I’m just in from taking my new telescope out for its first light. Wow is it ever impressive. With the 4.5″ reflector I have, whenever I pushed the image up to 200x it almost always came out blurry and very dim. Quite the opposite with the 8″ – they’re extremly bright and sharp. I’ll be writing up a summary of things I looked at this evening and post a link sometime tomorrow.
My dad stopped by for a while to check out the view, so I gave him a quick tour of Saturn, the Pleiades, Orion Nebula, and the double Castor. After he left my neighbor was out on his deck and we ended up chatting for a while. I offered him the chance to look through the telescope and he seemed very excited but was busy at the moment. He said he’d definitely take me up on the offer another time he sees me out.
Well, time to get to bed. I’m glad I was able to get outside tonight, it’s supposed to be cloudy for the next few days 
The Johnson Blog 