John

The very early HEQ5 mounts did not have GOTO. They are black rather than white. Then a GOTO upgrade came out which was popular. Then the GOTO version of the HEQ5 cam out and the non-GOTO version was dropped. It was at that point that the colour scheme changed to white. There used to be 2 versions of the HEQ5 GOTO, one with a basic handset (Syntrek) and one with the fully featured one (Synscan). I think the Syntrek version has been dropped now.

I bought a pristine 10" Skywatcher dob for £100 a few years back. It was a "buy it now" on e.bay. The owner just wanted to get shot of it.

Yes. There are almost endless modifications or improvements that you can make. As long as the optics are good then the rest of the stuff can be swapped / modified / tweaked to get the scope as you want it to be.

I think colour perception will vary person to person and quite possibly change within a person as they age or acquire or loose certain eye conditions. When doing outreach I've noticed that younger eyes seem to perceive colour differences more readily than older eyes.

I had a Celestron branded ST102 F/5 recently for a while. I was surprised that the CA was not too bad at all at low to medium power. Stopping down helps of course if you don't mind the loss of light grasp and resolution. When I had a 150mm F/8 achro I tried a William Optics MV1 filter and that seemed to reduce the CA around the moons limb by about 50%. Interestingly, the CA that a 150mm F/8 generates should be around the same as a 102mm F/5 according to optical theory. A lot of folks live with the 150mm F/8's without filtering.

60% of retail is about the normal price for good condition used equipment. Sometimes less if the owner wants to get rid of it. There is usually a reason that equipment is priced on the low side. Is the mirror a good one and in good condition for example ?

I used my Tasco 60mm last night as it happens. Amazingly it showed a nice view of Venus at 200x and I was able to split some quite close double stars. Back in the day the scope showed me Jupiters moons and banding, Saturns rings and a few of the brighter galaxies so quite enough to get me hooked on the hobby I'm glad we have a much better choice of beginners scopes today though.

Putting the filter on the eyepiece adapter works fine but just check that none of the 1.25" barrels of your eyepiece would contact the filter. Most don't but some 1.25" barrels are a bit longer than others so it's worth a quick check to avoid damaging an expensive filter. I don't use filters all that often but when I do I want them to be effective. I prefer the views of some nebulae filterless and many nebulae are worth observing with and without a filter to observe the different features. They only really make a difference on selected nebulae. For galaxies and clusters dark skies are the best for improving the view. I find that I use an O-III filter more often than I do the UHC's but that might be just my preference. There are some nebulae where the O-III filter can make the difference between seeing virtually nothing and having a fine view:

Did you remove the main mirror from the scope to clean it ? If you did, you will probably need to re-collimate the scope, that is to ensure that the alignment of the primary and secondary mirrors is accurate. I think that design of scope also uses a correcting lens at the bottom of the eyepiece drawtube ?. If so it is a bird-jones design scope.

Dobsonians are very popular starter scopes. You do get the most aperture per £ spent and therefore better views of deep sky objects. They are quite bulky scopes however. While some dobsonians do have motor drives and even GOTO computer systems to find targets, these add to the price and weight so most folks are content to "drive" their dobsonians themselves and to find objects themselves. So you do need to be prepared to navigate your scope around the sky to find targets using a star chart, mobile phone based app or similar tool.

I agree with the above, Blemishes or dirt on the corrector will have little or no effect on image quality. Did you take the scope apart to clean the mirrors and the corrector ?

Hint: it is a dark feature I used to look for a pattern made of stars until I realised that !

Some fine views of Venus with the old frac this evening but thin cloud has limited what I could go on to observe. With darkness came the cloud layer which has made finding my intended targets tricky. I did manage to find Gamma Leonis and was rewarded with a nice split of this golden pair at magnifications from 45x upwards. The separation between these stars is 4.3 arc seconds. I also managed to split the closer pair of Gamma Virginis (Porrima) which have a separation of 2.8 arc seconds. That was pretty close to the limit tonight with this scope on it's rather wobbly mount and using the simple huygens type eyepieces. I had a go at Izar in Bootes and could see that it was a double star but did not get the split. It looked rather like a peanut shape with a different tint to each end. I've had a quick look at Epsilon Lyrae but, while the stars are clearly both elongated along the axis of their respective binary pairs, they do not appear as a "double double" currently. I will wait for them to rise a little higher but I suspect getting clear splits here might be beyond this little scope tonight. It has been fun using the old scope again but it has made me realise how much todays eyepieces, finder scopes and mountings have improved over the entry level ones that were available in the 60's and 70's. I think the scope optics are quite good though and I would like to try it on a more stable mount with up to date eyepieces in it.

The usual advice is that UHC is a bit more versatile than O-III but both types will eventually become very useful to have for enhancing a range of nebulae types. The best quality and performance visual filters are by Astronomik and Tele Vue (the Bandmate II's) but there are less expensive options by brands such as Explore Scientific which give you a good feel for what these filters can do. Lumicon can also be very good but there has been some quality variation with this brand recently. The other thing you need to consider is whether to go for the 2 inch or 1.25" filter size. You can use 1.25" eyepieces with a 2 inch filter but not vice versa really. Of course the 2 inch size are more expensive - no surprise there !

Each design has it's strengths and weaknesses but all of them can observe the full range of astro targets. As Geoff says above, to all intents and purposes all astro targets are at infinity for focusing purposes. People end up having more than one scope as they develop in the hobby and want something particularly good at something specific but all the designs are actually quite versatile.

I've managed to get some very nice views of the crescent Venus this evening with my ancient 60mm Tasco refractor. First time I've used it for 16 years. Even with the very basic .965 inch eyepieces I've had nice views up to 200x. Just a touch of false colour either side of the crescent but nothing distracting. Not bad for a 50+ year old scope that cost me 45 quid !

Sorry Steve - I misinterpreted your reference to "research into quality". I can quite understand why you might feel that you want to move on from the UHC-S

Hi and welcome to the forum. Celestron, Skywatcher, Bresser and Meade are all around the same quality. Some of their models have features which make them more attractive and some prefer this brands compterised GOTO system over that one but broadly these brands occupy the same quality sector. Celestron and Skywatcher are actually owned and made by the same company now. So look for the model that has the specification and features that you feel you might need and that hits your price point. Remember to allow enough budget for accessories such as dew shields, and additional eyepieces and maybe a finder scope upgrade. These seem to be the first additions people make to scopes. Dew shields are important with scopes such as the mak-cassegrains (ie: the Celestron 4E) and schmidt-cassegrains.

I'm 60 so not too young !

The UHC-C is good quality - it does exactly what Baader designed it to do.

My FC-100 DL focuser is spot on for me now. I don't feel the need to add either the Tak or FT micro focuser. The adjustments that I made above seem to have lasted. It is better than my Vixen ED102SS R&P and I don't notice any disadvantages when using the Tak to the Moonlite on my ED120 or FT on my LZOS/TMB 130. I'm not terribly fussy about my focusers though so others may feel differently. I do like them to work efficiently though and not to "slop" in any way.

The Baader UHS-C was the 1st "deep sky" filter that I ever owned Steve. It showed me the Veil Nebula for the 1st time with a 100mm refractor. I bought it because it was billed as being optimised for smaller aperture scopes and that it was. As the aperture of my scopes increased though I found that the UHC-S was not as effective as a "full blown" UHC and later an O-III Looking at your scopes I think you would get more benefit from a "full strength" UHC. The ES is closer to that as is the Orion Ultrablock although the latter can be a bit variable. Astronomik or the DGM NBP filter are a touch more effective again. All these filters work and are of decent quality but some have better optimised band pass profiles than others, and those seem to be the most effective. There is a trade off between band pass width and star dimming. Sometimes it is nice to see quite a lot of background stars to set the nebula in context. Other times you want the maximum nebulosity enhancement and to hell with the stars !

My silly humour Dave - I thought astroturf was a nice term, given our hobby It must be nice not to have to mow it - my lawn needs doing !

I think you would need to get a 2 inch barlow to avoid loosing some of the field of view of the Morpheus 17.5. So that would also mean a 2 inch diagonal. There are some good barlows about but personally, with an eyepiece like the Morpheus (good quality, big field stop, lots of glass and rather tall !) I would go for another eyepiece.

Is astroturf a particularly good surface to observe from ?