Time: 3/23/2002 10:00PM-12:00AM
Location: Parent’s house, College Point, NY — about 45 degrees
Equipment: 4.5″ Newtonian
Got my laser collimator today, and tried to collimate the scope using it. I also have the focuser cap for 1.25″ eyepieces instead of the .965″ eyepieces.
After collimating used the 17mm(54x) and 7.4mm(123x) 1.25″ eyepieces on Jupiter. Was able to see 2 belts on Jupiter easily, however the image was wavering quite a bit. Jupiter was also fairly brigh, even with the 7.4mm. With good seeing and some decent planetary filters, I think I may be able to start finding more details on the disk.
Tried to test collimation with Procyon. Using the 1.25″ eyepieces the diffraction rings were very easy to see, the other .965 eyepieces may be garbage. Anyway the collimation seemed to be OK, however it was hard to tell due to all the flickering.
Since the moon was out, I decided to look at it as well. Using the 17mm on the moon, the image was clear, but it was shimmering so much it was easy to see that the seeing was horrible. Noticed an interesting feature, which I found out was Sinus Iridium, sort of like a bay. Also there was a faint star near the limb of the moon which if I waited longer I would have seen the moon occult. The star is listed as SAO 80634, mag 7.68, so I know my scope can see stars at least that dim, even under really bad light pollution conditions.
I also tried to find M51 (Whirlpool Galaxy) by star hopping however was not able to.
I’d estimate the limiting magnitude was between 3 and 4, which made it kind of hard to find things.