New toy

As of Sunday night I am the happy owner of a Vixen R130 Sf astronomy telescope. It is an early Christmas present from Clare and it is a rather impressive piece of kit. It is a Newtonian reflector at 130 mm / f5. Last couple of nights I've been looking at Jupiter, since it is in a very good position for looking at right now. And I have seen Uranus (careful now!) and it's moon Titan as well. It is really fascinating!
This is what the telescope looks like. The tripod stand is a proper astronomy model. Really sturdy and with screws to get the scope in to the last bit of the exact position. That is really really needed. Can't think what it would be without it! When looking at Jupiter (or any other object up there) you can almost see the movement caused by the rotation of the Earth. With the highest magnification eyepiece in it, I'd say any object is only visible for maybe 20 seconds before going out of sight and you have to readjust. Now this is done with a simple twist on the adjustment knob(-s) to move the telescope the little fraction of a degree it is needed to move. To even try and do this manually would be a really time consuming task. Just a little nudge will knock the telescope too much and the object would be most likely be out of sight. There is a little telescope attached to the big one, a "finder scope" which makes it much easier to do the initial aiming towards any object up there.

The thing is rather large, I'd say. :-)


Mirror mirror in the scope...