New Stellarvue Refractor

First Light For a Lovely Telescope

My new Stellarvue 130 mm f/7 apochromatic telescope arrived recently. I've waited my whole life for an instrument of this quality! As you can see in the first image below, its external appearance is simply beautiful! It's almost too pretty to use with its spotless objective lens glass. Also visible is the fine 80 mm black finder scope mounted parallel to the main telescope.

The telescope itself is fairly heavy. It comes with a massive black storage case. Fortunately, the case has wheels, because I found it impossible to lift the case with the telescope inside.

The first opportunity to use the new telescope came just a few days after its arrival. A bright waxing Moon lit the sky on March 18th. The temperature was fairly mild and there was no wind. I set the Stellarvue on my Paramount MX mount during twilight and anticipated my first views through this exquisite refractor.

My non-permanent mount is aligned fairly well to the celestial pole. I have marked location circles for the tripod legs. The mount's altitude and azimuth have been set during the solar observing I've done over the past several years. I synchronized the mount on the star Rigel in Orion. When I slewed the telescope to other stars in Orion, the stars were not exactly centered in the eyepiece, but they were easily visible within about 10 arc minutes of center. It's amazing how well the mount pointed with only single star synchronization. 

Once I was satisfied with the mount's pointing accuracy, I began to enjoy the views. The first thing I noticed was absolutely perfect pinpoint star images. Stars appeared much more condensed and sharp than views I've experienced in Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes in the past. I'm looking forward to observing lots of gorgeous double stars in the future. Then I moved to Jupiter. The image was crisp and clear. At first I saw three Jovian moons arrayed on one side of the planet. But suddenly I realized there were four moons visible! What I initially perceived to be one moon was actually two moons very, very close together! This is where the quality of the new telescope became evident. I could distinguish these two distant tiny dots of light with a clearly perceptible dark space between them! Next, I moved to the Moon and enjoyed super sharp views of craters and shadows near the terminator.

After playing around with different eyepieces and Barlow lenses, I eventually tried some imaging with my ZWO ASI174 video camera and a 5X Barlow lens. The next picture shows Jupiter with three of its four Galilean moons. The pair of moons nearest to Jupiter had moved slightly further apart since I initially saw them closer together in the eyepiece. Too bad I didn't center the view better to capture all four moons. I might try planetary imaging with a color camera in the future.

The Moon was also an obvious target for imaging. The next image is a 6-panel mosaic near the terminator. I'm really pleased with the detail here.

Soon clouds began to cover the sky. My personal star party ended.

The new telescope will be excellent! I'm enthusiastic about looking at the night sky again. It's been a long time since I wandered around from one celestial object to another just for fun and curiosity. During my academic career it seemed I was always hurrying to measure variable stars while fighting exhaustion. Now I can relax and enjoy the views through a dream telescope.