by Jay Reynolds Freeman
I was out this evening, briefly, checking out my 10-inch Dobson again. Tonight was fourth light for this instrument, and the first time I had used it with the separable truss tubes that some of you have seen, that split into two pieces for packing in a suitcase. I was anxious to see if they were really stiff enough when joined. No problemo, and what's more, the extra weight of the joints puts the telescope in perfect balance.
I looked at a few more Messier objects -- it's always fun chasing M83 from suburbia -- and also NGC 4361, the big planetary about two thirds of the way up the sail of Corvus. The latter showed a vague disc with central star. I tried a few double stars, but seeing was poor -- Polaris and Mizar were easy splits, but Izar was at most suspected of being a little pointy. All this was at 106x (12 mm Brandon), and the seeing was such that there was no temptation to go to more magnification on the doubles.
A neighbor came by while I was viewing, a woman in her late twenties who had been there long enough to remember the time I took advantage of the power outage after the 1989 earthquake, to give a dark sky star party for the block. I showed her M104, and she was able to see that it was in fact an edge on view of a spiral galaxy.
I quit at Moon rise.