Star Party in Payette

I hate doing star parties in summer. If it's really not dark until about 10:00. People with much better eyesight could see Venus well enough to aim at it 20-30 minutes before me. Venus is at the gibbous phase right now. Not very interesting. 

Jupiter was more interesting.  Even my Televue-85 was showing multiple cloud bands at 108x. As much as I am frustrated by the inability to control the mount for goto and even somple centering, it tracked very reliably.  Jupiter stayed center of eyepiece even at 108x as long as 30 minutes.  By comparison, Dobsonian owners and one gal with an alt-az mounted Newtonian were busy moving and adjusting every couple minutes.

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The Televue-85 is a very small aperture refractor of exceptional quality. It does not have the resolution of the 8" telescopes but it is dramatically inferior, either. When it was showing two bands, an 8" Schmidt-Cassegrain was also showing two bands. The light disadvantage, which is the square of aperture, is not as severe as you might expect because your eye does a pretty good job of compensating for brightness difference. 

The Televue-85 is not the best choice for planetary observing although it id gorgeous on the Moon. It is better suited to deep sky astronomy because its short focal length allows a very wide field of view, well suited to the Pleiades or globular clusters such as M13. My 50mn eyepiece provides a 3 5 degree field.

The great advantage is portability.  It weighs about ten pounds and on the mount it weighs about 20 pounds.  At one point I realized that I might be able get the Sun so I could pick it up and carry it to a better location. 

We had a decent crowd of people out there.