by Nilesh Shah
I resisted the temptation of making the announcement before the weekend as I didn't want to be blamed for a bad weather. So, here it is.
Those who know my 6" f8 telescope(named Alfani)was built by Paul Lefevre and hence I call it a PLD(Paul Lefevre Dob).
Well, Alfani has a bigger brother - a 12.5" f6 PLD. I bought Paul's 12.5" scope named "Papa Joe". So, it's another PLD in the family.
A nice arrengement worked out by Mark and Paul and Paul handed the scope to Mark at RTMC and Mark got it back to bay area with him. Yesterday was the first light for me with the scope (although I've had views through that scope before, but it's still first light :)
I went over to Mark's place to have an observing session with the new scope. Although the moon was bright, I just couldn't resist. And we sure were rewarded with some excellent views of Messier objects we observed. It was a different experience for me as I'm not used to a big scope(compared to Alfani) like this.
After collimation and blowing away some RTMC dust from the mirror, we were set to try the first object.
I tried getting M3, but I had some difficulty - must be that excitement. So I tried a simple target M13. The view was beautiful, although it would have been better if the sky was not that bright because of the moon.
We tried my 20 mm Meade RG(@95x) and 12.4 mm Meade RG(@150x) eyepieces. We also tried Mark's 50 mm eyepiece while looking for M3. Looking through that eyepiece feels like watching outside a plane window.
We saw several objects including M3, M13, M51, M10, M12, M14, M72, Ring Nebula, Blinking Planetary, M11. It was fun to blink the blinking planetary again and ring nebula was huge. As Mark said - it looked like an intergalactic donut.
The bright globulars looked steady and awesome, thanks to good transparancy.
The scope is slightly nose heavy, Mark brought some lead bars to help balance it which helped a lot. And I'm gonna need a shroud and a step tool to reach the eyepiece when it's standing tall.
In all, it was a fun first light session and I am a happy owner of a great telescope.
Now I know what its to have a bigger aperture :)