Orion purple Maksutovs

by Jay Freeman

I have a 127 mm Orion Mak-Cass; by coincidence it had first light last night (November 26-27, 2001). Seeing wasn't good enough for a star test, and it was cold enough and late enough that I didn't want to stay out long enough for it to come to thermal equilibrium, but even so, the optics looked pretty good, the focus was smooth, and if there was any mirror wobble I certainly didn't notice it. I look forward to star-testing in better conditions. For the moment, all I can do is report that at only 64x, with a 10-day Moon in the sky, a trace of high haze, and the lights of Palo Alto, it split Polaris cleanly.

I have put this OTA on my NexStar 8 mount, with an adapter bracket similar to the ones I have used for other OTAs on this mount -- some of you have seen them. The 127 is much more compact and less clumsy than the 8-inch SCT that came with it. With the lightweight tripod that came with the NexStar 8 (which took some tweaking to fix a serious case of the wobblies), I am quite comfortable picking uo the entire instrument -- mount, OTA, and tripod -- and either carrying it over my shoulder or in one hand with the tripod legs horizontal. That makes it very convenient for quick setups and quick looks.

The NexStar 8 mount has inadequate pointing to get things into the field of a medium or high-magnification eyepiece, but is more than adequate for getting things into a finder field; thus I have replaced the original straight-through 6x30 finder, that came with it, with one of Orion's new 6x30 right-angle finders with a correct image. That makes it very handy when using charts to find things.

But the best thing about the telescope is, that the color scheme is sufficiently outrageous off the shelf that I don't need to refinish the OTA. (I did stick some glow-in-the-dark plastic stars onto all the dust covers, but that is another matter altogether.)