Where to start?!!!!

Yesterday was quite a day. I'll attempt to start at the beginning, which is actually the night before!
It began on Tuesday night, when myself and AstroCousin tried to get my rig auto-guiding. Now I've been working on this for ages; getting the mount sturdy and well balanced, calibrating and locking into position the finder-guidescope, working out how to get the communication between the guidance software (PHD) and the mount's handset. Well all of this had worked individually over the preceding weeks and I thought it was time to get it all going for real. So we set up, found a target, went to guide and....nothing. Camera refuses to send commands to the mount. Right, well we stripped everything down, checked all the wiring, checked the soldering from the earlier modifications. Everything checked out fine but the camera just wasn't sending the signals, even though the PC was receiving an image. So it seems like the part of the camera that's connected to the mount is kaput.

Well that all put me in a pretty bad mood, as I've been fiddling with all this for months now. But then, something incredible happened! A friend called to say that he needed somewhere to store his telescope, and I grudgingly (ha!) agreed, on the proviso that I could use his wee-beastie. Well ladies and gentlemen let me tell you when I saw this colossus I was filled with lust, oh yes.
It's a 12" 1500mm focal length (f/4.9) monster on an NEQ6 Synscan mount. Fully GOTO and with more light gathering power than a herd of Hubbles, it looks like some kind of nuclear warhead launcher, and that's before you even turn it on.

Switching on was the hard part. After manhandling the enormous beast into it's brackets and tightening all the nuts, it was time to align with Polaris and fire the cannon up. Nothing doing. Did we need two power sources; one for the mount and one for the Synscan handset? No, that didn't help. Did we need a higher current supply? Nope. Turns out that although they put two power sockets on, you only use the one, which powers both units.

OK so we had juice. Next, the 3-Star alignment. Well...'mixed bag' is about the best description I can give our experiences of this process. However, once we'd correctly aligned the scope, found suitable guide-stars and tweaked our method, we finally had something we could work with.

When the NEQ6 slews with the giant telescope aboard, it really is as if we're targeting North Korea with a huge missile. The lumbering beast swivels neatly into place with unearthly and high-tech sounding beeps and whirs, demonstrating the presence of precision gears and controllers at work. Each time it effortlessly picks out our target and beeps satisfyingly, as if locked on and ready to fire. One half expects that beep to be succeeded by the rat-tat-tat of heavy gunfire or the roar-whoosh of an intercontinental ballistic missile launch.

Instead though, one looks into the eyepiece, and what riches one finds there! First, we visited an old favourite of mine (and everyone else's methinks), M42, the Orion Nebula. I chose this as a) I knew what I was looking for and b) it's a hard target to miss. Well it was lovely. The trapezium leapt out with four clearly defined and well separated stars. There was nebulosity aplenty and the full field of view was filled with that wispy blue smokiness that M42 lovers are so familiar with.
Then came M51, the enchanting Whirlpool Galaxy. This was the first time I had ever seen structure in a galaxy through the eyepiece. The spiral arms were clearly visible, and though I'd expected the evening to remain purely observational, I knew at this moment that we'd be taking a photo of this later on. For now though, we continued with naught but our eyes (and £1600 worth of telescope!). Next to Saturn, which leapt from the eyepiece in glorious colour. At 150x magnification it stood out beautifully against the darkness, three small moons accompanying it. The gap between the rings and the planet was visible even in the weakest eyepiece, and became a gulf under higher power. Also evident was the shadow of the planet upon the rings where they curved away behind the globe. I've seen Saturn many times before, but this was really something special. We even managed to persuade a 'wow' out of my usually under-awed sister-in-law who was persuaded out to see the twinkling edifice, and even more surprising from my wife as well!

From there we ventured to M64, the only mediocre target. It was still lovely of course, standing boldly out against the night, but we'd recently been wooed by the majesty of the Whirlpool, and so we moved quickly on to M13, the Hercules cluster, and that really was a wonder. Clear individual stars peppered the eyepiece, a million jewels sparkling brightly in the dark. The 'propeller' was visible too, a faint three-pointed dimness against the brightness of the cluster. More and more we magnified the cloud of twinkles, and more and more detailed it became, unlike anything else I've ever seen through a telescope. It was one of my favourite targets before, but now even more so.

Finally, it was time for a picture. In went the camera and we fiddled to get a rough focus. A quick 15 second exposure showed the cores of the two galaxies, and 30 seconds revealed detail in the spiral arms. In the end we settled for 75 exposures (25 were thrown out leaving 50) of 45 seconds each at ISO 800, with 25 darks. Unfortunately the focus was a bit soft, so we'll need another shot at this, but the result is still awesome, and here it is, taken with a Canon EOS 450D:

So all in all, an awesome evening. I think we were both suitably mind-blown, and will clearly be spending a good few more nights out with this monster of a telescope! More pictures will inevitably follow!