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6:31:00 PM EDT
Sweet!
That William Optics 66SD APO looks sweet riding on my faithful C8 OTA, anyway, but, as your Uncle always says, “Purty is as purty does.” That means you’ll have to wait a little longer and allow me to do some in-depth testing before you’ll hear my final verdict on this little refractor. Shore looks nice, though, don’t it?
You’re impatient, are you? You wanna know your Old Uncle’s impressions of the 66 RIGHT NOW? Sheesh, you young folks! Well, OK, you know how tender hearted I am. But before I tell you what happened with the 66 last night after I installed the piggyback ring system to mount her on my Ultima 8, let me tell you why the U8 looks the way she does now.
Those of you who’ve known me for a while will recall that way back in ‘95, I decided to purchase what would, I thought, be the ULTIMATE C8, an Ultima C8, and that I would finally and for all time be happy. And I was happy for a few years. But people change, and Uncle Rod is no exception. After preaching about how wonderful fork mounts are for more years than I care to remember, I suddenly found myself good and sick of ‘em. Equatorial forks anyway.
The last time I took the U8 in her original form to a star party--oh, must have been the 2001 Peach State Star Gaze--I had a great time with the scope. Saw some wonderful “stuff.” But before the three days were up, I had come to the conclusion that equatorially aligned forks are a big pain in the—neck. All that bending down to look through the often weirdly placed finder and contorting my bod to get at the main eyepiece when viewing objects anywhere close to the NCP had finally got me down. I realized the fork-setup on the U8 (no goto, just equatorially aligned tracking) had always been painful. It was just that my 40-ish body was more able to take this torture than my 50-ish one now was.
How do you find objects with an Ultima 8? The OLD FASHONED WAY. I used to boast that no object in the sky could elude my combo of analog setting circles, 50mm finder, and TELRAD. And that was true. When I was in practice. Like most of you, my observing time, my deep sky observing time, is severely limited. I’d get to a star party and fumble around for a night or two before getting back into the groove. But by then it was almost time to go home.
Yep, four little letters were assuming ever more prominence in my mind (or what passes for a mind): g-o-t-o. I finally had to admit that, good as I was at star hopping, I couldn’t compete with modern technology. Even when I was really in the swing of things, people with goto scopes were seeing a lot more than I was. Sure, hunting can be fun, but after 40 years of hunting, I’m now more interested in seeing.
Step one on the path to accommodating my changing astronomical life was the purchase of my first serious goto scope, a Celestron Nexstar 11 GPS. This is a fine instrument, and I continueto use her frequently. But in the process of getting friendly with the NS11, I came to a couple more conclusions: a C8 is still the Queen of Portability, and forks are not perfect mounts when you find yourself doing more imaging and less visual work.
With increasing light pollution along the Gulf Coast and a continuing loss of remaining dark sites to developers, I’m more involved than ever in celestial picture-taking with video, CCD, and webcams. I’ve certainly used fork mounts successfully for these endeavors, but when it’s time to start piggybacking refractors and heavy cameras, one major difficulty with forks becomes increasingly obvious: balance. It’s very difficult to balance a fork in both RA and dec for substantial piggyback loads (and even a Short Tube 80 is “substantial” for a C8). Life is just a lot easier with a GEM, a “German Equatorial Mount.”
What’s one thing y’all know about me? I’m not about to spend a lot of money unless I know what I’m gettin’ into first. That being the case I decided to low-ball it when it came to a goto GEM for my Ultima 8 OTA (I was perfectly happy with the pretty black C8 tube, XLT or no XLT). Rather than a GM8 or a Sphinx, I’d try one of Celestron’s inexpensive CG5 (ASGT) mounts first. See how I liked it and whether it seemed as good an alternative to getting forked all the time as I thought it would be. I didn’t expect too much, and figgered that when the (Synta) CG5 gave up the ghost a few months hence, I’d sell the remains on Astromart to help finance a good GEM.
Surprise! Over a year later, the CG5 continues to perform like a champ on every task I set it to. Not only does it do a great job visually (the goto accuracy is at least as good as that of the NS11), it’s also proved to be a capable imaging platform that is easily autoguided. Only painful part? Removing the U8 OTA from that big, beautiful Celestron fork. It really did seem like the end of an era.
Which brings us, in Uncle Rod’s meandering fashion, back around to last night. Once I got the rings installed (a proletarian, but crazily inexpensive and perfectly functional piggyback system from Jim Henson at Scopestuff.com), I didn’t waste time setting up the C8 in the hot, muggy, and Tiger Mosquito infested backyard of Chaos Manor South. A glance to the east revealed a nice gibbous Moon, but it wouldn’t be long before it was lost in the trees
One of the wonderful things about the CG5 is that you can do a decent goto alignment with it even if you can’t see any alignment stars. Just point the RA axis in the direction you think Polaris lies, and hit “Quick Align” on the hand control. You won’t get perfect pointing, no, but it will turn on your RA tracking, and this simple alignment is often enough to place objects in the central 1/3 of the finder field, which it did with the Moon.
Being in a hurry, I didn’t run upstairs to the Equipment Vault for the premium eyepieces, just grabbed a box of 1.25”ers containing a Meade plössl or two and several of Synta’s “Expanses” (that’s what Orion calls ‘em, anyway). Inserted a Synta 9mm in the WO dielectric diagonal and took a look. It wasn’t dark yet, but there was tremendous detail visible along the terminator, detail that held up well even when I upped the power to about 150x with the aid ofa 3X barlow (Gassendi was a treat). It wasn’t dark enough to make any hard conclusions about false color on the Lunar limb; all I can say is I didn’t see any in the twilight.
With Luna lost in leaves, I switched over to the C8 and spent the next hour or so imaging Jupiter (for some of my recent shots see http://skywatch.brainiac.com/planets/index.htm). But, just before Jupe followed Diana into the limbs, I took a good look at him with the 66. What did I see? Ah-ah-ah…you li’l rascals are just gonna have to wait. I will say this, though: the 66 sucks up power like a sponge and asks for more. Despite its small aperture, it delivered such sharp images that I kept searching for shorter and shorter focal length eyepieces and more powerful barlows. Exactly what did Jupiter look like in this purty little thang? How sharp is “sharp”? Ask me again in a week or three. Till then…
Gotta Know More Now?
http://www.buytelescopes.com/manufacturer.asp?s=2&m=49
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6/8/06 10:27 PM
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