I ordered a Celestron Travel Scope 70 (TS70) from B&H Photo As a bonus they include a free red LED flash light that they value at $12.95*. I also ordered a Celestron Universal Piggyback Mount from the same vendor.
Mounting the TS70 on the Celestron 8/SCT is simple with the supplied screws and matching pre-drilled holes. The AVX counterweight is not sufficient to counterbalance the SCT, the TS70 and the 9x50RACI finder. Thus in the field I will align the system first with help of the finder.,park the system pointing at Polaris then install the TS70 and remove the 9x50 RACI finder.
I've only had one clear night since procuring the TS70; the day I received it. It was windy and seeing was lousy. Thus, I set up the C8/SCT on the patio with the TS70 riding piggy back. From my south facing patio I cannot see Polaris, so rough aligned with North and used Rigel and Procyon as alignment stars. Below is an image of M42 (Orion Nebula) averaged from 25 8sec exposures.
The image is reduced 50% from the original size. The brightest stars are quite bloated which I hope means the can be improved in sharpness with better focusing and IR filtering. This will prove interesting considering the crudeness of this scope's rack and pinion focuser.
Since this first night trial I checked the and improved TS70's collimation with a Cheshire eyepiece using the shaking method suggested by a 10 Minute Astronomy blog post. Tonight I'll head out to Harvard MA to put it through its paces. This post was originally composed on 3/6/16.
*It turns out, despite containing a 9V battery, the battery appears to be non-standard. Thus, the battery could not be replaced rendering the red flash light useless.
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