Celestron CPC800 - First Light - Part 1

Last week I wrote about why I chose the Celestron CC800 for my new scope. This week I want to share the first light experience.

The scope arrived via FedEx last Thursday. I worked from home that day so I would be present to accept the rather large boxes and avoid them being abandoned on my front porch. The scope came in two boxes with the Power tank arriving in a third. All appeared in order upon an initial inspection of the condition of the boxes. Celestron used double boxes to ship these scopes in. I am not sure if they have always done this but it sure does make a very secure shipping package.

The set up was quick and easy. I had pre-read the instructions available for download on the Celestron website. The instructions were simple and very clear. The one thing I discovered while setting it up was that it is important that the clutch on the azimuth axes needs to be snugged up a bit when placing the scope on the tripod. This is necessary so that the scope base will turn as the top is rotated to engage with the self locating mechanism.

I was lucky in that the skies Thursday night cooperated and I was able to observe some. For this first light experience I chose not to go to the dark site but to just set it up in my back yard. I did this as I thought if there were issues and I needed some light to help I could always turn on the flood lights. Fortunately this was not necessary.

This first session was really just an opportunity to see how the alignment process worked and not really an observing session. There are several options to chose from in the alignment process. I chose the "Sky Align" method in which you center three bright stars or planets in the eyepiece. The scope's internal computer determines the identities of the objects and calculates its alignment parameters. This takes all of about 5 minutes to do. Once this was performed, I chose an object, Jupiter, and let the scope slew to it and just like magic, Jupiter appeared in the 40 mm eyepiece. Alignment success!

I spent the next hour just getting the hang of the hand controller and slewed to several brighter objects, i.e. M31, M103, and a couple double stars. The observing conditions in the back yard were really not that favorable to determining the optical quality of the scope and so I would just have to be satisfied with check out of the mechanics. I did test the collmination  at one point on a star and I was presently surprised that the scope was still in collmination after being transported and handled.

Well after about an hour I noticed that the corrector plate was starting to dew over quite significantly. So I decided that I would call it a night. The dew shield I ordered has not yet shipped but I am expecting it within another week or so.  Until then, dew is going to be problematic for this scope.

Next week I will tell y'all about the scope's first trip to the dark site I use and how the optics checked out. Until then, Merry Christmas and clear skies.

rw