Leavitt's First Light
I finally used my new 8" telescope with a working mirror cell! Report:
Jupiter is nice and bright!
M42 is so much brighter than in my first telescope! It’s green and I can the bat wings and texture in the trapezium along with four stars!
There are so many stars everywhere!
High power reveals flaws. High power stars look like ovals. After some investigation, my secondary mirror wasn’t centered in the eyepiece view. I don’t have enough room to fix it all the way before it hits the spider. Time to redesign.
Mars looks blurry. No detail. May be due to seeing. A hint of ice cap but not much else, and then my eyepiece fogged over.
Focuser is bad at holding eyepieces. They keep sliding out. Something with set screws is probably a better idea. I managed to take a few pictures but the weight of a camera meant it was no longer face-on and had distorted stars.
At least M44 looks great!