3 replies to this topic

[Jay_Reynolds_Freeman]

I had a frustrating but whimsical experience on the night of April 19-20, 2025, with my newish SkyMax 180 Maksutov-Cassegrain and my recently-upgraded Losmandy G-11. The upgrade was a retrofit to Gemini-2 standards, making the G-11 a competent automated go-to mount. It had worked before, but on this night it failed during initialization -- the hand controller would not connect to the main control box no matter what I did. (Diagnostics in progress, with many thanks to the immediate support of the on-line Gemini-2 user's group.) In that state, the mount was electrically dead in the water -- no ability to do anything powered, and in particular, no sidereal drive or slow motions. It was the equivalent of a quite large and very expensive "pipe mounting", made of plumbing fittings bought at the local hardware store. There I was, dressed for the cold, at a decent Bortle-4 or so site an hour from home and a mile higher, with everything set up and well aligned, with a list of Messier targets as part of shaking down the 180. What to do?

 

The answer, of course, was to hand-slew and use the finders (I had installed a second one for ease of access in all observing positions). The telescope was well balanced, I had recently relubricated the bearings, and the G-11's clutches are finely adjustable, so smooth motions were possible. I restricted myself to a low magnification (47x, 48-mm Brandon) since the lack of manual slow motions made it difficult to adjust position with accuracy greater than about half a degree. Notwithstanding, I was able to log 27 Messier objects in less than two hours, plus a few extras, mostly in the difficult-to navigate Virgo galaxy cloud.

 

The toughest object of the night was M83, well down in a light dome to the south, but nevertheless visible. M104 showed classic detail -- central bulge and dark lane. The heart of the Virgo cluster was interesting, as always. In addition to M84 and M86, I could see nearby galaxies NGC 4387, NGC 4388 and NGC 4402: These last five resemble a smile face, with the Messier galaxies two big eyes, NGC 4388 the mouth, NGC 4387 the nose, and NGC 4402 perhaps a cynically raised eyebrow, amazed that a mere bloblet of protoplasm would dare gaze at a great galaxy cluster. With M85 in the field, nearby NGC 4384 was easy as well. M64 showed no trace of its "black eye", though I would have liked to try a little more magnification on it.

 

Several globular clusters were on the night's agenda, all easy to find but frustrating in that many showed "granularity" which suggested that more magnification would have resolved them. M3, M5, M13 and M92 were granular. M13 also showed the well-known "propeller" feature, and it was easy to find nearby galaxy NGC 6207. I could not find NGC 5053 near M53.

 

As I was about to suspend operations for the night, I noticed that Lyra had risen, so took a final view of M57, the tiny ring easily visible at 47x, and of M56. All in all, it was a very good night, and now I will have to see if I can get the Gemini-2 working for the next time out. The SkyMax 180 is turning out to be a quite nice telescope, perhaps a bit small for serious deep-sky work but nevertheless providing interesting views of brighter objects.

 

 

Clear sky ...

 

 

 

 

[12BH7]

Thanks, that was nice report. I hope you work out the mount issue.

[deSitter]

I had a frustrating but whimsical experience on the night of April 19-20, 2025, with my newish SkyMax 180 Maksutov-Cassegrain and my recently-upgraded Losmandy G-11. The upgrade was a retrofit to Gemini-2 standards, making the G-11 a competent automated go-to mount. It had worked before, but on this night it failed during initialization -- the hand controller would not connect to the main control box no matter what I did. (Diagnostics in progress, with many thanks to the immediate support of the on-line Gemini-2 user's group.) In that state, the mount was electrically dead in the water -- no ability to do anything powered, and in particular, no sidereal drive or slow motions. It was the equivalent of a quite large and very expensive "pipe mounting", made of plumbing fittings bought at the local hardware store. There I was, dressed for the cold, at a decent Bortle-4 or so site an hour from home and a mile higher, with everything set up and well aligned, with a list of Messier targets as part of shaking down the 180. What to do?

 

The answer, of course, was to hand-slew and use the finders (I had installed a second one for ease of access in all observing positions). The telescope was well balanced, I had recently relubricated the bearings, and the G-11's clutches are finely adjustable, so smooth motions were possible. I restricted myself to a low magnification (47x, 48-mm Brandon) since the lack of manual slow motions made it difficult to adjust position with accuracy greater than about half a degree. Notwithstanding, I was able to log 27 Messier objects in less than two hours, plus a few extras, mostly in the difficult-to navigate Virgo galaxy cloud.

 

The toughest object of the night was M83, well down in a light dome to the south, but nevertheless visible. M104 showed classic detail -- central bulge and dark lane. The heart of the Virgo cluster was interesting, as always. In addition to M84 and M86, I could see nearby galaxies NGC 4387, NGC 4388 and NGC 4402: These last five resemble a smile face, with the Messier galaxies two big eyes, NGC 4388 the mouth, NGC 4387 the nose, and NGC 4402 perhaps a cynically raised eyebrow, amazed that a mere bloblet of protoplasm would dare gaze at a great galaxy cluster. With M85 in the field, nearby NGC 4384 was easy as well. M64 showed no trace of its "black eye", though I would have liked to try a little more magnification on it.

 

Several globular clusters were on the night's agenda, all easy to find but frustrating in that many showed "granularity" which suggested that more magnification would have resolved them. M3, M5, M13 and M92 were granular. M13 also showed the well-known "propeller" feature, and it was easy to find nearby galaxy NGC 6207. I could not find NGC 5053 near M53.

 

As I was about to suspend operations for the night, I noticed that Lyra had risen, so took a final view of M57, the tiny ring easily visible at 47x, and of M56. All in all, it was a very good night, and now I will have to see if I can get the Gemini-2 working for the next time out. The SkyMax 180 is turning out to be a quite nice telescope, perhaps a bit small for serious deep-sky work but nevertheless providing interesting views of brighter objects.

 

 

Clear sky ...

 

Yes! Although the wheelhouse of the 180 is planets and Moon, it's perfectly fine for DSOs. At f/15 you can use simple eyepieces and get medium powers with long ones. My 30mm Meade QX (Erfle derivative) loves that scope. That gives 90x which is very good for DSOs.

 

-drl

[Jay_Reynolds_Freeman]

Yes! Although the wheelhouse of the 180 is planets and Moon, it's perfectly fine for DSOs. At f/15 you can use simple eyepieces and get medium powers with long ones. My 30mm Meade QX (Erfle derivative) loves that scope. That gives 90x which is very good for DSOs.

 

-drl

Most of my observing has been of deep-sky stuff, and most of it was done with focal ratios longer than many people associate with that kind of work: I have made some use of 6-, 8- and 10-inch Newtonians at around f/5, but my primary instrument has been a Celestron 14 at f/11 (over 10000 observations logged), and I have also made great use of two other Maksutov-Cassegrains; namely, a six-inch at f/10 and a 10-inch at f/14.6. I have used refractors down to about f/8 for various deep-sky projects, such as Herschel-400 and Herschel-400-2 surveys, and at one point I went through the entire Bedford Catalog of some 800 objects with a 6-inch f/8 triplet, which came close to exactly duplicating the performance of the original instrument used to create that catalog, nearly 200 years ago. Lately, most of my deep-sky work has been Messier surveys with small instruments, just because I like to play with telescopes.

 

My eyepieces for most deep-sky work have generally been Brandons, typically the 12 mm for focal ratios around f/8 and the 16 mm for f/10 and f/11. I would probably have been using a Brandon 24 mm with the SkyMax 180's f/15 if the drive and slow motions had been operating. In my experience, Brandons generally scatter noticeably less light than eyepieces with more air-glass interfaces, so produce slightly better contrast, which is much appreciated in viewing low surface-brightness objects. For that reason, I haven't had much use for super-wide-field eyepieces: The "porthole" views are nice but scarcely necessary -- star-hopping and a decent finder will put things in a narrower field easily, where I can then center them up, and most of what I look at is much smaller than the field of view of the Brandon/telescope combinations that I use to view them.

 

 

Clear sky ...