Backyard Sketches

After looking at the weather forecast Saturday morning I decided that in the evening I would set up the grab-n-go scope and try out the new Baader Hyperion Zoom eyepiece I bought a while back. It’s always a good idea to check that everything is in good working order before a session – but to hell with that, I’d rather have to fix things in the dark!

To start with, the head on my EZ Touch mount had come loose after months of sitting in the corner doing nothing, so as well as rotating in the azimuth, it just plain rotated whenever you tried to move it! This was easily fixed though, with my handy allen key set from my Earth, Moon & Sun model I am building. After some tightening, everything was back to normal again.

Then came the focuser, which If I remember correctly, had the same problem last time I tried to observe. As soon as I was pointing the telescope over about 30-40° in altitude, I couldn’t move the focus at all, and with my heavier eyepieces, the focus would slide out on its own due to the extra weight. Again, an allen key and some googling this time came to the rescue and solved the problem.

During all this, I discovered my Red Dot Finder didn’t work and it was one of those flat watch-type batteries that no one, not even dedicated battery shops carry. So I was without a finder for the whole session – my first session in at least 18 months, maybe much, much longer.

Thoughts on the Zoom
After all the hype garnered by the eyepiece over at Cloudy Nights I thought I’d give one a try as it’d be a nice grab-n-go eyepiece for my ZS66.
I can’t say that I was super impressed unfortunately.

The Good

• Twist up / down eye guard
• Easy eye placement
• Sharp across entire field of view

The Bad

• Very difficult to read what zoom setting you are on in the dark
• Twisting the eye guard up or down caused the zoom setting to change and movement of the telescope
• The longest focal length (24mm) is useless as a “finder” as the field of view is far too narrow at 44° to actually find anything
• The shortest focal length (8mm) didn’t seem short enough (not enough magnification), and perversely, seemed far too wide at 72°!

Now, I appreciate this was my first observing session in a very long time so I won’t be selling up quite yet, but as far as the eyepiece goes, I don’t think I would ever use it as the only piece for a session. I would always need a longer focal length piece with a wider field of view for finding things, and I would always need a shorter focal length for high powered stuff. I’ll give it another go, with equipment hopefully firing on all cylinders, but keep an eye on Astronomy Buy & Sell UK!

The Session
Nothing much to report due to the RDF issue, I did have a scan around the Milky Way running through Cygnus, which was nice, and I spotted a small fuzzy patch that was M13 through my 35mm Panoptic, but lost it when switching to the 12mm Nagler T4.