On the night of July 20, 1996, I took my Intes six-inch f/10 Maksutov to a star party at Foothill Park, in Palo Alto, California. This park is about half way up the east side of the hills of the San Francisco Peninsula, about a fifteen minute drive from my house. The star party was well attended -- many telescopes up through big Dobsons and refractors, and lots of the general public looking through them. I believe the star party was organized by the Peninsula Astronomical Society, but I am not sure; I heard about it by word of mouth (well, word of Internet) at the last minute.

I arrived at dusk. Temperatures were comfortably in the shirt-sleeve range, having backed off from daytime highs pushing 100 F, but the Intes, which had been stored in my non-air-conditioned house, was slow to equilibrate; it took nearly two hours before it was ready to perform. That's one of the gotchas with Maksutovs.

The Moon was up. The terminator had just cleared Posidonius, and the great wrinkle ridge that runs down Mare Serenetatis at about Selenographic longitude 25 E was beautifully illuminated by grazing light.

Jupiter was popular, though the seeing to the southeast was still rather ratty. For variety, I showed some people M22, which was obviously granular (starting to resolve) even at only 58x. Comet Hale-Bopp was also well-placed. I explained that the central condensation meant that stuff was evaporating from the nucleus and hinted that the comet would be very spectacular next spring. People seemed impressed that when Comet Halley (1986 apparition) was as far from the sun as Hale-Bopp is now, it was ten thousand times fainter.

Bored with Jupiter, I chased down Uranus and Neptune, using the finder charts in the Observer's Handbook of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. They were close together near the Capricornus / Sagittarius border. Both showed featureless discs at 150x, Uranus greenish and Neptune blue. I did not notice any moons, but did not particularly look for them. One passerby was not certain she could tell that Neptune was a disc at 150x, so I put in a 4 mm Orthoscopic for 375x. The disc became obvious to her then, but she commented that it was not steady -- she was noticing seeing effects. I switched back to Jupiter with the same power, to show just how bad things actually looked with too much magnification. Then I put back in the 10 mm eyepiece for 150x, and showed a much more satisfying view. I was glad I had looked at Jupiter again, for one moon -- Io, I think -- was very close to the eastern limb of the planet, almost touching it.

My eyepiece for 150x was a 10 mm Vixen Lanthanum. These are great star-party eyepieces. The 20 mm eye relief means I can focus with my glasses on, tell spectators to leave theirs in place, and no one has to refocus. With so-so seeing, it is difficult and time-consuming to get the focus right, so the long eye relief is an important feature.

After both telescope and seeing had settled down a little, I split Antares with the Intes at a magnification of 375. Less might have done. This experience illustrated one of the differences between a Maksutov and a refractor of similar aperture and quality. Rich Neuschaefer was set up ten meters from me with his six-inch f/9 Astrophysics. I asked him to take a look at Antares, too, for I had not brought any catalog that showed the position angle of the secondary, and couldn't remember it from the last time, and wanted verification. Rich had a much cleaner separation than I did, for at least two reasons.

First, at the time I looked, the Mak still hadn't settled into thermal equilibrium. Rich had set up well before I did, and refractors are generally vastly less temperature-sensitive than Maksutovs. His telescope was performing more nearly at its actual maximum capability than mine.

Second, the two-inch secondary of the Mak roughly doubles the proportion of light that goes in the rings of the Airy disc compared to an unobstructed system, from perhaps fifteen percent to a bit over thirty percent. A lot of that light goes into the outer rings, where it reduces contrast in lunar and planetary views. With a star as bright as Antares, the difference in the Airy disc is obvious at the eyepiece. The companion of Antares is five magnitudes fainter than the primary, and I was seeing it against a much brighter background than Rich was. What's more, that background was in motion; the seeing was not steady, and all those extra rings were dancing and jiggling, all but swamping the companion. No doubt the rings were dancing in Rich's telescope, too, but they were too faint to see. It would have been much easier for the Intes to resolve Antares in better seeing, whereas the big refractor was less bothered by imperfect conditions.

I have said before that even with superb optics (which my Intes and Rich's Astrophysics both seem to have), it is nonsense to think that the images produced by a system with a large secondary can truly be refractor-like, compared to a refractor of equal aperture. The difference I just described is one of the things I had in mind, that will be immediately obvious to an experienced observer.

Incidentally, splitting Antares in a six-inch is nothing to boast about. As reported in Burnham's Celestial Handbook, it has been done in a three-inch. I myself have resolved it in my 90 mm refractor (Vixen fluorite) at only 116x. The usual decline of seeing with distance away from the zenith makes it a challenging task in mid northern latitudes, though. My 90 mm observation was from my back yard in Palo Alto, in late summer.

Later on I looked at epsilon Bootis and 70 Ophiuchi. Both resolved clearly at 150x. The telescope had come to equilibrium, and these stars were higher in the sky than Antares, so the Intes delivered sterling images.

I also looked at a few more deep-sky objects. The small globular clusters NGC 6522 and 6528 lie just west of the spout of the teapot. It was easy to get both in the same 58x field. M13 showed resolution and lanes of stars at 150x, and at that power and at 58x I showed people NGC 6207, the brighter of the "companion" galaxies to the globular.

There were several interesting instruments at this star party. One man had bought Intes six-inch optics from JMI and assembled them into an optical tube assembly of his own manufacture. The Intes units that JMI had were reportedly of spotty quality; it is interesting that the optics that this person had were excellent, once collimated. Perhaps the JMI units merely suffered from mechanical problems.

The woman set up next to me had some rather classic hardware, including a Cave six-inch Newtonian -- it looked like f/8 or f/9 -- and one of the relatively rare Coulter collapsible 4.25-inch "back-packer" telescopes. Both seemed to work well.