Neighbor

Tonight my neighbor Rafael joined me and my 80mm refractor with his Celestron AstroMaster 90AZ telescope. I first showed him M57, Epsilon Lyrae and Albireo with my refractor before we tried to use his 90mm refractor.

I found it impossible to adjust the finder correctly, and the mount was difficult to handle. Possibly it can be improved by rebalancing the telescope somewhat, but we didn't try. Both eyepieces were ok (40mm and 20mm, Plossls I guess), but the telescope's collimation seems way off, as all stars looked like comets even with my 19mm Panoptic. Like with my 80ED, collimation seems to be done through adjustment of the focuser, so we'll have to try to fix it.

We also observed M31 and the double cluster using the 70mm binoculars.

After Rafael went home, I observed Globular Cluster M56 in Lyra. I could only find it by star hopping, although I found out later that I was pretty close with my initial Rigel Quick Finder method . It's just that M56 is much dimmer in the 80mm than I had expected. It looked like a faint fuzzy ball.

I really ought to start making some drawings.