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First light - finally!
Well here's a 1st light report - finally.
My tsa-120 rolled up yesterday & I took it out last night for first viewing.
Transparency was'nt great & seeing a little average.
I don't have a finder yet, but I've hooked up a telrad to the top mounting ring; I got the parallax rings & joe nastasi was great; he made up a little aluminium plate which bolts to the top ring so I could stick my telrad on it. I highly recommend doing this.
I first pointed to saturn and stuck in my 35mm panoptic for 26x.. I got a little worried. Then I switched to a 17.3mm delos for about 50x... Something was still wrong; no rings, or even at least an elongated disk! Now I got more worried! Then I went to 150x and realised I was actually looking at mars :-) Oops! It was pretty small with maybe a hint of detail, but the seeing was swimming so I gave up & went back to low power.
47 tuc. Looked really nice - best at about 50x. However, I was entranced by the view of ngc6752 in pavo for quite some time, studying it with a variety of magnifications from 26x up to 100x. Like 47 tuc, i found it looked best in my 17.3 delos at about 50x. I could see maybe two dozen tiny pinpoint stars superimposed over a diffuse glow. A very pleasing view. Ngc253 looked washed out, which I think was a testament to the transparency last night. Certainly the low power views were pleasing and sharp. I did look at 1 bright star at 150x to check out the airy disk.. It looked very clean. Only my view of mars wasn't too pleasing - at low power the disk didnt really look like a disk, with what I thought was a little flaring to one side as I racked to either side of focus - but maybe that to some extent was because at that stage I was expecting saturn ;-). However, at 150x the disk was clearly defined & gibbous. Noticeably dimmer than in my 10", as expected.
I am pleased so far with the scope. Build quality is absolutely exceptional and the scope looks soooo much better than it does in photos, which don't do it justice.
My other scope is a 10" f6 newt. which has first rate optics. At this stage, the view through the tak. so far is certainly just as sharp, but I don't think better. Some people promote refractors as having almost magical powers, but the reality is that they are bound by the same laws of physics as a top quality newtonian. We'll see how it stacks up better over time.
Though I will do side by side comparisons with my newt, my first experience with the tak. Certainly didn't leave me wanting for more aperture.
The scope is a joy to use & sits like a rock on my g11 mount, which will eventually also mount my newt. once I rebuild it into a new OTA.
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