Re: Observing tonight?

I did my first official Saturn observation for ALPO yesterday morning.  Seeing wasn't the greatest.  I got to try out my new Tom Osypowski equatorial platform, and let me tell you Dob owners – if you do any observing at high powers (or, like me, tried to avoid doing so because tracking was so difficult) you have got to get one of these things!  I did the roughest of alignments – just generally pointed it north – and Saturn stayed in the eyepiece at 266X for a couple of minutes.  I could even do things like swap filters on my eyepiece and not lose my target.  With a little tweaking of settings, I was up to 5 minutes before Saturn wasn't quite centered and I wanted to nudge it – no doubt because the platform was made for 43 degrees lat instead of my 45 – and I didn't do anything to correct for it.  Maybe next time I'll do a more accurate polar alignment.  This thing will be great for sharing the views with others, too.  I'll have to pitch my canned "the earth rotates, and at these high powers, you can almost feel the earth moving under you…" speech.  Sketching was much easier, too.