Rigel, which I have always found easy in a good refractor, was cleanly split but with the companion only visible sometimes at 224x. The brighter component danced about in the cooling air. Temps probably began at around 48F and dropped 5 degrees while I was observing.
From Rigel, I went up to the Trapezium. The F component blinked in and out, but E was buried in the seeing for me. I could not spot it, either at 112x or 224x. One could easily see the arms of M42 reaching out from the area.
Next up was Sigma Orionis, a multiple star system which is really a small cluster in the process of breaking up. Nicely framed at 112x.
From there, I moved north and found M78 at 18.6x. It's just a smudge of blue in my suburban sky. I tried to get a closer look with the 5mm but could not see it.
Next over to Sirius, a great sight in the SVED80. At 18.6x, I saw no false color at all. It was just a beautiful white star in a lovely field. From Sirius, I moved south to M41, which looked small and somewhat unimpressive in the wide field of the 30mm. So I moved down to the next bright star in Canis Major and used it to find NGC 2362. I always look for the Queen and Her Court, an open cluster of stars presided over by one particularly bright star complemented by several dimmer cluster members that shimmer and dance around her. It reminds me of my bride and our beautiful children (ok, we don't have quite that many). Of this cluster, the 30mm hardly revealed anything, and the 5mm blew up the picture too much. Better get out the 10mm Vixen Lanthanum, I figured, which yielded 56x and framed the cluster perfectly.
