Saturn - under first clear skies for weeks

[russ]

Had my first clear sky for a couple of weeks last night. Transparency was poor but seeing quite steady. There were some brief moments where the high cloud cleared but on the whole it was pretty murky.

I've had a huge purge of my kit lately, not much left but i have added a couple of cheap bits to bolster what i had left.

Firstly was a 6mm Skywatcher UWA from Andrew. This gives a perfect 200x in the dob and i've owned this type eyepiece twice before when times are hard.

The second item bought was a Celestron Astromaster 90 ota. This is to be my new white light solar scope replacing the Bresser Skylux 70. But i couldn't resist testing it on the nightsky.

Sadly with the transparency so poor that ruled out any deepsky observations, so only really left with Saturn and Mars.

Saturn - I turned the AM90 onto Saturn and started off with the Pentax XF12. Have to say i almost fell over backwards when i looked through the eyepiece. Wasn't expecting much to be honest, after all it's only a cheap scope. Really wasn't expecting a razor sharp image free of chromatic abberation....hmm that's impressive. Added a GSO 2.5x barlow to the mix and the view was better still. Still razor sharp but with added image scale the banding popped into view. It was incredibly good.

I compared it to the 8" dob and found the dob equally sharp and brighter but lacking the contrast of the 90mm refractor. That said, the longer i looked through the dob, the better the view got. Both scopes topped out around 200x, so the seeing wasn't brilliant. But that banding was clearly defined and the rings pin sharp crossing the planet.

Mars - a real tough cookie now! Getting so small and the seeing had reduced further by the time i moved onto Mars. Both scopes showed a nice sharp but very small disk at 200x. And both scopes showed the polar cap without any problem but absolutely no other markings to see. A better night where a little more power could have been applied may have teased out a little extra but not this night.

The AM90 showed just a tiny bit of CA when looking at Mars but with the focus nailed it really was tiny and not at all distracting. Highly impressive for a cheap mass produced achromat. The f11.11 focal ratio obviously helping quite a bit. A very mild colour filter would probably remove it entirely.

Nice to see some night sky again, if only briefly. But the forecast shows the weather on the up now, so hopefully plenty of clear skies coming in the next few weeks, nicely timed with new moon.

Russ

[Doc]

With the weather being so bad recently it's always good to venture out as much as possible, I did as well last night.

That little AM90 sounds just the ticket for planets, well done Russ for a nice report.

[russ]

Thanks Mick, it was nice to be out. Were you planet watching or did your skies allow some deepsky too?