Quote:
Originally Posted by Renato1
I suspect you would have a hard time splitting the tiny companion star from Antares with the big dob.
Regards,
Renato
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That is simply not true. I have cleanly split Antares on hundreds of occasions in newtonians from 6" to 25", which is the sizes I have tried on it. The mirror needs to be cool, the telescope needs to be collimated, the optics need to be decent, the seeing needs to be decent and Antares needs to have reasonable elevation, to achieve a clean split. I have also split it in high quality APO refractors down to 4". The smallest being a Takahashi FS 102. The same type of conditions apply when splitting it in a refractor.
Two nights ago at Coonabarabran under reasonably good seeing we split Sirius at 300x in my 18" Obsession and Antares at 200x in my 14" SDM. These were at different times. Had I swapped the scopes around the 14" would have split Sirius easily and the 18" would have split Antares. My 10" SDM has split them both under favourable conditions on many occasions.
I first split Sirius many years ago, when it was infinitely harder due to the closer separation, in my 18" Obsession, under excellent conditions at 1050x (5mm Pentax XW + 2.5x TV powermate).
You should try 1050x in a refractor, (I am sure a 6" APO can pull 175x per inch of aperture)
, it does an excellent job of showing extended detail in targets like the homonculus and planetary nebula like the Ghost of Jupiter (NGC 3242).
Cheers
John B