Short OR and equipment review 01/12/08

Dave Staples

Saturday night finally brought clear skies in the North Bay...at least until the marine layer rolled in at about 10:30.

Conditions at my backyard in Santa Rosa weren't great seeing was poor and humidity was high. I stayed with the bright stuff, the Moon and Mars (my 8 year old loves the planets), M42, and a bunch of multiple systems in Orion. After about 45min both my telrad and optical finder were dewed over, but with one of Mark W's dew shields my corrector stayed clear.

Seeing was no good above 120x and Mars was just a milky orange disk with no detail. The moon was better although still boiling. Rupes Cauchy a 120km long escarpment was nice and sharp, and the 2 parallel rays heading west from the Messier craters were bright and a hit with my daughter. Orion was well placed and the trapezium was showing 5 stars most of the time at 120x.

Now for the equipment review. I received 2 new eyepieces (actually 3, but the 24mm is backordered) for Christmas, 13mm and 17mm Baader Hyperions. They are panoptic wannabe's with a 68 deg field of view. I tried them in my C8 and Orion ST80. I only have generic Plossl's to compare them with, but I was very pleased with the contrast in the Hyperions. Both the 13 and 17 were crisp to the edges with the C8 but lost a little of that crispness with the ST80, but then again in the ST80 the field of view was 2.21deg/31x and 2.89deg/24x respectively.

Overall I'm pretty happy with the Hyperions, especially since I was able to get three of them for the price of one panoptic. It was nice to finally get a chance the try the eyepieces out, I think the weather gods were especially harsh on me since I hadn't bought any hardware for about 3 years.

Cheers,

Dave