John

6 minutes ago, Shaun VS said:

...Anyway I tried it out and glimpsed a 16th mag star in the field of AY Lyr. Was it worth the 30 mins, I will leave you to decide?

With what aperture scope ?

You will need a dew shield at least.

SCT's are dew magnets !

55 minutes ago, mikeDnight said:

 Other options may have a better edge, and I used to love Vixen's older designs, but the modern incarnations are both ugly and cheap looking, as well as over priced; I've had the superb 17.5mm Morpheus and liked it a lot, but after prolonged sweeping I found it gave me eye strain; and after having pretty much all the Nagler's at some stage or another, I don't want to return to anything Televue.....

You are clearly in search of "something different" Mike

Most people would be very pleased to own and use any of the above though.

I can't see the point in paying for that additional AFoV if it's not well corrected

Here is a link to a report on the 26mm 85 degree Masuyama. Hmmmm:

https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/568710-masuyama-26mm-85-degree-eyepiece/?p=7933492

Not ultra premium edge correction by the sound of it.

The only wide Masuyama's that I've tried, as mentioned in another thread, were Celestron Axiom / WA-70's and the edge correction in those was not too good.

Maybe their strengths lie in other directions?

They must be good - they are labelled not just as "Premium" but "Ultra Premium"

As an observer I think the following topics might be of interest:

- A look at "whats up" over the coming, say, 2 months.

- Collimation tips and methods.

- How to star hop.

- Tips on how to get the best out of the deep sky under light polluted skies.

- Tips on getting the best planetary views taking account of the planetary apparitions that are coming up.

- Sketching techniques.

- Solar observing methods, white light and H-Alpha.

Those are ones that popped into my head immediately - I'm sure there are many others. Some of the above could be combined of course.

Thanks for asking

Both those are far, far better than I could produce - thanks for posting them

Look forward to seeing that Sean

This was my Vixen ED102SS in action last night with the 21mm Ethos looking for Comet C/2017 T2 PANSTARRS up by M81 and M82. I'm having a night in tonight

The Vixen R&P focuser does a rather good job of holding nearly 3 lbs of eyepiece and diagonal steady and sharply focused when the scope is pointing high in the sky !

Yes.

Hi,

The ED100 is a very good 100mm refractor.

I'm not sure it will offer anything that your 127mm mak does though. Perhaps a faster cool down time ?

If you did not own the mak the ED100 would make a nice complement to your 150mm F/5 newtonian though.

20 minutes ago, mikeDnight said:

...... I've been most disappointed with have been some of the Tak LE's.

We could start a whole other thread on disappointing eyepieces 

The interesting thing is that I doubt there would be much consensus - I've seen this so many times since I've been on forums.

46 minutes ago, mikeDnight said:

... It just seems of little benefit to pay for a wide field eyepiece, which isn't pin sharp at the edge and loses the on axis sharpness that some quality narrower field eyepieces offer....

Interestingly I have owned a couple of pseudo-Masuyama's that fell foul of the above issues. The Celestron Ultima range included 70 degree Axioms (also known as WA-70s) which were rather disappointing at least in faster scopes that I tried them in.

They were from the same factory but, alas, not Panoptic rivals, despite their rather high price when new.

Clearly the 52 degree, 5 element PM's are much better bets

11 minutes ago, mih said:

Yeah, i have heard that 300x is in the perfect conditions, that's why i am a bit sceptical. I think i should go with the 2x or 2.5x, i mainly observe planets. Is that enough for some deep sky objects too?

300x is the max theoretical useful magnification. In practice what is actually useful is more often 150x-250x.

Deep sky observing is usually done at low to medium magnification.

I had a 4.8mm Nagler smoothside many years ago. That and a 7mm T1 were my 1st ultra wide eyepieces.

I believe Roland Christen used a 4.8 as his benchmarking eyepiece ?

I used to have an Ethos SX 4.7 as well but that's another story !

36 minutes ago, Jem789 said:

Sorry for the late reply but thank you all for your responses.

I saw the heritage 130p but was unsure as it doesn’t have a mount but being able to see more definitely sounds better to me than having it on a mount. I know it’s a bit of a tight budget to be on but for a beginner and the current budget I have I’ll have a little search around for what I can get for the money. 
Thanks again. 

It does have a mount but you need a stable table top or other flat surface to stand it on.

The Parks GS-5 10mm is the same optically as the Celestron Ultima 10mm and the Orion Ultrascopic 10mm and the Antares Elite 10mm.

I use the Baader Q-Turret 2.25x barlow. Simple design but very nice optics

I use something similar in terms of the phone and holder and have got some pleasing results.

Great report Stu

That's a much better pic than I managed to get !

1 hour ago, FMA said:

Thanks for the answers. Is it gonna need to be collimated being NEW? Sound that you’re buying something that’s not new! It’s something I want thinking about buying it now.....

 

It's usual to check the collimation and perhaps tweak it a bit each time the scope is used.

The collimation is also likely to shift a bit in transit. Nothing unusual about that and it does not mean that it is not new !

Still very clear here but I'm a bit tired tonight so I've packed in.

Finished by comparing the Cats Eye Nebula and the Blinking Planetary Nebula. The latter was still not really blinking despite using 30% of the aperture that I did last time - I could see the nebulosity surrounding the central star more or less all the time. Perhaps it's darker than I thought out there !

If you don't want to wait up until the early hours for comet C/2020 F8 SWAN, Comet C/2020 T2 PANSTARRS is nicely positioned in Ursa Major tonight forming a triangle with the galaxies M81 and M82 in a low power, wide angle eyepiece. PANSTARRS is currently billed as magnitude 9.1 which seems to match it's relative brightness compared with the two galaxies.

The Ethos 21 in the Vixen ED 102 doing the business this evening after those lovely Moon - Venus - Mercury views earlier

That and the Zeiss look like microscope eyepieces to me.

I've heard that they can work very well in scopes though and Lomo, like Zeiss, can produce really nice optics.