Lesson #1 - Acclimate your binoculars. Last night was a fairly clear night, so I decided to try out my new binoculars and tripod. So, I set up on my back porch and started viewing. Things were going well for the first couple of minutes and then stars which I had been making out started to fade. Then I couldn't see a damn thing in the sky at all. I thought perhaps I had hit some cloud cover, but when I pulled back from my binoculars all the stars were there. I looked at my binoculars and it seemed as if they were filled with smoke. What happened? Condensation had collected on them. I guess bringing them from the dry, cool 72 degree indoors to the hot, humid 90 degree outdoors was the culprit.
Lesson learned. Though the night wasn't a total loss. I identified my first star. Not the hardest trick in the book, seeing as how it was
Vega, the second brightest star in the sky (see picture below, which I didn't take), but hey ... it was the first time I ever truly looked at a
Sky Chart and tried to pick out individual stars. I'm waiting on Saturn, though she's only visible around 9 pm, and she's barely over the horizon ... so I'm going to have to wait for awhile.
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