Date: 17th May 08, Friday
Observation Time : 11:45pm to 01:00am (1:15 hrs)
Location : SD Home
Weather: Seeing was good.. No cloud cover.. some wavy views thru eyepiece..
Highlight of the night: Crater Aristarchus and its surrounding region..
Observed few craters on Moon NW Rim and lil bit of SW Rim.
Moon phase is in its 13th day. Waxing gibbous with 95% of the Moon's visible disk illuminated.
With 32mm, prominent stuff is visible.. 32mm x 2x, 25mm x 2x combos were fine too... but 12mm x 2x eyepiece combo was THE great. It indeed showed details of craters and its surrounding prominently..
Few problems with this high magnification eyepiece combo were:
- The view in the eyepiece was moving too fast. so lil bit difficult to observe a feature for long time. Auto-Tracking on telescope would have been helpful.
- Focusing precisely at this high magnification is difficult. Why does the high magnification or short focal eyepiece focusing is so difficult?
- Felt vibrations of the cement floor in the eyepiece view. it was shaking a lot. Need rubber pads or something similar for telescope tripod.
- Preffered to observe without eyeglasses.. my impression abt 12mm eyepiece was bad before.. but this observation made me realize that the aperture size of the frontal lens is not bad.. Infact during observation I didn't feel at all that aperture hole is that small.. Thought that I should buy high eye relief 10mm eyepiece.
Moon filter was useful with 32mm... but didn't help much on 12mm x 2x eyepiece.
Crater Aristarchus: 12mm x 2x eyepiece really worked great.. crater and its surrounding were beautiful.. was able to see valleys around it clearly.. It was fun to follow the entire valley and mountains range from N of this crater to S till Crater Mauris. Mountains are visible clearly.. Couple of bright white spots on those mountains.. Shadow on east rim of the crater. West side of the crater was really bright. It sort of gave the perception how deep the crater is..
Crater Gassendi: Lil bit of shadow on east side visible.. the mountain in the center of Gassendi was strikingly bright..
Crater Kepler: Kepler and Enke were visible.. Enke was too faint becasue of moon light.. none of the moon domes were visible.. but bright rays emanating from Kepler and going towards Crater Mauris were easily visible.
Crater Mauris: Nothing special.. but because of shadows, looked like really prominent one.. Kepler + Mauris combo looks good.
Crater Babbage + J Herschel at N: Babbage and Babbage A was easy to find.. just below sinus Iradium. Compared to babbage, J herschel was too faint.. Pythagoras was still in the dark.