[CJ (Chris)]

It arrived! Impressive service from Andrews. I opened up the boxes looking for the assembly instructions. None! Fortunately it wasn’t too much of a challenge to work out what screws and things went where. Someone who struggle’s with flat pack furniture might find it difficult. The turntable bolt washers could be transposed but the correct way is fairly obvious. It’s quite large. I knew its dimensions but it’s still surprisingly large when assembled.
There were some discrepancies between the Andrews description and what was in the boxes. The tube suspension lugs did not have the knurled aluminium tension knobs as described but plastic ones. They were fitted to impressively chunky, drop in, metal fulcrum blocks. There was also an unexpected 6mm Plossl eyepiece which from what I’ve read is probably not all that useful. The base was black, unlike the image on Andrews website.

By some miracle it was a clear sky here last night so out I went with my new scope to the darkest spot of the garden. I’ve observed from here before using my Skywatcher Heritage 130 collapsible dobbie so I had something to compare the GSO with.

Bearing in mind I don’t have a huge amount of experience, I was amazed at the overall detail of the moon. The sphere hanging in space impression was extraordinary. I think if people could look back at earth in that way they might try looking after it a bit better. Probably not.
The Orion Nebulae was amazing. It went from a somewhat dim, fuzzy blur to an eerie wisp of smoke. Fantastic.
Jupiter’s bands were easily distinguishable with the 10:1 focuser giving a nice smooth and accurate focus. A huge improvement over the SW130 focuser. My wife said I came back in with a big grin!

I wasn’t too keen on the finderscope. I found the red light finder on the SW130 very easy to use and love the positional context you get with the both eyes open technique.

I don’t have the experience to critique the eyepieces but I was struck by the darkness of the dark bits and the brightness of the bright things. Some were a little too bright! Jupiter, and it’s moons, had that cross of light effect much admired by some film directors. I don’t know what it’s called.

The tube just sits on the base. I find this approach surprising and a bit worrying. I can lift the whole assembly to move it but I can see the tube getting dislodged and crashing to the ground, hitting me in the face on the way down! Some sort of locking in place mechanism would be comforting. It appears to be strapped in on GSO’s website. I might do something similar.

All in all, I’m very pleased with the increase in clarity. I got an impressive amount of, to me, solidly engineered and well constructed equipment for my money. It should keep me busy for a while!