A Walk in the Park

After an early dinner last night Donna and I went for a walk in Sabino Canyon. Skies were darkening as we entered the park after the 1/2 mile walk to get there. So this night I decided to only bring my camera and no accessories which 99 out of a hundred times I do but I digress here lol. As we are walking up the main road I look to the west and there is but a bare sliver of a crescent moon about 20 degrees or so above the horizon and I do the slap myself in the back of the head move. I knew that I really needed my tripod to do the scene justice as it was getting darker and darker by the minute. It was a pretty site with the Saguaros showing up against the dimming reds, oranges and blues of the western sky. Found a sign and decided to try and take a few pictures, not ideal mind you but for fast and dirty they are ok.

The sky was looking clear but light polluted as is the case even up here. I set up the telescope in a different spot tonight as there are cars now parked in my usual place across the parking lot. Ran my extension cord and covered up the lights with boxes and preceded to look once again at M42 using all the ep's and the barlow. Next I went to M41 the open cluster under Sirius and did a wide field view with the 40mm lens. Decided to pull out the binos and look at M46 and M47 as the sky was almost to bright to find my pointer stars and align the scope as it is a manual mount. I did manage to bring in and find M93 a 6.2 mag open cluster with the telescope. It has a few bright stars close by making it easy to get close to and then do a quick back and forth until it pops into the ep. I know I could be doing a RA/Dec find using the wheels on the scope but I had only done a point to what I thought is north alignment. Next up was Saturn and I spent quite a bit of time using all the ep's and barlow once again. Tonight Saturn had a moon to the right in the ep that was close to Satrun and about halfway between the rings and top of the planet in the ep. As my location did not afford me a view of the north I had limited options and chose M3 a globular cluster and once again spent quite a bit of time using all the ep's. It is way cool to have an RA motor that allows the scope to really settle down and let the faint stars resolve at higher magnifactions allowing a greater depth of view of the cluster. Went in the condo and got Donna as I felt she should see this cluster. Took the scope back to Saturn so Donna could look at the placement of the moon and decided to call it a night as I did not want to fight the light pollution any more.