Telescope Reviews: A "grab and go" night with a small refractor

The beauty of a small scope is I can sling the entire almada of observing necessities, (scope & eyepieces in the case, observing table, tripod, thermacell, binos) over my shoulder and make my way to the barn about a hundred yards away where I get my best views to the south. One trip and I can be setting up to view in minutes. Jupiter was easy to notice just above the tree line as my first catch of the night in the binos but the orientation of its moons were hardly discernable without my preferred parallelogram mounting to steady them out. While I had the binos handy and my eyes had not quite gotten ready for seeing faint fuzzys, I scanned the sky in the direction of Scutum, Sagittarius, and the great rift of the Milky Way. What a glorious area`of sky to behold! I just sat there in amazement as I tried to imagine how we are positioned as an earth-sun system amoungst the vast array of stars as I gazed out into the dust separating us from seeing much at all towards the center of our galaxy. I found the Scutum Star cloud and tonight was a night for looking at this cluster rich area of the Milky May without trying to gain any bearings with maps and such until later. Once I did take a look through the refractor, I saw a very bright globular at the top of the teapot (later identified as either M22 or M28 and the identification was uncertain because I could not see the whole of the teapot asterism as it was mostly below the tree line from my observing location.) Since globulars were on my mind, I scanned up to Hercules and caught M13 which resolved nicely into thousands of tiny pin points of light. I kept scanning the skies looking for old friends and came upon another globular M71 in Sagitta and briefly looked for the dumbell M27 which I remembered being off the tip of the arrow of Sagitta. I did not locate it tonight however. I was later surprised to learn how many fields of view off the tip of the arrow this planetary nebula really was and I didn't look far enough. I once heard someone say about observing that "I've forgotten more than a lot of people will ever know" and at the time I didn't understand. The wisdom in that statement is now resonating with me and it seems to be the great equalizer in astronomy that makes us all beginners in one form or another. As the moon rose, my evening ended with another period of rapt attention toward the entire milky way arcing overhead with just my eyes. And THAT was the best observing I did all night!

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Clear Skies, Jim
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Discovering: Messier objects, Deep sky treasures, NGCs, Double stars, & Nebulae of all kinds.
Televue 85 "Polaris" Mount
Custom Crafted Newtonian Dob 8" f7 w/Feathertouch
Celestron Cometron Reflector 114mm f8
Zeiss Diafun 8 X 30 Binos
Zeiss 10 X 56 Binos

Aldrich Astronomical Society