First light report OMEGON ProCC 154/1800

[wouterdhoye]

Hi,

No less than 2 nights after receiving my new telescope I was able to give it first light. Quite a miracle as usually you get three months of clouds after receiving new gear. or maybe there is a correlation with the cost. this one was fairly inexpensive.

anyway. Conditions were not quite ideal. Seeing was only so so and transparency was quite bad with a creamy haze.

The setup:

The Omegon Pro CC 154/1800 was installed on my 20year old Vixen GP with Boxdoerfer controller (this is becoming sorta vintage gear 🙂 ) on the back of the telescope is a baader flip mirror, ZWO filter wheel and QHY5-III-462C camera. Eyepiece at the flip mirror is a baader Zoom 8-24mm. The RDF on the scope is a baader Sky Surfer V.

It took some fiddling to get everything parfocal but all worked out quite fine and was very solid. Also the focuser on the telescope which by no means is a feathertouch (which costs way more than this scope) worked flawlessly with no play shifting sagging or the like. Focuser movement was sufficiently smooth and manual focusing was no problem. 

Cooldown:

open tube systems do suffer from air current as long as the scope is not cooled down. below image clearly shows the heat plume.

15 minute later 5the scope would have been outside then somewhere between 30 and 45minutes. it looks like below.

I think this kind of acclimatization is normal and acceptable considering the scope was indoors in a heated room. Storing in a cool place would reduce this effect considerably.

The collimation is not perfect, but I, at this moment did not bother tweaking it. I did tweak secondary collimation indoors with a Tak collimation scope. There only a slight adjustment was required. And from the above only a minor tweak of the primary will be required to get a nice concentric pattern.

I'm not much of a visual observer so will not comment too much on that. For me, besides the bad seeing the images was quite pleasing.

Imaging was was a joy. The scope is easy to focus, and the resulting, processed images are the result. Notice however that these were shot under not quite ideal conditions. So I guess there is a lot more potential to this scope as what is shown below.

Conclusion,

There is a lot of potential to this scope for lunar imaging. Resolved detail is excellent and would give the novice (and even the more experienced selenographer) an impressive value for money. This scope only costs €400,- brand new. Compare that to €7000,- for my 12"CFF. 

I'm sure this little gem will give me loads of fun. The entire setup is light enough to take out in one go.

Highly recommended for lunar imagers on the go!

Clear skies.

Wouter.

[callisto]

Nice report, thanks for sharing 👍

 

Mark

[Nik271]

Thanks for the review! It does look a nice planetary scope and 90% of the time the seeing does not need more than 150mm of aperture. If I didn't have two Maks already I will be tempted to get one of those. Here in the UK there is also the StellaLyra line which is I think very similar.

By the way you got the 'eyes of Clavius', great! I was looking for an image of this from last night, exactly what I saw visually.

[neil phillips]

Good report. look foward to seeing what it can do under good conditions

[wouterdhoye]

Second light served to optimize the telescope. I corrected collimation. During the day I used a takahashi collimation scope to correct the secondary positioning. At night I collimated the primary on a star.

the out of focus images look a lot better now. Allowing the scope ample time to cool down helped a lot too. this image was taken about 2,5 hours after taking the scope outside.

the results are a lot better too. despite less seeing than yesterday and rather annoying wind the results are noticeably better.

I leave it to this on reviewing this telescope on an imagers perspective. And hope many other prospective buyers of these GSO made classical cassegrain telescope will find it a useful reference.

Clear skies,

 

Wouter D'hoye