SALSA (San Antonio League of Sidewalk Astronomers) have a Tuesday Night in the Park event every week when the weather cooperates. We’ll take August off as most nights will just be too hot for comfort. But tonight was a nice night, if a bit windy.
We had a very good crowd tonight. I was a little late getting to the park, arriving right at sunset and I was travelling light. All I brought were my Orion Resolux 10.5 x 70mm binoculars. Here are a couple of shots of the moon. One through the binoculars, one unzoomed. The moon is a bit over exposed.
We had a family with a young lady using her scope for only the second time. Her telescope doesn’t have a real finder on it, so she was having a hard time finding objects. Nina helped her find the moon, though, and soon she even found Mars. Saturn was elusive, however. We’ll be working with them to get a proper finder for her telescope and that will ease her frustration a bit.
A Japanese couple were there with their kids too. I talked to the dad about binoculars. He’s getting a 10x50mm set of Nikon binoculars. They make very good binoculars and I said so. His kids have only been in the US for a week and he was having them tell us “thank you” and “good afternoon” in English and apologized if we were upset they didn’t speak more English. We weren’t of course, but appreciated the effort.
John Kelly had his recently re-collimated SCT. The views through it were very good, even at high magnification. Nice job John.
There were several others out, but I didn’t interact with them much – we were all busy with our own stuff.
The wind that I mentioned earlier did make things a little difficult. My binocular mount is free swinging, so the wind easily moved it around. The more substantial telescopes were still affected, the image in the eyepiece often shaking markedly. But when thing were calm, the viewing was good, despite the bright lit sky.
Through Chuck’s scopes I got to see the Ring Nebula in Lyra (couldn’t quite resolve it with my binoculars). I also got to see the Butterfly cluster in Scorpius and a nice pair of doubles in Lyra.
After looking at the Butterfly cluster I took a look at the tail of Scorpius to see M7 and M6 (the Butterfly cluster) in my Binoculars. They’re actually very nice at 10.5 power through a pair of 70mm lenses.
If it weren’t for the sport’s field bright lights, the viewing would have been very good for the middle of San Antonio. Well, near edge of San Antonio and well within the Urban sprawl.
Since you have already been linookg around and probably know this my suggestion is something like a 7 35 as a minimum. Anything with a magnification higher than 10 will shake too much and will require a tripod mounting which you may still want to do later on. Go for as large a lens as you can afford. I personally use a Nikon Sporting II which is 10 50. I wanted the larger diameter and a higher magnification and unfortunately it doesn’t have a tripod mount, but I bought this 15 years ago when I didn’t know any better so have kept with it. Maybe someday I will design a tripod mount for it.Try the Green Witch at Cambridge they have a selection, and they can help you out. Even the bird-watching ones are fine. Some of them come with tripod mountings.