John

The dew shield on those slides off. It is held on by three felt covered pads which are part of the objective cell. Have you got the type that has a collimatable objective cell ?

Once the dew shield is off, you can remove the cell that holds the objective from the counter cell that is screwed onto the scope tube by 3 screws with nuts on the inside. As I recall you can't get to the 3 nuts inside the tube that holds the counter cell in place without removing the objective in it's cell.

You need to mark the relative orientation of the cell that holds the objective to the counter cell so that you put it back in the same way. This should minimise the need for re-collimation.

I've owned one of these scopes and also the 6 inch version and the Bresser Messier 127L which is of the same design.

What a wonderful triple star !

I have not observed Tegmine for a long while but after observing the open clusters M44 and M67 in Cancer I suddenly remembered Zeta Cancri and panned my ED120 refractor over to it. The 2mm-4mm Nagler zoom eyepiece provided me with the fire power to get a split of the close pair (I think its a touch over an arc second now ?) and with the 3rd star just over 5 arc seconds away these 3 form a wonderful tight group.

I'll try this one again with my Tak 100 on another night and see if I can get the close pair split with that.

I've really enjoyed "discovering" Tegmine again tonight with the ED120 though

I'll re-vist again often while Cancer is well placed.

It's close to a 7th mag star just now - both in the same field at 128x with my ED120. Comet looks similar to last night (unsurprising !).

I find that my 12 inch dobsonian usually noticeably outperforms my refractors which range from 100mm to 130mm in aperture. On deep sky objects the difference is very striking. On the moon and planets the refractors do very well for their aperture but usually the 12 inch will show finer details.

Your Skylight F/15 is s super refractor (as are mine) but personally I have always found having some additional aperture beneficial on most targets.

Great report Chris

I agree with Phillip - the Baader zoom would be a good workhorse and earn its keep !

The 190MN is F/5.3 so you do still need reasonably well corrected eyepieces to avoid seeing astigmatism in the outer parts of the field of view. Astigmatism comes from eyepiece optics. Coma (which comes from from the scope optics) is quite a bit less in a mak-newt than a conventional newtonian.

Decent eyepieces range from £50 (eg: BST Starguiders) to, well many £hundreds for the really exotic ones.

Baader Morpheus are well thought of quality eyepieces with a 76 degree apparent field and a good range of focal lengths. There are many choices really, depending on the budget available.

A zoom might be useful - gives you options to find out just what magnification works best each session as the comet changes in brightness and apparent size. The Baader 8-24 zoom is pretty good but your would need to find a used one to stick to your budget.

Great report Mark

Some lovely, and chellenging targets there !

I have to admit that a 12 inch scope under a reasonably good sky really does enable you to get very deep amonst the galaxies. As you pan around the Leo / Virgo / Coma area they just keep popping into view once you get "your eye in". Easy to get lost there !

I use a magnetic kitchen knife strip and a couple of old iron counter weights. Old kitchen scale weights would do though:

Stars though a scope still look like points of light - you just see more of them.

Venus is the only planet that is easily visible right now - can't miss it in the west early evening.

Use the lowest power eyepiece (25mm ?) while you practice using the scope and finding things.

For some reason that I can't quite explain, even to myself, I decided to have a go at finding the distant and rather faint globular cluster NGC 2419 (Caldwell 25) tonight armed with just the 10cm aperture of my Takahashi FC100-DL. I guess the name used on some charts of "Intergalactic Tramp" has a romantic attraction to it. Lynx and Gemini are also quite close to the zenith tonight which would help pick this magnitude 9 or 10 (depends on the reference) object out of the background sky.

It turned out to be quite a challenge as a couple of references that I consulted warned be that it would be with a 10cm aperture scope. I'd definitely now lean towards magnitude 10 !

Although in the constellation Lynx, Pollux and Castor in Gemini are the best initial pointers to the patch of sky where NGC 2419 resides. Then refer to 3 stars in Auriga for the next steps - 65, 63 and 66 loop you around to be close to the right spot. Sliding back over the border into Lynx for the final step. Here is a star chart to better explain the location:

This faint and far off cluster is conveniently located next to a couple of close stars that are visible even in my 30mm finder and the three form a line with the globular glowing very faintly (through the scope but NOT in the finder) as the 3rd object. Tonight, despite being very high in a sky with a NELM of around mag 5, was on the margins of being an averted vision object. When I boosted the magnification to 120x or so I could just make out a small fuzzy patch of light with direct vision.

I have seen this object with my 12 inch dobsonian a few years back and it was somewhat easier of course but I was being subborn about getting it with the 100mm Tak tonight

This is actually a massive and highly luminous globular cluster with 1 million member stars spread across 400 light years of space. It is though around 270,000 light years from us. That is more than 10x as far away as the famous Messier 13 globular cluster in Hercules and 100,000 light years further out from the galactic centre the Magellanic Clouds.  This illustrates the distance of this object well:

Recent research seems to indicate that the nickname "Intergalactic Tramp" (coined by Harlow Shapley I believe) is not quite accurate as, despite it's remoteness, NGC 2419 is still under the influence of our galaxy. It will however take around 3 billion years to complete one orbit of the galactic centre.

Observed visually with a small scope, or even with a larger one, this is not a spectacular object however it is one which provides a good challenge to see and, when you find out a little more about it and realise what you are observing, it takes on a special fascination. This sketch by Phil Harrington was the view from a dark site with a 102mm refractor. My view was not quite as good but not far off:

When the Hubble Space Telescope imaged it, NGC 2419 did reveal its full majesty

I'm very pleased to have tracked this one down tonight with my little refractor. Very satisfying and I've learned a lot as I've researched it further as well

Just had a look at comet C/2019 Y4 Atlas and also C/2017 T2 Panstarrs with my Tak 100m refractor.

In previous observations of these two comets I've consistently felt that Panstarrs was a little brighter and larger in extent than C/2019 Y4 Atlas but this evening the opposite seems to be the case. Y4 Atlas seems to have brightened and expanded in size a little and is now a slightly more distictive object than T2 Panstarrs, even allowing for the higher elevation of Y4 Atlas.

"The Sky Live" website has Y4 Atlas at mag 8.3 and T2 Panstarrs at 8.7 this evening so that seems to bear this out. "Heavens Above" has the two at mag 8.0 and 8.5 respectively but again with Y4 Atlas the brighter.

The skies at Lucksall can be rather good. I can remember a night there when M101 was clear and quite extensive in my 50mm finder. From here it can be a challenge with my 12 inch dob !

I still think Pauls original post is valid though - M1 is really not a regularly seen 10x50 binocular object for many folks.

This is from 25th March 1620. Nice conjunction of Jupiter and Mars. Maybe not quite what Paz meant though

For interest, you could try making a card aperture mask for the 150 newtonian. Something like this:

If the aperture falls between the secondary vanes you get an unobstructed scope albeit of smaller aperture. You get some nice results on double stars and bright targets such as Venus - "refractor-like" views

Not sure that the EQ5 is good enough to image with that scope on it. It will do fine for visual observing though.

Instead of ES 100 degree eyepieces I would go for the APM / Lunt ones. There is not much in the performance but I think the APM / Lunt 100's are slightly better performers and may well be less expensive.

That does seem a bit over-optimistic for most observers Paul.

I'm not sure that I've clearly seen M1 with 11x70's let alone 10x50's.

Great report Mark !

Makes sense to me - its fun to compare the views with different scope types

I think the seeing can also be impeded by quite local factors such as a heating plume from a building which you don't even know is there.

I remember once observing Saturn on a warm Summer evening when the planet was just above a line of trees. The seeing was very unsteady. I read somewhere later that under certain conditions, some tree species can emit a sort of haze, maybe even tiny insect swarms which occupy the air above the tree tops. 

Nice report as ever Nick

I have a soft spot for Algieba and Leo generally because it was the first part of the sky that I explored when I got my first scope way back. I was so thrilled to see those 2 lovely golden orbs separated through the eyepiece of my old 60m refractor.

Venus looked nice earlier this evening after the Sun had gone down behind our hedge. That was with the Tak FC-100DL. Quite a nice crisp, steady image even at 280x.

That's what Venus currently looks like. Its at around 50% phase right now so will look like a tiny version of a half phase moon.

The 25mm eyepiece is delivering magnification with your scope of 48x which is quite low power.

I found this comet and Panstarrs again with my ED120 refractor tonight. Panstarrs is still a little brighter and a little larger. Both easy to overlook still.