So I decided that I would get the cash together to be able to replace with a bike of somewhat the same type and spec. On donedeal.ie I had seen that there was a Reign X1 for sale, a little outside of my price range, but the seller was open for negotiation. Last week I called down to the seller and I drove home with the X1 on the roof.

It’s a 2009 X1 with the pierced downtube, 160mm Fox Van R 36 forks, Fox DHX3.0 shock with a 500×2.35 spring giving 170mm of travel on hte rear, Hayes stroker trail brakes (not even fully bedded in), Sram X7 drivetrain with RaceFace rings cranks and BB. It has the grey paint of the standard X1. I’ve obtained replacement grips as horns were installed by the first owner, and I’m getting a new seatpost as the original was cut too low for me. There are Shimano dual flat/SPD pedals. The tyres were the standard WTB prowler tyres, but I’ve exchanged those for my standard favourite Maxxis Advantage 2.1 tyres. It took a bit of effort to get those seated correctly on the rims but they are on now and there’s not a wobble on them.

Getting used to the SPDs is interesting. I’ve only had 2 offs so far that are related to SPD issues but the tension was far too high. That’s fixed :) The shoes I got at a cheap price in Decathlon in France are pretty good, comfortable and not giving me any hotspots so far. They could do with a better grip on the flat side of the pedals though.

This bike is now insured properly (I hope) but I don’t want to be the victim of crime again.

I’ve been around Derroura, the green loop in BallyH and a nice fireroad climbing loop on the side of Sliabhnaman so far, as well as a nice loop to Salthill from the house in Galway.

Hope I stay on it..

After spending a bit of time there I thought I’d get a look at Venus as it would be easier to see anything of interest with the daytime sky behind it. I could see it clearly and I got to try some colour filters, and trying all of my eyepieces and barlows to get a view.

Next up was to locate Mars – the Autostar made short work of that, and I could easily see Mars against the daytime sky, with well over an hour to sunset. There was not much to see except hints of markings of course, given the 6.2″ diameter of Mars at the moment  and the 2″ rayleigh resolution limit of this little scope, combined with the short 350mm focal length. Still, it was nice to actually see the planet at all.

Feeling confident, I went off and selected Saturn. Lo and behold, there was Saturn, just barely brighter than the background sky, but still visible. I could see the rings almost edge on, and the shadow of the rings on the planet cloudtops. Still impressive I think, and points me to the possibility of observing some items during the day at least

It’s a metallic green Giant Reign, with RockShox Recon 335 front forks, and a Specialized V-groove saddle. The bike has sentimental value apart from the actual cost to me to replace it.

If anyone sees this bike either in use or for sale please get in contact with the Gardai in Henry Street, or contact me directly by phone or text on zero eight seven, six four three eight seven two five.

There’s a decent cash reward for information leading to the safe return of this bike.

First light was Friday night, and it was enlightening to see how easy M101 and M51 were to see, M13 looked like a globular cluster and not just a puffball. M104 was seen as a spindle. It really looked like I was looking  through two telescopes and seeing more than I had been seeing in the ETX.

With the work-in-progress briefcase dob, I got a look at a 13-day old moon and Saturn. Both were seen through a variable thin layer of cirrusstratus that was clearing up completely every now and then. Seeing wasn’t that good. The moon showed fast moving ripples over the surface.

The 16mm UWA (cost me €65) is a nicely built eyepiece, possibly a bit weighty. The images are clean and crisp in the scope, and it’s nice to get a good look at last in a premium eyepiece! The eye relief is just not enough to be comfortable with wearing the glasses but at an exit pupil of 2.8mm in my scope my astigmatism wasn’t *that* noticable. However the views were slightly improved with wearing the glasses at a cost of the outer 10 degrees of view. Using the meade #128 barlow with this eyepiece vignetted the outer 10 degrees but allowed the use without glasses for an effective FL of 5.3mm. At the native FL Saturn is crisp, easily showing the major moons. Very slight softness at the edge of field, and requiring a little bit of head movement to get the complete FOV.

The 7mm TMB Planetary (€45) is also very good but different. This is sharper to the field stop than the Meade is at the field stop, but it’s a narrower FOV at 58 degrees. The twist up eyecup is not as useful as the Meade’s. It is a little harder to find the sweet spot for the fully illuminated FOV, but this is reachable with wearing my glasses and I can still see the field stop. Just for fun, I put this eyepiece on the 3x barlow, for an FL of 2.3 and magnification around 580x. It focused to almost sharp, and it was odd seing the seeing shimmers over the globe of Saturn, and I was managing to keep Saturn in hte

The moon wasn’t being that interesting last night. I was looking at sunrise over Schiaparelli and I saw some details in the Aristarchus rilles that I never looked at before.

Saturn was not far from edge-on, with the gap between the rings and planet being difficult to see, and Cassini’s division was intermittently visible.The moons were resolving almost to points as it appeared that the high-altitude cirrus was getting in the way a bit.

My overall impression is that these eyepieces do make the telescope “get of the way” when looking through them. I’m looking forwards to adding a TV 2x barlow or powermate to the arsenal. The comfort difference that the wider FOV and longer eye relief gives is really quite a big one. The longer time between nudges is very useful too. MAkes me want to get that equatorial platform up and running.

I can’t argue with the NATS decision to stop air flights, so I’ll have to consider a bus-ferry ticket this weekend as an alternative in case Ryanair decide to not fly again for a few days.

There is some hope about the restrictions being lifted by tomorrow, but the restrictions are looking likely to be back in place by Wednesday. The ash models are showing no real movement except to reach Canada..

I brought the ETX70 out of the car and set it up at the NW end of the house in Galway, attaching the 12v battery leads and easy-aligning. For a first target I chose M51, and seeing that there was actually fairly good transparency I went in and took out the 8″ dob-in-progress. As that cooled down I did a little bit of touring around the sky taking in some old friends, as I wanted to get a look at Saturn after the mirror had reached ambient.

As there is currently no finder on the Dob, I was re-learning star-hopping from bright stars again. First up was M51 – this was not that hard to locate, I think I could see hints of spiral structure but it wasn’t clear. I identified M104 through the high-level cloud to the south, then I swung up to M53 (quite a pleasant sight really) and on to M64 (couldn’t see the dark lane). I had a bit of trouble locating M97 but I located it in the end, it’s a little bit larger than I was expecting. I couldn’t locate M108 nearby. Over to Leo and M65/M66 were located, and I tried for M95/M96 without success. M13 was a spectacular sight in all my eyepieces, easily resolved in the 32mm. A quick look at the double-double, clear clean splits on both. Quickly scan over to M57 and using the UHC (thank you Sarah!) and OIII filters really helped to make the Ring surprisingly bright and visible. I slewed back over to Saturn, and it was crisp and mostly steady. Even though the rings are about 2 degrees from edge on, I could just make out the cassini division, and I could easily see through the ring-planet gap. There was an easily visible band across the planet’s surface, that I think was the ring system in silhouette. As I was looking at Saturn, there appeared a halo around the planet that got brighter as the minutes passed. This was seen in all of the eyepieces. Saturn got fainter and fainter and that put paid to my plans to go galaxy hunting in the Virgo cluster.

So at 02.30 in the morning I started to feel sleepy again, so off to bed I went, satisfied with a fairly productive 2 hours outside.