Top >   Astronomy >   Observation Reports

Observation Log - 23/11/2004

Equipment

Comments

My new 80mm ED refractor arrived yesterday evening and, despite feeling decidedly under the weather, I just had to take it out for a quick spin. This is one great little scope! I'm rather impressed with what a scope of such small aperture is able to reveal of these urban skies of mine. Even though this is my first completely manually-operated scope, I quickly got used to the German equatorial mount and was able to find quite a number of bright targets easily. My first star-hop around Auriga for a few Messier open clusters wasn't 100% successful, but I'm sure that'll improve with practise.

One of the main reasons for getting this scope was for those sprawling, wide-field views. The Pleiades were rising in the East, so I pointed the scope in their general direction and peered into the finder. I had to realign a couple of times, but there was no missing it when I finally got on target. My first full view of M45 without a set off crosshairs to spoil it was simply gorgeous. The 26mm Plossl yeilds a 2.25-degree FOV in this scope - more than enough to frame this target.

Gemini was located straight in front of me, so I pointed the scope at Castor to get my first look at a double in this scope. It took a bit of power, but the split was very clean. With my 9.7mm Plossl and 2x Barlow, two tiny, perfect Airy disks appeared. The view was noticably better than what I remember from the LX90, and I spent a good few minutes just admiring this simple sight. Mizar was next, and equally impressive.

Orion was low in the South-East. After a while admiring the very apparent red hue of Betelgeuse, I moved on to the trapezium below the belt. The "sword" area was fascinating, and I spent a while experimenting with different powers on and around M42.

Saturn was now rising above some thin cloud at the horizon and I was eager to see what this scope would do for it. The highest power I had available at the moment (about 120x) gave an impressive view, albeit rather small. I'll have to get some shorter focal length eyepieces for this scope and see how far it'll go on the planets!

Moving the scope through the house to the balcony was a piece of cake. It's a bit much, but possible, to do this in one go, but removing the OTA and counterweight from the mount makes the job easy in two trips. By this time the Moon was high in the South-West; probably too high for the LX90, but easily reachable with the 80mm on its GEM. The views didn't leave me wanting - perfectly sharp and not even a hint of false colour to be seen. I took a couple of quick afocal shots with the PowerShot S45, the wide FOV allowing me to image the whole of the Moon when fully zoomed in.

Orion had now moved around to be visible from the balcony, and I got a much better view of M42, comparable to that of the LX90. I tried a couple of 15" exposures at low power which didn't turn out that bad considering I was turning the RA slow-motion control by hand to track the target! I really ought to sort out a power supply for that motor, as this is going to make one fine scope for imaging.

Back to Observations Index