Mewlon 180 & Jupiter

Took some time with the bino & 180 and looked at Jupiter tonight. Images were very nice. Air was pretty steady but a good bit of high clouds that eventually did me in. Good detail in the bands and I picked up a fairly large festoon tonight between the equatorial belts.

Also looked at some double stars. Once again found myself surprised by the color intensity and also the lack of extraneous junk around the airy disk. I fully expect to see more diffraction rings around stars given the size of the central obstruction. But tonight I was essentially getting one around the airy disk, pretty unexpected.

Collimation is pretty good but I would not say it is dead on center. I will probably try tweaking it again this weekend. So far my tweaks have not be successful, but after doing some reading, and applying a little common sense I think I know why. Still, just looking up the visual back and eyeballing it gets me 1/2 a radius away in an 8.5 mm Pentax XF - not bad.

Hey Larry, how did you make out with your new Tak SCT?

Take care,
john

Hi John,

I have been plagued by crappy seeing and I am waiting for a dew shield as we are having really wet skies. But I did get a pretty good look at collimation and it is really good. One morning over the weekend I pointed it at a satellite dish nearby and the lettering was razor sharp, just like the FC-100 sitting right next to it. So I think this is going to be a winner!

Also have a cooling fan in the works. The small fan and power source have been ordered and I will be sending them off to a machinist (Jon Savelle) to duplicate the original as closely as possible. I need to call Art to talk about those details, but it will be very close!

larry