The Fear and Panic of First Light

by Bill Arnett

Well, my first journey into ATM land has finally reached its ultimate goal: my new 10" f/6 Dob-Newt saw first light this evening! I'm afraid I don't have it collimated very well and the seeing was awful but seeing the Moon and Mars with a mirror ground, polished and figured by my own hands is really something special! My mount works OK, too :-)

Then I noticed that Starry Night was showing Phobos and Deimos in easy to find locations relative to Mars. I had never seen them in a telescope. So back out I went, dropped in my 4.8mm Nagler giving 317x, and damned if I didn't see them both! I didn't quite believe it could be that easy but there they were unmistakenly popping in and out about 50% of the time. What a trip: two new shallow objects in a brand new scope!

I spend a lot of time looking for these two little rocks last opposition with my 12" LX200 with no luck. To see them this easily must mean something good about my new scope :-) There is noticeably less scattered light which is the name of the game with Mars's diminutive companions. I attribute this to: the inherent superiority of a Newtonian vs an SCT in this respect, the *black* flocking paper from Protostar that I used inside the tube, and the cleanliness of my brand new mirrors. My new mirror has a pretty good figure, too (~1/10 wave), but I don't think that matters much in this particular case (besides, my less than perfect collimation probably destroys whatever benefit the figure would give).

(OK, I did peek at a deep sky object (M13) but with a full Moon out it didn't look too great.)