An evening with Takahashi's finest....
So very, very briefly (and unscientifically) :
With the forecast of perfectly clear skies for the evening ahead, couple of days ago Phil and I decided to leave the big scopes at home and go 'TOA to TOA' at his dark sky site....
We set up around 1830hrs, Phil'S TAK TOA150 on the T-Rex sitting atop the Avalon T-Pod130 and along side it my TOA130NFB on the AZ-EQ6GT.
The TOA150 was fitted with the Takahashi 2" mirror diagonal, the TOA130 had the Baader BBHS 2" ClickLock diagonal.
The scopes were only given minimal time to acclimatise before being turned toward the Vallis Schröteri, Aristachus, Väisälä and Herodotus.
We then spent hours comparing the views using a variety of Takahashi and Televue eyepieces..... including:
Nagler 31mm T5,
Nagler 22mm T4,
Nagler 17mm T4, Delos 14mm, 10mm, 8mm, 6mm, & 4.5mm.
Delite 7mm
Panoptic 24mm pair in Televue Binovues
and
Takahashi eyepieces:
LE50mm, 30mm, 24mm, 18mm
Without going into too much detail, the TOA150 as expected, does show finer details but not by as much as I expected. Everything that we saw in the bigger one was also seen in the smaller but at times with a bit more effort.
The views were some of the finest lunar views I have had in years, with excellent detail in the areas around V. Schröteri and many very small craters sighted (my atlas doesn't have names for them.... too small I guess)
Given the near full moon was washing out most DSOs, we later spent a couple of hours comparing filters trying to eek out the best detail in M42, NGC2070 & NGC3372. To do this the scopes were used with Lumicon UHC, Astronomik OIII and DGM NPB on various eyepieces. The filters all performed well, giving a marked improvement over the unfiltered view ( almost **** ). The Astronomik OIII outperformed the Lumicon on Eta Carina. The DGM NPB gave an excellent result on the nebulae but turns bright stars red (which doesn't bother me)
**** but the surprise was that all of these filters were outdone by the unfiltered Televue Panoptics when they were used in the Binovue binoviewers attached to the Baader Zeiss T2 Prism diagonal.... this combination was excellent especially on M42, showing great detail and contrast.
Another little comparison was done with Phil's TOA:
we compared the Takahashi 2" Mirror diagonal to the Baader 2" BBHS Silver and found that there was very little difference (each of us actually slightly preferred the view in our own diagonal
). The target was NGC4755 and in particular a very dim and close optical double.
The end of the evening's entertainment was heralded by the appearance of Jupiter in the eastern sky followed soon after by the brilliant Sun.
Bleary-eyed, I arrived back at home in Canberra at 0700hrs and took a nap till 1000hrs.....
Consumables used for the comparison:
Coffee (several cups)
Henschke Shiraz (1 bottle)
Sandwiches (1 large boxful)
End result is that while there is a visible difference given the larger aperture of the TOA150, I will be happily keeping my 130NFB but am prepared admit that the TOA150 is the finest refractor I have ever looked through...
EDIT: We also established that the standard tripod on an EQ6 mount is hideously bad when carrying AZ-EQ6, 10Kg counterweight and a TOA130NFB, extending the legs even halfway turns this rather flimsy tripod to jelly...
I will have to look for an alternative and soon....
