[mch62 (Mark)]

Sorry guys for the delay in getting the photos up or for doing a report.
Have been on the busy side .
Another great night had by all.
look forward to next month guys.
Any one else in the SE are welcome along for the next night.
Hopefully the observatory will have a scope in it by then.

Dan don't let the problem with the scope let you down.
I have been there big time, and feel for ya mate.
The guys who know me no what I mean .

For those reading this , and I am not trying to brag or down the Williams Optics Megrez but it does have an optical problem , and Dan asked me to check and compare with a know scope at the same time.
We used different eyepieces ranging from Radians to Orthoscopics and also changed diagonals , all to try to rectify the problem , but nothing made any difference..

As a better quality build and being a triplet ED as compared to my Celestron doublet Ed it should be superior in performance and colour correction.

I have to say thou the mechanicals of the scope are excellent from the focuser down to the baffling.
That focuser was so sweet and would love to have it on my scope.

The star tests were very baffling with the in and out of focus image being very different and throwing up large amounts of blue chromatic colour in the out of focus test and the inner rings being very unclear.
The focused star test also showed more blue surrounding the star as well than the doublet Celestron.
The rings were concentric and collimation appeared to be fine although even by the end of the night the image still appeared to be suffering from heat.

From the pictures you can see we inverted the scope for a while to try to lessen this problem but the Megrez still appeared to show images suffering from internal heat.

The Celestron star test was seen by all present to be more definet and stable and showing very little chromatic aberrations.
The outer and inner focus star concentric rings where that clear they showed individual rings with clear spaces between each.
No heat wavering could be seen in the rings or false colours.
(See my review )

Now the curious part , the Megrez image was brighter than the Celestron.
I didn't try this but the Megrez has one of those lovely Williams Optics diagonal and I only had an ell cheapo Sky Watcher diagonal.
This may be the cause of this, and will have to try Comet Hunters (Andrew) dialectic diagonal next time out.

I would not be to bothered by this problem with the Megrez as it is more than likely just a bad one that got through the QA.
Although for the premium price paid one would hope this is not the norm.

I hope you get it sorted quickly Dan and when you get a scope back please feel free to come out again just to make sure.

Mark