Doing the dob-step

[szymon]

What a wonderful evening.  Today I collected my Revelation 12" dobsonian telescope, and miracle of miracles the skies cleared up beautifully!  I started out by looking at a few specific stars -- Arcturus was the first to appear in the sky, so I panned around with the 32mm until I found it and then used it to centre the finder scope (which was way out).  I then pointed straight up at Vega, who appeared next, and noticed one huge advantage of the dobsonian mount -- no tripod means stars in the zenith are comfortable and easy to view!  Spent a good while just panning around and looking at stars, when the clouds rolled in for a bit so I took a break.  Two hours later, I come out again and there's not a cloud in the sky.

I had planned my star-hop; I wanted to find the Ring nebula, so I'd used Stellarium to pinpoint the way and knew more or less to expect.  The whole plan went out the window when I realised that my finder scope shows things inverted and backwards, so I had to flip my brain upside-down to try and get it going!  Find the triangle of stars with Vega, jump to the one that isn't a double, follow in roughly the same direction to another double, and then down.  No, the other down.  Drat, where was that last double.  Back to Vega, start again, jump, jump, *other* down, oh look there are the two stars Sheliak and Sulafat, finder in the middle between them...jump to the eyepiece and there's a fuzzy light.  Swap to the 12mm, focus and BAM -- there's a ring!  It looks absolutely lovely, clear ring with inner darker than outer.  Jump onto the 8mm, flip the focus a tiny bit (turns out the BSTs aren't actually parfocal, just pretty close), and there it is closer in, can just make out a faint star in the middle of the nebula.  Superb!

I spent another half hour or so playing, and then came inside because I have to get some work done.  I think I'll go out again in a bit, and find the dumbell.  Tomorrow I'll have the imaging rig, with 200P and HEQ5 Pro with goto and so on, and I'm sure I'll spend time working out how to polar align it and calibrate it and tune it and sync it to the stars and make it automagically find things for me...and yes I'm sure that I'll be able to find interesting things with it and take some great photos...but you know what, I think I'm probably going to spend more time with the Dob just *looking* at the skies...

-simon

[FenlandPaul]

Congrats! Look forward to hearing about more of your views.

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[estwing]

You must have fantastic skies to see that star inside the ring I couldn't manage it last year with mine...sounds like another happy dob owner!

[szymon]

You must have fantastic skies to see that star inside the ring I couldn't manage it last year with mine...sounds like another happy dob owner!

I live in Sudbury, on the border of Wembley and Harrow in North West London.  I have terrible skies :-)

But, yesterday was somehow a truly superb night for viewing.  There was scattered cloud around in places, but in the places where it was not, it was incredible!  I don't know whether that was due to the new scope or the skies though, that remains to be seen...

[Scosmico]

Welcome to the Dob mob.

[mdstuart]

Sounds like you are enjoying your new scope.

Have a look at M15 the globular in Pegasus and count the stars with your 8mm eyepiece..

Mark