I was lucky this evening to have some really sharp viewing conditions, so I set up even though it was freezing out! (It stayed around zero degrees over my whole observing period. Brrr!)
First up, the Moon was in a great position for me to get some short video to process and stack later. I'll share the result on here when I'm finished :)
After the moon slid out of my view, I looked around the Hyades in Taurus using my 25mm eyepiece for the largest FOV I could manage. The Hyades are so beautiful, I love looking at them! After that, I had a go at splitting Alnitak which is one of my January quests, but had no luck. (you can read my other January targets here ) I did manage to split Mintaka though with a 4mm eyepiece which gives me 250x magnification. It was a lovely sight, the larger primary star and smaller, fainter blue companion stood out really nicely.
I was coming to the end of the time I had allowed, so I thought I'd have a tinker with the alignment and the GoTo on the mount. I haven't really ever used these elements as I wanted to learn my way around the night sky. After I'd aligned it, i set it to look for Uranus, and was delighted to see it shining green in the eyepiece! It wasn't as visually impressive as Saturn or Jupiter, and it remained a small disc even at 250x magnification, but I was really pleased to finally see it!
All in all, I was pretty pleased with my unplanned short session!
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