First light with my 130P

[RobertI]

Having thought I had purchased a lemon of a scope for £70 on eBay, I managed to fix the (manufacturing) issues and collimated it ready for some viewing. I was not hopeful about the quality of the optics, but tonight’s first light was a great success. With a very bright low moon intruding on the darkness, and the scope mounted on a mini-Giro and Horizon heavy duty photo tripod, I had an enjoyable time. Here are my main experiences of the scope:

- Initial star tests looked very good. High power views showed nice diffraction rings, slightly broken due to the atmospheric conditions. Stars were pinpoint with four diffraction spikes which really helped with focussing. The scope was nicely collimated. 

- The single speed focuser worked well and was a vast improvement on the helical focuser of the Heritage 130P, allowing the use of a twist zoom eyepiece and accurate focusing. It’s pretty basic rack and pinion but works well.

- The drawtube allows the removal of the 1.25” adaptor and reveals what looks like a 2” fitting with two securing screws. But bizarrely it’s slightly too small for 2” eyepieces, so must be a photo fitting of some sort. 

- Looking at some wide doubles like Albireo and Mizar was a joy, the apochromat mirrors showing the colour contrasts beautifully, and Vega and Deneb looking blue-white in colour. Polaris’s companion was nicely visible.

- Upping the ante, I thought I’d try Pi Aquilae. At 1.4” separation it’s not a trivial split but at 180x it was easily split with a clear gap between and some nice faint diffraction rings visible.

- Open clusters in Cassiopeia and Cygnus were lovely in spite of the bright sky, with the ET cluster the right way round and waving at me cheerfully.  

- M13 was nicely resolved but not spectacular in the bright conditions.

So all in all it exceeded my expectations and will be a very nice grab and go setup. I think these small sized newts get a bad reputation as they are so often sold as cheap packages with poor quality mounts and tripods. But they really DO perform mightily well.   

As an aside, I think the secondary mirror on mine is oversized like the 130PDS. It is certainly larger than the Heritage 130P, but it didn’t affect its performance and I now think the 130PDS could make a very nice visual scope despite being optimized for imaging.

[Alan White]

That sounds like a resounding success grappled from potential upset Rob, great job in rescue.
The 130 size is a bit Goldilocks in my view, not to big, not too small.

[lunator]

Rob, well done on getting the scope sorted. 

Hopefully plenty of enjoyable views ahead 😀

Cheers

Ian