John

What eyepiece are you using ?

Looking at where the poster is located, I think something simple, reliable and robust is required. A smallish refractor on an alt-azimuth mount perhaps ?

That is very much my preference as well 👍

Hi and welcome to SGL 🙂 I'll be watching this thread with interest. My grandson is 6 years old and is showing an interest in astronomy. I'm giving some thought to which of my scopes he might find the easiest to use so suggestions here might help steer me too.

During this stormy day with heavy cloud cover I've been playing with my travel scope setup. The scope is an Altair Starwave 70mm F/6 ED. The mount is the TS AZ6. The tripod is a Slick Master Classic. I have 3 eyepieces that will form my travel kit: Baader 8-24mm zoom, Svbony 3-8mm zoom and the Maxvision 20mm 68 (seen in the photos) I also have a 1.25 inch Lunt herschel wedge for solar white light observing. The whole setup as pictured weighs 5kg so easily one hand portable. I took the setup to the island of Jersey last year and managed to observe supernova SN2023ixf in Messier 101, amongst other things 🙂

I was thinking just that, earlier. This UK vendor seems to have stock and reasonable pricing: APM 20mm XWA 100 Degree AFOV Eyepiece (astrograph.net)

Fascinating. These were published just 6 years after Edwin Hubble found Cephid Variables in the Andromeda Galaxy demonstrating that there were separate galaxies beyond the milky way. Cutting edge ideas back then.

That looks awful Michael 😔

Great looking scope. Congratulations Paul 🙂 It seems to be gaining a reputation as a "3 in 1" scope: visual mono, visual binoviewer friendly and imaging too. Look forward to performance reports on it 👍

I didn't post a write up in the end. I enjoyed trying them out and was very grateful to Steve / @bomberbaz for the loan of the APM and the Svbony. I was impressed with both, the Svbony particularly, considering it's cost. I have ended up with one of my own in fact 😁

I have the Nagler 31mm and it is my least used eyepiece for that reason and also that my moderate light pollution generally means that I get better views of fainter targets with a 21mm eyepiece. I'm still glad to have the 82 / 31mm for when I want to go as wide as possible though 🙂

It will be interesting to see how that Svbony 7-21 compares with the 3-8 zoom at the 7 and 8mm settings Steve 🙂

Another advocate of the 8" dobsonian for visual observing here. I recently acquired a very lightly used Skywatcher 200P Classic and, with a couple of minor tweaks, it is turning out to be an excellent performer. I have not owned one for a decade or more and had forgotten what good optics these things have in them. I'm sure the other dobsonians now available are also great 🙂

Each time I read this (you are not the only one who says it) I get out some of my 100 degree AFoV eyepieces and check that I can still see the whole of the field of view without conscious head turning or eyeball rolling or swivelling. As of 15 minutes ago, I still can 🙂 The whole point of ultra and hyper wide eyepieces though is that the edge of the field of view is not really apparent to the observer. As Alan Dyer says in his review of several 100 degree mid-focal length eyepieces "....that’s more or less the point — the eyepiece gets out of the way so you no longer have the sense you are looking through a round porthole or window....." On the whole, field stops are not terribly interesting to observe in my opinion. It is the space in between them where the fascinating stuff lies 🙂

We all have our preferences in eyepieces. @PeterC65 said that a person cannot take in a field of view of more than 68 degrees which is simply not my experience. To be fair though he did later quality this in that those are his preferences rather than a blanket statement applying to all.

I seem to get on quite well with eyepieces up to 110 degrees AFoV but I guess I've had a lot of experience using them so know the technique.

Is that because of the tight eye relief with the ES 18mm 82 ?

You do need a star diagonal to get the ST/CT80's to focus visually.

You will find that the Hyperion 8mm (and the other Hyperions I think) work best using the 1.25 inch part of the eyepiece barrel. Using the 2 inch section directly into the focuser drawtube moves the focal plane of the eyepiece inwards significantly meaning that you have to rack the focuser even further out to reach focus. Using a 2x barlow with the 8mm eyepiece will give you an effective 4mm eyepiece. This means 375x magnification in your scope which will be too much for Jupiter and probably even for Saturn unless the seeing conditions are excellent and the collimation and cooling of the scope spot on. While the image scale of the planet will be larger, contrast details (eg: Jupiter's belts, red spot etc) get washed out when over-magnified. With a 300mm scope Jupiter is generally best observed at 180x - 225x I have found. Saturn can usually benefit from a bit more magnification so 250x - 280x maybe. The 8mm eyepiece on it's own is probably ideal for Jupiter. Maybe a 6mm would be worthwhile for Saturn ? A low cost way of gaining a 6mm eyepiece is to use a 14mm Baader Fine Tuning which will change your 8mm Hyperion into an effective 6mm when the FT ring is fitted. These are rather fiddly to fit but might allow you to experiment with higher magnification without undue additional cost: Baader Hyperion Finetuning Ring | First Light Optics

To fill the gap, such as there is, you should really be considering a 24mm 82 degree eyepiece. The 24mm 68 is too close to the true field that the 18mm 82 gives to be worth the investment.

Unless it is massively out of collimation, a newtonian does actually show views of astronomical targets. I would give priority to getting the finder scope accurately aligned with the main scope and then learning how to bring the scope to focus on an easy to find astronomical target such as the moon or Jupiter (use a low power eyepiece such as a 25mm one to start with). Once you have got that far and can find things to look at in the sky, focus the scope on them, have worked out how the scope moves around the sky with the mount you have, collimation checks and, if needed, adjustment can follow on from that.

The Heritage 130 is a very capable telescope. I know a number of very experienced members of this forum who own one along with a number of other scopes and rate the ability of the Heritage very highly for both low power and high power observing. It has loads of potential, you just need to build your experience and skills in using it 🙂

As advised above, getting your finder scope accurately aligned with the view through your main scope is vital in being able to find and view astronomical targets.

It simply plays when I click on it. I am using a laptop though. The movie is posted on Youtube.

The dismounting segment is rather scary 😬