First light report 26 may

by Mark Bracewell

May 26 - First light! I'm not sure really what I am supposed to see, but it all looked good! Up until now I have really only spent time with refractors. Saw a little white spot transit on jupiter at about 10:45 (and the GRS for the first time last night on the 27th!), looked at Porrima, couldn't split it (ha ha!). I know I'll be chasing that puppy all summer. Split Delta Serpentis, 3.9", yawn. My logs for this double in the 4" refractor say 'very tight pair' - not tonight, you could fit another star in the space between them. Mag 3 skies with mag -100 streetlights, still got nice views of M5 & M13. I won't be using the word 'smudge' nearly so often in my logs. Or maybe I will, now I'll be able to see some of those galaxies far far away :)

Pretty sure I have a lot to learn about collimation, and I think I need beefier springs on the mirror cell. Motions are very smooth. I built the scope with a 12 oz. counterweight planned, but haven't made the weight yet, so it's a little bottom heavy, but it managed OK which is great - if it handles OK when it is 12 oz. out of balance then it should be nice with the weight on there. It's really nice comfort-wise. With an adjustable chair I can sit comfortably with the scope pointed just about anywhere.

I'm used to judging seeing with a much smaller aperture - with a 10" I can't see proper diffraction rings at 200x or even 290x but it seemed fair to good tonight. Star test is slightly non-concentric when racked out, but not when racked in - I expect this is due to the helical focuser. Plenty of time to test and tweak coming up!

Scope pics at http://wgg.com/scope/dipper.html

Many thanks to all Tacos who helped - you may not even know you did, but I've been getting tremendous help and support from many, many of you since I began last year.

Posted on sf-bay-tac May 28, 2005 10:46:15 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Sep 20, 2005 13:57:36 PT