ATM 20" Bino second impressions.

[Clive Milne <milnecd@yahoo.com>]

    A few repairs & modifications have been done to the beast, and I'm a long way from being
finished yet. (Will I ever be?)  Not surprisingly, I found that setting them up was significantly
easier the second time around, and with a few of the wrinkles ironed out, the actual observing
experience went a bit more smoothly as well.  With the bearing friction reduced, less torque was
required on the structure to move it, consequently, only once during the night was a small tweak
required to fine tune the image convergence.   Anyway, the purpose of the exercise was mechanical
fine tuning rather than observing, so they were set up under a heavily light polluted sky.   I was
pleasantly surprised to see that the binocular experience was no less compelling in spite of the
adverse conditions.  Star clusters are one particular class of object that really benifits from
binocular vision. Also, of all the different types of deep sky object, star clusters are perhaps
the least impacted by light pollution. So I really should not have been surprised. Planetary
nebulae are also kinda cute in large binoculars, especially if they have high inherent contrast to
begin with.
    If I was forever city bound, I'd be happy to sacrifice some aperture in persuit of a wider
field of view than I presently have with the 20's.   I guess a nice little pair of 12's would be
just the ticket, but they will have to wait until the next project (24" bino's) is finished :)
   Regards,
        Clive.


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