Big Bertha 2.0: Wow!
I mentioned that the optics seem to be behaving themselves. A friend came over for dinner last night, and we rolled Big Bertha 2.0 out. Unfortunately, Saturn was low in the west, and Jupiter was low in the east, so turbulence impaired image quality pretty seriously. But for objects closer to the zenith, the results were awesome!
I was able to find M13 (the globular cluster in Hercules) without too much of a struggle--and at 111x, it didn't look radically different from this image. It has been often compared to a loose collection of tiny diamonds on black velvet; but remember that this is actually about 100,000 stars, 20,000 light years away.
M57, the Ring Nebula, was not quite as large as this at 111x, but again, it wasn't dramatically worse. And it actually had some color through Big Bertha. (The larger the mirror, the more light there is, and the more light means the more opportunity for the cones of your eye to respond--which is why you see color. Rods show black and white; cones show color.)
I still have to resolve some balance problems to get the clock drive to keep everything moving correctly. I am not quite balanced, so if I turn the balance clamps tight enough to prevent the scope from moving on its own, they are too tight for the clock drive to move everything. But I should get that resolved in the next few days, and be able to start do astrophotography of these deep sky wonders.
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