I have really been enjoying the Polaris 114 I bought, the last few nights, mostly looking at the Moon. I have been going up and down the terminator with an HD 60 4.5mm eyepiece, giving a nice 200X. I have found those six element eyepieces show more detail and have as much light transmission as my Orthos, with a 60 degree field, instead of 45. In one crater, I could not only make out wall colapses, I could also see rubble almost all the way from the rim to the central peak. A couple scarfs have stood out very well as well as some of the sinuous lava flows and other interesting formations. The tones in features have been really nice.
The only things I have done to the scope so far, have been to darken the bevel on the primary mirror and put some strips of flocking inside the focuser to take up some extra clearance around the draw tube. What I thought was a tiny center dot on the primary ended up being a particle of some sort, so I put a dot in the middle with a Sharpie pen.
I need to work on tripod wiggle and I need to shorten the 12 inch controls to little stubby knobs. Using the gear for a motor on RA to move the scope does not cause a lot of wiggle, but using the long cable on the other side does. Using the long cable on the Dec adjustment also causes a lot of extra wiggle. I will probably put some dowel rods or rolled steel rod inside the lower legs and build a really heavy eyepiece rack to work as a fulcrum. I already am using some dampening pads on the bottom of the legs that help some. The pads are half inch plywood squares, about three inches on a side, with five two inch squares of material from a "mouse mat" glued to the plywood with window caulk applied around the rim of each piece of the material.
I checked out how centered the secondary mirror is and found it to be in the right place, except that to post is a bit long....maybe actually designed for an f/5 scope instead of an f/8. Anyway, as far as I can tell, collimation is now dead on the money.
On Jupiter, I can see four bands. If the Great Red Spot is out, I can see it clearly with the blue filter. At times, I can see three or four dark spots on the North Equatorial band, plus some irregularities along its inside edge. Sometimes, I can see diagonal lines going across the space between the two equatorial bands. The two temperate bands vary a lot in how much I can see them, but I can always see them at least a little bit. I saw a bit of a show with what I think was Io coming out from behind Jupiter. With Jupiter, 100X seems to be the magic magnification with the blue filter. I cannot see very much without the filter.
With the Moon out, I really have not tried for any DSOs or anything like that. I may try to get up early in the morning, assuming I can wake up enough, and have a look before the Sun comes up!
Bill
