I pulled my big Newt out of storage again in the beginning of 2022.

It was definitely an adventure! The first panic moment happened during inspection of the tube: I was checking the tension on the nuts that fasten the secondary mirror spider, and suddenly one of these 4 nuts broke off with an audible bang. Luckily, I had a spare nut laying around that fit the threads, otherwise I would have had no chance to image at all.

The primary mirror had become pretty dirty and this reduced contrast when I looked through the collimation tools. Luckily, the dirt didn’t appear to have much effect on the star shapes during my focusing routine. But when I looked at my first full image, the edges were absolutely terrible. It turned out I simply forgot to put in an 11 mm spacer during the reconfiguration of my optical train for off-axis guiding. The coma corrector backspacing was completely off!





I quickly re-assembled the system with the spacer. The edges of my field were not going to be great with tilt, so I selected a small galaxy that would fit the central (best) part of my sensor as the target for the first night. NGC 891 is a fairly bright edge-on galaxy and similar to NGC 4565 which I have shot several times in the past. Surprisingly, I never imaged NGC 891 before. I guess there’s just too much competition from other showpiece objects around this time of the year. With so few clear nights in Winter, beginners will likely shoot objects like the Orion Nebula or Rosette nebula.

The central dust lane of NGC 891 is really intriguing, with many small dark details emerging perpendicular to this plane. Teasing out these details was a challenge, as I only had a limited amount of integration time. Guiding with an OAG and the new multi-star algorithm in PHD2 helped a lot here, I didn’t lose a single sub to poor tracking. Clouds rolled in at 1 AM and when I went to pack up the telescope, I noticed the outside of the carbon fiber tube was covered in ice. Also no dew on the mirrors this time, which really surprised me because humidity was 100% during the night and I didn’t use dew heaters.