Did some observing last night with some friends who came over.  Almost full moon and a bit hazy but trying to get used to the scope so I’m not fiddling with it when we get some good clear nights.  I updated the AutoStar handcontroller so I had to recalibrate to Polaris and train the drives.  I also got to try out Starry Night Pro (SNP) for the first time and connected it to the scope.  SNP was able to slew the scope pretty well onto even some faint objects.  We did some nebulas and star clusters.  While SNP is not an atlas program per se (more of a planetarium software), it is easy to use and I think that’s what I need now to start.  While we were observing, I got a call from Harry Siebert who was finalizing a few eyepieces I purchased from him.  As always, very kind on the phone and he hoped to mail them today.  Can’t wait to try the new eyepieces on the scope.

Had the first ’star party’ at our house with the new scope.  A few friends came over and we got to check out a few sights.  Lots of ambient light and 1/2 moon so we did some obvious stuff like Orion, Saturn, Mars, Pleiades, etc.  I had trained the drives earlier and that made a big difference in terms of slewing — the scope moves to the target object pretty right on now.  I think I’ll need to retrain once again since when I did it, it was windy, but the slewing works pretty decently already.  To train the drives, I needed a reticle eyepiece but since I didn’t want to spend money on that, I used a piece of hair and taped it to the back of a 3.8mm eyepiece — worked just fine.

I ordered the springy thingy to help mount the scope onto the tripod.  I also ordered Starry Night Pro — while the Star Atlas:PRO had good telescope contol capability, I didn’t find the interface user-friendly enough for my tastes so I’m going to try Starry Night Pro.  Other software that I’ve heard is good is SkyMap.

Lastly, I had mentioned the Scope Buggy earlier as well as the JMI Wheely-bars.  I decided for now not to purchase either since carrying the scope wasn’t as bad as I anticipated.  We move the scope and the tripod separately and the weight is manageable.

Took the scope out tonight briefly since the sky was SO clear (but a bit turbulent). Still getting the hang of things and the wind was picking up again so I tried some easy stuff.

Did very quick pictures of the Orion Nebula and the Moon as well as Saturn - no focusing tools, etc. since it was too cold and windy for my taste.

I think I’ll need to get a wedge (allows for polar alignment) for some more serious pictures but these were fun to start with. The Orion Nebula was a 15 second shot as ISO 1600 while Saturn was a 1/2 second shot at ISO 400.

Just got the new telescope and got to take it for a test drive two nights in a row.  The first night, the calibration was off (and of course, I didn’t read the manual!) in that the scope was consistently about 15 degrees off to the West.  Discovered that the way to troubleshoot the scope in this case was to apply “Calibrate Sensors” so that the telscope knows where Polaris, or the North Star, is.  When I applied that on the second night, the scope worked great!  (I think I’ll need to calibrate again only because it was so windy that the scope was moving a bit in the wind).  The scope was able to align itself pretty decently to Sirius and Dubhe.  So, the first thing my wife and I slewed to was the Moon (just to test the slewing) and then decided that what we wanted to see was Pleiades (M45).  It found M45 pretty right on and with the microfocuser, the image came out very good.  As I’ve read, you don’t really see the nebulosity that you see in pictures (esp. with my suburban surroundings) but all the stars in the eyepiece looked very sharp.  It was pretty cold with the wind so we decided to just test a few quick objects and head back inside.  So, we then went to Mars (could make out some color) and Saturn (was able to make out the Cassini division!).  We played a bit between the Meade 26mm and the 2x barlow and well as some other eyepieces I had from the my first telescope.  With the wind, it was just becoming too difficult to enjoy the show but I was glad to confirm that the scope works and works pretty well.  Can’t wait to calibrate even better and to really enjoy sitting down and doing some observing — and then some astrophotography of course.  No regrets in investing in this scope — a bit heavy but manageable and it seems very promising!

In my seemingly never-ending quest to order anything and everything for the new scope (don’t want to be caught off guard), I ordered the following:

• DSLR Focus — fairly standard software for focusing your digital SLR (DSLR); in my case, I’ll be using the Canon Digital Rebel (300D) — you can get the software from dslrfocus.com
• DSUSB connection for my camera — while I can connect my Canon Digital Rebel to my PC with the USB cable that comes with the camera, you are limited to 30 seconds or less exposure (and you need more than that for deep sky objects); this USB connection allows you to connect a USB port to the camera’s remote trigger and thus allow for “bulb” exposures (as long as you want) in the camera’s manual mode.  This connection can be gotten from shoestringastronomy.com which also has some other neat products and an astrophotography gallery.
• Also ordered the Meade Cable #507 (you can get this from a host of sellers) for connecting the PC to the telescope and be able to drive the telescope from the PC using the planetarium software; I should also be able to adjust the microfocuser through DSLR Focus and therefore automate the focusing of pictures.

I’ve also looked at ImagesPlus (mlunsold.com) and MaxDSLR (cyanogen.com/products/maxdslr_main.htm) for processing images and might go down that path eventually but I’m still quite the amateur so I’m holding off for now.

Against what might have been a bit more convenient, I ordered some eyepieces from Harry Siebert (siebertoptics.com) instead of eyepieces from Meade or Televue for example.  Televue eyepieces especially look like very high quality items but the price is high quality too (you can easily spend $300 or more on one eyepiece).  Harry’s eyepieces are perhaps not as ‘pretty’ on the outside but the optics are known to be pretty good in general given their more reasonable price.  I spoke to Harry personally a few times and each time, he was very helpful and very willing to listen to the features I was looking for.  He clearly cares about customer satisfaction!  I ordered a 36mm for wide-views, a 2x barlow, and a 15mm for close-ups, all 2 inches.  I noticed a lot of posts on cloudynights.com regarding Siebert eyepieces and most people had a positive impressions of these eyepieces.  I plan to post my impressions once I get these eyepieces.

This past Saturday, I ordered the Meade LX200 10″.  I ordered the telescope from skiesunlimited.net and mostly dealt with Gary, one of the two partners there.  It’s a decent sized shop in Glenmoore, PA and is probably the closest specialy store for telescopes within 2 hours of my house in New Jersey.  Gary was helpful in narrowing down my choices based on what I want to do with this scope.  In general, I decided for a reflector with the GoTo capability since I mostly want to do observing and make it user-friendly for kids, etc. to look through the scope.  The Meade should also allow me to do novice-imaging as I go along.

The LX200 comes with GPS so the scope knows where it is located.  I was comparing it to the LX90 model which also now comes with GPS.  However, when you compare the features, the LX90 is primarily missing the microfocuser (helps you focus finely).  If you add that to the LX90 as an option, the price difference between the two works out to a few hundred bucks — so since the LX200 has a more stable mount (as I understand from some forums) and has better gearing for sky-tracking per the spec-sheet, I opted for the LX200.  Should be here in about a week…

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