John

1 hour ago, Second Time Around said:

....I'd add be careful of reviews on sites like Amazon etc.  Most such reviews are done by beginners, who think just about all eyepieces are good as they have nothing to compare them with!  So you're doing the right thing by asking here as there's a huge amount of experience amongst the members.

 

Totally agree

I owned the much admired Leica ASPH zoom for a while. That one has an apparent field that ranges between 60 and 80 degrees. The focal range is not as much as the Baader and some others at 17.8mm - 8.9mm but it works extremely well with the Baader VIP barlow and various extensions to give a wider range.

The Leica ASPH and my current Tele Vue Nagler 2mm-4mm zooms are the only ones that I have used that have truly matched the optical quality of really good fixed focal length equivalents. But then they should do - the Nagler zoom costs £390.00 and the Leica ASPH £750.00 !

The other zoom that I currently use is a clone of the Hyperflex 7.2mm - 21.5mm which I usually use with a Baader 2.25x barlow to create a 9.55mm - 3.2mm high power zoom which competes surprisingly well with quality fixed FL alternatives such as the Pentax XW's. When the chips are down and I want the best views though, I do opt for a fixed FL eyepiece.

One of the experienced members here uses a Celestron Regal zoom and gives it the thumbs up for astro use but I can't recall what scope they use it in ?

Zooms have come a long way from the awful things that were around a few decades back though.

Clever stuff !

G looks a lot tougher than E & F visually - nice to see that it and the H's actually exist though

40 minutes ago, Saganite said:

The extra 1" of aperture has paid off as I knew it would and I got a nice split of Tegmin about 40 minutes ago. High cloud is now encroaching.

Yep - I've now got that cloud that @Zermelo mentioned above

I found the 20mm that the ED120 had over the Tak 100 took Tegmine from "heavily notched" to "split". One of the reasons that I have held onto the ED120 despite obtaining the Tak 100 and the LZOS 130 - it's optics are superb and it is a very easy to handle and rugged near-5 inch refractor

Lovely crisp moon this evening through my Tak FC100 refractor.

Aristarchus, Schroters Valley and the nearby Marius Dome Field are close to the terminator and really well illuminated.

Aristarchus is showing streaks and other textures on it's inner wall surfaces.

Great area of the moons surface for the small scope (and large ones !)

Just look at the details that the LRO Camera managed to capture

http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/posts/592

Just got to try about 10,000x magnification and see if I can get that

Taks are good but even they have their limits ......

It's quite nice here just now. How long it will last, we just don't know ! (said in best Sir Patrick Moore voice )

Quite a bit of hazy cloud around here currently. I've put the Tak FC100 out anyway although it hardly needs any cooling time.

41 minutes ago, Ceramus said:

The finder harness is a very wise precaution...once, when removing a large cover off my 300p flex tube in the dark the finder slipped off and nearly fell into the fully extended OTA, which would undoubtably have caused grave consequences to the primary...I've secured it with wire to the bracket but cable ties are more neat.

I agree that the safety harness could prove useful.

I pop my finder on and off my dob quite often though so it would probably get in the way for me.

2 minutes ago, JamesF said:

Clear sky forecast for here tonight, at least until 11pm.  However, a clear sky has been forecast all day too and we've had 75% cloud since about 10am

James

It's sort of a mixed forecast here tonight. Nice morning but clouded up now. Light clouds though.

Might get some time at an eyepiece with a refractor later if we get some clear spells.

4 hours ago, Spile said:

...Last night without using my straight-through finder* I was delighted to locate Bode's (M81) and the Cigar (M82). This was despite the best efforts of the moon to spoil the party.

* Given the lack of brighter stars in this region, I am not sure it would have helped.

This star hop route to M81 and M82 works very well with an optical finder:

Some items come up time and time again. They seem to pick very high status items in the hope to provoke a knee jerk reaction I think

Must be frustrating if you are the legitimate owner to see your pride and joy coming up for sale over and over again.

Excellent haul wookie and nice sketches too !

Always great to get a "first" as well

I would also never lift an optical tube using the finder / finder bracket.

The only scopes that I know of where where this is designed to be a feature are the Takahashi Mewlons.

2 minutes ago, John said:

Posted in error.

All nebulae will look better in a dark sky regardless of whether a filter is used or not.

Filters like the UHC and O-III  enhance the contrast of emission nebula by permitting the wavelengths of light that they emit while excluding most other wavelengths. So they help to see the nebula a bit more under moonlit conditions but under a dark sky will have even more impact.

Just in case anyone is tempted, the e.bay Nikon refractor below is a scam sale. The real scope is on sale from APM Telescopes in Germany (2nd link):

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Telescope-Nikon-100-MM-For-1200-MM-Ed-Apochromatic-Lens-Refractor-Telescoping/143927866091?hash=item2182c4f2eb:g:uHAAAOSwxwZgDoOn

https://www.apm-telescopes.de/en/offers--lists/secondhand/nikon-100-mm-f-1200-mm-ed-apo-refractor-telescope.html

I'll report it when I get time.

You can still be into astronomy without having loads of kit.

I sold my scope when our kids came along and had around 10 years without anything other than binoculars , a few books and "Astronomy Now" magazine. No forums back then either. The interest in space and astronomy did not go away though.

By the time I was in a position, and had the desire, to buy a decent scope again, the price of equipment had actually come down quite a bit, relatively speaking, so for a relatively modest sum I was able to get a good scope and re-learned how to observe.

It is only a hobby. We should never feel trapped by it. People are welcome on SGL armed with nothing other than an interest

After a little initial tweaking I rather like the Tak R&P that my FC100-DL has. It's F/9 though so perhaps dual speed is less essential, at least for the purely visual observer like myself ?

I have a Moonlite on my ED120 and a Feathertouch on my LZOS 130 which are also very nice though. If I was to change the focuser on the Tak it would be to a Feathertouch. It makes even the Moonlite seem a little ordinary.

Good list of "Moon-proof" targets there

If a planet is close to the moon in the sky I think that is often an advantage. I've noticed that planetary colour tints look more saturated when they are bathed in a bit of moonlight.

Maybe the same for coloured double stars ?

I think Sirius has been a bit steadier than previous winters when I've observed it. Betelgeuse seems to be more or less like it's old self.

I have found the Pup star a bit easier than previous years but I guess I've had more practice and the separation is more or less the max it will get now.

The Baader zoom comes with 2 barrels - a 1.25 inch one and a 2 inch one. It is a 1.25" eyepiece and the barrel you use does not change that but some people prefer to put it into the 2 inch adapter because it is quite a large eyepiece.

Full 2 inch eyepieces are pretty weighty bulky things but they can show about 60% more sky than a 1.25 in the same focal length:

13 minutes ago, starboy71 said:

Many thanks for the replies,you are a good bunch....yes i`m going for it! yay...but now remains the question of which eyepiece for a massive FOV??...but i guess i`ll only use that in the summer when we have the decent bit of the milky way up above..i have a 25mm BST for that but i want more sky!...oh the decisions!

Are you prepared to go to the 2 inch format ?

If you stick with 1.25 inch you can get a little more true field than the 25mm BST gives, but not a lot more.

1 minute ago, Zermelo said:

Yes, I feel the same way.

One thing you can do is to adjust the extinction magnitudes of the stars in planispere apps, so that they better match your observing conditions. Last night, I could see few guide stars in my 6x30 finder, but having just the brightest ones showing in the app helps to match the views.

On the scale issue, I think it's very like how some people can use a terrestrial map to navigate car journeys successfully because they've done it a lot and they're used to the scale, while others (like me) don't judge the distances so well.  It will all come with experience.

I sometimes find a 6x30 finder easier than a 9x50 for that reason. For more detailed and precise "hopping" the additional aperture and scale can be useful though.

As the seasons go by I do still need to remind myself of where seasonal targets are if I have not observed them for a few months. The first "hops" on a seasonal target can be a bit embarrassing

Last night I was observing Sirius A and B again using my 12 inch dobsonian. The gap between the pair is currently about 11 arc seconds so about as wide as it gets during their 50 year orbit.

The actual distance between Sirius A and B varies between 8.2 and 31.5 AU so at their furthest apart a distance similar to that between the Sun and Neptune lies between them. At their closest approach the distance is a bit closer than the Sun - Saturn gap.

So the above gives a little idea of the scale of what we are observing over the 8.6 light years between us and the Sirius system.

With Sirius A being about twice the physical size of the Sun but 25x more luminous and Sirius B about the physical size of Venus, the system would make a fascinating spectacle from, say, .5 of a light year distance I would think

Great sketch !.

If not a 100% split, it is very close indeed.

I think the challenge is that our eye and brain tend to "join things up" if we sense they might be there from the other evidence, ie: the heavy notch between what are virtually touching airy disks. IMHO the "cleaner" star images presented by a refractor make it a bit easier to determine whether that black gap is really present in full or not although the larger aperture presents a smaller airy disk so the split will be there if a little masked by diffraction effects.

It's a strangely compelling business, isn't it ?