Last night was a lot of fun; I ended up spending about an hour hoping from one double to another all around Lyra. Lyra is one of my favorite constellations for double stars there are just so many excellent examples packed into a fairly small patch of sky. About midway through the evening I slewed over to Vega and used my Bahtinov mask to set my focus. First of all the view was amazing; the visual appearance of the focusing spikes when looking at a bright star like Vega is just gorgeous. Second, my focus was off just a tad and with the help of the mask I was able to set it perfectly, and then I went back to observing starting with the double-double. Using the mask didn’t make a huge difference, but it was nice knowing I had the focus set as good as I was going to get, and the double-double was beautifully split without having to fish around the focus trying to convince myself the diffraction rings were as sharp as I could make them.

Neat stuff.

-John