CN FORUMS ARCHIVE Telescope Reviews: First light: Orion XT8i

Well, I got to take my,(er, I mean my wife's...hehe)new scope for a spin. Conditions were partly cloudy (and getting cloudier)and the moon was pretty darn bright! Seeing was poor as well, I mean...pretty mirage effects!

I planned on looking at the moon, Orion nebula, Saturn, Plaeides and M81/M82 for extra credit. The moon was great and extremely bright! (I'll get a filter one of these days!) Orion nebula was just a faint smudge...not able to see any real color or contrast because the sky was so bright and the moon so close to it. Prety cool anyway, I can't wait to try the scope out on a dark sky.

Saturn was easy to find...I just figured it must be the bright yellowish "star" next to the moon. Yep, we could clearly see the rings, but no further detail...seeing was just to poor. I only have the 25mm and 10mm eyepieces, maybe a little more magnification would have helped.

Pleiades wasn't real impressive tonight...We'll re-visit it with a wider angle eyepiece and a darker night.

No extra credit tonight, I didn't try for M81/M82, they were behind clouds, too low on the horizon and probably too dim (but hey, maybe not?) to see in these conditions anyway.

Overall, I'mm very pleased with the scope and glad I went with the 8" dob vs the Celestron C4 I was considering. Since I live in Portland and it is winter...even a bright, partly cloudy night with poor seeing is a good thing. I expected it to be overcast for quite awhile before we would get a chance to take her out.

As far as the scope, it assembled fairly easily. The pinned thread above is excellent for further info on that subject. I collomated it last night. I'm a complete newbie, but this was no big deal. The secondary was centered in the focus tube and the primary was centered, or very, very close to being centered in the secondary. I made no changes to the secondary at all.

The primary was just a little bit (2-4mm?)off of being perfectly lined up with the mirror center mark. This was a little suprising because when I went to loosen the set screws the were already loose! So, the scope was shipped with the set screws loosened and held it's collomation nearly perfectly through shipment and assembly. A couple twists on the collomation screws and a tightening of the set screws and I was in business.

I have, and installed, the Intelliscope controller. I did not try it out tonight as I figured any object I couldn't locate with my eyes would either be behind the clouds, or too dim to see given the conditions.

Thanks for the help in choosing this scope, my wife loves it. She was shocked at how big it was and said "Cool, you bought me a rocket launcher!" when she saw on Christmas morning.