John

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:

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.

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

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 !

I'll lock this thread and move the other to this section to avoid having 2 threads on the same topic.

Bear in mind that under less than dark skies, the 3rd member of the trio can be tough to spot. It is quite a bit fainter than the other two.

You want something that will show a true field of around 1.2 degrees. So a 20mm or 24mm SWA type eyepiece would do the job. Or a 30/32mm plossl.

Well manufacturers specs are often a little wide of the mark.

With my 12 inch dob, from home, with moderate light pollution, the faintest point source that I've seen is magnitude 14.7. For an extended source (eg: galaxy, comet etc) the limit seems to be a little less - probably around magnitude 14 or so.

You would still get the 82 degree field, or at least most of it. Some barlow lenses do reduce the apparent field of view though depending on the barlow and eyepiece specs. You can generally see if this is happening because the edges of the field of view become fuzzy rather then sharp. Telextenders / Powermates / Focal Extenders don't tend to reduce the apparent field. My favourite globular cluster eyepiece with my 12 inch dob is the 8mm Ethos

Great stuff Mark and nice memories too I did have a "night off" last night. If the latest reported magnitude on here is accurate, SN2020ftl might be dimming now: http://www.rochesterastronomy.org/sn2020/sn2020ftl.html

All the BST Starguiders have a 60 degree apparent field of view (AFoV).

The only drawback of the Nirvana over the others is that, for some, the 12mm of eye relief might be on the "tight" side. The 15mm NPL (a plossl design) will be similar in this respect but you don't get the benefit of the ultra-wide view. Also some people find that they just don't like apparent fields of view much over 70 degrees. They would all work very well with the F/10 SCT though. Most eyepieces do.

Baader 8-24 zoom then you just need a 24mm 68 degree to have a "full set" for most occasions Thats off topic though. Of the ones you list I would go for the Nirvana 16mm 82 degrees because I love ultra-wide views and it's a fine eyepiece for the money.

Izar has a lot of attractions as a binary pair, the colour contrast, the tightness of the separation and it's relatively easy to find. A "must see" in the springtime and a good test of seeing conditons

On the mount, yes the price was good if the optics were OK when you purchased it. The scopes do show some CA visually but it's not too bad. The bright streetlight will show it worse than most astro targets. I don't image myself so I can't comment on that.

Skywatcher Evostar 120 on the EQ3-2 mount. I owned one just like it once. It has a collimatable objective cell which makes collimation at least possible with this type. It seems to be missing it's finder scope ?