With daylight savings time I started to observe shortly before dinner, this time the quarter moon. Seeing was quite good, and I was pleased that the cheap 25mm Meade eyepieces I used in the binoviewer. It was a trick to find the right eye position but once there the contrast was quite good. There was so much amazing detail to be seen.
After evening chores, I went out again at 9pm. My computer needed to do an update so in the meantime I slewed over to BU 1, a lovely "L" set of stars with a close pair at the tip of the small L. There was an arc of three faint stars above it, which disappeared when I put the 8" mask on. I didn't need the mask however since I was getting perfect airy disks at full aperture.
Once the PC was working, I had a lot of trouble slewing to targets. As I think about it now, I likely need to reset the Argo's clock due to daylight savings time. It was frustrating, since seeing was so good (though transparency is still hurt with wildfire smoke.
I more or less gave up and decided to have a look at Uranus, which was just clearing the meridian tree. I needed to slew around a bit to find it, but it really looked great. At 333x it was a beautiful light blue orb, and I could see some faint small dark swirls in the disk, and one side of it had a buff color to it. I could also see two faint moons, which disappeared with the 8" mask.
Seeing is to be good again tonight, but there is still a lot of smoke haze in the air. Hope it will still be a good night.
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