Quick post. C.V. randomly offered to loan me a 70mm refractor and brought it straight to my door today, fancy that! Really sweet of him. The sky was clear enough for me to go out on to the deck for a few minutes and point it up, just now. I managed to sight Saturn very quickly with the 10mm lens, seeing for the first time [odd] the speed of the earth’s rotation through a completely manual scope. I couldn’t manage to control the position of the scope well enough to find it with the planetary astro-cam so I tried to capture some pics with the phone camera. By the time I retrieved it I’d lost the planet and spent more time than I felt I ought to have needed to find it again. Like, 5 minutes. My mother happily came outside in her pajamas to take a peek. Below is a slightly adjusted [brightness, contrast] and cropped image from the iphone, using the darker of the two HDR images, which captured a double image, or, well, a ghosted specular oddity. Which reminds me, Jeff Nye asked me how I feel about monumental image scale today, planning for the MacKenzie show this coming winter…
Anyway, next will be to try the planetary imager during the daytime, and take up C.V.s suggestion to see if I can’t align the finder scope, maybe that will help next time.
iphone hdr image, handheld.