I know Guide-Users is for the software, but as an amateur astronomer, I wanted to share my experience from last night!

I went up to Riker Hill Park tonight. I had a problem with my tripod hooking into the telescope. I remember Kevin telling me early on that he had to work up something himself to resolve that problem. Do I need to get another circular piece that goes on the threads and put it down further so as to push the threading up more? I do have an extra one.

I didn't use my "go to" feature for the above reason, but I did enjoy Jupiter and 5 of its satellites and Saturn, but I guess I wanted a little more challenge. The moon was also beautiful. I put my new 2x Barlow in the 26mm eyepiece, but I'm confused by it. It just makes me have to focus doubly to get the same picture - let's say of Jupiter for instance. But the moon was also confusing to me. So I put that toy away, and got out the oxygen III filter.

By the way, that Telrad is absolutely the best! I knew where to find M42 (listen to me!), so I slewed around a bit. I missed it at first. I saw a star cluster, but didn't recognize the dust cloud. I even remember saying to myself that I wasn't no where near the Pleides, but it was beautiful. Then I recognized it and changed my filters. It was a memorable experience. Not quite as good as the first time I seen it, but up there.

But I find myself using the sky like a map and that's cool! When I first got my telescope I looked up in the sky and said how am I going to possible learn all this? Not that I'm anywhere near "acquainted", I find myself naming off Rigel, Aldebaron (spelling??), etc.

Thanks for listening. I'm very excited and I hope I don't lose the enthusiasm. But I've been interested in this since I was a little girl - me and my twin brother. Now, I get to share his world with my nephews and he gets to share my world with the telescope. Sounds like a great deal to me! See ya's soon!

----- Original Message -----
From: Gene Faulkner
Sent: Tuesday, January 22, 2002 9:02 PM
To: mark ivanovic
Cc: Georgiana Inturrisi; Jim; Joesph Marzullo; kdconod; Kathy Nielsen; John Miksits
Subject: 7observing

Had a very enjoyable night or 2 hours of observing tonight. Actually not observing so much as getting use to the ccd camera. I have a very nice image of M42, taken at prime focus, 9 images of 3 sec's each stacked. And 10 images of 3 sec's each stacked. I was also imaging Alnitak, the furthest star to the East in Orion's belt. It is a tiple star, which when imaged did not show all three star's at first. I was able to change the exposure to get all three, two of which appear to be very close together. I also shot a couple image's of NGC2024 even though the Moon was out and close by. The first two image's definitely showed neblosity, however slight. But I will work on them to see if I can bring out more detail. We'll let you know how I made out. The wind started to pick up, and being I was recently ill, I decided to close early. But it is a very clear night for visual observing.


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