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Time for a new Telescope
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Our First Night Out
Orion SpaceProbe 130ST First Light
Handicapped Astronomy
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Handicapped Astronomy
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God, Genesis and the big bang
I ordered the Orion SpaceProbe 130ST EQ from
High Point Scientific on Friday evening August 24, 2007. The order was
processed and shipped the next Monday (the 27th). Fed Ex scheduled
delivery for Thursday (30th) but they missed it by one day as it
arrived Friday (31st). The scope shipped from California and I am in
Indiana so I guess that is pretty good but the extra 24 hours was hard
to take! The box arrived without a single dent, which is pretty amazing. The packaging was double boxed and well bubble wrapped. In fact there were a couple empty boxes whose sole purpose was to keep the other boxes from moving about during shipping. The package was a lot heavier than I expected. I suspect the published weight of the scope did not include the massive counterweight. I believe the scope is a lot closer to 35 pounds. About 10 pounds heavier than published by Orion.
The assembly instructions were fairly clear. I could have used more and larger pictures, as I was completely unfamiliar with equatorial mounts. Orion claimed 30 minutes assembly time. It took me closer to an hour. Assembly tools were furnished. All the parts were there and they all fit together nicely. Balancing the scope was easy and took only a few minutes. It is a good looking scope. The focuser looks a little plasticy but seems to work well.
The scope came with a 25mm and 10mm Sirius Plossl eyepiece. It did not come with a Moon filter. I have a couple already but the absence of one surprised me. There is a smaller masking hole in the OTA end cap to reduce the amount of light from bright objects. A filter is probably still necessary. The masking hole is not threaded so I don't know if a solar filter could be adapted to fit it safely. Never point any scope towards the sun without a solar filter!
Next I removed the lens caps and popped in the supplied collimation cap, as expected the mirrors were out of alignment. The supplied collimation instructions were well written and easy to follow. If it is your first experience with collimation you might disagree. Trust me these instructions are as good as it gets. Also trust me, collimation gets a lot easier to grasp once you turn a few screws.
One complaint: why Orion supplies the collimation cap and not the two allen wrenches required to make adjustments I can't understand. Luckily I located a proper sized wrench in my guitar tools. Collimation was pretty easy once I had the tools.
I adjusted the polar axis to match my local latitude and locked it down. I read and reread the operating instructions to understand how to use the slow motion controls and the setting circles. Finally, I spent some time just going over the controls and maneuvering the scope around to understand how it would actually behave in the dark.
Ready as I was going to get, I took my new scope out Saturday September 1, 2007. Waited a little too late, it was already starting to get dark before I had everything set up. I did manage to get the tripod level in the daylight. I bought a bubble level and placed it in the accessory tray. This worked amazingly well and at only one dollar was a great idea.
Put the 25mm plossl in and pointed towards Jupiter in the Southern sky. At 26x it was a lot like viewing Jupiter in binoculars, except I could see a couple dark bands on the planet. Put in the 10mm plossl for a 65x view. The view was still very tiny. I didn't buy this scope to be a planet killer and it's a good thing as high power views are going to be harder to get.
By this time it was dark enough that Polaris was visible so I could polar align the scope. That's when I realized the latitude adjustment had moved. Apparently the way the mount is made I will have to check this every time I set up. Polar alignment was a breeze so this is really no big deal.
Our viewing site is in a friend's field a couple miles from my home. It has a wide-open view in almost all direction. There is one annoying tree directly south but whatever is behind it will be in the open within an hour. The temperature was mid to low 70's. The wind was calm. The stars were steady almost no twinkle. All six stars in the Ursa Minor were visible so I estimate it was a magnitude 5 sky. The Milky Way was visible from Cassiopeia to the southern horizon. Beautiful, beautiful night. The Moon would not rise for another three hours. Enough time for a first light deep space object run.
Pointed the scope at Vega so I could set the RA circle. That is when I realized I had left my list of star coordinates at home. That meant I was not going to be able to use the setting circles this night. This turned out to be a good thing. It probably kept me from becoming totally discouraged the first night out.
Moving the scope around and using the controls was so easy in my home in the daylight the day before. Now, in the dark, I couldn't find or figure out the RA/Dec lock knobs. I couldn';t find or figure out the slow motion controls. I couldn't seem to get the scope to point in the direction I wanted it to go for the life of me. When I did accidentally get it where I wanted, it wouldn't stay put.
The focuser seemed to always be pointed in an awkward position and the finder scope was often in an impossible to use location. The manual doesn't tell you this is going to happen or what to do when it does. Here's what you do - loosen the knobs on the rings that hold the optical tube and rotate the OTA in the rings until the focuser and finder are in a comfortable position. While doing this watch that the tube doesn't slide up or down in the rings or it will throw off the balance of the scope. Don't forget to retighten the screws!
I started getting really frustrated but it was such a beautiful night I was determined not to let it be ruined. So I stepped back from the scope reached for the Oberwerks and just leaned on the car with the binoculars. I scanned up and down the Milky Way with no particular target in mind. I happened upon a number of globular clusters and nebula.
This proved to be so much fun that I got the courage to go back to the scope. This time I didn't worry about controls. I loosened up the locks and just began to push the scope as if it were a dob. As I did with the binoculars I began scanning from the horizon up the center of our galaxy. Even at very low power I was thrilled with the images in this rich field telescope.
I had only been at it a couple hours when my dad arrived to see the telescope. He didn't so much want to look through it, as to look at it. It's dark out so how is he going to do that you ask? Well, he has a flashlight! A brilliant, overpowered, white light menace of a flashlight! After blinding me on multiple occasions he happily and obliviously walked away. I knew my first night out was drawing to a close, especially since the moon would be heading over the horizon soon.
If you read my article on our first night out with the dobsonian you will see this evening was not near the smashing success of that evening. On the other hand, I didn't have to deal with trees at this location and the temperature was much more to my liking.
The next afternoon I set the scope up in my home and just sat and looked at it for a while. I was pretty sure the troubles I experienced were far more my own doing than the scopes. I began slowly working with the controls and knobs and began to get a feel for them. It started making more sense. I did some research on the setting circles, then went back to the scope and imagined applying what I had read. I was pretty sure I had it this time.
Sunday September 2, 2007 I packed my scope and my son packed the 8" Deep Space Hunter into the car and off we went to try again. Got to our site an hour before dark to get our base of operation established. It doesn't take a lot of time but there is a lot of work involved unpacking and setting up a table, a couple chairs, reference materials, eyepiece case, red light, and two scopes. My son can have the dob set up and aligned in about three minutes. He is a pro. I am still trying to learn this scope so it takes me a little, ok a lot, longer.
The sun goes down and the Milky Way again begins to reveal itself. The conditions are pretty much a carbon copy of the night before. Mid 70's, very low humidity, magnitude 5 stars, very little twinkling. Nights like these are rare around here.
My scope is polar aligned and locking clamps set. This time I have my star location charts. I swing the scope to Vega. I look at the setting circles and realize I still don't understand them. So setting circles are going to have to wait for a star party where an expert can show me how to read them. That's ok, we will just have to find targets the old fashioned way.
First object I sought out was M51, the whirlpool galaxy. Found it easy enough but it lacked detail. My son located it in the dob. Same story. That is a good thing. It means it is not my scope. We have seen dust trails in this galaxy before, now it is just a fuzzy patch. Another plus is it was just as bright in my eyepiece as it was in my son's. Apparently the transparency is not near as good as we thought it to be. The background in the eyepiece was fairly bright making detail hard to discern.
Next went to Andromeda M31. Same story only bigger. No detail big fuzzy patch. My son found M81 and M82, which we have never seen before - two galaxies in the same field of view. Now that we knew where to look, I turned my scope on them. Pretty much the same exact image. Cool. No detail, but cool.
After viewing these galaxies, I turned the scope South into the regions of Scorpius and Ophiuchus which are teeming with globular clusters. With the panoramic views at low power I didn't even have to work at finding them. I simply pointed in the general direction and scanned a little and they jumped right out. I viewed about a half dozen of them. I also viewed a couple open clusters in this region. Next time I will work at putting some power to them and seeing what kind of detail I can bring out. This outing I just wanted to find out if the scope was capable of deep space object hunting, however even at low power many individual points of light were easily seen in each cluster.
I then concentrated on nebula. I don't own a nebula filter but these fuzzy gray patches in the sky are my favorite targets to view. I guess my imagination is fired up when viewing them by the Hubble pictures I have seen on the net and the pictures taken by amateurs that are published in magazines. They don't look anything like that in an eyepiece but they still fascinate. I viewed three Nebulas this night including the Trifid nebula.
I purposely viewed all of this nights outing at low power. I wanted to see the wow factor of the scope at its lowest magnification. I was very pleased with it in this regard. All of my eyepieces are fairly generic plossls. I had tried using some of them to reach higher power the night before and the image felt mushy. These same ep's work great in my 8" scope. I wouldn't have thought going from F/6 to F/5 would make that much difference but the focal length is half at 650mm compared to 1200mm. It may require a better grade of eyepiece to reach high power with this scope. That test will have to wait for a later outing.
Although this was still a night of learning, I did have a lot of good viewing time. The images were bright. The stars focused to pinpoints. I am happy with the performance and quality of the scope. It is a pretty good bargain at the price. Rotating the tube in the rings to keep the focuser in a comfortable position became second nature very quickly. Moving the scope on the equatorial mount came a lot easier this second night. Using the slow motion controls was also easy and required very little additional thought.
A lot was accomplished in two nights. What remains is to understand the setting circles. Some of my stargazer friends tell me they have never figured them out. I am determined. I will get this. I also need to work on getting more magnification. I think a 2x or 3x Barlow should be just the ticket without adding a lot of expense.
I hope you found something of interest here. If you did drop me a note.
Clear skies!
Copyright © 2007 by Kevin Sluder
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