Searching81
07-07-2013, 01:26 AM
In the last week, I've acquired a 150mm Mak, EQ6 Pro and 8/13/21mm Baader Hyperion eyepieces.
Had my first outing with this new gear tonight and am pretty happy :D
My previous scope (bought about 8 years ago on the spur of the moment with no research) was a horrid Bushnell Northstar GoTo 4.5" reflector... it almost destroyed my interest in astronomy... terribly unstable mount and the GoTo controller had no internal clock, a fact that sadly took me a very long time to discover... Eventually I abandoned any hope of having functioning GoTo and just used it in manual mode but after a few years it got thrown into a corner and mostly abandoned.
The EQ6 guidance blew me away tonight... I had a rather limited patch of sky and lots of light pollution to contend with, so I only did a very rough polar and 2-star alignment to familiarize myself with it... even so, it still found objects near dead on... and the thing is rock stable when changing eye pieces or if you bump it slightly... I saw more in 2 hours with a hasty test setup in my backyard than I ever did on well planned, carefully setup, dark sky trips with my old POS scope. Can't wait to take this thing somewhere dark!
:D:D:D
Had my first outing with this new gear tonight and am pretty happy :D
My previous scope (bought about 8 years ago on the spur of the moment with no research) was a horrid Bushnell Northstar GoTo 4.5" reflector... it almost destroyed my interest in astronomy... terribly unstable mount and the GoTo controller had no internal clock, a fact that sadly took me a very long time to discover... Eventually I abandoned any hope of having functioning GoTo and just used it in manual mode but after a few years it got thrown into a corner and mostly abandoned.
The EQ6 guidance blew me away tonight... I had a rather limited patch of sky and lots of light pollution to contend with, so I only did a very rough polar and 2-star alignment to familiarize myself with it... even so, it still found objects near dead on... and the thing is rock stable when changing eye pieces or if you bump it slightly... I saw more in 2 hours with a hasty test setup in my backyard than I ever did on well planned, carefully setup, dark sky trips with my old POS scope. Can't wait to take this thing somewhere dark!
:D:D:D