I decided to call up Bintel this morning and tell them that the missing light problem is still there, and they ended up offering to get a delivery truck to come pick it up today for them to see it for themselves at night
. Noone has come to pick it up today, so hopefully Bintel will be seeing through the scope thursday or friday night, and it will all be sorted out soon. To clear some things up regarding my lack of knowledge and experience, I will explain it with 2 short stories...
Rob - Buys a flashy car on a whim, hops in and starts it up. With no previous knowledge of cars, and using advertisements as an unrealistic reference of the car, he is very unimpressed with it. It doesnt fly over mountains, the speed stripes dont glow, and it doesn't go from 0-100 in 1/4 of a second. He is convinced it is broken because it doesn't live up to his unrealistic expectations. Rob also believes the world is flat
.
Bob - Does his research before buying a car, hops in and starts it up. It doesnt start, the starter doesnt even try. He goes through the possibilities carefully, discusses it with others, and ends up descovering that his original idea fixed it. Once it starts, it has no power, wont even budge an inch. After going through all the possibilities he can think of, and in as much detail as he can without voiding the warranty, he is convinced the problem is a missing part in the gearbox. Bob is sure his expectations of forward motion are well within acceptable limits.
Bob would describe my situation. Notice the difference. I don't know the extent of what kind of views I can expect, but I'm not clueless and I do expect any astronomical telescope to collect and distribute a little more light than my naked eye at the very least. Besides a faint view of only the brightest part of the Orion nebula (which I can see with my naked eye), I see nothing but stars. That is as far as it goes. Other structures in the Orion molecular cloud complex that should be viewable, do not appear in the slightest at any time of night. Nor has anything else through many many hours of scanning the sky. This telescope does not show any more light than my naked eye. The images I see are clear enough, there is just no extra light there. To have a finderscope out of position and be convinced that the telescope isn't working is very foolish. Even bintel thought that was the case at first, and although I can understand how such things need to be ruled out, I assure you guys I wouldn't do such a silly thing
. Having a finderscope out of alignment is very obvious and takes only a few seconds to fix with ease
.
Thank you very much for the help offers and advice, especially those in PM and iceman's offer to visit me. There are some very helpful people here
. But now that Bintel will be checking this for themselves, it's out of my hands for the time being. I will breathe a big sigh of relief if they confirm the same problem
.
Getting to the pony club is almost impossible at the moment. But if that changes, I'll be sure to send a PM right away
.