First light - C8!

by Bruce Prickett

Well, I'm the one who bought Paul's C8, pretty much directly financing his Cave purchase :-) (He got a good deal, and I think gave me a good one too). I checked it out with him on Friday night, snatching glimpses of Saturn and stars through the holes in the clouds. Paul demonstrated the laser-pointer-shutting-off-the-streetlight trick, and I saw enough to feel good about the C8. The images looked good, the focus action was pretty smooth and stable (very little image shift), and after alighment the star images were symetrical (though bouncing around from turbulence).

After I picked it up on Saturday (and admired Paul's new purchase), I got it home and put everything together on my SP mount. Lacking a second counter weight, I taped 50 cent penny rolls to the shaft until I could balance the mount by adjusting the regular weight. With about 18 rolls of pennies, this is much cheaper than a new 6 lb. weight from Orion! The sky was cloudy, but later on my son woke me up with a kick in the ribs as he cuddled up to his Mommy, so I took a look outside and found the sky was clear! I jumped into some warm clothes, grabbed the whole assembly and carefully carried it out to my soggy back yard. Even with the extra counter weight, the short C8 tube made it easy to get through the door without scraping anything.

Clouds were moving in, so I quickly lined up on Orion - for me the Telrad, right angle finder, and diagonal on the main tube worked great! M42 was very nice, though seeing held me to 4 stars in the Trapezium, with #5 at the limits of visibility. I saw much more detail in the nebula than before with my 4" - aperture wins in this case! The dark nebula were very distinct against the back-ground. I then viewed Saturn (nice, but still fuzzy), the double cluster, and M31. With the bigger scope, I tried hunting down M1 - not visible in the finder, but the Telrad let me find it in the main scope. Next time I will try the LPR filter that Paul included in the deal. I also did more star testing, but the boiling turbulence made it pointless for anything except checking the alignment. By then the clouds were moving in again, so back to bed I went.

Anyhow, I wanted Paul to know that the C8 is working great, and seems to be the right balance of aperture, image quality, and mobility for me. My C102 OTA has just been shipped to a buyer in LA who is setting up his son's first scope, so it will have a good home. His check should soon arrive to complete this chain of transactions :-)

Posted on sf-bay-tac Jan 05, 1998 16:38:18 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.4 Mar 21, 2006 20:14:09 PT

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