Chuck: On Friday night I took Alan MacRoberts article in S&T with me to SPOC. Using the chart for the elongations of Mimas I was able to see the see this tiny moon next to the glow of the nearly edge on rings. I was using 17.5 inches of aperture and I needed to wait for the mirror to cool down and then had to catch a moment of excellent seeing in the variable seeing of the night. Alan and others have seen this with 12 inches of aperture. Now I'll be looking for Iapetus and Hyperion which are supposed to be easier. On Friday and Saturday I picked up two comets. The transparency wasn't very good on either night but these still came through as easily as a Messier eliptical galaxy. DT --- On Sun, 5/16/10, Chuck Hards <chuck.hards@gmail.com> wrote:
From: Chuck Hards <chuck.hards@gmail.com> Subject: Re: [Utah-astronomy] Thank you on Ealing upgrades and repairs To: "Utah Astronomy" <utah-astronomy@mailman.xmission.com> Date: Sunday, May 16, 2010, 12:06 PM Last night was a good example of the seeing determining maximum usable aperture. I noticed that the 100mm refractor was showing a more crisp view of Saturn than the Bogdan (and other scopes with twice the aperture), even though it was appreciably dimmer in the smaller scope.
On 5/16/10, Canopus56 <canopus56@yahoo.com> wrote:
One general public visitor commented that he did not understand why the 16 inch Ealing had such a better image than the larger Grim scope. But I suspect that, as a glasses wearer, he was able to get the Ealing into proper focus with the fine focusing knob but could not do so with the Grim.
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