alan potts

Richard, Many thanks for the kind words but I don't know where you got the idea I was experienced at anything, most ot the time I just thrash around in the dark. I do enjoy doubles but Nick is the one for them, I often observe purely on the back of his reports though I must confess to being in love with Sirius. I am sure Nexas is great but it will be very difficult and risky for me to get hold of from Australia and I will not use the States to buy from unless I am there which was I different matter, I do like to try and keep it within Europe. I have just also got hold of 3 very high spec Lenovo pro Thinkpads for silly money all with the RS232 port, these are very rare now and dam costly to buy a Laptop with one on. I think Argo Navis just sounds as if it lends itself better to a laptop as I do not have an i phone. I am going to play find the target for the moment as the strength of the pound and dollar has pushed the price of stuff up a great deal for me, just look at a 21mm Ethos form TS now 910 euros, though no doubt if you asked them to price match Telly House, which I did once, they would do it again. Alan.

Simon, I know yours is a faster scope and for its size shorter by ratio but I can't imagine what an extra 4 inch must look like, I think when they get this size an observatory or two part rolloff shed is required. I noticed some time back one of our members in Australia has a 28 inch scope, that would be one to use outside while you look out the bedroom window with Powermate and Ethos arrangement in the focuser. alan

Clearly a very skill man! Alan

Sam, That colour if you put it outside I should be able to detect a glow from here with my scope. Alan

One-eyed-Sam, Looking at it closely I would say they are the exact same as I use under the Geoptik banner and mine are black so i can trip over them in the dark. The price sounds about the same as well, very good value cases. I have a Peli case and they too are great but designed to drop things out of 12 th floor windows. Rather costly too. alan.

It's a good job I kept all the bits I can start to glue them back into place . I have another case on the way i will try it. Alan

Gerry, I will be trying that though at the moment this is one area where i do have a small Light Pollution issue. It never was the case from the nearby town which is about 5 miles away, however they have changed a good amount of the street lighting to a new type and whilst not serious it is much worse than it was. Virgo rises in this general area so maybe in a month or so it will be a bit higher up in the sky. I trust you read the report, that is if I can find Virgo. Alan.

Faulksy, I hear what you say and thanks for the information, I will await the outcome of such talks and drop a line asking, I would be happy to be their first order of one of these if they were able to pull it off, I have a full 700 quid in the UK account, better not buy anything in the next few weeks. Alan

The Nexus seems very good by what you all say but I see it as only available from the USA and there is no way i will buy from there I just don't agree with it. I am very happy to support UK dealers from here and the Local and European dealers but not America. I do not hold anything against people that do this though. This was the only reason I opted for the Argo Navis. Is there anyone you know of in the UK that deals with these units after all they are made in Australia I think. Alan

Stu, I have the encoder fixing points and various connection bars made ready, I was going to put the Argo Navis system on at some point but it is a bit on the expensive side ( what isn't) but it could well be a next purchase. I really think I have enough eyepieces and in truth could even lose a few and not notice too much. I don't see anyone in England that seems to sell this stuff and I only really want to deal with the best retailers. The trouble at the moment is with the Pound and Dollar being strong against the Euro, the likes of TS stock has shot up a great deal, well over 10%, a 21mm Ethos from them is now over 900 Euros. I am very happy at the moment pushing and pulling my way around but I can't say I am very professional at it, I bet if a few of you could see me it would give you all a dam good laugh. I have been out 3 hours and the seeing tonight was poor, so much so I almost thought, is that Jupiter? Nothing like Saturday night when it was hey, come look at this ! What I am finding very watchable are many doubles that are now showing colour where as before they did not, I found a lovely double near Sirius (blue gold) which because of where it was I may even be able to find it again, it seems to show colour even on 5th and 6th mag stars. I took it apart Saturday and it didn't take very long to re-build though I was a bit nervous at first , collimation was so easy I am ashamed to say I even had a problem in this area :mad: , still it takes a man to admit things he got wrong sometimes. I know you have one Stu but I am very impressed with the combination of Sumerian and Nichols, Calvin was not wrong when he said i will not find better but he then he would . I also find this Atlas that you switched me on to very useful . Dannae, Greta advice on the doubles and yes I am a fan of these. alan

Sumerian 18 inch Dobsonian with John Nichol’s mirror. Taken by Michael at Sumerian in Holland, note the naked truss poles. Well at last I have had a chance to look through this scope, no thanks to an extra helping of misery dished up by the Bulgarian weather. We have had snow, rain with snow and the same again, with an additional annoyance, power cuts, it would seem the Electricity Board here have heard it will be an Olympic event and are putting in some extra training, not an issue if the sky is clear. Now as to where this came from, I think John Nichol packed as much as he could when the mirror was sent to Michael at Sumerian and The Cheshire bought from FLO and the Parrcorr from Moonshane also had generous amounts of clouds crammed in the boxes. When you add to this the size of the cases that the scope was packed in there is no wonder I have hardly seen blue sky in 3 weeks. Now as I said in my review of the scope it is a bit bigger than I thought it was going to be but I guess this is just a case of getting used to it, I only see pictures of Dobsonians here on the site and no one puts a tin of beans in the shot so how am I to know how big they are. I can see that keeping it in one piece is going to be a non-starter and that I will have to take it apart or hatch a cunning plan of some sort. Another observatory, now that’s a plan! I have sorted out the collimation with many thanks to Faulksy and Scoot, members on site, one of which has not long since received a similar scope to mine. Issues with collimation were purely that I was trying to look too deep into the whole art and the very few lines from them made it concise and became clear, after all, in the end it was really no different to my Mak/Newtonian 190mm, it was just I couldn’t see this and was trying to over do things. For the first light I was going to keep it simple as my ability of nudging was shall we say more akin to kicking shoving and head-butting , I could not work out which way was left or right or up and down. I really did like the freedom of being able to just move around the sky at will to where-ever I pleased, not that I really had a massive idea of what was where. There was me thinking I was a bit sharp with where things were in the sky but all I managed was to show myself how goto systems make you lazy and do a great deal of the thinking for you. It is one thing being able to find Sirius with a telescope but another altogether being able to locate something not readily visible, even with a 60mm finder. I had enough problems finding Sirius which is a bit disconcerting when it is so easy to see. I just want to say a little about finders which bears no reflection on either scope or mirror. I don’t know if it me but few of them seem to be even remotely decent quality. A few years back I bought a 60mm Baader finder-scope, the so called Vario Finder. This was not cheap, at 350 Euros if I recall correctly for scope and adjustable mounting rings. For me it is not a quality finder and has far to much play in the optical plain causing all sorts of aberrations. I was plainly seduced by the words Zeiss being used in the advert in relation to the objective, personally I feel the nearest it gets to Carl Zeiss is maybe sitting on the same shelf at the suppliers. I can’t say I am remotely impressed by the very similar looking 60mm Teleskop Services offering either which I selected with the scope, for one the focuser/eyepiece will not turn far enough to reach what I call sharp focus, it only needs a fraction more travel but these are things that we should not need to be worrying over, the mounting shoe is also very sloppy and should be better. I can see myself replacing this with an offering from maybe Borg, smaller objective at 50mm yes, but I bet it is sharp, after all it is a name that has quality stamped all over it. I never expect any of these little scopes to be sharp at the edges but on axis I don’t feel is too much to ask for. I have a fair finder collection now with two Sky Watchers and one from Meade which is also poor but for me the cheapest which came with the M/N 190mm and Mak 180mm, in use have proved to be the best so far. Targets for first light. Jupiter. Even a novice with a Dobsonian can find Jupiter though it was proving a challenge in almost daylight, I could just see the planet but could I get it in the cross-wires? Once I had centered the gas giant I took a deep breath for what I was about to see, which was just as well, it was so bright I could feel the need for sunglasses. I started out with the 41mm Panoptic which gave a very low power even with the Paracorr in line of a mere X55, even at this lowly power the sight was impressive and sharper than anything I had seen before, it just screamed, More Power! Then I grabbed the 9mm Nagler, something that I have not done too many times since I bought it, this really piled on the coal with an unheard of for X253. The sight was stunning, totally stunning, without much in the way of exaggeration it looked little like the opening sequence of the Sky at Night where you see Jupiter looming in to view. I was used to looking at Jupiter through a fairly large scope in the shape of my 12 inch Meade but the image offered up by this mirror from Nichols Optics was in a completely different league, it was like Gillingham and Manchester United. The first thing I did was run into the house and drag the Wife outside for a look, she looked impressed which is no mean feat when it comes to astronomy as in the area she thinks I have screw loose. The other thing that had graced me with it’s presents was the Great Red Spot, and it had colour, bags of colour. It was like a piece of fresh salmon before cooking and was garnished with swills of brown clouds, the type of cloud I didn’t mind seeing for one minute. The belts were jumping out of the eyepiece attacking the retina and this was at a power that I had only played with before on my smaller scope, much preferring a lower magnification around the x170 mark. Believing the seeing was decent I reached for the 7mm Nagler which upped the anti to X 325, something I have never done before. At this power I had the feeling that contrast suffered a little and thought maybe a bigger scope would deliver better, for me there was nothing to be gained by the slightly larger image and the use of the 7mm only meant more pushing and tugging at the scope trusses trying to keep it in view, I could see this needs more practice. This was without a doubt the clearest, most contrasted and sharpest view I had ever had of Jupiter, it made you want to sit and watch it for ages which of course is something that will be difficult to do with this scope, it is very much a stand up and view scope with anything high up in the sky. I have to say that with this level of sharpness and overall quality of the image, even at X325, I missed not having a drive to keep it in the middle of the field of view. Sirius. This was my old favourite and I wanted to see how it handled what is not an easy split of Pup star, so it was back to 41mm Panoptic once more which offers just about the widest field of view from this scope at 1.22 degrees with Paracorr. The first thing that I noticed was I could see more stars around Sirius than I could with other scopes, I look at this so much I can recall how many are there in field. The Dog Star was staggeringly bright and stable with a tight point source and delicate diffraction rings, rare indeed, the likes of which I can only match with the 115mm APO, that how good these optics are in this scope. The only thing that I found a little distracting was the sight of the spider veins which I do not have in any of my other telescopes, this is a thing that I am sure I will get used to and not even notice after a while. I was not able to see the Pup star with this amount of power but putting the 21mm Ethos into bat developed things with approximately twice the magnification, there it was as plain as day and it was not coming and going it was just there. I think this was one of the better nights seeing wise that I had had so far this year, not before time in my books. I could see now why the Ethos and to a slightly lesser extent Naglers are so popular with Dobsonian owners, both offer that wide field and allow more time to view objects, something that is not really that important on a driven scope. There is also that extra sharpness that you get at the edge of field which just comes into it’s own with a Paracorr in the mix, stunning sharpness absolutely everywhere and don’t forget this mirror is an F 4.33, maybe not a Lilly or Thompson but for sure a Bob Willis. A general point here, I was noticing that the X108 offered by the 21mm Ethos was better sharpness than much lower X73 in the Meade offered by the large Panoptic, the stars were just so sharp pin point and it is not the first night I have ever had of this seeing. I had clearly got the collimation spot on and checking after one hour of pushing and pulling with the odd knock of the head found the scope was still exactly the same, I feel this could be something that cannot be said of all truss type scopes. NGC 2204 and 2358, with a little beehive on the side I feel this just goes to show how utterly hopeless I am at the moment at finding things as I came across a couple of patches of grey in the finderscope that I thought I would come back to after I find Sirius, that was if I could re-locate them. A trip indoors to look at the Deep Sky Atlas was required here, this is something that I feel must be outside at the scope with future observations, this scope turns up things that other scopes I have don’t. Open Cluster NGC 2204 sits to the east of the star Mirzam and is a lovely small open cluster with many stars visible when using the 17mm Ethos which delivers a still razor sharp X134. Getting lost in the heavens also helped me come across NGC 2358 a larger open cluster on the west side of Sirius, that’s how lost I can get, still I was enjoying myself and it was not a race. The cluster looked stunning in the 21mm Ethos with everything as sharp as I have ever seen in any scope, these optics really are in the APO premier league and the colour of even fainter stars being beautifully delivered with the extra aperture. While I was in the area I took a look at the Messier 41 open cluster which I had just found out was called “the little beehive”, you learn something every day. This looked lovely with more stars on show than I can recall seeing before and by now the 31mm Nagler was showing me why I bought this eyepiece in the first place, an eyepiece that really comes into its own as a finder that still offers me a 1.12 degree field of view and all other TeleVue trimmings. I can see this is going to a regular visitor to the focuser as you would think the two were made for each other. After almost 2 1/2hours I was starting to wonder if anyone would be able to see a difference in a better finished mirror, this one is finished to a 1/8 PV accuracy though it has been said by many that John’s mirror are exceptional and better than stated, everything was so good I could not imagine or see how anything could be improved. This is not a cheap mirror but then quality never is, though it was a special offer being reduced over others on offer on the website. Bear in mind now I have used it just once, but to me it’s by no means expensive when you see what it can deliver under good skies, it is spell binding, I have never been more impressed with a view through a telescope as this one. The area of Orion. At this time of year I feel no report of a first light would be complete without at least a look at Orion’s famous Messier 42. For once it did not take me ages to find the nebula, this could have been me getting used to the scope a little. With the 31mm Nagler now taking centre stage as finder eyepiece and the 41mm confined to case there it was spread almost fully across the field of view. Much brighter than I have ever seen before and so sharp you would think you were there in a space ship. The shorter eyepieces were called up, first with the 21mm which was jaw dropping and then 17mm (X134) which framed it perfectly. I was able to see both ‘E’ and ‘F’ with consummate ease and the detail in the gas clouds was a sight to behold, though I think a playing around with filters will not be far away. I can see myself spending more time on this target next time out in a search for stars ‘G and H’ of the trapezium, these under my skies should be a reasonable ask as both are at around magnitude 15, though Orion is not getting better now. Going back to the wider views with the Nagler, I had the distinct impression of colour in the clouds, pale greeny blue in central regions and a little pinkyness on the outer edges, it was most certainly not grey. This is something that will of course require greater study later, though we are starting to lose Orion now not long after midnight. I turned my attention to the Flame nebula which I have to say has always been a disappointment in my 12 inch, let’s see if the extra aperture makes a difference. I was back with the 31mm as I was not over confident of my hunting skills, in fact I just pointed the scope at Alnitak knowing the field of view was enough to show it. I was taken aback as there was a reflection nebula showing as bold as brass exactly the same shape as it was in the Deep Sky Atlas, I wondered why I had never noticed it before, can an extra 6 inches of mirror make all that difference? It was then the little green devil put in a show on my shoulder and asked what would a 24 inch mirror show then Alan? If I find a spare 9,000 quid in the garden maybe one day I will let you all know. I spent about 30 minutes taking in the whole belt area with visits to Alnilam and Mintaka the double of which was so wide I wondered if I had the right star. In truth with this scope you could spend years on this part of the sky alone and not look at the same thing twice, from my short time so far there are wow moment to be had everywhere. Conclusion. Now I know that maybe the size of such a scope will put many people off as it is maybe too large to be handled due to physical ability or that some are not as young as they once were, me included in that one. Others are sadly limited by the cost of such scopes but I have to say that you are really getting a lot of scope for your money, you can pay more and in my humble opinion do worse. The mirror from John Nichols is an absolute gem and I have nothing but praise for it, I am over the moon with it and bear in mind this is only really the first time out, things can only get better as my skill level grows over time. The scope works wonderfully well even with me being the weakest link: it pushes and pulls just right; balance never seems to be an issue and it holds collimation extremely well over an evening. If you ever seriously think you are in the market for a high quality telescope and think this type and make are out of your reach take a look and I really feel that you will find they are only a little more than some other well know quality scopes that are available on the market. Whilst I would never criticise someone else’s choice of scope I think it is very nice to own a tailor made scope. I know the optical systems are not the same but I really like the rendition of stars with the this mirror over the Meade SC scope that I also own and the contrast is just drop dead gorgeous, for me it just goes to eleven. Happy Bunny. Alan.

What an amasing amount of time and effort you have put into this mirror so far, I take my hat off to you. I know mine is smaller but John made my mirror which I have not been able to use to it's full as yet due to weather. I don't know too much about what you have been doing but I can see by the one night that I have used my 18 inch that John without doubt know exactly what he is doing and talking about, stunning quality. Having just read the whole thread I consider what I paid for mine very good value as I am sure even a mirror 4 inches smaller would take ages to make. I hope all goes well from here on in, ready for Christmas? Alan

Derek, I see you have the new TeleVue eyepiece, the Talisker, it has a very interesting lens element arrangement with triples and doubles in combination. aLAN

I have never seen so many Peli cases, I have one I bought in Hull and you have more than the shop I got mine in. I am using Geoptik cases, not quite as good but less than half the price.

Deepspacehunter, It is funny but I like TV and Meade SWA as well, it must be to colours, The blue UWA's are not at all bad from the first run though I have seen a number of poor reports on the newer 14mm UWA that was out a couple of years back. I had the first one from about 2008 and that was a superb eyepiece, wish I had kept all of them in truth, but I would still have bought the TeleVue's, can't have too much of a good thing. alan

Derek, I like a man that is not know for half measures, sound like a cue to pop in for a single malt .

Derek, Well one thing is for sure no one could ever accuse of doing things by half, congratualtions on the new glass, my bet is you will like them. Alan

I use a series of cases from Geoptik which look and seem the same as Peli. I have one Peli with camera lenses in and this cost a lot of money, about 150 quid ten years ago. The Geoptik's are about a 1/3 of the price and for me worth ever Euro. For me with TeleVues at anything from 200-600 pounds a time its nice to know they are well protected. Alan

Nice report Shane and I fully understand why the BGO's exited, they must be hard work with a Dob, though I still think the 13mm E is a hard act to follow. I have never seen the early Naglers before so thanks for sharing. I would like to swap a few things but where I am once I buy something, in particualr scope, I'm stuck with it unless I give it away basically. Eyepieces I can at least sell in the UK at a fair cost to me for a courier service, the lesson for me here is to make sure I really want a item for keeps first. Alan

Helen, Err no! I will have a look ing the morning I am just off to bed. I have no reason not to have seen it, I had my eyes tested just before Christmas but I didn't see it, or should I say didn't look. Thanks anyway. Alan

After having a play about I managed to load CDC up with all sorts of stuff and it works really well, as I said before just a case of knowing which buttons to press. I stopped short of going down to stars of the 16th magnitude though just in case the computer exploded. Alan

Merlin, It did not require it for the LX, worked like a dream, prefer it to the Meade program which I have to say is in need of a face lift. Alan

Considering it costs nothing it is a very useful software program, with me it is just a case of not know which buttons to press. Looking at it if I am right I can use it with the AZ EQ 6 as well. Alan

Well thankyou for all your help, I managed it now. The trouble is I do not use these programs enough and I forget how to sometimes. Ten years ago I was very good on Photoshop as I used it most days, now it is easier to use I am lost on it. Alan.

You two are not just pretty faces . So I guess you have to do that with every comet that you wish to view, I thought they came up straight away as you input the data file, didn't realise you had to call them up. Now all I have to do is put it in the other laptops. Alan