OK, the HVAG star party is tomorrow, so I took the new beastie out on the side of the house to do mundane stuff like line up finders, check balance with accessories in place, practice setup/teardown, all that boring stuff. That way, no surprises and the equipment will be ready to load to the car tomorrow afternoon.
Brightest thing that could be seen from the side of the house (all of 6 feet between house and the fence...not a lot of room for a C14 on a huge mount) was Jupiter, so I aimed at it after doing "polar alignment" by using a compass and guessing some on the altitude adjust. I had a bit of trepidation on this as a C14 has a rather long focal length and initially finding Jupiter (by eyeballing down the OTA) could prove to be a chore. But, nothing ventured, nothing gained and....Jupiter popped into the "wide" field eyepiece view on the first try. Good omen! (Except for the seeing, which was mostly bad with the rare moment of clarity). Moreover, Jupiter was just hanging there in the eyepiece...almost no drift; got lucky on the polar alignment. Good omen #2.
Of course, I immediately forgot what I had set out to do and began to observe Jupiter. And, lo and behold, Mom Nature decided to put on a small astronomical event for me, as a tiny bump appeared on the side of the planet as Io started coming out from behind. Got lost in watching that one until it was fully separated. Good Omen #3.
(Boring interlude....aligned Telrad and both 8X50 finders).
Eager as always to try stellar spectra, I targeted a couple of the few brighter stars available in the small strip of sky I had. There is no question that the C14's light gathering power really juiced up the color and brightness of the spectra. Stars of a magnitude that only provided grey streaks in the C8 were fully colored. Seeing was bad, so the finding of absorbtion lines was problematical at best (I was reasonably sure of B-star's (one of the Pleiades, I forget which) H-beta line, which is by far the easiest one to catch, but no others...exception see below). I might add that the Pleiades (as expected) are not a really good object for the verrrrrrrrry long focal length C14...you could get basically about half of it in view with the 40mm eyepiece.
Saturn was somewhat disappointing with the seeing. Only very rarely was the Cassini division present (but when it was, it went all the way around) and it was basically "appearing" and "disappearing" with the wavy air. Neither Saturn nor Jupiter profited much from 180X (22mm ep) over 145X (27mm). I tried the Vixen 17mm LVW (new eyepiece, too) but the seeing simply didn't support 230X.
Found Capella in amongst the bare branches of the backyard sycamore. Tried the spectrum there. Wow! Bright! And, when the seeing settled for a few moments I was almost sure I could see lines in the yellow-orange (perhaps the D sodium pair?) as well some hints of lines in the blue (perhaps the Ca lines or the CH G-band...Capella is G-type, so hydrogen lines are not too likely to be strong for it).
Sure hope the seeing is better tomorrow!