Earth Mother smiled and the sky was clear here in Chicagoland on Saturday night. Stacey and I started the evening with a nice meal at a local Thai place, then on to her place for some astronomy.
As usual, here Meade Autostar was being cranky and after fighting to get the thing to function, we just swapped it out with the hand control from her other scope. I've been observing with her on six different occasions now and only once did we avoid computer glitches. So guess what I think of computerized telescopes? Aaaarrrggghh!
On a brighter note, I did test our new line of Japanese made Vixen binoculars with the Vixen 12x80. Overall, it was very good, though not quite up to the much more expensive Nikon Astroluxe, but still a definite step up from the usual Chinese stuff. Edge to edge sharpness was very good with only a little hint of flare on some of the brightest stars.
Also played around with my Nikon 82mm ED scope to see what it could do. At 75x was able to see cloud belts of Jupiter very well. M13 was gorgeous and even managed to get M57 and M27 under very light polluted and moonlit skies. If it wasn't strictly limited to Nikon eyepieces, this scope would give a Televue a run for its money.
No birding on Sunday - astronomers have to sleep sometime!
