As long as polar alignment is good they are pretty easy to use. I’ve gone more to star hopping over the years, and now I want to install DSCs, and do PushTo. I have an app on my phone that lets me do that.
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My observing sessions (with my 16ʺ Dobs) usually include bright objects all the way through to extremely faint objects, because I like to organise my observations into projects, some small (one night’s observing), some larger (a few nights), some take a year to see all the objects, one took a number of summers.
For example, observing every object visible to my telescope in Crux, or all the galaxies visible to my telescope in Pavo (wow, there are a lot, dozens!!) Or a project observing dark nebulae (I love observing dark nebulae; there is something very strange about seeing what isn’t there until you discover how many variations of darkness the eye can discern and the shapes they reveal). Or working my way through one of our southern hemisphere catalogues, such as the 24 Pişmiş open clusters. (Lovely project; a few of them are exquisitely bright and delicate, others appear as tiny glints of stars mingled with a faint hazy glow of unresolved starlight, and yet others appear as little more than a faint and tantalizing mistiness.) In 2019, I spent the entire year observing every globular cluster I could see from my location at -26.8 (only a couple are too far north, and as globulars are my favourite objects, that was a sublime project). I spent a number of summers on a Large Magellanic Cloud project, identifying and observing every object in the Cloud visible to my telescope. That was fun!! And some nights, I abandon all projects and just spend the night visiting old friends; those objects one returns to over and over again!
I am a charts and star-hopping observer; I enjoy finding my way among the stars almost as much as the view when I get there.
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I’m a Glob nut too .
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Globs and nebula for me
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Globulars, nebulae and galaxies, but lately I’ve been doing more lunar observing. My wife loves to look at the moon.
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Globulars, and searching for galaxies.
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