Clear Sky & Big Bertha

Okay, a couple evenings of clouds and rain. But tonight it was clear! I rolled Big Bertha out, and waited for the mirror to cool.

And waited.

And waited.

Definitely need to put a fan in there.

But it was still amazing. There is still a collimation problem--I think I need to put in four inch screws instead of three inch for the mirror cell to move on, but at least I was starting to get close.

But before collimation reached that point, oh my, does this gather a lot of light!

Ways To Know You Have Enough Aperture

1. You decide to increase magnification from 111x to 160x not because you need a larger image to see detail, but because Saturn is so bright that it is washing out the detail--enlarging the image makes it less overpoweringly bright.

2. You point at the Moon at 400x--and it is still too bright to make out details without a Moon filter on the eyepiece.

3. You put a cardboard off-axis aperture mask (a piece of cardboard with a hole in it) on the front of your telescope--and the aperture mask still has more aperture than your next size smaller of telescope does.

4. The Orion Nebula (M42) has an oppressively green cast to it.

5. You scroll across the sky and you are astounded at how many stars have very, very noticeable color to them--because there is now enough light to excite your cones, not just your rods.

6. Instead of looking hard and seeing one satellite of Saturn--Titan--you can't help but see four obvious satellites of Saturn. And this is from my suburban front yard!


Okay, there's still some work to do on this. Saturn was not what it should have been. I could see the Cassini Division all the way around the planet, but it wasn't black. I could see the brown cloud band on Saturn's atmosphere, but no more detail than in my 5" refractor (admittedly, at a larger scale). I went to 500x on the Moon--and while it wasn't as crisp as I would have liked, it wasn't real bad, either--and the problem was partly atmospheric turbulence. Coma is a problem (and perhaps even fixing the collimation won't solve it--this is an f/4.5 mirror, and they tend to have a bit of a coma problem). Still, it was awesome, even within these limitations.