A tour at 30x. First night out with a scope in AGES.

[Captain Scarlet]

It's been many weeks since I actually got a mount out. So long that I've actually relocated from UK to Ireland. In the UK, we had weeks and weeks of cloud. And here in West Cork I've been so busy that I've only managed a few cursory nippings-out with binoculars. Also, being almost as Westerly as one can get within the Greenwich Time Zone, 9 degrees West of where we were before, everything astronomical happens 36 minutes later. At this time of year any formal session necessarily ends not before 2am so after tiring days one needs resolve.

After Umming and Ahh-ing for ages I decided to quickly get out my Ayo II mount plus Nexus DSC, and not having allowed my Maks to cool, I put my Kowa TSN-883 spotting scope on it. 88mm aperture, 510mm FL and Kowa's 17mm "wide" eyepiece (72 degree field I understand). I have an adapter to allow 1.25" eyepieces to fit, but I can't immediately remember where it is. So 30x mag and 2.9 degree FoV it was, with my Zeiss Conquest 15x56 bins as back-up. A short wide-field night.

First in the queue was M52, now I know exactly where it is, after finding and reporting on the nearby Nova over the past few months. Through the Kowa, aside from one prominent bright star, it was still immediately a patch rather than a well-defined cluster. A little more concentration and some averted vision did allow it to just about resolve into a peppering of points. I look forward to getting it through my 12" when I've finished installing it into its new Helmerichs carbon tube.

The Double Cluster. Easily naked eye, funnily enough I've never really targeted it, it really is a wonderful sight in a wide field.

Alpha Perseii Cluster Melotte 20. One of my favourites through binoculars, it was very nice too at 30x.

Almach. I could just about split it, the colour contrast was not so evident, but the brighter of the two stars was a little affected by my own astigmatism. Obviously a short-FL scope is not the ideal instrument for splitting doubles!

Mizar/Alcor. As usual, lovely.

Cor Caroli. Wider than Almach, two pretty pinpoints.

Through the bins rather than the scope I took in the globs M13 and M92. The Kowa scope has a 45 degree diagonal and I couldn't face the gymnastics required to point it that high.

I suddenly remembered I'd not seen M31 for a long while, so after confirming I could see it naked eye (with the 55% Moon still on view my "mag level" was around 21.0), I "did" M31 although I couldn't detect M110 through the bins. I have done so from here before through 12x50s on darker nights.

I also navigated to M33 and found it as I was sweeping around not quite recalling where exactly it was. It's amazing how the faintest barely-detectable smudge can somehow still "leap out" once you've seen it enough times.

I finished off with the Moon, very low down and very brown over the Western sea.

Quite happy having bothered to get a scope out, the Kowa is actually a really good refractor with its pure Fluorite objective, and whatever prism it uses to RACI-fy  Ractify  deliver a corrected image was not detracting anything that I could discern. My easy-mount location, our patio a few steps from the utility room where the scopes are kept, has its view mainly North, albeit with a 180 degree elevated vista. From there the view south is blocked by the house, so I completely forgot that at about the time I was packing up, Jupiter and Saturn would have been very nicely on view. These are going to be my subjects over the next few days, I think, whilst the waxing Moon washes everything else out.

Thanks for reading, Magnus

 

Edited July 18, 2021 by Captain Magenta

[JeremyS]

Great to hear you are back in action, Magnus

[wookie1965]

Brilliant Magnus great read.

Paul