Hello Friend,

    Well I must say the past couple of days, Spring has really kicked in, and we had literally
hundreds of birds coming by our feeders.

         This morning I even saw a hummingbird, which was really special.    I'll have to get the
Sugar water feeders up sooner than later, because I did not expect to see them so soon.

        One finch, even managed to get itself stuck inside one of our feeders, and my sweetie
had fun getting that one out.

Two managed to knock themselves silly, into the windows.

One my sweetie nursed back to health, and unfortunately the other one eventually died.

           We even brought one finch into the house because it was so cold and soaked from the
downpour we had, that it decided to curl up under the wood roof of one of our feeders.

      After being wrapped up in a towel and warmed up, it was taken outside and flew up into
the trees.

Enough bird adventures for today.

      Yesterday I told you about the Skywatcher EQ6 AltAZ/EQ mount
  http://khanscope.com/accessDetails.cfm?productID=4427
which is an excellent medium to heavy duty sized mount for many astronomical applications, including visual and imaging.

     Someone asked me if there was a light to medium duty mount available in the under $1000 range
that I could recommend without sacrificing quality.

Fortunately, there is and it's made by Celestron, it's called the Advanced VX Equatorial mount.
http://khanscope.com/accessDetails.cfm?productID=4516

    The predecessor to this mount was the Celestron SGT mount, however the Advanced VX mount was
designed from the ground up, and includes a myriad of improvements in design.

So if you want something more affordable, and don't need the bigger payload capability of the EQ6 AltAz/EQ mount
then it's the perfect choice.

Clear Skies,


Ray Khan

PS Merlin the cat was mesmerized by all the bird activity, and sat transfixed by the patio door.