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New scope, new eyepiece


jonathan

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I have been waiting patiently for a good clear night to take my new Skywatcher 150P out to perform final collimation, the star test, having already checked as much as I can indoors. This would also be the first time out with a 5mm eyepiece for me, my 8SE apparently too slow to use one.

I mounted the 150P on my Omni CG-4 mount and tripod, the large and small weights were required to balance the scope. The star test seemed to be correct, a perfect circle surrounding a black dot in the centre as I moved in and out of focus, although with the turbulent atmosphere it was a rather chaotic looking circle with animated spikes and such.

Views through the eyepiece looked good, stars were reasonably sharp points and the moon looked magnificent (with moon filter). I aligned the finder scope and trained it on Jupiter, just next to the almost full moon. I was pleasantly surprised at how much of the bands I could see, seems to be much better than I remember the 8SE (which hasn't been out for quite some time due to the weather). It would not surprise me if the 150P and 5mm eyepiece combination is better for Jupiter than the 8SE, unless I can get absolutely perfect conditions which just isn't going to happen from my back garden.

There was some dew but not a massive amount, although the 25mm did dew up when I left it on the tripod eyepiece rack with the caps off. The new 6" Astrozap dewshield seemed to do it's job - the main body of the scope was wet but the mirrors remained clear. The finder was dewing up towards the end of my relatively short session (only about 1 1/2 hours), may think about making a small dew shield for that out of foam card.

I cheekily tried my 38mm 2" eyepiece, I removed the 1 1/2 inch adaptor and slotted the eyepiece in, but found that there wasn't enough focuser travel to achieve focus... so I moved the eyepiece out slightly until it was in focus. A simple tube should solve this problem, I shall have to look into acquiring something official for it (maybe that's what a focal reducer is? I have no idea in reality).

Eventually the clouds rolled in, thin stuff to start off with but the main cloud bank wasn't far behind, soon enough there was only the moon and Jupiter, and a few other bright stars, visible. Time to pack up and enjoy the rest of my Christmas Day evening in the warmth. A successful first night out, and a much faster and easier pack-up time than the 8SE / NEQ6.

blogentry-2740-0-46358200-1356473843_thu

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Second time out with the 150P - I had a go at some of the Moore Winter Marathon. Managed to see the Fish's Mouth and Trapezium in the Orion Nebula, quite impressed really despite the relatively poor seeing conditions (compared to last time).

It's certainly interesting to compare to my 8SE, that has more power for sure (especially with the 38mm eyepiece) but the views are not that dissimilar.

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