Last night looked good and I had a favorable enough work schedule to make a trip to Columbus. This was my first time with my newly built 14.7” (373mm) alt-az-mounted, Telekit Newtonian in a dark place. For the past several years, I have been limited to 10” at the Columbus site. I haven’t had any larger aperture there since 2011:
https://polarisb.blogspot.com/2011/03/camping-at-dark-sky-site-3-14-2011.html
What a difference five more inches makes! A ten inch mirror (less the secondary) provides ~70k sq. mm (less the secondary) of light collecting power. A 373mm mirror provides >100,000 sq. mm! This increase was obvious.
Everything I looked at seemed new. Compare M15 to M2! In that aperture, they look like different classes of object. The Double Cluster seemed to go on endlessly. Mirach’s Ghost looked like a globular.
Highlights of the night, each a first find for me, included IC10 (surprisingly big and round), NGC 147, NGC 891’s dark lane, six members of the Abell 347 cluster (just east of NGC 891), M76’s lobes (with a nebular filter), and three members of Stephan’s Quintet.
I learned some things, too. One thing is that I need more solutions for dew: by 11, everything external was fogging up if it wasn’t heated, and water was dripping off the telescope; things are laid out around the house today to dry. But today I am basking in the glow of a great night of observing!
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