Some Messiers and Heritage 130p first light

[Mr niall]

This is sort of a combined first light / observing report I guess.

After a few months off I finally landed on a heritage 130p courtesy of @FLO, without doubt the worlds most understanding retailer! The plan was to get the skyliner 200p but after “discussions” at home (along the lines of “it’s how big? Where are we supposed to put that!!” And so on, we settled for the 130p, safe in the knowledge that if it was terrible it was Neil English’s fault...)

Anyway, collimation was miles off on both primary and secondary, which was probably a good thing as it was a good opportunity spending at least an hour learning the skills to collimate a newt! I won’t add to the hundreds of reviews about this scope out there but in terms of value for money it truly is amazing and very well thought out and put together.

Because I live in a very light polluted area, and because I’m truly terrible at astronomy, I generally use the @BinocularSky newsletter for planning all my sessions, as these are quite nice bright easy to find targets that even I can normally track down! Also the clicky maps can be printed out and are great in the field.

last night I thought I’d add to my messier tally; so settled on M10 and 12, allegedly big and easy to find even for me....

Disaster! Spent 15 minutes not seeing anything through the eyepiece, wouldn’t focus, couldn’t pick anything up. Was the RDF off? Had I broken it, maybe I’d collimated wrong? Maybe I’d damaged it?

The front protective cap was still on ?, despite sitting in my garden on my own, in the dark, I still actually looked around to check nobody had seen my error ha ha. Anyway, I was now up and running!

Ive been using Opticstar WA66 degree eyepieces. It turns out these aren’t very good; anything outside the middle 60 percent drops off rapidly to a smudgy mess and it’s impossible to focus across the whole field of view. They are not an improvement over the bundled eyepieces. BUT they are only £17 and are quite useful for finding things so they’ll do for now.

Anyway - after drifting around I found either M10 or 12 (not sure which!) a very very faint smudge, had almost momentary glimpses of granularity but nothing significant. I think this was a combination of it not being dark enough, and the focus issues with the lower quality eyepieces and crazy helical focusser (I actually quite like it).

With abut if help from sky safari I noticed a quite distinctive rhombus shape of stars nearby that meant this was M10: so with a bit of stars hopping it only took about 15 seconds to get to M12.

M12 was a similar experience but I’d say the more pleasant of the two, felt bigger and less tightly clustered with almost a hint of structure and core; maybe I’d focussed better or it was getting darker. I don’t know ?. But was definitely my fave.

Finished up on saturn, bands easy to separate with the 6mm, but no Cassini division, couldn’t seem to pin down a good focus but in all honesty I think this really was atmospheric. Certainly no colour - a uniform butterscotch all the was across. Still a marvel though!

All told, a great session though, brill to be out under the stars again! Did some sketching, but I’ve lost the knack I think... and also lost my red torch somewhere so was mostly guesswork!

 

[happy-kat]

That's a great report.

They sure are a tidy, capable, compact, portable telescope and versatile with being able to put the telescope on other mounts having a standard dove bar.

[cotterless45]

Great report. The Heritage likes BST Starguider eps, give great results,

Nick.

[Mr niall]

22 minutes ago, cotterless45 said:

Great report. The Heritage likes BST Starguider eps, give great results,

Nick.

Thanks Nick, I’ve actually lined up the 25mm as my next purchase (when the financial dust settles from this one of course!...)

[wookie1965]

I've had all of the BST'S I use the 25mm now as my scanning eyepiece.

[Eastman]

Great report, the heritage 130p is a great scope for his size. But put it under a dark sky a little later this year and you be amazed of it's capability.

I also use it as a grab and go for lunar observation. Have fun with it.

[BinocularSky]

I use a Heritage 130P primarily for teaching purposes. Cracking little scope and remarkably good VFM. What I also like about it is that I can take it of the Dob mount and pop it on my AZ4. I have a half-way decent 8-24mm zoom eyepiece which is remarkably good fun with it (not as good an image as my BST 18mm, though).