The moon through the 20"

We went observing last night and given the haze there wasn't alot to be seen.
We had a look at Saturn but the detail was lost and Venus had its usual shape.
Then we pointed the scope at the moon and wow the detail is amazing.
Despite the haze, I was able to get the magnification up to 500x (15mm+3xbarlow) and 773x (9.7mm+3xbarlow) and was able to "dive" into Copernicus. The brightness was not excessive at those magnifications.
The central peaks were very visible, one was shaped like a Y and there was 3 more below it. One side of the crater floor was rough while the other side was smooth, there was alot of rugged detail in there, I have never seen that before.
The uplift and craterlets around Copernicus was truly 3D, there was so much detail in the crater wall, you could have spent hours drawing it, the detail of other craters was also fantastic.
We also had a good look at Plato and was able to see 4 small craters on its floor, again a first for me.

The 20mm type 2 nagler was just about able to put the entire moon on the field of view, it was seriously blinding but worth it, the detail visible was amazing, it would definitely put the 12" LX200 to shame.

The massive field of view the nagler gives makes the standard 52 degree field of the view of the plossls look like narrow tunnels, I might go down the road of getting some more wide angle high power eyepieces. I'm also going to look into getting a binoviewer for this scope, the one I have and Franks celestron bino wont reach focus.
Surprisingly the 3x and 2x barlows reach focus, this is a nice bonus..

And who said that the moon was boring

Good report Dave.
Did you try using the binoviewer with a barlow? They usually come to focus in this configuration.

:x I never though of that ! The binoviewer already has a 1.5 barlow built in.
I'll give that a go next time.

:roll:

:x I never though of that ! The binoviewer already has a 1.5 barlow built in.
I'll give that a go next time.

I knew you didn't hear me right last night
when I said to try it with the barlow I had with me!

Ahh.. your Brother was distracting you!

Sounds like you are putting the scope to good use dave. your views of copernicus sound amazing.

As for the plato craterlets, I have never seen them myself either, although I got a hint of one last night. They reckon they are easier to spot closer to full moon as they are more reflective than plato itself.

Frank, I didnt hear that !!, you should have beaten me around the head to make sure I heard you :lol:

Trevor, I'm stunned by the planetary and lunar views through this scope, I was under the mis-conception that such a big aperture scope would automatically suffer terribly from bad seeing. I can tell you now that this is not the case !!

PS, the deepsky views are class aswell, but that was not surprising.