11-Dec-98, 21:30 - 22:00

Before tonight, I would say my 32mm Plossl is not useful, since the 20mm plus the Star Pointer work fine for finding objects. However, I've looked at the belt of the Orion, woo!!! It's one of the greatest view I ever had, excellent! The three stars fit nicely into the 3.3 degree field of view, and there're too many stars within! The 32mm Plossl is not bad at all, stars were rather sharp to the edge, stars were pin-point on-axis. I used the 32mm throughout the observing session, except when I was trying to compare the view by raising the power on the Orion Nebula right under the belt. Except the wide field view, I've tried to test the Ranger at the Sirius by using 152X, I could see quite a lot of colors. Not bad, I would say, I still love my Ranger since there's nothing to view with Sirius at high power; anything else were perfectly alright. The in-focus and out-focus image were round, and diffraction rings were detected at that power. The sky here (PW) was not very dark, I could not detect M42 near the Sirius.