C9.25 observing report - Houge

by Paul Sterngold

Last night marked a first for my C9.25. I had never used the scope for lunar or doubles work before, only FFO's and imaging. I wondered how the scope would perform, especially in light of the reputed (mythical?) better optical configuration of the C9.25.

The SJAA (San Jose Astro Assn) was holding a sidewalk observing party at an in-town location. Unfortunately it completely fogged up when I arrived. You could still see the moon through the fog, and some scopes were trained on it. At first, I decided not to set up the C9.25, but then had a change of heart and decided a foggy moon was better than no moon. Luckily, it cleared up shortly thereafter, although transparency was poor throughout the night. Still, it was okay for doubles as well as Selene.

As soon as I was set up, Phil suggested the double-double, epsilon Lyrae. Seeing was fair to moderate, but it was an easy split at 196x (12mm Nagler). Phil thought the diffraction patterns seemed skewed, so we trained the scope on a brighter star, pumped up the magnification to 336x (7mm Nagler), and thanks to my Bob's Nobs [sic], we quickly tweaked the collimation and immediately noticed an improvement.

The double-double was much cleaner, and a beautiful sight as always. But the 7mm Nagler was a little too much magnification for the seeing, so we stepped down to 261x (9mm Nagler) for most of our double star hunting, and even 147x (16mm Brandon) later in the evening. The doubles that we observed included:

zeta Aquarii: easily split at 1.8" separation.
gamma Andromedae: a wide but gloriously colored pair, with one golden and one relatively deep blue.
gamma Delphini: a nice surprise; much like gamma And but closer.
sigma Cass: easily split at 3" separation; lovely B-G colors.
iota Cass: neat triple star, the closest pair are 2" apart and were cleanly split with a nice black gap between; not much color in the stars themselves.
Polaris: the great disparity in magnitudes - 2.0 and 9.0 - makes this an interesting double. It was easy in the C9.25.

I then went back to lunar observing. First, I looked through a friend's 7" A-P refractor at about 160x, then looked through the C9.25 at about the same magnification. Er, umm..., the seeing was definitely affecting my C9.25 far more than it was his 7" apo! Sour grapes. The seeing did settle a little while later, and Copernicus made a splendid sight at 147x (16mm Brandon), with the strings of craterlets between it and Eratosthenes quite striking. Rupes recta was also a nice sight.

I showed Phil my new 2.8mm Tak ortho, and he suggested that we give it a try on the moon - 839x?!?!. Why not? The fog was rapidly returning, and by now the moon was already dimmed by a thin veneer. Still, the view of Copernicus was surprisingly good. Four of us took a look at that ridiculously high mangle-fication, and were all pleasantly surprised by the view. Unfortunately, the fog was ruthlessly fast, so we only had a few brief glimpses.

All things considered, I'm very pleased with the C9.25's performance. I can't wait to drag it out one of these fine mornings and feast my eyes on Jupiter and Saturn.