John

Orion Optics primary mirrors tend to be thinner than most, and therefore lighter. One of those honeycomb or strut back type designs is needed to lighten further I guess. Skywatcher use something like that on their 14 inch and upwards dobs I seem to recall.

Congratulations and thanks for the interesting and helpful input to SGL 👍

Poor Zaphod - he and Ford Prefect grew up together on a planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse 😬 Still, he would have wanted to go out with a bang 😉

Nice capture 😀 I managed to snap it once back in 2020 with my old mobile phone at the eyepiece when it was close to Venus in the sky. Nowhere near as nice as your shot but at least you can just about see a phase:

Very interesting images Ian 🙂 I must dig out the sketches I made of Zeta Herculis when I first split it and more recently. I recall that those showed a noticeable change in position angle over a period of a few years as well. Unless it was just my lousy sketching 🤔 The Universe in motion - great stuff 🙂

Sounds lovely Neil ! It's a pity that this comet is really badly placed for me. I've managed to catch it with binoculars and my 4 inch refractor a couple of weeks back but the part of the sky that it is currently in is just about the hardest for me to get a clear view of from home. No opportunity to take a scope somewhere else currently so I'm having to enjoy it vicariously through reports such as yours 🙂

You should get good views of your targets of interest with both those scopes. Patience is needed with the planets though, because they are not always in favourable observing positions. Photos can be misleading because the camera can often capture more than the eye can see. Have a look for sketches done with similar scopes for a more accurate guide to what might be achievable visually. For the Sun you must use a suitable solar filter of course. Apologies if you know this already.

I've been doing a few measurements of where eyepieces reach focus. Of mine, the Svbony 3-8 zoom is the one that needs the most inwards focuser travel and the TV Panoptic's (and other TV par-focal group "b" eyepieces) need the most outwards travel. With the scope that I have been testing with (a long focal length refractor) the range of focuser travel I needed to accommodate the needs of both extremes was ~16mm when the scope was focused on Polaris.

I'm not sure that the ES Ultra Light's are any lighter than the Skywatcher equivalents 🤔 It's worth checking.

Good luck Dave ! Nice avatar by the way - one of my favourite albums 🙂

Just my thoughts as well 🤔

I enjoy Leo for a number of reasons and a good supply of relatively bright galaxies is one of them 🙂 In the area of the lion's "neck" there are a couple of notable groups, A close pair from the Arp 94 group just "behind" Algeiba are visible in scopes as small as 4 inch on a dark night and a couple of the Hickson 44 group can also be spotted a little further up the "neck". Add the groups in the lion's "backside" and good old NGC 2903 just off the tip of the "nose" and you get some rich galactic hunting with small to medium apertures. Also good practice before diving into the treasures of Coma Berenices and the Virgo "bowl" where getting lost amongst the distant glows is entirely possible 😀 Nice piece on the Sky & Telescope website on the Leo fuzzies by Bob King from 3 years back: Exploring Bright Galaxy Groups in Leo - Sky & Telescope - Sky & Telescope (skyandtelescope.org)

Was your 16 inch the Flextube that used to come to the SGL star parties a few years ago ? I can recall looking through that one and thinking that the views were lovely but the scope certainly very far from "grab and go" 😁

At least it matches the kitchen worktop now ! 🙂

Guilty as charged - I took it at face value because it was posted well before the dawning of the 1st of April here in the UK 🙂 Jon Isaacs on CN certainly seems to be "fully engaged" with the topic ! 😁

Tegmine close pair: ~4 inch to get resolution, ~5 inch to split 🙂

Hi, The only way to know for sure that they are meteoric is to get a sample from them analysed by a recognised meteorite laboratory such as the Natural History Museum in London: Meteorites | Natural History Museum (nhm.ac.uk) In the USA, the USGS provides the following advice: I think I found a meteorite. How can I tell for sure? | U.S. Geological Survey (usgs.gov)

That was called on CN but the OP is still playing it straight there 🙂

Can you actually see Antares from Scotland ? That's a challenging double as well. I've done it a couple of times from down here in the SW UK, as it flits between local houses !

Interesting. Drilling the tube of a Celestron is one thing but I'm not sure that I could bring myself to do the same on an AP Stowaway to gain that slight inwards movement of the DT bar. Hope it works well for you though 🙂

My 1st experience of seeing, with my eye at an eyepiece, spiral galaxy structure was M51 with a Skywatcher 12 inch dob at my first SGL star party which must have been around 13 years ago now. Saw my 1st supernova with that scope as well. Magical memories 🙂 A couple of years later the same target with a 20 inch David Lukehust dob gave such an "in my face" view of the spiral structure that it's still engraved on my memory.

To echo part of what @Stu says above, I had a 12 inch F/5.3 dob based on an Orion Optics tube and a custom made base which broadly followed the OO small footprint design. The overall weight of that scope + mount was similar to a 10 inch chinese made dob. I'd previously had a 12 inch Meade Lightbridge and found it too heavy for me so moving to the OO based dob meant that I could keep the aperture, get slightly better optics and be able to set the scope up and tear it down quite quickly and without feeling that I was risking an injury of some sort ! I did consider getting a 14 inch OO dob a couple of times but doing the maths made me realise that I would be back where I was with the Lightbridge 12 in terms of overall weight. So I stuck with the 12 inch for over a decade.

Just a few favourite double stars tonight with the 100mm Tak. Short session just to say that "I've been out" 🙂 If I don't do a bit of observing now and then, questions start getting asked about the "need" to have 6 telescopes knocking around the dining room 😬 Showed my better half Porrima (Gamma Virgonis) earlier, when she enquired what I was looking at. Seemed to impress 😁

Maybe your current focuser could be adjusted to perform better ? If you did upgrade to a 2 inch you would need to cut a larger hole in the tube for the focuser drawtube and likely drill new holes to bolt the new focuser onto the tube. I can see such a project ending up costing nearly as much as the scope is worth in all honesty. You might be able to find an older 1.25 inch focuser that is made of metal such as the one that the Skywatcher 150PL uses but you will need to post a "wanted" advert on somewhere like the UK Astro Buy & Sell website because, as far as I know, such focusers are not available to purchase new. you might find someone who has upgraded the focuser on their 150PL ?

I've just ordered one of the Svbony 7-21mm's to use with my travel scope. Ernest in Russia was impressed by it - I hope I am 🙂 It won't be as good as the 3-8mm but hopefully will make a lightweight and versatile EP for the little travel setup.