Getting a CELESTRON C6-R

[deepspacehunter]

I am getting a CELESTRON C6-R    6" Refractor... The summer sky here in Florida has been terrible for observing this year. The sky should start to improve soon.. my Refractor will have a Moonlite focuser. I will post  a First Light Report when possible !

6" F//8     Focal Length 1200mm

Mark

[John]

Congratulations Mark

I've owned a few of those - they are fun scopes !

Is it going on your Atlas mount ?

[southernman]

I have the skywatcher equivalent and am more than happy with it's performance . Enjoy!

Peter

[deepspacehunter]

Thx guys... and YES , it is going on the Atlas mount, the go to is spot on.....

Mark

[russ.will]

In a sick kind of way, I'm heartened to hear that somebody else has suffered a terrible summer of weather!

Okay, at out latitude there is no true astro dark for a a good month mid-summer making weather somewhat moot, but every time the diary has been empty and I've looked out to see clear skies, it's been accompanied by a near full moon.

I think this is karma equalising the balance of my first winter with a decent scope three years ago, much like it did when I took up skiing. Barely able to stand on skis, my first venture to the Alps delivered lovely bright and crisp -10deg C days, with 100-150mm of fresh snow falling every night. "Is it always like this?" I ventured to my friends over the evening meal in the chalet on the penultimate night. A brief pause was broken by a chorus of derision, pointing and laughter.

I had no idea.

10 years later, I now realize that I had basically been given the keys to a Ferrari and a warm, dry empty track, but had only just got my provisional car license, with nought but a year on a moped to count as experience. And so it was with my first winter of astronomy. Ice welded to my hat by 8pm and weeks of nose stinging, sub zero, crystal clear skies lasting weeks at a time, seemed about right. However, prior to this, I did not stand outside mid winter into the wee hours on a regular basis to know what average was. Now I do, I wish I'd started a few years earlier because on that first winter, I could barely collimate, had £30 eyepieces and regularly wasted an hour wondering why my GOTO scope was pointing at the ground, due to some abhorrent colonial system of date notation that I'd forgotten about, whilst cramming all the other stuff into my tiny brain.

Still, next time the powder is knee deep, the track dry and my hat frozen, I'm ready and I don't need GOTO anymore than I need an automatic gearbox, or beginners skis set to 'slow'. Dare I remind myself that the first winter was proceeded by a rubbish summer too.....?

Russell

PS. Sorry about the OT, but sometimes a casually observed phrase necessitates a wordy rant!

[cotterless45]

Nice rant !

Just completed my 76th session this year. We've had a super summer, one of the very best for observing. The rest of the grab and go nights have been greatly enhanced by GOTO. In addition my C6r has enabled observing through haze and thin cloud.

In many instances this has enhanced the view , particularly of planets.

Lots of nights have turned out opposite to the forecasts. We live on the edge of town and I'm at the point of giving up on faint fuzzies and big aperture .

There are plenty of sustainable targets and a 6" refractor is a mighty handy weapon , even for brighter deep sky targets. We find that a 2" diagonal and a Baader semi apo filter gives an apo performance, not only reducing ca , but helping with tight star splitting. At this price , the collimatable Cr6 is simply astounding value.

I'd also advise a dew heater around the base of the dew shield . You might like to make one as per my mate Lee, down the road,

http://www.atm.me.uk/Lee--Making-his-own-dew-heater/lee--making-his-own-dew-heaters-30-5-14.html

If you like a project to dip in and out of with a frac, then I'd recommend http://www.amazon.com/Double-Stars-Small-Telescopes-Stargazing/dp/1931559325 and the link below.

We had terrific fun last night with an Opticstar 80mm f5 achro, finding comet Jacques then an assortment of about 50 clusters and brighter deep sky. We limited our observing from x16 to x50.

Hoping that we are heading speedily towards those long dark nights with

Clear Skies !

[John]

I used to use the Chromacor CA / SA correctors with the 6" F/8's that I owned. Amazing devices which actually corrected CA rather than filtering it out. When properly matched to the objective they corrected SA too (common in these scopes) which tightened up performance at high magnifications considerably and extended the useful range to 300x plus on good nights. Unfortunately Chromacors are as rare as hens teeth these days and have become very expensive to acquire generally but if you ever come across one at a decent price (I managed to find 3 over a couple of years) well worth picking up. They are quite fussy about installation and scope collimation though but the fixes for this are well documented on the web.

ES and Istar are supposed to be working on similar optical correctors but have gone a bit quiet on this front of late. Perhaps they feel that there is more mileage in bringing ED 6" scopes to the market rather than correctors for achromats ?

I tried a couple of MV type filters but they could not get close to the Chromacor levels of correction and seemed to tint the image in a way I was not keen on.

[Tacobrahe]

Nice rant!!