First Light in the Valley

We finally left rainy MO and arrived in the RGV last Tuesday night to beautiful, warm, clear south Texas skies. Except for a couple of cloudy nights, it has been wonderful ever since except for the nearly full moon and the usual high light pollution. I spent part of today getting my ETX 70 setup, put my stand back together, leveled it, and made a small improvement by adding a handset holder out of a couple of screw hooks. Tonight I decided that full moon or no I was going to look at something. Capella was visible so I decided I'd check out Auriga. I initialized the scope after fiddling with the power a bit. The newly leveled stand works great and the handset cradle even better than that. I pointed the scope in the general direction of North, approximately level tube, and aligned on Capella. It was right at the edge of the field. I centered it and everything after that was right on. The limiting magnitude tonight was about 7.7. I sketched the field around Capella and M31 and got them fairly close. A red light would be handy. I simply counted stars in the fields around a couple more of the brighter stars in Auriga and that agreed pretty well with CdC with the magnitude limited to 7.7 to that was about right. It was a nice clear, cool (60F), moonlit night so perhaps it'll be a bit better later on with no moon. It was an ok night and I even got serenaded by a Dia de los Muertos celebration going on at a nearby Fiestahall.