12" DOB 1st Light....... ........ ........

[deepspacehunter]

I got up at 3 am , looked outside, the sky was mostly clear.... It was a great opportunity to check out my 12" Starhopper Dob....  knowing that there was an almost full moon high in the sky, I still proceeded to go ahead and check the optics...   I go to a place sometimes right close to home... it is on the property of my job, and the property is always open, although it is not the darkest site, it is a nice spot where there are no lights street lights visible, yay.... SO..........

I arrived @ 3:40 am... set the base on the ground, then put the big tube on the mount...( oh, the joy and ease of a dob ).... As I scanned around, I was VERY impressed at the amount of stars that I was seeing ( 20mm NAGLER ).... I had to remind myself that there was a full moon in the sky... so I was enjoying the myriads of stars...  M41 was beautiful....NGC 2362, also beautiful... after about an hour of cool down time....TIME TO CHECK COLLIMATION....STAR TEST... it was off just a little.... tweaked it to perfect..... then put my Wollensack 2" 12.5 Eyepice in and WOW...I MEAN WOW.... I was very impressed in the flat field, my object was JUPITER.... it was very sharp and there was a shadow transit of one of the moons,  the shadow was a perfect black round BB sized dot....I enjoyed looking at JUPITER for about 30 mins, then I put the 20mm NAGLER back in the scope and started looking around in the area of Canis Major and surrounding areas, but the 1st thing that I noticed..... THE MIRROR WAS READY NOW....and WOW, WOW, WOW...star fields were so beautiful all over, the pinpoint stars just made this old veteran astronomer smile like a little kid at Christmas time, I know that in a dark sky .... We are going to enjoy this BIG DOB and the great views SO MUCH, can't wait... so needless to say, I am very pleased with this CELESTRON BIG DOB !!! ....... I have found that CELESTRON consistently puts out very outstanding optics, no matter what type Telescope it is...

Clear and Dark Skies

Mark

[deepspacehunter]

The picture is a stock picture of the DOB, but I have upgrade the straight through finder to a CELESTRON 9 x 50 RACI FINDER.....

Mark

[cotterless45]

Superb, I've found Celestron gear just a cut above others at the same price point. Hope you get some clear skies to enjoy the simplicity of a big Dob,

Nick.

[Reeny]

The carry handles look useful.

What a good idea.

[John]

Lovely enthusiastic report

I too have some good experiences of Celestron scopes and optics. The Starhopper 12 is an interesting scope as I believe the optics and tube are made by GSO but the dob base is identical to a Skywatcher.

[estwing]

Great report thanks sharing...

[jabeoo1]

You wont ever tire of how intuitive and rewarding a scope like that is.  I really enjoy mine and have found loads with it.  Manual control really makes learning and finding things really rewarding.

Nice one very good choice !

[tarotrocola]

I love my 12 too, yes, it's big and heavy to handle, but once it is in place you forget about it.. also, I find that the height of the eyepiece is usually more confortable than in smaller scopes, and you won't move it a bit changing eyepieces..

[swamp thing]

Nice one Mark.

You can't beat steering a big Dob around the sky. Its as good as this hobby gets IMO. 

Enjoy