John

That is good news ! I had a similar result when I requested that a light in a nearby school car park was partially masked to keep it's light off my house and garden. It took a couple of letters copied to my local councillor but they did take action eventually.

Contrast and background darkness can be improved by applying magnification so hyper wide eyepieces allow that while retaining wide true fields. In terms of pure light transmission, reports from folks who use really big aperture scopes under really dark skies have shown that the very best are the Zeiss ZAO orthos followed by the (as Mark says) Baader Classic Ortho 10mm (the 18mm is pretty good as well) then followed by Delos, XW's Ethos etc, etc. The Morpheus is probably a good choice as well but I have not used those personally. Here is the website that covers the reports I am referring to: http://www.faintfuzzies.com/ Well worth browsing though their reports.

That sounds like you want the highest light transmission then ?

When you say cutting out DSO detail do you mean in terms of reduced light transmission or in terms of not having a wide enough view ? Personally I use Ethos eyepieces myself with my 12 inch F/5.3 but it sounds like you are not so keen on those ?

Just about to get clouded over here. Nice while it lasted today, though

The more northernmost spot group seems to have subtly changed it's form over the past hour. A couple of the smaller spots seem less distinct now than they were - paler ?

Just been having a look with my Tak 100 and the Lunt HW. Seems to be 7 or so small spots broadly in two groups but associated with each other. Set in an area of complex faculae - like a mass of pale spaghetti vaguely centered around the two groups of spots. Seeing is variable here. Some nice, sharp, moments at 125x but then things go hazy and I need to back off the magnification to regain a sharp view. So nice to have a zoom eyepiece for this - you can instantly react as the seeing varies. Worth keeping an eye on and worth setting the scope up for

The view of Izar the other night with my Tak FC-100DL at 281x was very like the 200mm Aberrator image. Really tight stars and a big gap.

Great report Stu ! I have a rather old copy of the Broadhurst Clarkson and Fuller catalogue (bookalogue as they called it) which dates to around the time that the little Tal 65 became available over there. Dudley Fuller says in there that he rarely recommends scopes of less than 3 inches aperture but he was delighted to make an exception for the Tal Alkor becuse it has exquisite optical quality, excellent design and is over-engineered in a way that you just don't find in the average scope of this aperture. Your experiences confirm Dudley's views I think

I use a simple cheshire eyepiece. I have had a few laser collimators and still have one. Having got so used to the cheshire view now that is by far my most often used tool. My secondary rarely needs adjustment and the primary just the occasional tweak so it's not a challenging scope to maintain.

I put together this simple set of eyepieces a couple of years back expressly for travel and outreach (not that I've been able to do any for the past 6 weeks or so !) the aim being to have good optical performance, robustness, ease of viewing (ie: comfortable eye relief etc), not much to cart about and relatively low cost. I can carry them all in my coat pockets. I've been pretty pleased at the way that these have performed for their cost (around £50 or less per item). I've found myself using them for my own sessions quite often as well. The coverage is from 30mm / 70 degrees AFoV to 3.2mm. The zoom + barlow combination gives a very useful 9.5mm - 3.2mm zoom. They get well used as you can see from the markings on their barrels ! Anyone else have a similar set for similar reasons ?

My 12 inch F/5.3 is stored in a corner of the dining room which is about 3 metres from where it is used, on the patio. I prefer to observe standing up and had the base of my dob "made to measure" so that I could do that.

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.

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 ........

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 !