First light after 18 years under covers

[Bruce Williams]

To my shame, my once-loved, AstroSystems 8.5" newtonian telescope has been languishing under sheets for the last 18 years. It has sat untouched in the garage all that time - just receiving an occasional guilty glance and a whispered promise to "get you out sometime soon".

Anyway my recent experiments in photographing the moon with a Sigma 150-500mm lens (see posts in the Photography Critique and Advice forum) encouraged me to finally take the plunge and whip off the sheeting. Well I expected much worse.... there was a very large but fortunately very old mouse nest covering the floor under the mount and luckily the tube itself appeared to be reasonably well sealed. Aside from an attractive tracery of spider web criss-crossing the tube and covering the primary mirror all looked to be in reasonably good shape.

My Vixen SP mount needed a bit of touching up with Hammerite but it and it's RA and DEC drives seemed to work just fine (time will tell if this is actually the case).

With the help of a good friend the mirrors were removed and carefully washed. After replacing the mirrors the scope was re-collimated using my friend's new-fangled laser collimator and all was ready for first light (well first light in a long time ).

The day the sheets came off I bought a second-hand 24mm Baader Hyperion eyepiece which comes conveniently threaded to take a T-mount. So after visually checking out the moon with this wonderful eyepiece - on went my Nikon D300 to try my first ever go at lens projection photography. I couldn't fit the moon onto a single frame so I took pairs of moon images (top and bottom) and stitched them in Panorama Studio. Here's the much reduced in size result (after processing in Photoshop):



Bruce

[artdemole]

Great 1st quarter shot.

[snowdrop]

Thats a great picture Bruce. I hope you post lots more.

[Bruce Williams]

Thanks for your encouraging comments artdemole and snowflake - much appreciated.

Bruce

[Bruce Williams]

Ooops - Sorry for getting your name wrong snowdrop ,

Bruce

[animartco]

Lovely picture BRuce! Set me thinking. Al those great big craters are level inside and don't have high sides like the little new ones. Does this mean that a long time ago there were much bigger lumps of rock floating around the solar system than there are now? Or have the big ones changed possition?

[snowdrop]

Thats ok, Bruce.

[Bruce Williams]

Thanks for your comments animartco.

This Wikipedia article may go some way to answering your question - in particular you might find the section entitled "Geological History" quite interesting. Check out the paragraph starting, 'Analysis of the lunar samples....' (and read to end of section): Geology of the Moon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ga = billion

Bruce