Posted 01 June 2019 - 06:48 AM

The "Bird Jones" revisited...

Over three months have passed since my last posting. I spent the interim ever mindful of this particular telescope, yet occupied with others, and with other mounts, including its own "PowerSeeker" CG-2/EQ-1 which has now been hyper-tuned with bronze and fitted with wooden legs...

The Bird will not be alighting upon that mount, as the counterweight required for it is much too large and heavy. Only the smaller and smallest of my telescopes will mount upon that one in future.

The telescope had yet to enjoy its first light under the starry void, until early this morning. I did not want to begin renovating it until afterwards. The telescope has not been touched, yet. Now, without further ado, the first-light report of my 127mm f/8 "Bird Jones"...

For this session, the telescope was mounted upon my new "Twilight Nano" alt-azimuth, and it supports it quite well...

The accoutrements that came bundled with the telescope...

...the 20mm erecting-eyepiece, the 4mm modified-achromat(I imagine), and a 3x barlow.

First off, I needed to align the finderscope to the telescope itself. I used Polaris, the North Star, for that task, and whilst I was at it, I snapped a shot through the 20mm...

That is also precisely how it appeared to my eye, and at best focus; like the devil's own pitchfork; no surprise, really.

After the 5x24 finderscope was aligned, I aimed the Bird at Jupiter(my apologies, Jove)...

4mm(250x)...

The 4mm isn't all bad. It performed better than anyone had a right to expect, but as you can see there the view wasn't sharp.

20mm(50x)...

After testing those two, a spate of madness overwhelmed me, forcing me, against my better judgement, to pop the 20mm into the 3x-barlow...

I must say, the 3x isn't half bad, thus far. I will be testing it further, and with other telescopes.

Now, the camera had actually portrayed Jupiter much better than what I saw with my own eyes. For example, I could see the moons at all times, and the "Amici line" of the 20mm spanning across the field-of-view. Also, in almost all instances, Jupiter appeared almost doubled.

So, that's my Bird freshly fallen off of the overseas barge.

I've got to do something about this secondary-assembly...