I spent a lot of my time with the 25mm TV Plossl eyepieces giving the telescope 36 power.
I spent most of my time scanning the sky without a chart actually. But looked at a few identified objects and used a charting application on the ipad or iphone from time to time. I think I used the iphone for most of the chart lookups last night.
Dew became a problem and my front objectives were foggy. I took the Vixen into the car and dried it out with the heater then returned.
I spent a lot of time looking at the double cluster. It was fascinating. I decided to try to figure out why it looks so 3d in the binocular telescope compared to a normal telescope with one eyepiece. I discovered that some of the stars seem to shift in the field of view, like Parallax shift, not moving much, while others shift more considerably as if in the background. This happens in "real time" while viewing through the eyepiece. How is this happening? I'm thinking that this may be due to some kind of selective almost pincushion like distortion, perhaps with my eyesight, but I think others would see it as well. The way to see this is to set the eyepieces apart far enough to see while looking through both eyepieces. Not to far apart, but a normal distance. This allows a little bit of space to exist for your nose and you can actually move your eyes from one side to the other changing your relative position for both eyes looking through a more Right side alignment but still with both eyes and then with the left side being more closer to your nose. This shifting causes "some" of the stars to move and they appear to be in a background plain, while others end up staying in the same relative position in the foreground. It's an eye popping 3d effect which I think anyone would see with this setup.
Rather than just try to describe this I tried to draw and identify the "foreground" stars that appear to be "in front" of the other more shifting stars in the background. This meant I didn't need to draw all the stars of the double cluster. I didn't have a blank sheet of paper and pencil handy, so I used the iPad with a drawing app. This proved to be a little bit challenging, because the ipad is fairly bright and I spent a lot more time trying to tweak the drawings. My thought at first was I would draw over a photograph of the double cluster in the background of the drawing app, but I couldn't easily locate that photo on my iPad, so I just tried to draw the main foreground stars as best as I could. I ran into a problem of using a scale and not zooming in enough to draw the top cluster and have the second cluster fit on the screen. So I drew a couple of stars that appear like they are foreground stars in between the two on the first drawing and then drew them again on a second one. Figuring I could merge them or use those two "in between" stars as a guide to merge the two drawings later. Unfortunately my scales didn't match, so I may have to scale them to match and perhaps rotate one of them a bit.
They provide a good overview as to which stars would be in the foreground which I could redraw over a photo of the double cluster. I think our photos were taken with normal telescopes which means they are upside down, but my Vixen binoculars show a true perspective.
I don't have a chart or drawing ready to post here. But I looked at the double cluster for a long time and looked around that area experimenting and focusing on different star groups or patterns inside the cluster. Also looking at the cluster from a number of different framings to see how the stars or parts of the cluster would react in relation to their placement in the field of view. It seemed that if I focused mentally on a different small sub-pattern, that that group of stars many times would jump out and not move in the field of view relative to the others. So I could almost depending on the position of the stars and what I was mentally focusing, cause sub patterns of the cluster to appear to be in the foreground. Could it be that by focusing on some kind of pattern I was somehow locking mentally a part of the image in my mind and causing that pattern to mentally shift or be stabilized in a way that it didn't move. This was a very interesting experiment in (at least my) human vision. It's something that I think anyone would have fun viewing to note their reaction and to perhaps see which stars appear to be in the foreground. It could be some kind of pattern matching psychological effect that our vision can flip into.
From a scientific point of view it would seem that optically this would happen more with stars in the middle of the field of view as an optical change in the overall view, that is something like astimatism might occur in the optics. I don't have perfect eyesight so it could be in my eyes optics as well. It might be interesting to see if there was a way to photographically test this, but that would require a different setup and rig than I have as the Vixen is not suited for photography.
There are other reasons I thought in the past that I felt there was a 3d effect, but this is the most significant in my mind and something easy to demonstrate and repeat.
I also looked at M2, , the ring nebula, M45, and finally Jupiter. There was a glow, almost like northern lights that appeared in the wide field photographs but was barely detectable with my vision. These almost looked like northern lights, but also looked a lot like a cloud pattern or vapor trails from jets. I saw a couple jets flying high leave vapor trails during the nights viewing.
Here is a wide angle photo of the stars and clouds which look a bit like Northern lights. In the early morning hours as the sun was rising, it was clear that the clouds were appearing in the photo, not northern lights.
(looking at M45 with clouds obscuring some of the sky)
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