venus mercury moon and saturn

I spent a few minutes on the pair of them in the 4" Tak (wow, is that moon bright!), but since the seeing was decent, I spent the next hour and a half on Saturn alone. It was quite a test of eyepieces with the field awash in glare from the moon.

This was my first good spin with my new (well, new to me) Denkmeier binoviewers. I can see these becoming addictive. I used them mostly with a pair of 15mm RKEs, a pair of 21.5mm RKEs, and a pair of 12.5mm UO orthos (one volcano top and one OPS).

The UO orthos worked particularly well. I haven't much cared for the OPS coatings to date because even though they do improve contrast on the planet's disk slightly, they also impart a greenish tinge to the image which I'm not fond of. But with one OPS and one standard ortho in the bino you don't notice a green tinge. In fact, they worked so well that I was able to see shading in the North polar region and a few fleeting glimpses of the North tropical belt (in addition to the much darker North equatorial belt).

The seeing settled down for about 15min right after 11pm, with a handfull of second-to-second-and-a-half periods of crisp images even at 400x. During one of these I got a nice, long look at the Encke gap (the rest of the night it only appeared in fleeting glimpses), and my very first sighting of Hyperion! (Mimas was too close to the planet's disk to tease out, but I bagged Mimas once last year.)

All in all an unbelievable night.

Equipment: 16" LX200GPS OTA on AP1200GTO; Denkmeier binoviewer; 15mm & 21.5mm RKEs, 12.5mm UO orthos.
Conditions: Pickering 6 - 7, with about 15min of Pickering 8; NELM around 5.0 (with full moon)

-- Jeff.

wow it is 22.08 and the moon and saturn look like there touching you can just about see saturn with the naked eye now :shock: its fantastic to watch

By the early hours of the morning, the Moon was almost 1.8 (guesstimate) diameters away. Neat to see the traversing of the disc like that over a night!

Looks like another very cold night in store great. i'm heading off to have a look at venus & mercury, hoping it will be as good as last night.what can i say i'm dedicated. anyone in the balbriggan area can join me if they like.

Well Myself too other lads went back to the same spot as last night what can I say it was magnificent Venus & mercury by far the highlight of 07 so far. it was great it was clear for something like this as it does not happen very often.