I’ve just acquired a new telescope - a Sky Watcher Esprit 80EDX!

It’s my first refractor style telescope (not counting my guidescope of course), I’m honestly definitely more of a newt person - but a newt needs a whole shed for remote operation, while a small frac like this can reasonably fit in a mini obs/box :) those are plans for later though

I wasn’t able to go to my usual imaging spot over christmas, but I really wanted to test out the scope and see if everything is alright and stuff - this meant imaging from my parents’ garden, with ~bortle 7 light pollution levels and absolutely terrible horizon… This was gonna do for a test though! :D

I had 1.5 clear nights (so far, but unfortunately it’s not looking like I’m getting any more anytime soon…), the first half a night that was clear I spent entirely on setting things up and whatnot - this frac behaves much different from my previous newts, especially in terms of focusing. To be honest I’ve not nailed it yet still, but I’ve now gotten it to a point where it’s workable. It seems the red channel has some bloat - but this was expected from an esprit line scope, it’s not a problem at all with a touch of blurx :)

My guiding hasn’t been great still though - there’s some flexture going on with the frac (which I didn’t expect honestly because I didn’t experience it on the much worse mechanically newt lol) which I’m gonna fix by getting an OAG. The bigger problem is that my mount still has it’s problems and doesn’t work well… it seems to be less bad now after adjusting the RA backlash, but it’s far from good.

Admittedly, I didn’t spend too much time/effort on processing this one (I’m not even at my usual display), this is very little integration time in bortle 7, I also had some gradients from random city lights - it’s far from a good image, but it was a useful test and that’s all it was meant to be really :)

I did also grab some time on the Heart nebula and 3I/Atlas later in the night, I think the Heart neb image could be somewhat decent! But we’ll see.