Observing Log for Mike Durkin 3/23/2002 10:00PM-12:00AM Parent's house, College Point, NY -- about 45 degrees 4.5" Newtonian Got my laser collimator today, and tried to collimate the scope using it. I also have the focuser cap for 1.25" eyepieces instead of the .965" eyepieces. After collimating used the 17mm(54x) and 7.4mm(123x) 1.25" eyepieces on Jupiter. Was able to see 2 belts on Jupiter easily, however the image was wavering quite a bit. Jupiter was also fairly brigh, even with the 7.4mm. With good seeing and some decent planetary filters, I think I may be able to start finding more details on the disk. Tried to test collimation with Procyon. Using the 1.25" eyepieces the diffraction rings were very easy to see, the other .965 eyepieces may be garbage. Anyway the collimation seemed to be OK, however it was hard to tell due to all the flickering. Since the moon was out, I decided to look at it as well. Using the 17mm on the moon, the image was clear, but it was shimmering so much it was easy to see that the seeing was horrible. Noticed an interesting feature, which I found out was Sinus Iridium, sort of like a bay. Also there was a faint star near the limb of the moon which if I waited longer I would have seen the moon occult. The star is listed as SAO 80634, mag 7.68, so I know my scope can see stars at least that dim, even under really bad light pollution conditions. I also tried to find M51 (Whirlpool Galaxy) by starhopping however was not able to. I'd estimate the limiting magnitude was between 3 and 4, which made it kind of hard to find things. 3/14/2002 9:00-10:30 PM Jones Beach -- about 50 degrees 4.5 inch Newtonian. Sky started out partially cloudy. I went to Jones Beach mainly to test out my collimation. I'm trying to see if I can see Airy rings around stars. I started with what I'm pretty sure was Arcturus in the East, but I wasn;t able tp see any rings, although based on the shape of the de-focused star, I'd say my collimation is off by quite a bit. After Arcturus was clouded over, I shifted to Sirius. I think I was finally able to see some diffration lines around the shadow of my secondary mirror and the spider vanes with the 25mm eyepiece. I'm also pretty sure I saw the "sickle" in Leo tonight, however I didn't confirm. The sky was mostly coulded over by the time I left 3/10/2002 ~7:00-7:30 PM Jones Beach Went to Jones beach to meet with Linda Prince to Try to find Comet Ikeya-Zhang. Temp about mid 30s. Extremely windy. Partially cloudy. Did not set up the scope because of wind conidtions. Linda brought a set of Binoculars that she let me use to try to find the comet, however it was too hazy in the west. Did manage to see Mars in the Binoculars, and identify the constellation Aries.