"You may have a 20" Obsession, you may have that 120mm Tak, and yet all that vastness of space feels so annoyingly unconquered.
Even if at times you feel that you might have just about conquered space, have you done it in a manner that could honestly be described as 'Super'?
Probably not.
It's all about the equipment, or more specifically, the name of the equipment, and no one has yet to top 'Super Space Conqueror'."
I started my journey of amateur astronomy at the end of 2015 with a Celestron NexStar 4SE, a cute little computerized gizmo. The NexStar is a Mak, and a very good one at that. Visually it compares to my Meade ETX-90, which itself has identical optical quality to a Questar.
The NexStar in its first few months showed me a lot. In the solar system, it showed thousands of features on the Moon, the cloud belts of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, and the pinpoint Uranus. It is also big enough to pull in some deep-sky objects such as the Andromeda Galaxy, the Orion Nebula, and most of the other bright showpiece objects. I'm sure many people under dark skies would be happy with this as their only scope.
But after a while I got bored. Once you see the showpiece objects with a small scope, that's it - the little 95mm (Maksutovs are sold on the basis of the size of the corrector lens, but the primary is around 7mm smaller because the corrector scatters light a bit) primary mirror of the NexStar just isn't enough for real detail anyway - all galaxies are just smudges, M42's "wings" barely show up, globular clusters are barely resolved, and the planets are exciting for about 20 minutes. By April 2016 I knew I wanted a bigger scope.
As luck had it, I found optics and a focuser for a 6" f/8 Newtonian for sale on Cloudynights for $150 shipped. I convinced my dad that we could build a 6" Dob together and save some money compared to the price of a new one. He was convinced. Unfortunately my dad is not particularly good at woodworking so that project ended rather quickly.
By June, I was desperate. These optics were not going to sell for what I paid for them, so I searched around to find a solution, preferably a low-cost one. A guy had a Sovietski 6" f/8 with a spherical primary mirror, but that was too expensive. I looked at his other ads and found an Edmund Super Space Conqueror sans optics for $125 shipped. Thus, I have still saved money - an equatorial 6" costs $450, while a 6" Dob is $300.
I ordered it and waited. Unfortunately by the time it arrived I was about to go on a 2-week trip to Europe. By the time we got back school had started and I was in a new home-school program and wasn't ready for the stress of moving the primary mirror cell and installing the optics, so the scope sat around for a while.
The Super Space Conqueror is, truly, "super", at least in terms of size. This monster weighs 68 lbs and dwarfs ten-year-old children! Everything except for the setting circles and focuser knobs is made of metal.
By December I was ready to finish the scope. My mom and I took it to a shop to have the holes drilled in the OTA, and I removed the mirrors from their original wooden cells and put them in the Edmund ones. The primary is attached to its cell via clips, and the secondary sits on its stalk, attached by ultra-strong double-sided tape.
My first target with my not-so-new scope was the Pleiades, mainly to align the finder. What a sight! There were way more stars in the cluster than with the NexStar. I have since seen many objects with this scope, and I hope I have it for a long time.
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