Gregoria Luna's Astronomy Blog

 A discussion of finderscopes on astronomical telescopes.

For Christmas, I bought my cousin Quinn (19) an Orion SkyScanner 100, one of the telescopes I recommend most for beginners on a budget, especially but not limited to kids. As noted in my review and pretty much any time I talk about it, the position of the red dot finder and the eyepiece is... frustrating, to say the least. The eyepiece ends up too high and the straight-thru finder too low. While teaching Quinn, how to use the telescope, we found that due to some motor disabilities she deals with, the telescope was ergonomically almost unusable. So I had to work to fix the eyepiece and finderscope problem.

 I got a new telescope. Oh golly!

For the astronomy classes at GTCC, home of the Cline Observatory I volunteer for, students must fill out an observing report. But not everyone can do night time observing, so we provide solar observing opportunities several times a semester. We use two telescopes typically, an old Meade 8" SCT (it's gotta be 25 years old or so) with a sub-aperture solar filter for white light viewing, and a Coronado PST for hydrogen-alpha viewing.

I haven't posted in a while. I think I've said this before, but after a while, the weight of everything that's happened and the fact I could never hope to keep up with it all builds up, I procrastinate more, and well, I never get around to talking about what's happened the past month or so. I must confess, I have been worse about keeping observing log records as well for the past month or so, which has contributed to this problem. And, perhaps this blog doesn't get enough readers for me to bother apologizing, but a blog isn't necessarily only for readers from the present. The Great Conjunction was over quicker than it began! I observed it the week leading up to the 21st, with both my 6" Dobsonian and the new 10" Dob. It was a thrilling sight to see them come closer and closer, and I measured their approximate separations based upon with which eyepiece they could just barely be seen together in the field of view.

 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.