Hovering Over The Moon!

[Sunshine]

Last night was a night of great transparency although seeing wasn’t as good, it still allowed for some insane magnification of Lunar features. Using my 3.5mm for 230x I could see that I needed more power, it would have been nice to have a 2.5mm to avoid any softening but, I don’t have such an animal. What I do have is a 2.5x Powermate, surely this is insanity, I thought to myself, some quick math revealed a number of some 582x!! surely this was madness. 
 

To my shock, I was floored to see that features held up nicely, a little soft and quite a bit darker but, I was still able to see fine detail, it was as though I was looking out a thick window of an orbiting lunar ship. Features raced past at a good clip, requiring me to keep my hands on those slomo controls non stop. 
 

145x per inch of aperture lol, if someone had said that to me I would have thought they were bonkers. 

Edited March 20, 2021 by Sunshine

[John]

These Takahashi's do handle very high magnifications extremely well, conditions allowing

I didn't think I would use the 2-4mm Nagler zoom often but it seems to be my "goto" eyepiece for observing Mars, tight double stars and lunar details.

The Powermate 2.5 is a great alternative though, plus you get the extra field of view and eye relief of the Pentax XW's

 

Edited March 20, 2021 by John

[heliumstar]

I had similar experience with FS-60Q one night at ~270x. Yes, the image was dark(er) to the eye but I was actually flying over Luna. Maybe my mind is playing tricks on me since I am not sure if I remember correctly (keep notes right!) but I had similar experience with Vixen A81M as well.

[Roy Challen]

I had the same experience on Friday night, x375 in a Tal 100 is nearly x100 per inch - amazing for an achro!

Just goes to show that given the right conditions, any telescope can shine!

I used the RA drive for the first time ever on this mount too (5 years after buying it), no more twiddling 😉

 

Edited March 21, 2021 by Roy Challen

[Mr Spock]

It would be nice to have some good seeing. Just for that rare event when there are no clouds 

[Trentend]

Sensational lunar views up here in Edinburgh with a rare cloudless/windless night and the moon up high. If my maths is correct I was getting very sharp and surprisingly bright views at over x320 magnification with a little mak127, Binotron, D14’s and powerswitch on high setting. Best I’ve ever seen. Pretty small field of view (as expected) but watching the Apenninus come in to view was amazing. Gitzo and M2 very steady but I’d like to try a new mount with slow motion controls as I struggle to balance the mak and am not a nudge fan. Scopetech zero mount on the cards me thinks.

[Merlin]

A point about magnification limits. For extended objects  X50 max mag might apply in many cases, but for point sources  such as doubles, far higher magnifications can be used. William Herschel used extremely high mags for splitting close doubles.

[Andy ES]

I’ve pushed x522 mag on the moon and got away with it with my Baader Morpheus 4.5mm, well just about for a few minutes 😁