First light - the long version :-)

[ThomasBR]

This is premature and rushed I thought yesterday evening while I carried my recently acquired HEQ5 mount out of the shed and into my garden – two evenings ago I had only just aligned the polar scope but not aligned the finder to the main scope and had only tried to assemble the entire setup once inside the shed.

I got the mount pointing reasonably north and got it level using a carpenter’s spirit level. I then put on the mount head and tried to do polar alignment. I used “polar finder” on my HTC to determine the right position of Polaris. Unfortunately, I was unable to see any stars in the polar scope not matter how much I adjusted the focus. And I did remember to move the scope to “open up” for the polar scope. Even when I turned off the illumination of the polar scope I couldn’t find any stars. I found this strange as I two days previously had managed to find Polaris with the polar scope (got the mount before I got the scope). Anyway I carried on regardless. Not remembering the unaligned finder I thought that I would just put the mount and home position and center Polaris in the finder/main scope to do a rough PA.

I mounted my also recently acquired SW 200p and adjusted the finder to be reasonable parallel to the main scope and looked for Polaris in both the finder and the main scope. To my joy I could see a lot of stars which were not visible to the naked eye, but I couldn’t discern which of them were Polaris so, instead I slewed to a street light to get at least some kind alignment (probably not the best). But alas, I could not find the street light in the 25mm EP. So, now frustrations were mounting – this WAS probably too premature so I decided to just scan the sky randomly looking at the stars – this turned out to be quite enjoyable. At some point I noticed a distinct pattern of four stars and thought that maybe I could see that in the finder as well. Indeed I could and then I used that to align the finder.

Now wisps of fog started to drift in so I had to move fast to see anything but random stars. From previous (rather unsuccessful) nights trying to photograph M31 using my flimsy tripod and 500D I knew how to find it. Hence, I slewed to about the region where I expected (on the way I managed to enhance the finder alignment using Mirach). I did some kind of home brewed spiral type search and suddenly M31 was in sight – wauw J

After having marveled at the sight for a while I got the grand idea (NOT!) to take some pictures of M31. I managed to put on my 500D but of course focus was completely out. As I couldn’t see M31 on “live view” I repeated to take pictures and adjust focus. At some point I had enough of that and set the camera to take ten shots. While it was firing away I thought I would have a look at M31 through the finder but it was all covered in dew. I then realized that the fog was getting thick and haze/high level clouds were rolling in so I stopped the camera, popped in the 25mm EP and tried to find Jupiter (which was below M31).

As the finder was covered in dew I just looked along the OTA to judge where it was pointing and managed to find Jupiter quite quickly (somewhat to my surprise). I quickly upped my magnification in a few steps and ended with the supplied 2x Barlow and 10mm EP. After focusing I could clearly see two distinct red/brown bands and (I think) a couple of the moons. I was awestruck for a few minutes before the clouds/haze/fog chocked the sight.

When I afterwards looked at the (horrible) M31 pictures I could see substantial drift – hence the PA was probably way off. Anyway what started out as a frustrated rush job actually ended out quite well – it took me more than an hour to fall to sleep after having taken down the kit.

[Nexus 6]

Looks as if you had quite a night!, cannot comment on the set up, I use go to.... still must have been a thrill to see a few nice objects