Too much confusion

OK, I did it. I just got me one of those new, advanced Skywatcher Flextube GOTO dobsonian telescopes. I mean, 12 inch full aperture, tracking and finding faint fuzzies in the sky without having to fall back to Olympic gymnastics was just too tempting to resist.

I picked it up at Astromarket.be in Nieuwpoort, near the Belgian coast (if you ever visit the town, I can recommend Boothuis, excellent food we got in that resto). Astromarket is led by Jim Oostvogels, a nice guy. Much nicer than the blokes from UPS who dropped one of the boxes with a bit of cosmetical damage to one side of the scopes' rockerbox. Oh well, Oostvogels ordered a replacement part for the non-critical component.

  

Jim is holding a 6 inch APM ED refractor here. Which is rather small and light. Left in the picture, you can see the boxes for the Skywatcher dobsonian. I mean, these are *huge*. We succeeded in putting the boxes in our car. Just.

Last night was partially clear, so I started the construction of the rocker box. People who buy their furniture at Ikea: mounting a dobsonian rocker box is more or less the same story. Skywatcher included the necessary tools, very Swedish for a Chinese company. No surprises here, everything worked out very well, and after an hour, I had a complete rockerbox, ready for use.

Make no mistake: a 12 inch Skywatcher Flextube Goto is heavy, and big. It allows for a one man operation, but not by a big margin. It might be a good idea to put it on wheels and roll it outside, especially in my case, after years of back problems. Luckily, Martine is willing to help till the wheels are ready.

Martine in the dunes, making a selfie video, wearing a kinda Mick Jagger coat.

I first tried working the telescope manually. But I did not like it, too much friction for a dobsonian, making push and overshoot happening too frequently. The telescope really is designed for automated operation and tracking. Which luckily is not too difficult to do: connect a cable between the two motors, add the keypad and a power cable and you are all set. The alignment procedure seemed to work fine. After entering local coordinates, time, time zone and daylight saving time, the scope was ready to align on two bright stars. This was enough to bring objects in the finder after a goto operation. Not in the center of the field of the main telescope as it should be expected, but I am not yet worried: the scope was not level at all, a prerequisite for more or less accurate goto's.
Did I mention collimating the optics was straightforward? It is, with the big knobs on the primary mirror cell. Optics kept collimation very well, even after sliding the secondary mirror cage to the primary one for storage.

Optically, the scope seems to perform well. Unfortunately, before I could really do an accurate startest (easy, because the dobsonian was tracking the star very well), clouds ended the show the first night.

Update: today the weather gods allowed me for one full hour of observing with the Skywatcher. I perfected the collimation and leveled the scope. Optics seem to be of excellent quality indeed. Visually I could see quite some detail around the Red Spot region on Jupiter, together with the pitch black dot from the shadow of one of the moons. The goto operations got a lot better too. Going from Betelgeuse to M35 in Gemini put the object in the field of view of a 20mm widefield eyepiece. Tracking was excellent and having a keypad to center objects is a blessing.

One thing I did not like so far. Both Celestron and Skywatcher use a Synta handcontroller with nearly identical keypad layout, from the same factory, but the functions of the controller are behind different buttons on the keypad. Why can't they keep this standard? Using a Celestron mount too, I often ended up pushing the wrong button, interrupting an alignment procedure, selecting a different menu than I expected. Too much confusion here. Hope they correct this, one day.

Finishing my blog for today, here are a few Jupiter images of last week. Seeing was good, and I got some nice detail with the 6 inch refractor. Not as much as I would have liked tho. I found the images to render less detail in the red channel, rather odd. Red is normally very good. Giving it some thought, I realized I had mounted the filter wheel backwards after the move to our new home. A quick test yesterday proved that just flipping the wheel solved the little issue. It seems reflections and glare from the filter killed the contrast of the red channel more than it did green and blue. There is a reason manufacturers of RGB filters recommend which side to mount towards the CCD chip...

For the record, the two leftmost images were made with a monochrome ASI 120MM camera, the rightmost one with an ASI 120MC color camera.