by Paul LeFevre
An amazing thing happened this weekend -- I got a new scope, and the weather didn't cloud up!
Saturday morning I drove up to Oceanside Photo & Telescope and picked up a shiny new 10" Meade LX200. Watching Phil & Rashad play with their NexStar scopes had made me seriously think about getting a GOTO scope, but I had already ordered a Losmandy GM8 mount for my 8" SCT. When Pocono called me last week and told me the wait time had to be increased from 6 weeks to 12 weeks, I cancelled my order and decided to go with the LX200, giving me the GOTO capability I knew I would like, and a better photography platform than my current small LXD500 GEM mount.
Getting the 10" LX200 box into my little Nissan Sentra was an adventure in itself, but with the determined help of Mike West at OPT, we managed to get it stuffed into the car (along with the Meade Superwedge, the field tripod, and several boxes of "accessories"). I got it home and set up in the living room, and played with it a bit on Saturday, but was too tired to haul it outside Saturday night to try it out.
Sunday night I was less tired, and the weather cooperated, so I hauled the huge beast out into the yard to take it through its paces. Even though I had seen Bob C.'s LX200 (and others) before, I'm still amazed at how much bigger the 10" is than the 8" SCT -- this is one huge beast. It does only take a few minutes to set up in ALT-AZ mode, however, and within 10 minutes I was set up and ready to align the computer.
I used Arcturus and Spica to align, the computer gave the OK, then I picked M3 and hit GOTO...this is just too much fun. M3 was dead center in the 26mm EP, and the view was nice and bright with quite a few stars resolved. That's when I started to have some real fun with the GOTO key...M5, M66, M65, M104, NGC4565 -- all dead center in the FOV with the touch of a button. I learned the hard way (with generous help from numerous TACos) how to find these things, but now that I've "paid my dues," I have no problem letting the scope find them for me. All my targets looked very good from my Escondido yard, and I got down to Mag. 11 galaxies without trying very hard. It is sure easier to see dim fuzzies from a fairly light-polluted sight when you already know the object is in the FOV, and you just have to tease the deatil out from the background!
I'll be trying out the Superwedge and doing some photography with the new scope this weekend at Mt. Laguna -- really looking forward to that. The fork mount and tripod are very solid, and everything works as advertised. Guess I've officially joined the ranks of the astronomical coffee makers...;-)