Big Mak's Back!

[Nightspore]

 

At about 20:20 on Thursday I set up the Big Mak’ (127mm Synta Maksutov). Of course, like an idiot, I tried to use it straight away. I’ve spent so long with my diminutive refractors I’d forgotten about cool down time/thermal equilibrium and all that geeky cosmic jive. Either way the Met Office reckoned it would be clear at 21:00 for an hour and for some peculiar reason I believed them.

 

 

I took a Meade zoom and three eyepieces out with me. The Meade is almost certainly BST/Barsta and is more or less identical to my Celestron and generic 8-24mm zooms. There is an awful lot of BS talked about Meade zooms and I’m not going to wade through the brown smelly stuff here.

 

 

Suffice to say the zoom is competent and effective, although nothing particularly special. The eyepieces were originally going to be 12.5mm, 10mm, 7mm and 6mm orthoscopics.  All but the 10mm were Ohi (branded as Astro Hutech & Fujiyama). The 10mm was a Baader Classic Orthoscopic. 

 

 

There is much whinging on some less enlightened and uncongenial forums about the edge distortion on the BCO’s. That’s because the BCO’s are actually 42° but the extra 8° are to make target location easier. Unlike the 44° Takahashi ortho’s, which just have slightly bigger field stops (I think). Eventually, for simplicity’s sake I decided to ‘eighty-six’ the 12.5mm and just went with the 6, 7 and 10mm EP’s. It transpired (as usual) that the 10mm BCO (154x) saw the vast majority of the action. I also took two Baader diagonals out with me, one being a ‘Zeiss’ Amici. The Amici was intended for lunar viewing, although in the end I used it for most of the session, only switching to the conventional prism right at the end. This was mostly for comparison. TBH I couldn’t see any real difference (except for the mirroring). 

 

 

As Saturn was momentarily obscured by the white fluffy stuff I aimed Big Mak at the 94.6% illuminated Moon (Pisces). I was predominantly interested in Schroter’s Valley, Aristarchus and the Montes Harbinger. I also got a nice view of Schiller, Schickard and Clavius in the south. Eventually Saturn was relatively cloud-free and nearing transit. Not only could I see some beautiful detail, including the Cassini Division, I witnessed Titan and a 99.8% illuminated Rhea. Rhea is Saturn’s second largest moon.

 

 

I can’t always see it with my small refractors. Big Mak’s five inches of fun had no difficulties however. Rhea (the classical mythological 'mother of the gods') made my night. I had a cup of hot chocolate indoors as I waited for a steadily rising Jupiter to clear the fence of my hide/observatory. At 100% illumination and 49.4 arc seconds it was quite spectacular. Three of the Galilean moons were bunched in a triangle formation while Callisto was the outlier. I got some nice Jovian surface detail, although the GRS was sadly absent.

 

 

It was nice to get Big Mak and the Baader Amici prism out for a session. Even though I’ve been itching to get the newly repaired Titchy Sixty out. I’ll have to scratch that itch when there is much less Moon in the sky! 

 

 

[GazAstro]

Excellent night 👍🏻

Also love the tunes you post at the end 😁

Do you know/like these bands or just search for keywords ?

[Nightspore]

On 10/29/2023 at 9:09 AM, GazAstro said:

Excellent night 👍🏻

Also love the tunes you post at the end 😁

Do you know/like these bands or just search for keywords ?

 

Most of the bands are personal favourites.

 

 

This got me into Say She She.