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Some more quick shots. Took it to Clayton Bay on Saturday for "first light'. I arrived at Clayton full of trepidation, as this was the first time I was going to give the new 22 inch compact scope a run. I had only finished it on Wednesday and had not even had time to do some quick viewing at home.
While the others were setting up their imaging gear, I put up the new scope to find that it did not quite have enough in-focus on the brighter stars shining through the twilight with the parracor in its correct setting. Luckily, I had plenty of travel in the collimation bolts so all I did was wind them up a bit and it was fixed. After dusk I collimated and initialised the Argo Navis/Servocat and begun observing!
Eyepieces used were the 28mm UWAN (80X), 13mm Nagler(180X) and 9mm Nagler (260X) all with a 82 degree apparent field of view. They all worked well at the fast 3.6 focal ratio with the parracor in place, showing some slight abberrations at the very edge of the field, but better than in my F5 scope without a parracor. Viewing conditions were quite good, with a little bit of misty cloud only occasionally interfering with the viewing and the smoke haze much less than it had been in the previous week. Seeing was typically excellent for this location.
I was curious to see if there was a noticeable difference on objects from the 16" so I spent the early part of the night viewing common favourites to find out. The 22 inch collects nearly double the light of a 16 inch and I was actually quite surprised at how this was immediately apparent at the eyepiece on all objects. M42 was very bright, with the centre glowing its pale green light, but the big difference was the slight pink tint to the nebula around this centre part. 47 Tuc showed red colour in its stars. The Ghost of Jupiter at 260X was an aqua green colour, and the double shells of the nebulosity were very bright. IC 418 was a subtle fuzzy star in the 16'' but in the 22" you could see the central star a bluish tint in the inner area around the star, and a rasberry tint to the outer ring. Galaxies were much brighter and the details within them was much more obvious. M83, M104, Centaurus A and NGC 1566 were especially spectacular!
Higher powered views were excellent as well with the Homunculus as well as Saturn appearing very sharp and bright with Titan appearing like a disk. Later on in the evening I did a tour of Galaxies in Leo, but the light pollution from Adelaide was a bit more in that direction, so I switched and toured around Centaurus instead. Also looked at many other objects besides and I've decided to let myself start to get very excited about the scope. Left about 4.30 am as the moon was rising.
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