N5 at Coe

by Phil Chambers


I consider last night's test run of the N5 at Coe a success. After a considerable effort in aligning the thing it spoke for itself quite handily.

The alignment difficulty is that the first instruction is Level The Tube and they dont mean it. They mean "set dec to 0" i.e. make the tube perpendicular to the fork arm. This is hard on a wedge (C11 wedge) when there is no such thing as a straight line nor external dec scale on the scope. OK, first hour gone :-/

After successful alignment, nothing further was done for the evening on that score (including not using the "align" function to update).

It put objects consistantly in the lower left portion of the FOV of a 30mm Cel Ultima PLossl. Occasionally it would put them in the center.

I looked through several scopes at M104 during the evening (it seemed to be a popular target last night) and found that the N5 views were not all that much different than bigger scopes (seeing wasnt wonderful). The computer found stuff on all sides of the sky with the original alignment (Polaris and Sirius).

I was most impressed how 5" of SCT with a 3? % obstruction could give views like it did. I am very happy with my pick of a "grab and go" scope.