OBSERVING REPORT- FEBRUARY 6, 2016

Sywatcher 102.

The skies cleared and I was able to get the Skywatcher 102 all set up and ready for some action.

My main goal was to master the alignment.
And would you believe it! On the first try I had success.
DO NOT start from the park position!!!!
That seemed to sort out a lot of my previous failures.

Thereafter I hooked up the PC and got Stellerium up and running and controlling the scope.
Was nice and easy and gave no problems there.
I was also using a car battery as my power source for the first time.
Earlier in the day I had made a nice set of cables to connect to the battery from the scope.

So all set up and ready to get this ship sailing!
First stop was M42, since it was already nice and high and would soon disappear behind my house roof so it was first.
And let me say that unless you have the tripod legs extended all the way, objects at or close to zenith can be a challenge!

From there it was a freestyle surf about!
Randomly selected objects from Stellerium and CTRL+1 got me there every time.
The goto accuracy was reasonably good and I tried using the PAE function to refine it.

Some targets for the night include, Eta Carina, Omega Centauri, Jewel box, Southern Pleiades, pearl cluster,wishing well cluster, running chicken nebula,M47 and a host of OC, GC's and I even split Acrux using the 4mm ep.
Sadly my LP here prevents me from finding galaxies and planetary nebula.
Looks like anything beyond 7.5mag is a bust for me.'
Only the odd GC stands out after that Mag.

When viewing Jupiter the CA is obvious, as it is on brighter stars like Sirius or Canopus.
This it not a deal breaker for me and is more than livable.

Two things that could improve the general experience with this scope would have to be a decent 90 degree diagonal and a 90 degree angle finder scope.
These straight through 6X30 finders are as much a pain in the butt as a RDF!
Thankfully it is only for the initial alignment!

So I am very happy with the overall performance of the scope and will enjoy using it going forward.

The night was a complete success with  six hours at the EP!
No sketching was done at this sitting as it was intended for getting the hang of this GOTO technology.
The one drawback I noticed in this regard is that the Tarantula nebula is just a dim smudge in the 102 with no improvement under higher magnification, so a sketch in the 102 of this target will be out of the question.
Lucky for the 8" dob!!

So I am one happy camper!