I discovered a few days ago there was going to be a rare occurrence of a transit of Titan across Saturn last night. Locally it started around 8:30 so our plans were to set up the telescope  to watch from around that time. Unfortunately the skies weren’t at all clear when the time neared so we opted not to waste our time. Instead the Scientist and I watched the episode of Good News Week we had recorded Monday night before he had to be off to bed.

Our washing machine was finally returned yesterday and I finally had some clean clothes to hang out and did so after the Scientist had gone to sleep. I had a dilemma when I realised the skies had cleared considerably because I have never made use of the telescope on my own and our expert was in bed. I decided to have a go and take the telescope out. It’s a pretty big contraption but I managed to shuffle my way out with it with little ado, aside from scraping my foot on the bricks outside.

Although I’ve watched the Scientist set everything up before, I felt completely clueless once I got out there. I did, of course, know enough to take off the big cover to the reflector but then I was a bit stumped. But wait, the barrel was turned the wrong way and the scope and lens holder were rendered rather useless on the underside. First thing was to turn it around and so I accomplished my second act of bravery with expensive equipment for the night. (Of course this morning I realised that I didn’t need to turn it over but to turn the platform and flip it the opposite direction so the effort wasn’t needed. Bad brain!) The lenses were all in their holders along the side of the Dobsonian mount but how to get one onto the contraption? I thought more about this and remembered to remove the caps from the finder scope which was a bit of a start. Of course I really didn’t know where to find Saturn in the night sky. I had a general idea of where we’d seen it before and remembered it being bright enough to be distinguished from some other objects in the sky. I came inside to start up Stellarium on the computer and Lego Lover soon joined me outside in our search of the skies.