After driving back from the city central, where even the main stars of Auriga were visible, I decided to deploy my biggest scope for a quick grab and go.
The equipment is a VMC200L with Astrotech RDF on Portamount and a pair of 10x50 binos. Completing the lineup were a set of well corrected widefield eyepieces.
The first issue of the night was mounting the VMC. It was difficult due to the tight clearance it had with the Portamount base. Doable, certainly, but tight.
Next the AT RDF was a hassle; I had to spend at least 15 mins trying to align it and at the end never did successfully achieve good alignment. This meant that hunting for objects in the at-most 1.3deg field was a challenge. I much prefer the Telrad for this but unfortunately the Telrad base is glued to my 4" refractor.
Anyway, all set up and on to the first target of the day, M41, an open cluster in Sirius. Spent about 10 mins hunting for the elusive target before finding it. It looked..... OK. Gaggle of stars in an orangey background. Nice but nothing to yell about.
Moved on to M42. Still needed a min to hunt for it but found it. Nice nebulosity, bat wing structure partly seen and Running Man seen with averted vision barely. Decided against mounting the UHC filter since this was a grab and go.
Decided to try for M38, an open cluster in Auriga. Again ho hum but much better than in my 4" refractor, which would show basically a few stars (limiting Mag that night was 10 in the 4"). Swapped to a higher power EP and the background darkened but I lost a few extra stars as well.
After a rather disappointing evening, decided to use the binos to scan around Zenith where its darker (the Portamount has issues beyond 70deg elevation due to the OTA hitting the mount). Immediately noticed an impressive cluster near Zenith! I think I spent more time looking through the binos than through the telescope at this target. A quick search on Skysafari showed this to be the magnificent Beehive cluster.
Sent the telescope that way; took a while due to the inaccurate RDF even for an object this size.
Definitely more stars were visible and switching down from a 31mm to a 21mm produced a much darker background but sadly the view from the binos seemed more impressive. Perhaps its the context of the object that makes it all that much nicer - the Binos see a large patch of dark space around it while the scope shows mainly stars and stars. Definitely many more stars were seen in the VMC but the widefield view just looked more asthetic.
Finally with Mars high and Saturn rising decided to head over there before night's end.
Mars was quite featureless at the time, the polar icecap, a dark ring aroudn the icecap and at the opposite pole were somewhat seen but there was a significant amount of light scatter making the planet look almost milky. I attribute this to the 40% CO in the scope; otherwise I've been pampered by my exceptional 100ED However, despite the milkiness the albedo markings do seemt o be better defined. this is probably because of the higher resolving power of the 8" compared to the 4", viewing at 243x
On to Saturn, my last target of the night. Honestly, I did not expect much as the last time I pointed the scope that way last year, Cassini was somewhat visible, the planet was a uniform orange. But this year the scope has been well collimated and even though Saturn was only 26deg off the horizon, Cassini was clearly visible around the whole ring and a band was clearly visible on the planet as well. I enjoyed this view of Saturn which was, arguably, even nicer than in the 100ED. I probably spent the most time watching Saturn rise but the realities of an early morning the next day tore me away from the scope.
Astronomy is always a journey of learning and what I learnt this evening was that
1. While 8' of aperture was great, the long focal length of an SCT design (more properly an MCT) at f/10 has difficulty showing the context of the object. Here a widefield scope such as a faster reflector or refractor wins the day, but in Singapore the smaller aperture pretty much means everything except the brightest objects and clusters are easily visible (no, I don't like to chase faint fuzzies. I like them clearly visible to be enjoyed. faint fuzzies are for my camera)
2. Dark skies are infinitely better than bright. Even with a half moon and lights on in Sedili, my 100ED showed so much more nebulosity and detail than the 8" in Singapore. The 8" when deployed in Sedili,on the other hand, was fantastic. The whole Orion nebula simply filled up the FOV of the EP I was using (about 1deg) and the fainter nebulosity was clearly visible.
3. The Portamount (version 1) will easily take an 8" SCT plus 3 lbs of eyepiece and diagonal hanging off the end. Damping time was less than 2 sec (!) and the use of aftermarket slo-mo cables made fine adjustments a vibration free affair.
4. An RDF in Singapore is really only useful for aligning to bright objects like the major stars or planets. Anything more and a powered finder is far, far better. The converse is true in a dark skies location - the powered finder shows so many stars its almost confusing (to this city dweller).
Hopefully we will have more fine nights like last night with cloudless and moonless skies.
And now I think I'll buy me a 16" DOB
![[smilie=admire.gif]](./images/smilies/admire.gif "admire")
*I think I must be mad...*
![[smilie=good-job.gif]](./images/smilies/good-job.gif "good-job")
