1500x+

[astronut]

Hi Everyone,
Just got home from an observing night with my fellow members of M.A.S. "Omaroo + Astreisk"
It started to cloud over heavily, but before then Chris said "Here try my 5mm E/P with my 5X power mate. Now this was mated to my 12"Lb.
I didn't expect to see anything except a blob of light.
Instead I was greeted by a magnificent steady sight of the moon.
I felt like I was descending to the surface on one of the Apollo Missions.
I never thought I would be able to stretch the scope to its theoretical 600x, let alone 1500x+:scared:

Thanks Chris.:thumbsup:

[Kevnool]

Gday how did geoff go .....he,s been observing with me out here now its has to be me go with asterix and observe with him over there....cheers kev

[Ric]

Blimey John 1500x mag, you could just about see someone waving back. :hi:

Cheers

[astronut]

Hi Kev,
Geoff's going very well at the club.
Last night was a total loss with the cloud.:mad2:
He's mentioned the great times he's had out there.

Ric,
I think I did:lol:
It was a good combination of seeing, and optics. I've never been that close to the Moon before!:thumbsup:

[renormalised]

John...next time you bump it up to there, can you check for me how big a boot Neil Armstrong was wearing on the Moon??:D:P

I'll wager it was a size 10:P:rofl:

[Omaroo]

LOL! Hey John - it sure was a grand sight under freakishly-good seeing. I couldn't believe it either when we saw the image we did. Crater and rille detail was incredible, and steady-as even at 1,500 power. The combnation of the 5mm Type 6 Nagler, 5x PowerMate and your LB were stupendous on the night. Just wish we had a camera ready to go before the cloud killed it!!! :doh:

[Satchmo]

I'd just like to add that, at least at a technical level, there is no new detail to be seen above magnification of 25X to 50X per inch of aperture as , depending on your eyesight , at these mags the ( stellar ) diffraction pattern is allready visible.

Its a bit like magnifying newsprint: once you see the dots you are not achieving anything ( extra ) . The Moon, being a very high contrast object, can stand magnification way beyond the 'practical' level as it has a high "wow" factor zooming into a crater, and is very bright.
For planetary observing it is best to keep the powers lower as there can be many features visible through color differentiation rather than resolution. Witha 1mm exit pupil the eye has very poor colour perception.

Saturn also, generally showing little disc detail, seems to stand very high powers as well. I think its yellow monochromatism also helps with problems of chromatic atmospheric dispersion, holding a slightly sharper image at high power, much as the red channel on the RGB data of the planetary imagers is always sharper.

Mark ( The party pooper :P )

[Omaroo]

LOL!

Mark - all that given and accepted, we were as surprised as anyone to actually see anything worthwhile. The fact is that the detail that we saw was pretty impressive nontheless.

[asterisk]

Kevin - Anytime you like - don't bring anything that will rust in the dew!

Cheers