Last night was a bit of a wake up call. After the joy of my first session I thought I would get out for a short stint last night. Venus was visible as I rode home so I set up the scope on getting home then sorted myself out.
Before dinner I went out and lined up on Venus. The 25mm EP gave me a discernible disc so I swapped to the 10mm and managed to centre in the EP. The disc was more prominent but, as I had failed to fit a filter, the magnitude made focus difficult. I thought I would try then with the Barlow so fitted it. After the relative ease in which I found M31 the night before, I thought reacquiring Venus would be easy- more fool me.
One of my problems is that the site I have to observe that sector of sky has a street lamp about 15 yards away and, at 1800 last night, directly below Venus (about 2 palm widths below- not got the hang of degrees of declination yet). Combined with clumsy gross adjustments, I failed miserably.
Hey ho. All part of the learning experience.
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