My first time at this site. First light for the right angle Lumicon 80mm "Super Finder" and first light for the ST10XME.
The site is the boat launch parking area and it is quite spacious with a gentle slope. Light domes of Gilroy (SSW) and NW spanned each ~40 degrees and rose 20 degrees in altitude. They were quite bright and smoke/dust in the air undoubtedly contributed to the effect.
I hate the right angle finder (RAF)! I'm quite used to using a straight through finder and using one eye to watch the sky and one eye through the finder and very quickly bringing the scope on target. Simply impossible with the RAF. I ended up looking down the barrel and then into the eye piece iteratively to locate the target which worked so so. The right angle was obtained due to extreme controtions required to use a straight through in ~50% of pointings. In this respect the RAF performed as desired in allowing easy acess in the most awkward positions. Perhaps slapping my Telrad on top of the RAF will be a viable alternative. Optically I don't have much reference except cheap Meade and Orion finders which have chromatic and geometric distortions that are strong. The Lumicon still had large chromatic but considerably less geometric distortion and is quite usable over 75% of the field of view. I used both an 8 and 20mm Televue plossl in the RAF and planned to use my 10mm illuminated reticle Orion orthoscopic but the ST10 FOV was so large that the 20mm+RAF FOV is only ~5X larger so I just used that. Perhaps as my technique improves by hatred will subside but for now I'm still miffed...
I regret not spending enough "shop time" with the ST10 to full familiarize myself with its operation as well as the new v3.0 MaxIm. I used my usual setup with the STV and the Lumicon 80mm finder as a guide scope (the straight thru version) in case I couldn't figure out how to get the ST10 to guide. I imaged NGC7331 and NGC7640 and then wanted to fiddle with the ST10 guide chip. My damned batteries ran low before I managed to do anything!
As usual I had collimation problems and will one day fork out some cash for a laser collimation tool.
The Perseid Meteors were few but there were about five really big ones that I saw. They were about 20-40 degrees in size and at least mag 0 bright. I think I saw more non-Perseid meteors ...
