It’s been a long 7 months since I purchased a second-hand Simak 240 that turned out to be afflicted by some pinching. Despite the best efforts by my friend Samuel, who doesn’t live too far from my remote observatory, it could not be fixed.
Several trips, several attempts, and it would just not go away. As I have resolved to send the telescope to the original manufacturer for repairing, Samuel gave me his RC8.
It’s an 8 incher instead of the 10 incher I had originally bought, and a little slow at F/8 (compared to the Simak 240 at F/5.6), but it’s well tested and it was already in Nerpio, so it only needed to be transferred to my mount.
After an incredible string of bad weather, in what has turned out to be the rainiest winter in Spain in recorded history, finally Samuel took a chance and travelled to the observatory location to install his telescope (soon to be mine) on my staunch GM2000.
Here’s my first light, which I’m very happy about. The seeing was terrible last night, and I think the collimation could be improved, but I’m glad the nightmare is pretty much over.
Now I’ll have to ship the Simak to Venice, hometown of Costruzioni Ottiche Zen, have them repair it and certify that it works fine now. Then I’ll try to sell it on the Italian territory.
I hope that my being well known in the astronomy community thanks to my work on AstroBin will shadow the fact that I can’t show any good pictures made with the Simak 240.
Here’s the AstroBin link for this M81: M81 on AstroBin