John

Great setup David.

Those ADM finder mounts are excellent - I have put one on my Tak FC-100 DL:

I've just had a look at Venus with my 11x70 binoculars and the phase is clearly visible.

A rather delicate 2.68 day old Moon is below it in the W sky.

33 minutes ago, mark81 said:

Nice session Doug.

I managed a  look at M53 last night, much lower power of course (st80 x26) and got Glob 5053 in the same FOV - well worth a look - but you just may need something a little smaller than the 8se..😁

Clear skies

Mark

NGC 5053 is a really challenging object - you did really well to see anything of it with your ST80. My 12 inch dob struggles to show much with that one.

That does make sense.

Have a go with the scope with the accessories that it comes with. While not perfect the stock eyepieces will work decently because the scope is F/7.8 so not too demanding on them.

The stability of  mount can be improved by having a weight hanging from the centre of the tripod eg: a milk bottle filled with sand or water.

Hope you have some fun with it

A slew of these ads appear on e.bay from time to time. They stand out like a sore thumb if you are a regular used equipment browser. Info and photos culled from old adverts on Astromart. Always the highest end and rarest equipment and the possibility of a "bargain" price to grab attention. They use hacked e.bay accounts. Sad for the original owners of those accounts who have carefully built up good feedback over a long time.

I seriously doubt that e.bay have the manpower to vet each and every advert that is placed - there must be 1000's worldwide each day. The rely heavily on other users reporting the dodgy ones.

If the schmidt-newtonian counts as a cat then does the mak-newtonian ?. I used to have this Intes MK61 150mm F/6 mak-newt but Orion (USA) branded. Superb planetary and lunar scope with a tiny central obstruction:

I've also owned a range of other CAT's in the past, eg: Nexstar 5, Nexstar 8SE, Celestron C5 (pictured below), Skymax 127 and 180 at some point. One of the nicest was this older Celestron C8 Plus which is also pictured below. No CATS in my scope fleet currently though

On targets such as the moon and planets I think a 100mm ED will perform better than a 120mm achromat (I assume you mean the F/8.3 version ?). On deep sky objects the 120 will still do slightly better.

What scope is it ?

Good for you for sticking at it Doug

You can get RDF's with that fitting:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Red-Dot-Finder-Scope-for-telescope-two-hole-fixing/381663633332?hash=item58dcecdfb4:g:E4wAAOSwnFZXWBjc

Might not help with the neck ache much but they are a bit easier than peering though a small, straight through, optical finder.

I remember a challenge 3 years back when Venus was well placed, which was to try and catch the slimmest crescent you could. Mike (mikeDnight) "won" I seem to remember but it was fun

Venus gets progressively larger and a touch dimmer as it gets thinner.

This was the slimmest that I managed to get (it's a simulation rather than a sketch) and this was on 20th of March 2017:

DZ, DZ, DZ ........

On 22/04/2020 at 16:39, Louis D said:

If the ZWO camera doesn't have it's own lens, I don't know that the Delos will project a flat enough field onto its imaging chip to get a well focused image across it.  I assume you're trying eyepiece projection rather than afocal projection, which is what you get holding a cellphone camera up to an eyepiece.  The camera's lens in that case takes care of flattening the field for you.  You'll need to find some sort of adapter to attach them since there's no thread on the top of the Delos unlike the M43 threads on top of Pentax XWs and Morpheuses.

I got these just holding my old mobile phone over an eyepiece. It's hard work to keep it steady but you can get half decent lunar and solar images. I'm using a Lunt Herschel wedge for the solar work - always use full and proper filtering of course. You may well want better than this though. I'm not an imager usually and it shows !

Hi and welcome to the forum.

On the eyepieces, if you can spend £47 apiece, the BST Starguiders are a great upgrade and will do well in future scopes you might own:

https://www.firstlightoptics.com/bst-starguider-eyepieces.html

If you want to spend a little less then the Vixen NPL plossls are good quality and value currently:

https://www.firstlightoptics.com/vixen-eyepieces/vixen-npl-eyepieces.html

3 focal lengths giving you low, medium and high power would make sense so perhaps something in the 30mm-25mm range, something in the 12mm-10mm range and something in the 8mm-5mm range.

Personally I would not bother with filters just now but some folks find the moon a bit bright so a moon filter, maybe. I don't use one myself though.

For a finder upgrade, the Rigel Quikfinder would do a great job:

https://www.firstlightoptics.com/finders/rigel-quikfinder-compact-reflex-sight.html

For a mount upgrade, I think the EQ3-2 mount would do a much better job with the 114mm 900mm focal length tube than an EQ1 or EQ2:

https://www.firstlightoptics.com/skywatcher-mounts/skywatcher-eq3-2-deluxe.html

Of, if you would like to try alt-azimuth, the AZ-4 is pretty solid:

https://www.firstlightoptics.com/skywatcher-mounts/skywatcher-az4-alt-az-mount.html

Do bear in mind that upgrading the mount will entail investing nearly as much as a 150mm aperture dobsonian would cost and that would give you quite a lot more performance than you current scope has.

Buying used stuff will make your budget go much further of course.

The other upgrades would compliment a larger scope if and when you move to one and have an element of "future proofing" about them.

Hope that helps - other ideas will be forthcoming soon I'm sure

I snapped this one last night through the eyepiece of my Tak 100. Fairly basic mobile phone shot really:

1 hour ago, jonathan said:

What instrument would you say is best under reasonably dark skies to see this comet?  I have a 70mm travel scope, 70mm bins, and the others in my signature.

Wanted to see ATLAS but alas things conspired against me on that one.

Currently, a telescope that is located quite far south

Can't speak highly enough of my 100mm Tak doublet - mine is the F/9 version but the F/7.4 and F/8's are really superb as well.

I still have my ED120 Skywatcher though and that is also a cracking scope. The 100mm Tak gets mighty close to it in performance though - closer than it ought really for a 20mm aperture difference

If you have followed any of the threads highlighting what the owners of these scopes think of them over the past 5 years you will see that the praise is fulsome. Having owned one myself for nearly 4 years now, I know why 

I tried to describe the differences between my Tak 100 and my (also excellent) Vixen ED102 SS on another forum and came up with this:

"Over the past couple of clear nights I've had both my 15 year old Vixen ED102SS F/6.5 and my new Tak FC100DL F/9 on the same mount to compare them. The targets have been Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, the Moon and some tightish double stars. This post is just a summary rather than anything in-depth on the scopes though.

While the Tak showed no CA whatsoever on anything whether in or out of focus, the Vixen did pretty well and just showed a very small splash of CA around Vega. No CA around the lunar limb, and the planets at focus and the usual ed doublet CA traces showing in the intra and extra focal image.

The star test on the Tak was pretty much identical inside and outside focus and textbook at focus. The Vixen again does quite nicely but the 1st diffraction ring is a little brighter than ideal and certainly brighter than the Tak's. Tight, uneven brightness, double stars are easier to split with the Tak because of this I think.

Both scopes showed more or less similar detail and contrast on the planets but I was conscious of having to look harder to find it with the Vixen and, as the magnification exceeded 200x the image in the Tak remained sharp and well composed while the Vixen started to lag a little. The Tak handles 200x plus pretty much as well as my (rather good) ED120 does with just slightly dimmer images. 257x and even 300x make you forget sometimes that you just have 3.9" of aperture to play with !

So the Tak FC100DL outperformed the Vixen ED102SS by a small but noticeable margin on these nights at least. The Vixen is still a lovely little refractor IMHO and it's wide field capability combined with pretty decent high power viewing will keep it in my possession  

The Tak FC100DL is my 1st Tak and my 1st refractor with a fluorite lens element and I can now understand what the owners of similar Tak models and the Vixen FL's are so enthusiastic about"

The Vixen has very similar performance to the Skywatcher ED100 which I owned before getting the Vixen.

I split Izar last night at 97x with my 100mm refractor. The split was more pronounced at higher magnifications of course. The differing colours of the two stars became more apparent as I increased the magnification as well.

The scope can be a bit out of collimation and still show decent images. It's when you start trying to observe things towards the edge of the scopes capabilities that having really accurate collimation matters more. Splitting tight double stars, trying to see finer lunar and planetary details, that sort of thing.

Your scope will show all the planets except for the ex-planet Pluto.

As John says above though, Uranus will look like a tiny pale blue spot and Neptune an even smaller blue / green spot even it high magnifications. You can actually see these things in 30-50mm binoculars if you know where to point them and which star-like point is which.

Saturn and Jupiter and Mars and Venus, when favourably placed are the most interesting to view through a scope. Venus is at a lovely phase right now and very easy to find in the western sky after sunset. Mars is currently tiny but will get quite a bit larger as it nears its opposition in the Autumn.

The BST Starguider eyepiece mentioned by John are a very good step up from the eyepieces that are supplied as stock with scopes.

1 hour ago, mikeDnight said:

...I bought a Neil English book last week (out of boredom), entitled "Classic Telescopes", and chapter six deals with these little refractors. The chapter is well worth reading. And once you come to terms with the authors natural biase for long focal length refractors, and his weak arguments that attempt to show the modern high end apo as being inferior, the book is otherwise a good read. Lots of pictures! A little like a BEANO for astronomers!!  Anyhow, it was chapter six that prompted me to play with the 60mm and very enjoyable it was too. 😊

Neil has changed his preferences since he was advocating the achromatic refractor. He is into the reflecting telescope in a big way now and seems to have less time for refractors of any sort. He always did have a dislike of what he called "poodles", the ED and triplet refractors that I now own 4 of !.

I'll have to re-name the corner of the dining room where they live "The Poodle Parlor" That should confuse my other half

1 hour ago, Steve Clay said:

Managed to find 2 of the 3 with my 120 and 33mm ep. Skys were clear. 

I don't feel too bad about finding just 2 under hazy skies with my 100mm now !

The Cats Eye nebula in Draco was an easier deep sky target last night - had a nice view of that at high power. It's surface brightness is somewhat higher than most galaxies though.

I really must dig my 1960's 60mm F/13.3 Tasco refractor out of the loft and put it on a decent mount. I've not looked though it for years now

I've just been observing Izar with my 100mm Takahashi refractor. The pair are split at 97x and become progressively more split as I boost the magnification (I have a 9mm - 3.2mm zoom / barlow combo in use currently). Beautifully well defined primary and secondary star at 281x with quite wide gap between them. The differing colours get more clearly defined as the magnification increases as well. Very nice indeed

Well I hope your skies in Cornwall are clearer than mine here in Somerset !

I can see stars but there is quite a lot of thin hazy cloud about which does not help with galaxies one bit. I've just about managed to spot M66 and M65 with my 100mm refractor but I suspect NGC 3628 is beyond the reach of my scope under the conditions here tonight.

I'll go back to observing double stars !