUGE in the view. I'm hooked on my new EP! I spent well over an hour tracking and viewing Mars, teasing every bit of detail I could out of it. Great fun.
Just to see what else it would do, I swung up to the zenith and found M13. Bright and fuzzy in the 26mm EP, sharp and resolving stars in the 10mm (taking up almost 1/2 the FOV), and then in the new 4mm...wow. I hadn't ever used very high power on a big cluster before -- it took up the entire FOV, and though not nearly as bright, was tack-sharp and showed me more individual stars than I could believe. The contrast was amazing.
This EP is a keeper, $150 well spent. I got it to look at Mars, but it's going to make a nice addition to my bag of tricks. :) If the weather holds, I'll have it at the peak this weekend for anybody who'd like to try it out!