John

I keep mine a bit above the outside temperature during a session. They are either inside or in their foam lined boxes. The foam seems to retain the heat a bit - keep the lib down between eyepiece changes and that seems to do the trick. If an eyepiece gets cold it tends to mist up in the colder weather as your eye approaches the eye lens. Very frustrating as I've found when I've left an eyepiece in the scope for sometime during a cold session.

That's pretty rude isn't it ? Deliberately posting that in a thread where you know that others have made the choice of the Baader product ? By all means make difference choices and explain your reasoning but have some respect for other fellow members choices here, as per the forum Code of Conduct. Implying that others are "stupid" is not in keeping with that. Thanks.

It had clouded over here before Mars rose high enough to observe Before then I had a really good session with my 12 inch dob on planetary nebulae and globular clusters.

Here as well. All going really well until that !

Nice dark night here and I'm busy touring the sky with my 12 inch dobsonian. I was using Stellarium as my guide and had picked off a number of the brighter planetary nebulae. The software was showing the planetary NGC 7354 in Cepheus which was well placed high in the sky. I can't recall observing this one before so hopped to it using a helpful triangle of stars with the variable star Delta Cephei at it's point. After a little scanning around at 70x magnification I spotted a suspect faint blob. I was using a zoom eyepiece so I could just dial in some more magnification and at around 200x the pale roughly circular patch of light was quite nicely defined. It looked rather like a miniature version of M97, the Owl Nebula. UHC and O-III filters made it pop out more and some suggestions of texture started to show across it's face. So a nice planetary nebula which is new to me. What I was a little surprised to find though was that NGC 7354 is not shown in my S&T Pocket Sky Atlas. While not the brightest PN, it was not too hard to find and, once found, stood out rather well I thought. It's listed at magnitude 12ish on some web references with even fainter surface brightness but it did not seem that faint tonight. My estimate would be around mag 11ish. It's well worth looking for if you have a 10 inch or larger aperture I think. I've added a finder chart from theskylive.com below showing it's general location:

That's bad luck. I won't go on about my lovely clear dark skies here tonight then .....

I have the Baader Zeiss T2 prism diagonal which I use with my Tak FC100. The Tak is F/9 and the prism works excellently with that but I'm not sure that they are as suitable for faster refractors ?

Seeing a bit wobbly here as well but the view is OK. Does make me hanker for the days when Jupiter was high in the sky though. The details that my 12 inch dob would show back then far surpass what can be made out with it this low in the sky GRS seems a little smaller than in previous years perhaps ?

+2 for it. I've had a bottle and the micro fibre cloth for ages and they are still doing a great job. Not an area that I'm interested in economizing in.

Thanks David. Very clear skies here and my dob is out cooling

Piece of cake

All way over the original posters intended budget of £280, unfortunately.

If you can't find it in the eyepiece without a barlow lens, having one is not going to help. You seem to have a diagonal of some sort - the eyepiece is inserted into it in your photo. The most important thing is to get your finder scope really accurately aligned with the view in the main scope. If that is not done then finding anything is going to be very hard work even if you can see it clearly with your eyes.

Nice sketch ! I enjoyed the better seeing as well when observing Mars with my ED120 tonight.

Mars is looking good tonight. Nice and steady with quite a lot of contrast in the surface features at 300x with my ED120 refractor. 20 arc second disk as well ! Forecast was cloudy tonight so a bonus session

In case it is of use to you, here is the original Vixen manual for the Super Polaris mount: super_polaris.pdf

They are very good scopes. It is probably worth a reasonable additional investment to get rid of the fungus between the lens elements as well.

I understand the point that you are making Don and the optical principles that underlie it but I'm rather baffled all the same. I've read many reports of the Antares 1.6x barlow being used with the Ethos in 2 inch mode on the CN forum (Lawrence Sayre was a great exponent of this approach, among others) and yet I have not read that these combinations result in more than very small variations, if any, from the 1.6x amplification. My own experience of using the barlow with the 8mm and 6mm Ethos, in 2 inch mode, and comparing the resulting combination with eyepieces with a native focal length of 5mm and 3.7mm is that there was no noticeable difference in the image scale that was achieved. Maybe I've missed something though, either from my own experience or the reports from others I guess it's fairly academic now because I don't use this barlow or any others with my principle eyepiece sets but I'm puzzled all the same !

Last week this thread was mixed up - by me when I tried to merge two threads and actually merged three ! I spent some time yesterday sorting it out back into two, unrelated threads. On the topic of this thread, if the OP is unsure about getting a scope its probably best if he / she holds off purchasing anything just now. Supplies and choice are limited currently and used prices seem to be escalating. The good thing is that the Universe will still be waiting if and when the interest is re-kindled

Some of my best views of the planets have come when observing them against a sky which still had quite a lot of light in it. Dark adaptation is just not needed and actually hinders seeing the more subtle detail.

Currently there are a lot of issues conspiring against getting good views of the planets because they lie low in the sky from the UK and these are not really related to the scope. With Jupiter I'm finding that 100x - 150x is delivering the crispest views and sometimes even those are not that sharp. With Saturn and Mars you can push things on to 200x or perhaps a bit more (Mars being higher in the sky helps). I have to say that my smaller aperture refractors are making a better job of handling the adverse positioning of the planets than my 12 inch dobsonian is.

How does that relate to the topic of this thread

I used to own one of those. An earlier version with a different colour scheme. It was a very good scope I felt. Minimal CA, well corrected and really gave a "big refractor" feel. They are long scopes that need a sturdy mount but the HEQ5 that Neil has would handle it well enough. That one is over priced though, as has been said.

As a slightly alternative point of view, I've owned a couple of the GSO / Revelation diagonals and the Skywatcher ones and the William Optics ones and found their performance pretty much the same. I currently have one of the 1.25" Skywatcher 1.25" dielectrics and have compared it directly with a Tele Vue Everbright 1.25" and my Baader T2 Zeiss prism in my Tak refractor and found the Skywatcher performed quite nicely. I paid £35 delivered for it so I'm quite happy with it. Just another "data point" of course