by Ray Gralak
Yesterday I finally received the rings for my AP 155 EDF refractor so last night was first light for this scope. I plan to use this scope mostly for CCD work but I wanted to try it out visually first.
I bought the scope used from Astromart so it is at least a few years old. It had just been into AP to have its lens cleaned and a bent focusser pin fixed (how did that happen?). Anyway, it seems like Roland didn't fix the focuser too well as there is definitely uneveness in it. But it is very useable as is.
I mounted the AP, which weighs 25 lbs, on my AP1200 GTO mount. This refractor is a lot heavier than my 5" Takahashi refractor. In fact, it weighs about the same as my 10" Ritchey. But the 1200 mount would easily be able to handle both scopes if I could mount them simultaneously.
I used the mount's goto feature to slew the scope to Deneb, which could not yet be seen visually. I used a 20 Nagler to center the star and recalibrate the mount. Then I hopped around from star to star in Cygnus using the tour mode of the AP mount. Again none of these stars were visible naked-eye yet but still I could see color in them. The most interesting star was Albeireo... the blue and yellow in this double were very obvious.
I switched to my Celestron 12mm microguider eyepiece and centered the scope on a star near the meridian to do drift alignment. I came back a little later just as the skies were getting dark. The star had barely moved north indicated I needed to slightly adjust the mount to the east.
I then went after a couple challenging objects. First Antares, which was just barely above my house. I switched to a 7.5mm Tak LE making for about 145x. Antares was boiling from the heat from my house and it's sinking altitude. But, it's greenish companion was visible anyway most of the time.
Then I moved to my main challenge, Zeta Bootes, which is a 1.0 arc-sec double. At 145x it looked slightly elongated but I wasn't sure so I switched to a 15mm Orion Ultrascopic and my 5x Televue Barlow. At this magnification (362x) Zeta Bootes was cleanly split! Two "little headlights" with dancing diffraction rings!
I then turned my attention to the moon. No false color was evident at all. It was still rather low and just over some houses so I could see the lunar was swimming around. Still the detail at times was very impressive.
I then took a peak at M8, M20, and M11. All were kind of muted by light pollution. I then retired for the evening but left the scope setup because...
At 4:30 am I woke to get ready for work. But before doing that I went outside and slewed the scope over to Jupiter. I was very impressed with the detail I saw. The GRS was not visible but there were at least a dozen bands at 362x. In the lower polar region (north?) there were hints of many fine bands like I have seen sometimes with my 17.5/18" dobs. In the equatorial region was a large dark barge (I think that is the technical name?).
Running out of time I quickly slewed to Saturn. It was increadibly sharp and sureal looking. At least one band was very visible on the disk. It could have taken more magnification but I had to quit. It was getting light very fast.
I was going to try imaging tonight but now there are clouds and rain maybe tomorrow... :-(