Gregoria Luna's Astronomy Blog

 I have found three winter open clusters in Auriga and Gemini to show sketches of.

 My 10" Dobsonian (SkyWatcher FlexTube 250P) finally gets its first reasonably dark test.

Though the weather forecast was not very hopeful, I stayed up late so I could peek through sucker-holes in the clouds, intent on feeding my new ten inch telescope some astronomical photons. I was surprised to find that it wasn't too difficult to just lift the whole telescope up and take it outside all at once. What the telescope gains in weight it makes up for with having easy to use handles. I wouldn't carry it up or down stairs or anything, but it will go sideways just fine. Maybe I gained a bit of muscle mass by carrying the DT6 in and out all at once the past month.   The seeing was really bad, the cloud cover was really bad, and the conditions did not provide an opportunity to really test the performance of this telescope, but the one thing I did notice was that it was bright as hell. I've seen the nearly full Moon at the same magnification, and at the same surface brightness, but combining the two concepts together puts a bright disk of energy shining into my eye. Mar