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Unboxing to First Light


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I've procrastinated enough, I promised to post this and I've been looking forward to doing it.

I've done a version on my website already, but I want to put more detail into this one.

I'll start off with a massive thanks to FLO and particularly Martin. Before I originally put my order in for a 10 inch dob, they rang the suppliers who erroneously told them they had some in stock. When I put the order in, it turned out they didnt have any and the supplier didn't let FLO know that.

So, when I had spent two days making my wife jump out of her skin every time a leaf landed near the front door in a particularly noisy fashion, I rang FLO who figured out the problem then patiently sorted out my change of order.

Really good stuff, thanks guys.

Ok, so what I ended up with after all is a Celestron NexStar 127SLT Maksutov-Cassegrain. It was one of the telescopes I had orginally considered, so I wasn't disappointed to end up with it.

It arrived in a single, fairly large box which neatly took up the center of the living room. These images aren't the best quality, I was pretty keen to open it up and didn't really set the room up with taking pictures in mind.

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Unwrapping this thing wasn't as simple as it would seem. Nestled inside three boxes, one of which is the proper branded box, there wasn't much short of a truck running over it which was going to do any harm to it.

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Very impressive stuff.

Opening the last box, I was relieved to finally be getting down to some hardware. Make no mistake, this telescope is really well packaged and protected from knocks and bumps in transit.

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The tripod and mount, interestingly, are supplied already attached to each other. All that needed to happen was to tighten up the screw holding the two together.

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The various accessories which come with the 127SLT pretty much have things covered for a beginner like myself. I had already received the Revelation eyepiece kit - that 32mm ep is fabulous - but if I hadn't, the eyepieces supplied seem to be pretty good.

In this picture, we have three CDs which are the software manual, Observer List, which can be used to control the mount remotely and The Sky X, which is now useless to me, since it crashes as soon as I try to enter my location. Below the CDs you can see the Celestron 9mm and 25mm eyepieces, the NexStar handset, the red dot finder, the accessory tray and the yellow handled screwdriver. Beside that lot are the quick start guide, the hardcopy manual and the optical tube assembly.

If you are reading this and are considering buying one of these things, be warned, the OTA is surprisingly heavy. Be prepared to use both hands when moving it around.

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There is a gotcha when you are attaching the OTA to the fork of the mount. The photo below shows the OTA on the mount after I had tightened the knob as much as I could by hand. As you can see, there is daylight between the OTA and the mount.

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Easily fixed though, it's just a matter of holding the OTA square to the mount when tightening the knob. It's an awkward position to be in holding a relatively heavy OTA one handed, but it's easily doable.

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After attaching the accessory tray, NexStar handset and the red dot finder, it was time to take it outside.

Well, that was the plan. There was a short interval before I could do that, but I managed it in the end.

Now I like to think that technicaly, first light for a telescope which isn't a dedicated solar telescope has to happen at night time, right?

If thats the case, then looking through it during the day doesn't count. If it does though, the following image is literally the first thing I focused on through the telescope.

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Afocal photography is hard, I think I need something better than my HTC desire. Thats without even mentioning that I have a really boring backyard.

Now, I was expecting that the weather would be rubbish and would prevent me from getting a proper look at anything that night, but I thought I spotted some clear sky headed my way towards dusk, so I loaded everything up into a three wheeler and took off to a little spot I know to align the finder and hopefully get first light.

As it turned out, I was completely wrong, it wasn't clear sky, it was high cloud and it's altitude started changing very quickly once the sun had left the scene.

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I packed up and left pretty quickly.

As it turned out, the next night I managed to get some time under the stars and I loved it.

What an amazing mixture of frustration and elation starhunting can be!

I've spent a fair bit of time in Stellarium over the past couple of weeks and I've tried to get a feel for familiar things in the sky near me with it.

When I finally got my telescope outside, I put that practice to good use and decided that my first look through the telescope at a night object would be at Saturn. From my position, it was lying pretty much directly to the south of me, at about 30 to 35 degrees above the horizon at 22:30.

I decided not to bother with aligning the mount for this look, I wanted to just have a look at stuff.

In all, I was pretty pleased with what I saw.

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I didn't take any photos, but this is another first for me, I've tried to do a sketch on the computer to show what I saw. It isn't very good, it is the wrong size, but it gives an idea.

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I had to look it up later, but what I ended up seeing was Saturn and Titan. Like I say, fairly rubbish in comparison to some of the sketches I've seen on this forum, but it gets the message across.

I decided after that to try to align the mount. I used the initial option offered by the software, and attempted a sky align. Four times, I tried it and it didn't take at all.

Now I had previously aligned the setup on a solar system alignment, using the sun as the target - I took the eyepieces out of the diagonal and watched the splashed reflections of the sun crawl up the barrel of the diagonal until it was plain the telescope was pointing at the sun. At no point did I look directly at the sun, either with my naked eye or through the telescope. I'm well aware of how dangerous that can be.

Anyway, after spending an hour looking for different combinations of bright stars to use for a sky align, and trying a couple of times to do a two star or auto two star align, I decided to press the factory reset button and start from scratch.

That did the trick, the sky align caught this time and I started looking for different objects.

Firstly though, I asked the mount to goto Saturn, just to see how accurate the goto system is.

As it turned out, while it was pretty impressive to get the planet in the field of view, it ended up being in the far lower left quadrant of the view. Easy enough to manually slew to center it, but as I was to find out, when trying to find something which isn't as distinctive as Saturn, it would be much easier to have things a bit more central.

Still, it's an excuse to learn how to hop between stars to find things, which will be a lot of fun.

I would love to hear any tips people may have for increasing the accuracy of the goto function though - after spending a couple of nights with the telescope, I still haven't really managed to find anything but Saturn. I did find a very faint set of three stars while I was scanning around trying to find M3. It looked a bit like a triforce which had toppled over on it's side. I have no idea what it was, but it kept me interested for a while.

I've had a few more plays with the telescope since then and I'm getting more and more impressed with it, although I'm still in the situation where I haven't seen anything but Saturn and stars. I'm sure I'll get there though - its a learning curve, I'm sure.

Now, along with this telescope, I bought a set of Celestron 10 x 50 binoculars from an Amazon dealer, which unfortunately arrived with a rather shocking rattle and an inability for the left barrel to be focused.

I contacted the seller, who informed me that if I wanted to send them back to them, it would be at my own expense and I would have to jump through several rather large, flaming hoops which were being moved around when I jumped.

Thats a metaphor obviously, but it's pretty indicative of what I would have to have done to return these £23 binoculars.

Instead, today, I decided to open them up and have a look at them to see what might be the cause.

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Well, it turned out that the cause of the rattle was the prism rattling around inside the barrel. In the picture above, you can see that the prism is held in place with a metal strap which is held in place by slotting one end of it into a notch in the body of the barrel.

The end of the strap which is held in the notch, had actually come out of the notch, allowing the prism about 5mm of play.

Unfortunately, the prism hadn't entirely escaped damage, there is a tiny shard of glass chipped off the side of the prism near the eyepiece, however now it's held back in place, that chip can't be seen.

I may have dodged a bullet there. I certainly saved myself the effort of sending them back to the Amazon seller.

Now thats dealt with, the only projects I have ahead of me now are my telescope trolley and some form of observing seat.

The telescope trolley is next though - the raw materials are in the picture below.

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To sum up, I love this telescope and I plan to figure out how to get the best out of it and me.

Thanks for reading.

Alan

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Nice write up Alan. A special 'Hats Off' for having the patience to take the photo's as you unpacked. I had every intention of doing something similar but was like a kid a christmas :-)

I'm sure you will have many hours or pleasure with that setup.

Justin

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Excellent write up, it was like I was the one who just received a new scope!

You have a good scope there, good enough you may well find you upgrade everything else in the system before you are done with the OTA.

Enjoy

Barry

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Nice write up Alan. A special 'Hats Off' for having the patience to take the photo's as you unpacked. I had every intention of doing something similar but was like a kid a christmas :-)

Tell me about it. I had all these grand plans to document the building of my deck, my obsy, etc, but whenever a job needed to be done I was much more interested in doing it than photographing it!

Thanks for the write-up, Alan. It made good reading, and really helped me to re-live the excitement of a new scope. When I go and blow more money on more optics, I will blame you.

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Alan,

I'm looking at getting one of these too, thanks for posting all the pictures of unboxing and setting up process it's answered some of my questions about how manageable its going to be for delivery and I'm sure will save me a few mistakes in the setup if I do go ahead an buy one.

Tyr

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Thanks guys, I enjoyed doing it.

I've been doing a lot of lunar observation in the early evening, while the sky is still blue, but with the earthshine illuminating it.

I've given Saturn a damn good dose of looking at and I'm starting to get a bit more interested at looking at some of the brighter DSO's.

I know an f11 is probably a bit slow for the fainter ones, but surely some of them are seeable, yeah?

The only complaints I have are probably common to most observers. In the 16th century, the average height was around 5'6".

Today, the average height is around 6'. Why are tripod still at such a back creaking maximum height?

The the thing isn't really a complaint, more a comment combined with a query.

I'm starting to pick up tips here and there about solidifying the mount and tripod, but what other tips are there around for fine tuning the alignment?

The way I'm doing things at the moment, I'm doing a three star align, slewing to an object, set mount position on that object, goto another object, calibrated goto, set mount position on that object, then carry on observing.

Still though, a goto will end up being about a moon width from centre of view, sometimes more.

Any ideas?

Alan

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Great first light report. Saturn is fine..Try and pick up M3 above arcturus and see if you can resolve the stars around the edge of this globular at high power...Then split Albeiro the double at the bottom of Cygnus and finally have a go at that ring neb in Lyra (M57)..

Enjoy and report back!

Mark

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