Driveway in Menlo Park, 10 May 2008

Pentti Kanerva

This was for the neighborhood children; turns out, parents are interested, too. At sunset I pointed my 5-in. Mak at the Moon. At 62x it fits well in the eyepiece and does not drift too fast, and twilight makes moon filters unnecessary. Kids can relate to the Moon is all I can say!

Naturally everybody was waiting for Saturn, and by 8:30 it was easily found. A real surprise when seen for the first time and fun to return to time after time. Now we played with eyepieces going up to 220x, losing sharpness and gaining wiggle. With an equatorial mount the children were able to track Saturn manually and had fun doing so-- they were also curious about the finder scope. Saturn's big moon makes for good conversation: larger than ours, yet looks like a tiny spark.

We also looked at Mars but saw no detail. More interesting was the double star gamma o'Lion, a.k.a. Algieba (an obvious misspelling of Algebra, a multiple seen as a double in the scope), also a good topic of conversation since the abundance of doubles and multiples is not commonly known.

Next Jupiter, but we agreed to wait a few months.

Good time was had by everyone.

-Pentti