Observing Jupiter, Saturn, a bit of Deep-Sky and a broken Argo Navis on September 5 and 7, 2021

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The beginning of September finally brought some very nice weather.  After I tested the Williams Optics Zenithstar 110 TMB APO, it was time to do some observations with my 18'' Obsession.  

On September 5, I set up the telescope.  There was a high humidity, and the transparency was not so good, but the seeing was looking good.  

When starting everything up, I got a strange error message on my Argo Navis.  The error message was something like 'SW Encoder Error'.  After restarting the Argo Navis, the same error appeared.  I tried restarting again, but the Argo Navis did not show anything anymore on the screen.  I could see that all LEDs were on, but nothing was visible.  After some investigations, it appears that there is a problem with the RAM of the Argo Navis.  It will not be easy to repair the Argo Navis and as my Argo Navis is already 15 years old, I will probably buy a new one or replace the Argo Navis with a Nexus DSC Pro.  Of course, this meant that I could not use my ServoCAT for guiding, so I had to guide the telescope manually.

The temperature was quite nice, with a temperature of 15.3° at the start of the observing session at 23:00 and a temperature of 13.4° at 0:15.  There was no wind.  The humidity rose from 87% to 92%. 

I mainly concentrated my observing session on Jupiter and Saturn.  As the seeing was quite good, I really could see a lot of detail on Jupiter.  I could even use my 5mm eyepiece, which results in a magnification of 473x.  

Also Saturn was very spectacular.  As far as I remember, it was the first time ever that I could see some details on the disk.  Also the ring was very nice, with differences in brightness and with an easy to see Cassini-division.

I also observed M 13, but the view was not as good as normally.  The bad transparency made the stars much fainter than normally.  The stars were still very sharp though with the 5mm eyepiece.

I also some a nice meteor this evening. 

Collimating the 18'' Obsession

On September 7, the sky was clear again.  I did some observing from 22:30 to midnight.  The temperature declined from 16.9° to 15.8°, while the humidity rose from 86% to 90%.  There was no wind.  

I observed M 27 in detail this time.  The details can be read in DeepskyLog.  I also observed M 13, and M 57.  The central star of M 57 could not be seen this time.  I finished the evening by observing Saturn and Jupiter, who were again very nice to see!  I saw again one nice meteor. 

Location: 3370 Roosbeek, België

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