RFaber

Hi, I got my son a Skywatcher 200 Flextube Dobsonian telescope as an upgrade to his 3D-printed Hadley telescope. He was excited and we went out to try it out in the backyard even if conditions were not optimal (neither the moon nor any planets were up, it was slightly cloudy, and there is some street lights and general light pollution), but we have previously been able to see lots of stuff in his old Hadley. We started by collimating the telescope with a laser collimator. Researching a bit, I have since found out that the laser collimator needs to be collimated itself, which it certainly wasn't. We didn't have the right hex-tool to collimate the secondary mirror, and it was almost centered anyway, so we only adjusted the primary mirror a bit. We used the 25mm ocular, found a group of clear stars, located them with the finder scope (the finder scope wasn't aligned with the primary scope), but was completely unable to locate them or anything in the primary scope. No matter how much we searched and tried focusing, we did not manage to get anything but a uniform grey view inside the primary scope. Once or twice we saw a bright shape shaped like the UFO, but I suspect that was just a nearby streetlight reflecting on something. The plan is to get out in daylight soon, get the finder scope aligned, and retry the collimation, but even with all those done badly, I would have expected us to be able to see something, even if washed out and out of focus. So I suspect we have done something else wrong. Do anyone have any hints on where to start troubleshooting? Cheers, Rasmus.

Thanks a lot for all the advice. The ZWO Seestar S50 looked really interesting, but I took note of the advice to actually ask my son, and he ended up prefering the Sky-Watcher Skyliner Flextube 250P. He really wanted the manual experience rather than the automation.

Hi, My son's birthday is coming up, and I plan to gift him a new telescope. He currently has a 3d-printed "Hadley" telescope, which has been great fun and learning, but he would like something a bit better and more stable. We live in a fairly light-polluted area, so it would be nice to have something that is not too hard to transport, but he would probably mostly be using it from our backyard. I have been looking at telescopes like "Sky-Watcher Skyliner Flextube 250P", "Sky-Watcher Skyliner 200P Flextube SynScan Go-To" and "Celestron StarSense Explorer 10"". I am not quite sure about how important the go-to features are. He has been spending a bit too much time finding objects compared to observing them with his current telescope, but perhaps that is just due to the instability of the mount? I would guess that would be much better with the Dobsonian mount? Any recommendations? He is 18 years old. Cheers, Rasmus.