2026-04-04

Visiting my parents in Idaho; I did not have enough space in the car to bring my scope along. Thankfully my father had a pair of 12x50 binoculars, and a 12-36x 50mm Vortex Crossfire spotting scope on a ball-mount tripod. With the conditions tonight looking very promising, we decided to drive a bit out of town to try them out on the night sky.

9:20PM

Lining the spotting scope with the Pleiades was fairly easy, since it’s a large target and easy to find. M 45 looked great in the scope at the lowest magnification, just able to keep all seven primary stars in the FoV.

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Turned the spotting scope to M 42 next. It looked great and had a nice observation of θ 1 and θ 2 Orionis.

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I next tried to find the Double Cluster in Perseus then giving up on that I tried to find the Sombrero Galaxy. Both of these targets were much harder and I began to struggle with the Alt-Az configuration of the mount and the lack of a way to align the scope with a prominent anchor star. My scopes at home have a flat surface allowing me the ability to aim down the side of the scope to align it with a target. The Vortex spotting scope was not flat and had no point that I could use to align.

After a half an hour of struggle, I finally located M 104, but it was small in the spotting scope and I could tell that the glass in this scope is not designed for the fainter elements of night sky targets.

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Packing up for the night, I turned the binocs to M 44. This was probably the best view of the night. I have never really attempted viewing the night sky with a pair of good binoculars and this view of M 44 was stunning.