Scattered Thoughts . . .

T he moon was shining brightly through our living room window as we headed to the bedroom so I figured I would take a quick view through that new little Orion 102mm Mak-Cassegrain telescope I evaluated recently.   Sheila was in the bathroom getting ready for bed so I had a few minutes to kill.  I went to retrieve a lightweight mount and the telescope and set it up at the window to take a quick look...  I easily found the bright moon in the sky and saw nothing but out-of-focus mush.  I again repeated what I had been saying all along about this little Mak-Cass telescope...  "what a piece of junk." This prompted me to go retrieve my Skywatcher 72mm refractor which is equally as small but with a much short focal length.  I brought that out to the living room and I was immediately treated to a stunningly sharp view of the moon.   Viewing through a window with optics is a no-no because glass will cause all sorts of problems.  Heat escaping the house through an open window is often

A fter a mostly sleepless night the night before last with some health issues that kept me in the bathroom and seriously cut into my sleep, I managed to get some sleep yesterday afternoon for about three or four hours in preparation of a clear night last night.  Clear nights around here are few and far between any time of year but especially in the November through March timeframe so I don't like to waste these rare nights, if possible.  This meant a relatively rare opportunity for viewing some objects in our solar system.   As the sky darkened to a deep dark blue, I set up a new telescope of mine that I have been evaluating as an option for beginners.  I had three eyepieces on hand;  a low power wide eyepiece, a medium power eyepiece, and a high power eyepiece.  I also had my Sony a6000 camera ready to go with a nosepiece on it so I could slide the camera into the diagonal in place of an eyepiece when I felt the view was worthy of recording.  Facing the back end of our backyard in