Posts Made By: Dave budlong

How many out there observe with their spouse or whatever? My wife and I observe together and without each other, just seeing how common or uncommon this is.

Went south last night for darker skies, but it wasn't clear. Tonight I am home and it looks to be better weather, my luck in action. 8)

OK here it is, if I were to purchase an 8" f10 SCT and connect my Canon Rebel XT, how big of a FOV would I be able to expect in my images? Just prime focus here, no f6.3 reducer included. Then with the f6.3 would my field increase dramatically or would that largely be to reduce exposure times?

It's a Month for Globular Clusters, and I am putting 9 of them on this months list.
M5, M13, M92, M10, M12, M14, M80, M4, M107.
How is everybody doing so far?

OK here goes nothing, I am going to try to word my question as best I can by prefacing it with several caveats. Think of all the scopes you have owned by various manufacturers, and without going into specific issues with the scopes other than optics and general function were your experiences with each scope positive, or negative to point that you had to get something else? Aperture Fever is not included as a negative either. I will set the tone by going through my scope list, the purpose of this is to get a frame of reference for all the different manufacturers.
Orion 80mm Refractor was OK for first scope
Orion 8" Dob Again OK optically fine, (helical focuser, issues there)
Televue Genesis Great Scope
Televue Solaris Great Scope(under used)
Meade ETX great little scope, (poor finder)
Orion 12" intelliscope So far a very nice scope, untested under really dark skies to date.
I have also had a couple of home made scopes but this is just to figure out about different manufacturers. Thanks

M19 Globular in Scorpius
M62 Globular in Scorpius
M 6 Nice Open Cluster in Scorpius
M 7 Another real nice Open Cluster in Scorpius
M57 The Ring Nebula, need I say more. Well yes its in Lyra and an easy trick to finding it is using a widefield EP and your middle ring of your Telrad field(for those with a Telrad) and lining up said ring with the 2 brighter stars at the bottom of the parallelogram in Lyra. It should be there in the FOV.
M56 Globular in Lyra
M27 A very large Bright Planetary in Vulpecula. Great object, can see it in Bino's from a good site. However its in one of those constellations that just does not exist from my backyard.
M71 Listed as a Globular Cluster in Sagitta, but if you have been playing along and done the last two list's for May and June you will be inclined to think of it as an Open Cluster.
M11 Open Cluster in Scutum, big. Also a great Bino object
M26 Another Open Cluster in Scutum, and also easy enough in Bino's.
Update if you have been playing along with these monthly list's then upon completion on July's list you will be 1/2 of an object away from being 25% done with the Messiers. Next Month we will hit Sagittarius and pick up 15 objects and the will pit us way ahead on our pace. Any way Happy Hunting and Have Safe and Wonderful 4th of July.

They are great, I am currently in central Oregon, at a dark sky location and I just spent a half an our with my pair of Celestron ranger 8x42 bino's and I saw 35 Messier objects. Any one who says you need a scope, just needs to get out to dark skies. These are good bino's but limited in aperture. They still deliver the DSO's though. Side note, any one who has not been to central Oregon is missing out. We have Mt. Rainer and St. Helens in WA, but from where I am I can see 7 snow covered volcanic peaks here in Oregon. I am about 35 or 40 miles from the site tat OSP is held every year, so if you are looking for a new star party to hit, this one would be a daytime winner too.

First the Globulars, M69, M70, M55, M54, M28 and my second Favorite Globular in the sky M22. Then we are off to the Lagoon M8 and the Trifid M20, and on up to M17, and nudging the scope a little further north we find M16.After seeing the nebula's in this area we push south again and grab M23, M24, and M25, now slide the scope a little west and get M9 since we are in the vicinity. Now we have to head east to grab just a few more in Capricorn M75, and M30 are a few more globulars and that concludes our whirlwind tour for the month. Happy Hunting.

I am sure this is a silly question, but I will ask anyway. Can the primary objective (50 mm) of a pair of bino's be made into any serviceable 2" EP? I know that even if it does work its not going to be great, but if it would be decent it would be worth the effort. I like to play around with silly projects so its just eating up "fiddle" time. I have a pair of Celestron Bino's I dropped in the parking lot after a birding hike and I fractured the prism, so other than looking at birds in the yard, they are shot.

OK this might be the last good month weather wise for some of us so I am going to load up one more time. Last month I overlooked M21 so we got to go back and get that one. Then moving the right direction in the sky we go and get M72, M73 and M2. Then we get to find another very nice globular cluster M15. Another couple of objects before we get to this months fun ones, lets get M52 and M39. Finally we are going to pick up M31, M32, and M110, these are always nice to look at and later in the month (or night) M33 so we end the month halfway through the total list at 55 objects. Happy Hunting.