The First Lights

Wow, the image was terrific. Working at 40x the Moon almost filled the eyepiece image, but it was too much light. Experts say that observing the full Moon is completely safe for your eyes. I'm not sure of it at all because along one hour after the observing I experienced a light loss of sight. Of course, now I know why telescope vendors sell lunar filters also!

Well, but what about the quality of the image?, I'm hearing you....
Splendid. No minimum trace of false color at this magnification and the sharpness and contrast of the images is so strong that the Moon appears to be only a mile away. You get the sensation that you can touch it with your hand.

Several days after, I focused my telescope towards M42, the Orion Nebula and I saw three stars of the "trapezium" at 40x. Having in mind that the scope was mounted in the living room of my flat with the standard light-polluted sky of a 300,000 ha. city, this was very remarkable. As everybody knows, observing thorough a window of your home is far from an ideal sky watching place due to turbulences in the air because different temperatures inside and outside the house.

Interestingly, since my flat doesn't have windows oriented to North I made a "Polar alignment" with only a compass and with the latitude adjustment of the scope. This more-or-less approach worked rather well, because after an hour or so of observing, I only made two or three adjustments in telescope declination. It was really fantastic to follow M42 only moving the R.A. control.

On 5th, April, I discovered Mercury just over the horizon at about 22:00 p.m. Again, I was using the scope from a flat and the seeing was not very good. I inserted a Celestron 7.5 mm Ultima eyepiece (133x) and it was impossible to get a perfect focused image due to polluted sky and atmosphere (Speaking about the 7.5 mm Ultima, I pointed the scope on the next day in the morning towards a series of white bars with a black background, and then I saw some false color in the form of a small blue halo. After all it's not an Apo, isn't it?)

One of the hardest test for an achromatic refractor is to focus the scope on the Moon using high magnifications. On 16th April, I again used the Ultima 7.5 mm eyepiece for it and the results were surprinsingly wonderful: Total absence of false color and incredible detail in craters and other Moon shapes. Now I'm pretty sure that my #395 is able to reach up to 200x under good observing conditions!

After those experiences under bad observing conditions I was rather happy with the #395 performance. What will happen in a deep-black starry night?, I asked myself.

Well, on April, 30th there was a clean sky and the temperature was excellent for spring standards. I drove about 40 Kms in order to find a true dark site. I concentrated mainly in Gemini, trying to split Castor, but at only 40x I was unable to distinguish the two brighter stars (magnitude 2 and 2.8 respectively, with separation of 2.8 seconds of arc). Nevertheless, I clearly saw another component of magnitude 9 and separated 72 seconds of arc from the brightest component (Castor is a multiple system). This weak component was rendered by the #395 as a dim but perfect pinpoint star.

I also tried to find M65, M66, M95 and M96 in Leo, but I didn't succeeded. These galaxies are really deep-sky objects and maybe a 3.5" refractor is not able to see them.