Binoculars

Well, I have probably used my binoculars seven times now. That lowers my cost per use down to around $47.

I find though that the costs in using the binoculars is not complete. That my computer programmer muscles are unable to hold the binoculars still for any significant amount of time.

There are many good things to using the binculars, though. Any reasonably clear night I can take them outside and view Jupiter and its moons. Tonight it was no problem only ten minutes ago to see 4 moons (Io is tough to know about for sure with 10X50s) around Jupiter.

I enjoy sometimes what I consider to be 'lay' observations of the sky. It is interesting to see how many stars there are out there - by looking towards one bright star and seeing that there are tens of stars in that area - just not visible to the naked eye.

It is even more impressive to look at a section of sky that appears to hold nothing at all - and to move back and forth and see hundreds of stars in apparently dark sky.

I understand the HST (Hubble Space Telescope) did something similar in its deep field image - picked a section of sky in which there were no objects - and revealed that indeed there are objects there - just far away and very dim.

I find though that the solar filters I have purchased are not what I could want of them. I would prefer (now with more knowledge) hydrogen alpha filters - that would reveal more of the sun's activities.

Even if I had purchased the better equipment - it seems that we are in the low end of the solar cycle for the kinds of activity that could be observed.

So, perhaps the filters will survive the years - as well as my binoculars - and I will get to see activity on the sun.

Knowing how things get destroyed in my house - I think it more likely that the money will be lost on those items - at some point in time. I will have to observe as often as I can - so that I will have a fair amount of monies worth in the use of my binoculars and the solar filters.

It seems though, that to get real good use out of the binoculars - I need to get a parrallelogram stype mount for my tripod. Then perhaps the stars will not dance so much when I try to observe them.

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