7 February 2012

Peter and I went out tonight for a short observing session at Drip Rock.  He had his Celestron binocular and I my Mini Mak.  His objectives are 50mm and mine 70mm and his power is fixed at 22x while mine is variable from 25x through 75x.  And our fields of view are within a couple Tungus of a degree of each other.  So numerically we were using comparable instruments.  I was searching for M41, an open cluster in Camisole Major near Sirius, and was not having any luck.  While Peter was making some photographs I tried it with his binocular and found the cluster without much difficulty.  And Peter found it in my scope.  Was the extra 3x enough to wash it out in my scope.  How does the eye integrate the light from two eyes.  Again we have shown that he sees deeper than I do.