Moon - 1st light with 'new' old scope

[Drac0]

Back in early February I picked up an old SW 150/1200 F8 refractor (Big Blue I'm calling it) at a very good price from an IIS member. It hadn't been used in quite some time, no cap on the focuser or the glass so was quite dirty inside & out - seller purchased second hand and never got around to cleaning it up himself. At the time I was heading off on a month long travelling holiday so it spent the month, and over 3000km just taking up space in the back of the car. Got back & it was a few weeks before I could get around to looking at it - by then the poor weather had set in so it was two months of almost nothing. Stripped it right down, cleaned it up inside & out then waited & waited.

Last night wasn't the best night - wind & poor seeing with the Moon looking like jelly on the screen. But I persisted as I really wanted to give it some sort of test. Set it up on my AZ-EQ5, ASI294MM, the 0.8 reducer off my 102mm and a 7nm Ha filter. Took about 50 single exposures and 10,000 16bit RAW video frames (plus another 3000 8bit avi frames).

The first image is one of the single exposures only cropped and put through RegiStax wavelets. Second image is a cropped stack of 50 video frames direct from PIPP & Autostakkert. I don't think they came out too bad & looking forward to more testing with this scope in the near future, seeing what the extra aperture and focal length can give me.

Cheers,
Mark

[Mickoid]

That's a big scope to take on a long holiday Mark. It's amazing it didn't lose collimation during the ride in the car. Looks like it cleaned up well by the result you got of the moon. Nice one! Can I ask why you shot these through an Ha filter? Was it to reduce CA from the scope being an achromat?

[Dave882]

Nice shots! With that kind of aperture you could experiment with some close ups too I reckon. I’ve found using an IR-pass filter on a mono camera can assist if the seeing isn’t too great too. :thumbsup:

[Drac0]

It certainly travelled well. Haven't done anything at all with the collimation yet, been too windy to have it out the last few nights but it doesn't look too bad & handled the tear down & reassembly without adjusting. I like using Ha with the moon, seems to present a clearer, crisper image. Will be connecting my 224MC or a DSLR later to check how bad the CA is, but most of my imaging is done in NB anyway. Over the next month or so Saturn & Jupiter will be climbing in the sky so will test it out on those with the 224MC & 3x barlow.

Cheers,
Mark

[Drac0]

Thanks David. Will check out getting an IR-Pass filter & testing it out.

Cheers,
Mark

[oska]

Nice work Mark. Looking forward to more.

[carlstronomy]

Nice images, the moon has nice detail that is sometimes forgotten.