Sunday, April 20, 2008

First light with Obsession 18"

Last week Thursday my 18" Obsession arrived at home. I ordered it directly from Obsession. I have spend a few hours to assemble it, and had kind of a first light on Friday. I could see the moon behind the clouds. As such not very spectacular, but it was my first look through my Obsession.

On Sunday I installed the ServoCat and ArgoNavis. And finally, in the evening it was more or less clear for an hour or so. At least clear enough to test the scope. And it was a success.

The first object was Saturnus. Woow - so much bigger than with a 20 cm scope. Then Mizar-Alkor. What a difference with my previous scope. Star images where pin point sharp.

Then I've set up the Argo-Navis. It worked!. M3 was really amazing - so many stars (it's not even completly dark). Then M81, M82 (woow). M36, M37 (very nice) and M36. At that moment the sky was completly covered by clouds. I still wanted to hunt M3 in an open area, but sadly one of the encoders was slipping.

What did not work was tracking. The scope was not tracking the objects, so I had to adjust manually. I need to go through the manual to see how this works.

Anyway, It was a successfull first light. I did not expect the Argo-Navis would work that easily from the start.

Clear Sky

Olivier

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