It's been a while since receiving our Pentax XW 7 EP. The skies haven't been friendly lately so our only real test until last night was on Jupiter.
When we first popped the 7 in a couple of weeks ago and looked into the EP at Jupiter we knew it was money well spent. Beautiful contrast and detail that we had never seen before. We tried the Virgo galaxies and Sombrero but because of the Western glow there wasn't enough contrast to determine detail with any of our EP's that night.
Last night was a different story. Here in the Yarra Valley we had a very dark blue cloudless sky at sunset which is always a good indication of good visability.
With the naked eye the Milky Way was bright and the dark lanes clearly visable. We could see the glow of many clusters and the glow of Lagoon and Swan nebula. Looking to the SMC we could see Tucanae 47 with naked eye vision. So we knew we were in for a good night.
We decided to go Galaxy hunting in the Eastern sky as visability was quite dark in that area.
Zero'd in on NGC55 in Sculptor with our 27 Pano it was very large and elongated and when we put the XW7 in the centre core was revealed slightly off centre and we could see a speckled effect with dark and light contrast. It also revealed very bright tiny areas at one edge of the galaxy.What a great sight !
Then NGC253 It was spectacular and covered the EP from edge to edge and once again the EP revealed the centre detail.
NGC247 was unusual as it appears vertical in the EP once again the detail revealed at the centre core.
On to a couple of our favourite nebulas with the DGM filter. The Swan almost filled the EP and the detail at that mag is increadible. The Dumbell very large and bright with great contrast once again.
All in all we're very happy with the EP as we purchased it to use for detail on galaxies and last night it proved to do just that.
The clouds rolled in about 10.30pm but we had already been observing for 3 hours. What a great night!
Barb & David
