Well, it looks like building the dob paid off!!! We had a lovely clear night here last night and I had the opportunity to bring the dob to a mate's house a couple of miles outside of Athenry. He had his 8" F6 GSO Dob & my own 12.5" F6 "TrevDob" out in the drive. The western part of the Milky Way was clearly visible. He has the perfect viewing location with horizon to horizon view and only 3 houses within 1/2 a kilometre.
It stayed clear for about 2 1/2 hours before the rain came in at 11:30 so we just skimmed through the Milky Way for a while before hitting some of the usual suspects.
First off were the 2 globs M13 & M15. These blew my socks off - which was quite uncomfortable given the freezing conditions. M13 filled the eyepiece at 8mm with individual stars everywhere. M15 was a delight, I've never split stars out with any of my scopes (though I've never tried it away from light pollution begore) before but the dob performed immaculately on it.
M57, M56, M27 were next. M57 was like a large donut & I've never seen M27 so bright before. It looked great a 8mm, though I preferred it at 12mm in the Hyperion Zoom. Very 3D like image - I wonder what it would look like in binoviewers? M56 was nowhere near as impressive as M15 or M13 but was still good to see.
Next was M31 & M32 - if I had any socks left they would have disappeared. M31 filled the fov of my 30mm 80 degree Moonfish EP. Two dust lanes visible and the galaxy exteneded out beyond the reaches of the eyepiece. M110 and M32 were both clearly visible, with the latter very bright.
M81, M82, M1, Double Cluster, M45, Mars
M81 and M82 are two of my favourite objects and were quite impressive. I've only bagged the core of M81 before but, although we could not make out individual arms & lanes we could see the galactic disc quite well.
M1 was very difficult to bag given that it was only at about 15 degrees or so. Viewing Mars was more like viewing Venus; I think it took up dancing, at least it looked like it was doing the "twist".
The double cluster was one of the best points of the night. It was absolutely stunning. The Moonfish EP is a perfect match for this one. It just manages to fit both objects in the field of view & did so quite well - I didn't notice any coma.
M45 was too much for the scope though, WAY to large - good thing we had my Megrez refractor along to take a look at it. Love that cluster.
Other highlights were M36, M37 & M39.
We did try NGC7000 for the laugh but, as expected, couldn't really see anything. We tried an Orion Ultrablock but this didn't improve the situation, it increased contrast and darkened the sky background considerably but no north american popped into view. May as well have tried the Horsehead.
One thing I noticed about using the dob without having my usual PC & astrocam running was that I spent WAY more time looking at the objects. New (to me) asterisms were appearing everywhere in the Milky Way area.
We caught two shooting stars and a satellite that whizzed right through the Dumbell as we looked at it at high power.
All in all a very happy and successful night. Can't wait to try it out again.
Trev
  