First Light, TV-101

by Jim Ster

I took possession of my new TV-101 with Gibraltar mount and Sky Tour last Saturday afternoon from fellow TACo Bob Czerwinski (I also bought his 12" LX-200 to get back into tracking satellites as they fly overhead, but that particular and most fun facet of my hobby will have to wait for another evening for First Light). Unfortunately, my trip home from Cordillia Junction was interrupted for well over an hour by a traffic snarl on the Yolo Causeway due to an overturned tractor-trailer rig that ultimately kept me from joining my friends up at IHOP for the evening. Instead of having some decent dark skies under which to do First Light, I chose to give it a go from my horribly light polluted front yard in beautiful downtown Carmichael. As it turned out, I'm glad I was able to stay home with it and spend some time familiarizing myself with the setup before I took it out. (It really makes things much easier in the long run. ;-)) I didn't bother to use the Sky Tour computer on the Gibraltar mount this evening, but from what I could tell by the setup, it will be a fairly easy to use. It's so straight forward that I'm even considering picking up a couple of extra encoders and mounting it onto my 18" Obsession sometime in the future.

It was a fairly short outing, starting around midnight and lasting only till 1:00 am. I began with my favorite wide-field eyepiece, a 31mm Nagler (17x) and trained it onto the Pleiades (M45) which was rising above my neighbors house to the north east. What an absolutely stunning view. The eyepiece was totally filled with this beautiful cluster. While it certainly wasn't the same caliber of view I'd of seen at our genuine dark sky sites, this 4" APO refractor was doing a superb job of making the absolute most of it. Each and every star was a perfect pinpoint of light and the background appeared velvety black.

From there, I took a look at the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) with the 31mm. Lots of detail and it seemed to fill the FOV. I pushed the power up to 112x with a 4.8 Nagler. The seeing and transparency were a little soft, probably due to valley smog and to smoke from a fire near Travis AFB I'd noticed earlier in the day. Still, there was quite a bit of detail to be seen in the dust lanes and spiral arms. I lowered the power down to 31x with a 17mm Nagler and was rewarded with the nicest view of it that evening.

Next, I aimed it at Alberio, my favorite double star combo which is located on the beak of Cygnus. Each component was a perfect point of light. The blue and gold colors were strikingly beautiful. Again, the velvety black background really made the objects stand out. I decided to use the 7mm Nagler along with a 5x Powermate (385x) and while I had greatly exceeded Dawes limits (200x on this 4" scope), the view was still quite nice. It will take some time to learn just how much force it takes to "nudge" this scope to track at higher powers, but the overall design and build quality of the mount

While I was in the area, I decided to take a shot at the Ring Nebula to finish up my evening. I didn't hold out much hope for this one with all the light pollution I had to deal with, but while starting out with a 26mm Nagler (20x), I was able to find the little gray smudge with averted vision. Bumping up the power to 77x with a 7mm Nagler, I was able to keep the object centered in the FOV and found I could sometimes view it with direct vision. While certainly not the best view I've ever seen of it, I was amazed at how easily the little 4" APO was able to get it under the Sacramento light dome.

While it was a short night, it sure was another fun night. Suffice it to say that I think I've finally found my perfect backyard scope for my light polluted neighborhood. The quality and ease of operation of the TV-101 and its Gibraltar mount are second to none. I still can't get over how absolutely black the backgrounds are through it. :-)

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Posted on tac-sac Sep 13, 2004 10:34:27 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Jan 09, 2005 16:08:35 PT