Fiiiinally got around to commissioning the 18" F4.1 GOTO Dob on Saturday night and it didn't disappoint. I shared the special occasion with my
life long astro partner and the telescopes owner, Attila Horvath. Attila and I shared a dream back when we were teenagers (almost 40 years ago), to have an 18 inch telescope. We actually started building one for astrophotography all those years ago (that looked more like the Hale 200" in engineering terms! way over engineered
) and still have the primary and secondary mirrors that have never seen starlight but we never finished it...
Anyway...what a fabulous night!
The scope is definitely a keeper! After a two star alignment, goto pointing was good enough to land everything in the 11mm Nagler and 18 inches of aperture is more than capable, no sign of any optical issues, stars were sharp and we noted great contrast, it gave incredible views. We checked out the green comet, was easy to find right next to the planet Mars, could just make it out with the naked eye. Under such a dark, high contrast and transparent sky, we were floored by seriously obvious spiral structure in galaxies, including NGC1365 and NGC1566 but the big surprise was we could both see subtle rose/brown and green in the Orion Nebula! As Carina culminated in the early hours, we saw amazing detail in the bright orange Homunculus around Eta Carina too, colour in stars generally was particularly vivid and we both commented on this. So amazing, happy days, was great to share the first light for this scope with my life long mate, very special and to finally realise our dream we had as teenagers ...we could never have imagined back then, doing it in such a location though
One ominous sign though, was watching bright satellite after bright satellite in the wee hours, flaring on like Iridium flares used to, low in the southern sky, every minute or so, was rather eeriy, bloody Starlink satellites
can only imagine what they and other super constellations are going to eventually do to our dark skies when low Earth orbit is full of them!
Mike