John

What an interesting read Magnus. Thanks very much for showing us the workings of these scopes Good to know for sure that these "Black Diamond" versions have the oversized primary mirror and therefore presumably operate at the full 180mm effective aperture.

The above clothes peg trick does work. There are other DIY was as well:

I'll be interested to see what you think of that one Mike. It was interesting that Orion commissioned the manufacturer to add a lower lens set with the 5mm and 3.8mm in their versions of this pseudo-Masuyama range. I presume this is to give better eye relief. I used to have the 5mm Celestron Ultima which did not use a lower lens set and the eye relief was pretty tight. Very nice optically though. There was never a Celestron Ultima 3.8mm - perhaps without a lower lens set the eye relief would have been virtually zero ! Edit: Actually I think the 5mm Ultrascopic is the same as the 10mm but with a 2x amplifier in the eyepiece barrel.

That is the old R&P focuser that the manufacturer used to put on these scopes a long time ago. I think they changed to the crayford type (which is what you have on yours) around 10 years ago. The reason that the adapter is shorter with the older focuser is that the focuser itself has a taller body so slightly less extension is needed to get the eyepiece to the right point to reach focus. To be fair, both types of focuser work reasonably well.

The focuser looks like the original one - it is a crayford but a single speed one. My guess is that he did have an upgraded crayford on the scope for a while (probably the one in the link below) then put the old one back on when the scope was sold but forgot to include the old adapter. He may still have it. https://www.firstlightoptics.com/skywatcher-focusers/dual-speed-low-profile-1252-inch-crayford-focuser.html

That's a low profile adapter that is usually used in a different focuser. The stock focuser (that your scope seems to have fitted) needs one of these:

There should be that long 1.25" eyepiece adapter in there between the eyepiece and the wide section of the focuser tube. As per merlin100's picture.

The faintest that I have got with my 12 inch is mag 14.7 from my back garden. Mag 16 with a 10 inch is amazing - I think the theoretical limit for that aperture is mag 15.2.

Nice lighting on the moon tonight. The slight haze (which I have had at times here too) has enhanced the view in some ways. Slightly "ghostly" my other half described it as

Another lovely evening with the Tak 100mm Venus needed some tree / chimney dodging but I got there at last and was rewarded with a very slender crescent - Venus is just 2.3% illuminated just now. Mercury should have been visible but I suspect that it was behind the "clutter" that I have near the horizon in that direction The Moon was looking really nice as the sky darkened. Nice to observe the crater pair Messier and Messier A with deep shadow in their interiors for a change. The rays that extend from Messier A like a faint comets tail across the lunar surface under this illumination. A thin, high, hazy cloud layer will mean that the Tak turns to double stars now I think. Basic snap of the Messier craters with mobile phone at eyepiece:

With what aperture scope ?

You will need a dew shield at least. SCT's are dew magnets !

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.

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.

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

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.