[Ford Prefect (James)]

Well, a week after having received it, I finally managed to achieve ‘first light’ with my new 12” dob. After what seemed to be a neverending continuous stream of cloud from the Southern Ocean, we had clear skies on Tuesday night. After the wife went to bed, I hurried out and got started.

I spent the first half an hour trying to align the finderscope and managed to achieve something acceptable using Jupiter as a target. Objects bagged as follows:

Jupiter was an easy first target. Whilst I couldn’t get a sharp disc, the scope is f/5 and I haven’t yet collimated it. However, I was happy to be able to discern the major red bands.

Rigil Kent was my next target, but I was unable to get sharp focus, not sure if this is due to the proximity of the pair, or collimation. I also found that I couldn’t achieve reasonable focus with either the 6mm or 9mm EPs, so I suspect collimation is the issue.

47 Tuc/NGC104 was looking pretty amazing as usual, but didn’t get to look too deeply into the core given the difficulties with the shorter EPs.

Messier 42/43 was my final object for the night, and a beautiful sight as you’d expect. I went inside to work out whereabouts in Orion I’d look for the Flame and Horse Head nebulae, but by the time I came back out it’d clouded over.

Yesterday was a beautiful cloudless day, and conditions held for another night’s observing.

I started off again with what I thought was 47 Tuc, but I now believe it was NGC362 as it appeared much less impressive than my previous sightings. I then spent a fair bit of time looking around for NGC253, but I don’t really know the sky well enough to work out where it was. I was also hoping to see Andromeda, but I think it was too close to the horizon for it to rise above the trees and neighbours’ houses.

I then had a look to the north-east, and saw what I believed was the Hyades, but a little later I looked at the sky and realised that given the relative positions I’d been looking at the Pleiades! I then went to move the scope to be able to have another look at features in Orion, but the wife arrived home from tennis at that point so I packed up for the night tired but happy

Very happy with the purchase, although I can see I’ve got a bit of an apprenticeship on my hands before I know my way around well enough to locate the less easy to find DSOs...