The sky was bright and seeing poor, but I gave the little mount a workout, using my home-made 50mm f/9 spotting-scope refractor, at 16X & 28X. I aligned on Saturn, then Arcturus, then tweaked it by going back to Regulus. It then slewed to M3, which was nicely centered, then over to M51, then to M13. M13 wasn't dead-center, but still well within the FOV. A nice little mount. I plan on trying my compact 80mm f/5 refractor on it in coming nights, which only weighs a tad under 4 lbs. The 80mm ED is much too massive for it, unfortunately. On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 6:28 PM, Chuck Hards <chuck.hards@gmail.com> wrote:
I plan on playing with the mount in coming nights, weather permitting, with a small refractor, on some night-time objects, and see how many of the 42,900 objects in the database are actually within the grasp of a 50-80mm telescope ROTFL!