mdstuart

I am glad people are finding my notes of use. The key to this as with many things is practice. Once you are familiar with anything such as a map of the UK it becomes easy to point at say Norwich...

Its the same with the sky. With practice it becomes easier to pick out Albeiro etc..

Mark

Thanks to everyone for the lovely comments.

The spelling mistakes are just me. You can tell its an original piece of my work!

Mark

I have prepared some guidelines for those new to the hobby describing how to find objects in the sky using star hoping.

They describe how to find a galaxy NGC 2903 in Leo but also include techniques designed to find fainter objects.

The notes come from my own experience of finding galaxies over the last few years.

I hope they help.

Regards

Mark Stuart

Star hoping.pdf

Or perhaps picture of the week!

So if I want to move the mirror up three mm in the tube how would I go about it.

Do I use the three visible screws at the base of the mirror.

(click to enlarge)

Will I not get the mirror out of alignment (collimation)

Is it really that easy?

By the way I measured the distance from the tube again to the eyepiece right in and it is 70mm. Using the 25mm lens supplied it is at 78mm.

Mark

Mark

Tube is 132m perhaps mirror is 120mm. Definitely a TAL based on the mount.

25mm lens focuses when moved out by 18mm using focuser. (which is a pretty big about 7cm in length).

9mm lens with focuser right in seems to be about 2mm short of focusing.

I might try a 15mm if I can borrow one and see if that works.

I have a 30mm coming which should work with the 2x barlow I have also bought on e-bay. The 25mm TAL lens is 0.1mm to big to fit in the Celestron Barlow.

By the way the telescope is great I can see M57 but its soooo small.

Mark

Good evening

I recently bought a reflecting telescope which I think is an old TAL. It has a 130mm mirror and one eyepiece which is a F25mm.

I tried buying another eyepiece ( a 9mm Celestron ).

But firstly the eyepiece is only just (about 0.5mm) smaller than the focuser tube….Not a problem I thought I will by a thin piece of rubber.

But the main issue is that I cannot focus with the new eyepiece. In order to get it to focus I would need to be able to put the eyepiece further in towards the diagonal mirror by a few more mm.

Perhaps it will work but only with eyepieces down to say 15mm?

Any help would be appreciated.

Regards

Mark