First of all, I want to publicly thank John and Lisa Zeigler for the telescope making class. I am one of their pupils who recently completed a 12 dobsonian. I think I underestimated the amount of work it would take, however, I am very pleased with the results. I already shared a little bit about the start party a week ago. Today, I am sharing my experience in the last few days. I am currently taking an Astronomy class at BYU, and some of my assignments involved making observations. Last Monday night I took my scope out to the backyard, and found a spot away from the street lights and the trees. For practical purposes, from this spot I can only see about one quadrant of the sky: from South to West plus a clear shot at the Zenith. Luckily the trees on the north block the lights from SLC, and the house blocks the lights from Provo to the East. As the night progressed, I thought this is going to be not a bad spot for observing without having to drive somewhere else. Anyway, to see how bad the light pollution is from my backyard, I found M13. Not as splendorous as it was during the star party, nonetheless, easy to find and could resolve stars in it. In fact, later on that night (after my mirror had cooled) I went back to M13 and used more and more magnification. I kept resolving stars at the core of it until I ran out of eyepieces. I got sidetracked. my goals was to find some open clusters. I found them on Sagittarius, and caught a glimpse of some well known Nebulas in the area (mental note: need to get to a dark spot to really see them). I put the scope away knowing that the extra aperture (I have a 4.5 scope as well) shows sufficient items despite the light pollution. Although nothing beats a really dark site. Early this morning my adventures continued. I had to track the moons of Saturn, which currently is visible in the wee hours of the morning. Unfortunately, It is in the southeast, so my backyard adventures turned into driveway astronomy. The worst part of my driveway is that I am in a cul-de-sac at the end of the street so I have several streetlights shinning in front of me. I got the scope out, and while the mirror cooled down, I pointed to Venus. used it to align the finder. Then pointed to the Pleaides and confirmed collimation - nice bright and crisp points of light. Since I had it in front of me, I couldnt resist to take a look to the Orion Nebula, even though it is right over the lights. It was easy to find, and despite the light pollution, the trapezium was easy to spot as well. In fact, I could see a fifth star in it! Back to my target: Saturn was quite bright, with the rings at such angle it was just beautiful. I could easily see the Cassini division. Time to count moons. . . I think I found 7. Got a pencil out and made a sketch (part of the assignment). I am glad I got up, since I heard on the radio on my way to work that bad weather is on its way, who knows when I can get out again so early and not freezing my buns. I checked my sketch with a simulated view of Saturn. Hmm, one of them is not a moon, but a star, so my count is down to 6. One more was too close to the main body, so most likely I lost it in the glare, and yet another one was past my field of view. I hope I can catch them next time. David __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail