My Newt is fixed - woohoo!

[rocketandroll]

Sorry, no actual nice pics... but after it's nasty fall, two months of pfaf and a repair at Orion... I finally managed to get first (second?) light on my Newt last night... and wanted to share

Still don't have a working laptop (after the drive died on it) so no guiding... but I just wanted to check if the optical gremlins were worked out of the Newt now..

Set up quickly (note to self, there is such a thing as too quick... if it doesn't look like Polaris, and doesn't smell like Polaris, it probably isn't Polaris, and that's why you were getting star trails on 10 second subs Ben)... and took a few subs on different subjects to try and see if things were working.

Nothing serious, so appologies for the ghastly pics, they were just to see if I still had bloaty fuzzy stars.... a few darks but (clearly from the dust motes everywhere) no flats.

first off, a couple of mins on the Beehive in 30 sec subs...

Not looking too bad...

then I did a few minutes on M3 as it had cleared the trees...

Also not too bad, again, at least the stars are small and tight... not the massive fuzzy blobs I was getting before.

I also did 20 mins on M51 but in 30 sec subs it really isn't worth posting :-)

It was a nice size in the frame though... I am REALLY looking forward to doing it true justice later in the year with some 5 min subs.

So... I'm a happy bunny.

I've now got a reliable scope at 345mm focal length for really big widefield subjects in the Meg, a working long focal length (1.2m) scope for galaxies, globulars etc in the Newt, and I've just bitten the bullet and agreed to buy an almost new FLT110 to fill the middle ground... so i'm fully covered for most subjects now.

Just need a good garden to work from :-)

These were taken under a bright moon from my garden which is about as light polluted as it's possibkle to get (2 X 1000 watt+ floodlight towers for the docks within 200yds of the end of the garden)... we're moving in April, somewhere more rural... so look for some new pics coming soon :-)

Ben

[Tim]

Thank goodness for that Ben!!! Very glad to hear you are back in business.

Tim