Thought this might be an appropriate update with my 12 Inch Goto.
Up until now, I had not had the opportunity to view the moon with the 12 inch dob. Last night, there seemed to be a break in the clouds, and the seeing did not look too bad so decided to quickly get the scope out, let it cool down a bit and see what it could do. I gave it a good collimation then did a quick star check and everything seemed spot on.
Initially with the 24mm Panoptic, absolutely crystal clear. Progressively went through a couple of more eyepieces and then thought what the heck.... took out the 4mm Burgess Optical/TMB Planetary. I though this would be pushing things. At 375x, the view was absolutely mesmerising. I then decided 'no guts no glory' and got out the 2.5x Powermate. At a staggering 937.5x I was viewing individual craters. I then set that rate mode to #2 and basically panned across the surface of the moon. I was absolutely gobsmacked at what the scope was bringing up. I have never really studied the moon with such a large aperture, but WOW! With the tracking set to lunar mode, it tracked wonderfully.
I then decided to get the DMK out. Part of my reason for purchasing this dob was to see whether it would be a possible candidate for some high res lunar imaging. As the cloud cover was increasing, I did manage to capture a couple of avi's with the DMK21 and a 5x Powermate. I will have a go at processing tonight, but I think I need more practice in IC Capture and playing around with the Gain and Gamma settings. But, the tracking seemed to keep the image very smooth. Damn clouds
!!
All in all, because of these preliminary results, this scope is a definite keeper!! I know I had this one advertised to try and go to either the 14 or 16, but I think this one is too good to move on.
Cheers,
Daniel