I finally had a short first light session with my new Sky-Watcher 150 F5 Newtonian on Sunday night. It was just a two hour short session, because need to book-in early next day..
The Sky-Watcher 150 F5 is around 69cm long, 18cm in diameter and weight around 6.5kg. It use a rack-and-pinion 1.25" focuser which is quite stiff.
The sky on sunday night was quite hazy, so my target was saturn, jupiter and the moon. I use a Takahashi LE 7.5mm eyepiece with a 3x barlow to give a high 300x magnification on saturn and jupietr. The view was very good and seem to be better than my Sky-Watcher ViewMax 127 (using a Sky-Watcher Super Plossl 10mm with a 2x barlow). The view of the moon was also very good, but when I use the ScopeTronix WA 14mm eyepiece adapter to take a few images of the moon, I was surprice to see some false colour on the moon edge in the image. I suspect that the false colour may be cause by the haze or the ScopeTronix WA 14mm eyepiece itself. After a 2 hour see see and look look session, I check the collimation and found out that it was out by a little. The scope seem to be out of collimation quite easily and I was wondering is this a common problem for fast newtonian??
Overall, I found the scope preformance exceed my expectation and perform very well. Also, I feel that to get the best out of this scope, you need to use very good eyepieces and this scope is more sensitive to the quality of the eyepieces compare to the Sky-Watcher ViewMax 127. Anyway, I will perform a more thorough test when my In-Camp Training end at 05 Mar 2004.
By the way, I have upload two pictures of the Sky-Watcher 150 F5 newtonian in my personal album during the session -
Scope: http://www.singastro.org/album_pic.php?pic_id=79
Focuser: http://www.singastro.org/album_pic.php?pic_id=77
Take a look if interested.
Have a nice day.
"The universe is composed mainly of hydrogen and ignorance."