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[katodog]

I had to work last night, and didn't think it would be a smart thing to bring any scopes with me. I didn't want to have the stuff outside if I had to go inside to do something. Besides, tonight they will be just as close as yesterday, so I can look tonight. My cousin got a great shot of the pair through his AR5. I think it's an awesome pic.

[Chicago Astronomer - Astro Joe]

Kdog,

That is a great shot, and how it appeared to me in my own instrument.

I wish I had the capability to capture the pair, but I can live vicariously thru your cousin.

Let's see what tonight hold for us.

Thanks for sharing.

[katodog]

My cousin always comes up with the awesome pictures. Even with the ones I have produced, I'm still always jealous of his pics. I'm definitely going to be outside tonight. The weather is incredible, and it's clear as a bell!!!

It's finally time to put the new scope through the ringer. I'm going to set up the AR6 and AT80 to shoot Venus and Saturn, and I'm going to try some photos with the LX200R. I want to see what it will do on Jupiter, and Saturn too. If it stays clear enough and I stay out long enough, I'm gonna check out what DSOs I can see through the 12".

God, I'm chomping at the bit to get out there already!!! When is the Sun going to go down??? I can't wait any longer!!

[katodog]

WOWEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!! ;D ;D

Well, I finally got to spend a lot of time with the LX200R, and I have to say that I am more than impressed. Looking through a scope with a long focal length (3048) with a 26mm and 20mm eyepiece is way different than what I'm used to. I have to use higher power on the AR6 to get the object to be the same size as using low power in the LX200R. The big difference is that with the higher power, the view sometimes isn't that great. But with the lower power and longer focal length, I get the same views with much better detail. It's amazing how the right combinations make a huge difference.

Now if only my camera would cooperate. I had the AR6/AT80 combo out for the Venus/Saturn pairing, and visually they looked awesome. But, the camera wouldn't give me any good shots, so I ditched it and just did visual. It was definitely impressive seeing the phase of Venus and the detail of Saturn in the same view. I had the LX200R out, and planned on doing quite a bit with it.

When I fist went out, is was still daylight, so I didn't have any stars to align with, and the GPS would take the first time. So, I just manually drove it to Venus. Wow again. The phase of Venus and clarity of the view was something else. I had to keep stopping and thinking to myslf, yes, this is my equipment. It's amazing. Then I checked out Saturn, which looked spectacular. But once again the camera had ideas of it's own. For some reason, the video on my camera likes to put the weirdest color into the view, and sometimes the video coms out looking like crap. But, I was more than content with just doing visual stuff. Once it started getting dark enough to see stars, I decided to redo the alignment.

Now this is the fun part. With the LXD75, you have to park the scope, turn it off, turn it back on, and then align. Which is not as much of a pain as it sounds, but does take a lot more time. The beauty of the LX200R is that it has this great feature called "align on home". It puts the scope in the home postion, and then you align from there. An absolute piece of cake. The first star it picked was not in the field, but since I had the finder aligned dead-on, it was easy to center the star. Then it went to the next star, and was off a bit, but I centerd it, and it said "Alignment Succesful". So, I told it to go to the Ring Nebula. It put the Ring nebula almost dead center of the 20mm ep. That is what I call precise. I checked out the Ring, then M13, and then took a few more videos of jupiter and Saturn before packing up. It was getting late, nd I did have to come to work this morning.

But, I have all night and all morning on Tuesday and Wednesday, so I may just stay out until morning.

Anyway, here's a shot of Jupiter. Taken with the Meade 12" LX200R, Fuji S5000 DSLR, 25mm ep (crappy generic ep), roughly 8x optical zoom, 1435 frames from an avi. Unfortunately the video mode is tiny, so I resized the pic 200%. I can't stand looking at the tiny frames from the video.

To give an idea, here's the small frame, which is what the camera produces:



And this is resized 200%:




Here's a shot of Venus. I'm not sure if the color is from the camera, from the scope, or from Venus. I'm pretty sure I wasn't focused too good:




I think I'll be playing around with the DSI tonight. I want to screw around with it to see if I will like using it. If I do, then I'll have to figure out how to use it where I'm not letting it do all the work. I don't like that it takes the human factor out. It taes all the fun out of it.

[Chicago Astronomer - Astro Joe]

Your enthusiasm and pure enjoyment of the session is portrayed in your post. An excellent and productive time on it's real first views.

It's great that it's performing superbly and the promise of many great upcoming sessions is exciting...