First Night with Skywatcher Skymax 90Trying out new equipment on a freezing cold winters night - new telescope, old mount.
When I returned home from a recent trip to Loch Lomond, I set about auditing and cleaning up my equipment. I found that I had a great big, heavy tripod and mount, a rubbish alt-az mount that can be moved, one telescope too large to use daily and one very low-quality scope with the same magnification as my camera lens. I need a scope that is small enough to carry around and use daily but as powerful as my large telescope.
I knew that this would be some compound scope, and after a little research, I got a Skywatcher Skymax 90 Maksutov-Cassegrain in a Black Friday deal. It only has a 90mm aperture, so it does not have the light-gathering ability the Explorer 200 has (it'll only gather light pollution anyway). However, it has a focal length of 1250mm, which is great for lunar, solar, and planetary observation and photography. It should also be reasonable for brighter deep-sky objects like Andromeda Galaxy M31 and Orion Nebula M42. I also picked up a Bresser Full HD deep sky camera to help with planetary and deep sky imaging.
Whilst I haven't had a chance to hook up the Bresser camera yet, I have taken the Skywatcher Skymax 90 out on my old HEQ5 with SynScan upgrade for some visual observations of the Moon, Venus, Saturn and Jupiter the other day.
I was also out last night with the DSLR and took some pretty good photos of the Moon with a T-Mount at prime focus. I also used a 2x Barlow lens to get some more details. Next, I shot some quick still frames of Jupiter, which I stacked to produce the picture below.
OK, the first images aren't great by any stretch of the imagination. There are focus issues somewhere in this setup. The view through the eyepiece is crystal sharp, although the 40mm eyepiece with long eye relief doesn't feel comfortable now that I no longer wear glasses. Through the camera's live view, the Moon looked in focus even at 5x zoom, yet the photos were slightly out. Jupiter was overexposed, and being low on the horizon, the seeing wasn't too great. You could see the dark band in the eyepiece for a fraction of a second. However, none of the frames I obtained had this moment of clarity. Hopefully, it will be better with the Bresser camera when I get that hooked up.
Focusing can be tricky on the Skywatcher Skymax 90 as there is a tiny little focus adjustment knob, a lot smaller than the focusers I'm used to. I used a clothes peg to help with the tiny adjustments needed, and I'll need to make a new Hartmann Mask or Bahtinov Mask for this scope.
Later in the evening, I wanted to try Orion Nebula, but the mount gave me problems. It just wouldn't align properly. Each time I did a 3-star alignment, it would fail, saying, "RA axis alignment > 45 degrees". The one time it did align, it was tracking in some random direction. It was getting too late, too cold and starting to get cloudy, so I took the frost-covered mount back inside to warm up, and when I warm up, I'll read up on the SynScan alignment process, as it's been 6+ years since I last had it working.
