SVP Intelliscope "Second Light!!"

After my first light with the Intelliscope last night, I was so excited I told myself I had to go out again tonight.
Decided to drive about 45mins out to slightly darker skies and thank God the skies were clear!! Only sad thing was the very very bright sky glow about 20deg in the East ...

So I set it up as usual, aligned everything and started my wonderful journey ...

Having not planned what to view that night, I used the Sky Tours provided by the COL. M51, M42, M41, M47 and alot more star clusters I can't remember all came within the FOV of my 25mm EP. (I neglected to bring my journal cos all I wanted was to check out how the COL worked and to do some Star testing/collimation ... )

Here's the wonderful thing, of the MANY star clusters I saw tonight, I don't think I would have found half of them if I had used my 8x50 RACI finder and RDF combo - when I looked into my finder AFTER looking through the EP (the weird reversal after getting a Push To device ... ) I couldn't see anything! Sometimes all I could see were just maybe 2-3 stars or maybe 5 at best I would not have thought that was a star cluster ... (That's how bad the light pollution is here in Singapore)

The only Nebula I found tonight was the Orion Nebula though (I've been looking at it every session since Nov... ) It looked beautiful tonight as it was the first time I was using my new (2 days old) UltraBlock AND Celestron OIII filter. It really jumped out at me with the OIII and I swear it was like someone turned up the dimmer to the Nebula although I know it's just the darkening of the background ... =)

No luck with the Crab Nebula, Californian Nebula and Eskimo Nebula though ... Never seen these before and couldn't find them with my 30mm(67x) EP even with my OIII on .... I might be using too low a magnification and the FOV might be too big for Nebulas ... I'm gonna try finding Nebulae exclusively tomorrow night ...

And now to the MOST BEAUTIFUL THING TONIGHT!! My wife who used to find coming out with the telescope too troublesome and tedious (although she loves naked eye and binocular astronomy) told me after the session that she couldn't wait to come back for more tomorrow!!!
It's the ease of pointing the scope and the fact that she could get involved in pushing the scope and "finding" the objects instead of waiting for me to find objects for her that gets her excited about the scope.
I foresee it's gonna be great for both of us! Another great thing is she's already asking me if they sell better accessory trays to place the COL and RA/DEC controller on and what EPs are good with certain things, which filter makes Saturn look better etc ... I'm gonna be able to buy so many more things now ... hee hee ...

On that note though, although objects were in view most of the time, they were not perfectly centred and were mostly off to one side in my FOV. It might be cos my mount was not properly polar aligned because the objects were off to the side that stars drifted to, =) So, it might still be my fault after all ...

This is one upgrade I really love and although I've been thinking of getting a beefier mount, I think I'm gonna keep this one just cos of the COL .... for now. Somehow I prefer the idea of a Push-To compared to a GOTO, I love the involvement.

Well, that's my SVP Intelliscope report for tonight and once again, I'm enjoying it more than ever. It's true - I saw more things in one night than Galileo in a lifetime ... =) In my case though, I see more things in one night than I ever would if I didn't have it to assist me.