A proper first light, and an 'interesting' evening!

[v4169sgr]

Saying this becuse it was 'interesting', and interesting, if you see what I mean!

Yesterday, my 14 yr old son and I decided that 'tonights the night' we're finally going to do something with the Orion CT8 + EQ6 beyond fiddling with the collimation, wondering what this 'mount' thing was and how it all fitted together. I've had it a long time but have never plucked up the courage to go all the way until last night. Did NOT regret it one bit - even though one of our paving slabs did!

Our back garden is suburban, ringed with bright streetlamps, and faces north-east, with a high southern horizon, and the house behind us as we look at Polaris.

I set up during the day very gradually on our circular patio. The EQ6 is a beast and takes two to handle safely. Took me a while to remember how to correctly set up the equipment tray without spread-eagling the legs. I took out the adjustment screws that came with the mount, and replaced them with some tougher ones. All except for the, crucial, altitude increasing adjustment screw, which just would not go in because as it was turned the plastic moulded screw handle collided with the polar scope & was made worse by the increasing angle of the mount's RA axis during the procedure.

I then collimated the CT8 OTA, by carrying it out, placing it [very!] approximately level on two plastic chairs, removing the cover, sighting along the tube from a fair way away, and then using a Hotech laser collimator attached through the sight tube. The primary and secondary were approximately lined up to begin with, and lining up the secondary on the primary using the secondary adjustment screws to centre the red spot on the primary within the 'doughnut' was amazingly easy. However, we found that the sight tube itself WOBBLES from left to right, even though the Hotech was very firmly attached. In the end we compromised by picking a middle position, and using that to line up the primary on the secondary, using the massive great screws on the base of the mirror to adjust the beam path so that it fell on the centre of the target in the Hotech. The collimation process was a great deal easier than previous, but could only have been approximate due to the sight tube wobble.

My son and I then carried the OTA out to the mount to mate the dovetail with the flanged fitting on the top of the mount. We were in the process of sliding the dovetail in, when the ENTIRE MOUNT TOPPLED AND FELL OFF THE TRIPOD, leaving us holding the OTA. Could have been far worse, could have been the OTA too, and one of us could have been standing there! I had of course forgotten to secure the mount to the tripod using the tripod's centre screw. The mount was just fine, apart from a few chips on the paintwork, but the paving slab it landed on smashed into three parts!

After picking up, dusting off, and refitting everything, we secured the OTA, fitted the power supply & made sure the mount powered up, brought the eyepieces and light proof cloth out, and retreated to wait for darkess. We could not locate a 12V supply with an appropriate fitting for the fans at the base of the mirror, so had to leave that for now for another occasion.

First thing we attempted after dusk was the polar alignment, which is where we had real trouble. I had the EQ6 manual, and had printed out two sets of third party instructions as well. In short, we had real trouble. Calibrating the polar scope itself was not much of a problem, although we had to shine a torch on the light proof material [a pale cream] and hold it in front of the polar scope's aperture to see the markings inside the reticule, or else hold the torch beam just to one side while looking through the polar scope so that we could see Polaris at the same time as the markings. We had to fiddle quite a bit though to even get approximately lined up with Polaris i.e. see it in the polar scope at all. We also had to hold up the light proof material like a screen [or hang it on the OTA] to avoid being blinded by the annoying street lamp just across the road while trying the locate Polaris.

It was the next bit, about adjusting the polar scope for the date and time when Polaris crosses the meridian, and adjusting for the difference between that date and time and the date and time last evening, that really had us foxed. We had a really hard time relating the instructions to anything on the mount that we could see in front of us i.e. what is the 'index marker', the 'RA setting circle', the 'white line'. Placing the circle representing Polaris a the bottom of the field of view [i.e.really the top, as the field of view is inverted] by rotating the telescope around the RA axis was not too much trouble, it was working out what to do and how to do it from then that proved troublesome. We did not understand at all how to achieve the 'two zeros': I could adjust the date circle to zero underneath a metal pointer we found easily enough, but then could not lock the date circle in place as the tiny fiddly locking screws could not be turned. There was a white line, but it was on the lower left hand side of the circle, and not on the right hand side as per the diagrams we were looking at.

After quite a while of head-scratching, we just used the adjusting screws in the mount to center Polaris where we thought it should be, and then turned the mount's power on, entered our latitude and longitude, and local date and time and summer time setting - correctly. But of course when we tried a three star alignment & instructed the mount to slew to the first star, using the finder and the 'Super 25' eyepiece that came with the scope, it was WAY OFF, 50 degrees or more, and we had to sort of optimistically 'adjust' [read 'dramatically slew to a different part of the sky'] using the arrow keys on the handset. Finding the second and third stars was a lot less traumatic [running inside a few times to check up on Stellarium to see where e.g. Regulus was] and required fewer adjustments, but we did not get the alignment to work, after two attempts. No surprise as we did not have the scope believably polar aligned.

If we could find some CLEAR AND SIMPLE instructions for polar aligning an EQ6, for TOTAL DUFFERS, preferably with photographs, that would help us a lot!!!

So in the end I suggested manually lining up on Jupiter using the handset. We still had [visual] tracking, if not alignment, so we could line up manually even if we could not use the goto. Did not take too much finding (!), and Jupiter with the Super 25 was quite a sight. It was after the popped in the Baader Hyperion clickstop zoom though that the 'wow-factor' really came into play. 12mm was probably the best magnification as it allowed us to see Jupiter as a disk with clear banding, and Io as well as the other three Galilean moons very clearly. We could even see the effect of Io's motion [approaching the limb of the disk from the right hand side, as we saw it]. And of course we could see that the plane of the moons, and of the banding, was lined up. At 8 mm though for the most part turbulence limited the view, the image was 'swimming', and focus was almost impossible to achieve. Could have been the lack of fans, but I doubt it as the scope had been in positon for some time by this time. Most likely the line of sight from where we had set up, straight over the top of the house, did not help! I really had wanted us to see M42 in Orion, and M37 in Auriga the same evening, but as Orion was setting behind the house by this time, and as we could only see the five brightest stars in Auriga by eye and did not have goto, I decided to stop for the evening.

Definitely a night to remember, for my son and I, both for the viewing and for other things!

[Langy]

It sounds like you had a quite a time. Quite lucky with the mount and having the OTA in your hands at the time. Just goes to show that things can turn out quite expensive with a lapse in concentration.

Glad you ended up having a good observing session, it makes all the earlier frustrations all worth while as a learning curve.

[v4169sgr]

It sounds like you had a quite a time. Quite lucky with the mount and having the OTA in your hands at the time. Just goes to show that things can turn out quite expensive with a lapse in concentration.

Glad you ended up having a good observing session, it makes all the earlier frustrations all worth while as a learning curve.

Thanks Paul

I would say 'ignorance / forgetting' as opposed to 'lapse of concentration' ....   And a VERY STEEP learning curve when it comes to the practical side ...!!

[Astro Imp]

Glad to read that none of your expensive equipment was damaged by your mishap.

Starting this hobby is a very steep learning curve but after a few sessions things that seemed difficult/impossible do start to get easier. Its like anything really the more you use your equipment the more familiar you become with it.

Stick at it and every little success will spur you on for the next time.

Good luck.