My 9.5-pound observatory

In the last post I introduced my new small scope, the PICO-6 60mm Mak-Cass. After having a positive first light, I decided the scope was good enough to be the center of a new travel observing kit. Here’s the scope mounted on a Universal Astronomics DwarfStar alt-az head and a Manfrotto CXPRO4 Carbon Fiber Tripod.

Here’s the kit broken down. The case is an AmazonBasics Medium DSLR Gadget Bag, which Doug Rennie helpfully put me on to. The Pocket Sky Atlas and small Night Sky planisphere go in the back pocket. In front of the bag from left to right:

• DwarfStar head with handle
• Celestron 8-24mm zoom eyepiece in its metal tube case
• Orion 32mm Plossl eyepiece (22x, 2.3-degree true field), standing
• PICO-6 OTA
• Orion Explorer II 6mm Kellner eyepiece (117x, 0.4-degree true field), lying in its cardboard box
• Astro-Tech 1.25″ dielectric diagonal

Here’s everything packed away. This was just a first pass. The final arrangement I came to is as follows:

• The left-hand slot holds the DwarfStar head with the handle removed and stowed separately, as shown here, and the 6mm eyepiece in its cardboard box, wrapped in a small piece of bubble wrap.
• The middle slot holds only the PICO-6 OTA, just as shown here.
• The right-hand slot holds the 32mm Plossl and the 8-24mm zoom eyepiece on the bottom, both of them in the beige metal cases that the zoom eyepieces come in (I had a spare). The tops of the two cases form a horizontal shelf which holds the diagonal, wrapped up in a small drawstring bag.
• Finally, a piece of bubble wrap goes across the tops of all three slots and gets tucked in at the edges and corners.

Oh, the vertical dividers in the case are held in with velcro so they can be adjusted or removed as needed.

For flight, the tripod can go in a backpack or in checked luggage, and the AmazonBasics case goes as my carry-on “additional item”. The tripod weighs 3.5 lbs, the fully-packed case weighs 6. For a total of 9.5 lbs, I have a full-size tripod, a smooth, variable-resistance alt-az head, eyepieces giving magnifications of 22x, 29-88x, and 117x, a scope which will show the Cassini Division and split Epsilon Lyrae, a planisphere, and a mag 7.6 all-sky atlas.

This past week I was out at Black Mesa, at the northwestern corner of the Oklahoma panhandle, to dig up dinosaurs. I took the whole kit, and I used it. On Sunday night I showed half a dozen people the moons of Jupiter, the ice caps of Mars, the rings of Saturn, a couple of double stars, and the full moon. Monday night I was too pooped for stargazing. Tuesday I spend a couple of hours observing with my parents and a couple of other visitors who were also staying at the Black Mesa Bed & Breakfast. We looked at the same run of stuff as I had Sunday evening, plus a couple more double stars, the open clusterM7, and the False Comet Cluster in southern Scorpio, which is a visual amalgam of the open clusters NGC 6231 and Trumpler 24. After that, we were clouded out for the rest of the week, but it was still more than worth it to have the little scope along.

Verdict: an amazingly flexible and capable setup. I look forward to many more adventures with it.

Here’s one more shot from the road. Nothing telescopic – on Thursday morning the rising sun was accompanied by a pair of sun dogs. This is a raw shot with my iPhone 5c. The best sun dogs I’ve ever seen in my life.

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Small telescope quest reloaded: the PICO-6 60mm Maksutov

This came a couple of weeks ago. I got it from Kasai Trading in Japan – here’s the link. They market both a 60mm Maksutov-Cassegrain, which is the PICO-6 shown here, and an 80mm Mak-Cass called the PICO-8. These appear to be the same scopes as those sold in Europe as the Omegon MightyMaks, which are available through Astroshop.edu (here) and Amazon.co.uk (here).

It’s been a while since I posted about small scopes, and after getting the little SV50 refractor nearly six years ago, I declared my small telescope quest complete. But the SV50 turns out to be a more satisfying finder than stand-alone scope, even for air travel. For deep-sky work when I’m traveling, I’m usually happy with binoculars (most recently on the Channel Islands), but sometimes it’s nice to check on the planets, too, and the SV50 just doesn’t have the reach.

I thought this little Mak might be just the ticket. As you can see, it is tiny. It weighs just a bit over 1 pound. Here it is with a regular-sized beverage bottle and my largest eyepiece, the 2-inch 32mm Astro-Tech Titan.

And here it is next to the SV50. The SV50 has a focal length of 210mm and a focal ratio of f/4.2. The PICO-6 has a focal length of 700mm and a focal ratio of f/11.7, which makes it roughly equivalent to the 60mm refractors sold by any number of astro vendors. I actually tested the PICO-6 side-by-side with London’s 60mm f/11.7 Meade refractor. The refractor threw up a brighter image – no shock there, since it’s unobstructed and has no mirrors to reduce light-throughput. But much to my surprise, the PICO-6 was a hair sharper: it could resolve fine details and split close doubles beyond the reach of the refractor. The differences weren’t dramatic, but they were there.

The PICO-6 comes with a dovetail bar and a brass compression ring in the visual back. Both required a bit of work. You can also see two of the three collimation screws in this photo.

I could not get a diagonal to seat in the visual back. After some investigation, I found that the brass compression ring could not fit neatly down into its groove. It had been poorly made, and had an extra flange of metal in two places that made it wider than the groove. It was the work of 5 minutes to grind down the extra width with my Dremel, but it’s still pretty disappointing. I don’t know how these things are made, but it seems unlikely to me that anyone could have seen this and not known that it was a problem.

Also, on the Kasai Trading “Dear Customers” page (here), under the heading “Quality Inspection” it says (courtesy of Google Translate):

Astronomical telescope of our handling is through the “Jisshi inspection” all by Kasai will be shipped to the customer. This is a test carried out by actually seen the night of stars, most practical-world, but the one that is adopted for performance is a test, it takes time and effort, also takes place on the night of good clear weather of seeing because it can not be accurate inspection unless, depending on the weather will give sometimes can not keep our promise of delivery date. Excuse me, please understand that effect.

That makes it sound like all of the scopes are star-tested before they go out to customers, but that clearly is not the case, because the scope I received was unusable until I fixed the visual back.

UPDATE: I was mistaken. According to Mr. Kasai in an email to a Cloudy Nights user, all of the scopes are tested before they ship out, but when they test them they unscrew the visual back. Here’s the key quote, and the “somebody” he’s referring to is me:

Also I dare to emphasize the fact that we do perform visual test on each unit with artificial stars – to check the residual aberration, collimation and mirror shift. Somebody who bought PICO-6 suspected us of this fact, as the brass ring in the eyepiece adapter was bent and it couldn’t accept an eyepiece easily. I feel sorry we forgot to check this defect on this case, but still this has nothing to do with our visual test.

Full message here.

So, I guess they do test them all. I still think it’s dumb to test all the scopes optically but not mechanically – sending out a scope that is unusable until one of the parts has been further machined is arguably worse quality control than sending out a scope has some spherical aberration. But at least they are optically tested, and I retract my claim that they aren’t.

The dovetail bar is also a bit wonky. It’s a couple of millimeters narrower than the Vixen/Orion/Celestron standard, so it will fit into a standard dovetail slot, but you really have to trust the thumbscrew because it will be the only thing holding the scope into the mount. I solved this by putting the scope on a dovetail shoe for the pistol-grip ball head shown here – by design or coincidence, that shoe is a good fit for standard Vixen dovetails. With the help of that shoe, I was able to use the scope with my Universal Astronomics DwarfStar alt-az head. More on that soon.

Now, it may sound like I am down on this scope. I’m not. I wish the quality control was a little higher, but the problems were not unfixable. At least for me, with almost nine years of experience tinkering with telescopes – I can’t recommend this scope for anyone who isn’t prepared to do some work on it. And optically it’s okay. It arrived out of collimation, but with a little help from Polaris I was able to get it tuned up enough to catch Saturn’s Cassini Division and split Epsilon Lyrae cleanly into all four components at 117x. After the mechanical difficulties with the scope, that was a welcome surprise.

Then I flew with it, but that’s a story for the next post.