Friday night at MB

by Michael Swartz


It was a pretty good night. I got to MB around 5:30pm, set up my trusty Takahashi Sky90 and outfitted it with my Coronado H-Alpha gear and set to observe the sun for a while. It provided some nice views yesterday. Plenty of pretty filiments, prominences, spots and magnetic modeling around the spot groups. The color was nice, the air was pretty steady until the sun started to get lower.

Later I was joined by 10 or 15 other observers. Everyone was friendly, conversational and would roam about conversing and sharing views and opinions.

I got involved in a crazy eyepiece comparison between the TV 31nagler and a TV 41panoptic. I thought I had brought over my 41 panoptic but only after four of us looked through a pair of 31 naglers did we finally realize that we couldn't figure out why they looked so similar until we looked at them with a light to see which one was which. Because suprisingly they even felt the same. So after a brief embarrassed appology I went and got my real 41mm panoptic and we compared views. There was a very noticable difference this time instead of just an imagined one. At one point I actually had a 31mm in each hand and was changing them again and again trying to see the difference. And I actually thought I saw something but I wasn't sure. The 31 and 41 are different though. The 41 does have a nice view, good contrast and nice images out to the edge, but the 31 has a nicer contrast. I am not sure if it's because of the magnification or not but the background sky was a little darker and showed more texture. That was kind of funny.

Later in the evening plenty of good views of Mars were enjoyed. I finally left around 1:00am.

It was a good night.