Impulse Buy

[Waxing_Gibbous (Peter)]

Its white, its huuuuge. Its brand spanking new.
It's a fresh out of the box 12" Bintel dob. And its MINE! Mine do you hear me! All Miiine! Mwaahahaha!
Actually its still fresh IN the box as I haven't worked out how to gat the styrofoam out and I think my wife will have to assemble the base(I am the world's least competent DIY'er).
I hadn't expected it to be quite so big and macho!
I am really looking forward to first light. I am expecting a big change from my 102 refractor. So if the clouds will hold off for a few hours I'll try to give some useful feedback.
Off to play!!!!

[jjjnettie (Jeanette)]

Have fun!

[dpastern (Dave Pastern)]

hehehe Have fun Peter - rather jealous of you with that 12" dob!

Dave

[Matty P (Matt)]

Impulse buying never hurt anyone. Have fun with your new toy Peter.

Watch out for the weather!

[Waxing_Gibbous (Peter)]

Thanks all.
Managed to assemble it without resort to Valium.
First impressions:
Pretty poor transparency. Lots of high cloud. Nothing below about Mag 8 visible and that distorted and blurry But:
Get that flashlight out of my eye!!! Well that'll be the moon. And boy what a moon. My 9mm LV is suddenly in its true element - astounding detail.
Jupiter: That can't be Jupiter! Jupiter's that tiny little disc with maybe a bit of banding. Too much for the Vixen with barlow. But near perfect with 13mm T5 + 2x barlow. Wow! Big. Actual detail in the bands. Moons are suddenly discs instead of points.
Haven't been able to star test (see "cloud", above) but fingers crossed.
The supplied EP's (32mm WA, 15 & 9mm Plossls) are OK except for the 32 which is surprisingly good. Its no Nagler or Panoptic but very little abberition and just the right FOV for sighting in.
All-in-all I'm well chuffed.
With redundancy looming at year-end I fgured it was now or never.
Glad I took the plunge.

[Gama]

I remember as a kid growing up, and reading some astronomy books, and reading about amauters owning 12" newtonians, i would ALWAYS, go to my mums cupboards and grab her 12" aluminium cooking dish, which was about 2" high, and hold it in my 2 hands, and drool at the size of thing, not to mention the enjoyment of using such a large (To a kid) telescope. I always wished i had a 12" telescope...... Well, flew right past that bleeding number.. went straight on further to those larger numbers..
Oh yes, memories.. Now to find those mongruls that put me on that bleeding aperature road..

Theo.