Post by Chicago Astronomer - Astro Joe on Sept 19, 2004 22:25:05 GMT -6
Lakefront Meet of the Chicago Astronomers
I ventured out to the lakefront, and settled on my usual spot by Copernicus. I was there about 15 minutes when Doug, our newest Chicago Astronomer member, made his introductions and brought out his Meade ETX90. Quite a nice scope. Compact and has the neat go-to feature that makes locating difficult targets much easier. Doug just got the scope Friday and is now breaking it in and learning to master it's features.
Pictured are: Chicago Astronomer Joe, Steve and Chicago Astronomer Doug
By chance, fellow astronomer Steve stopped by to see what we were up to and greatly assisted Doug in the operation of the Meade.
It's quite entertaining listening to it slew to the desired coordinates and see what you punched in - appear in the eyepiece. The set up needed just a bit of tweaking, but was good enough to pick up M13, Epsilon Lyrae and, (we think), the Andromeda galaxy. We think because the lights were so blatant in our faces that at times, we would be pointing our scopes at a target, and the street lamps would shine directly into the tubes. Even with M13, we needed to take turns shielding the light with a magazine. How pitiful. M13 appeared like a dim ghostly image, best seen with averted vision, but great to find and observe.
Of course, my favorite still remains the lunar landscape and was a very nice view this evening. A few people people stopped by to take a peek and enjoyed the views thru my scope. A women who stopped by to take a first ever look thru a telescope was amazed at the features of the Moon, and searched for appropriate colors to describe it.
At around 10:00 pm, we called it a night and packed up. It certainly was a pleasant evening sharing the Chicago skies with a fellow Chicago Astronomer.
Thanks to Doug who trekked out to the Planetarium and allowed me to observe thru his brand new scope. I see many more joint observational sessions in the future.
