jonathan

The erecting prism 20mm is probably really intended for daytime use, for astronomy you need to get the maximum light transmission possible, and that means the minimum of surfaces for the light to bounce off en-route to your eye. I'd reserve that 20mm for daytime use as pretty much any decent eyepiece you buy will not be an erecting one, swapping from one to the other will just confuse matters (the view will be back to front and/or upside down). The barlow can only do so much, and if it's a cheap kit one then it'll probably give quite poor results for astronomy purposes compared to one you might buy separately. I'd forget the barlow for now, put it away in the box. Try it with the new eyepieces you buy but don't be too disappointed if it doesn't give great results. You could spend around £100 on two or three decent eyepieces and they might just transform your viewing through that telescope, assuming the telescope is in good collimation (mirrors are aligned correctly, it's not hard to do). I'd advise getting your eyepieces first and try them out, if it's obvious there's something not quite right then look up how to collimate, decide whether it's necessary in the first place before you start adjusting anything. The basic collimation tool can be as simple as a film cannister with a tiny hole drilled in the centre, or pre-made tools do the same job. You'll probably want an eyepiece around 20 or 25mm as a starter when finding objects or looking at wide field objects such as the Pleiades, the Orion nebula, or Andromeda galaxy. The BST StarGuider eyepieces are popular and very reasonably priced, the 25mm would probably be a good eyepiece to have from this range, they should be good for using while wearing glasses (according to the description) however I've taken to removing my glasses when looking through the eyepiece as I find I get a much better look; if you have good close-up vision then I'd recommend giving this method a go. You could stick with the BST StarGuider range and get maybe a 12mm or 8mm, I'm not sure how far one could potentially push that telescope but it should be able to use the 12mm at least and give good views. Other forum members may be able to give advice on what should be possible, it may even work well with a 5mm eyepiece but I wouldn't like to advise that as I don't know enough about the StarGuiders when combined with a 114mm reflector. Plus there's a 10% off promotion on 2 or more BST StarGuider eyepieces. Note that Mars is particularly bright at the moment due to it's recent close approach, it should dim and return to it's usual reddish colour over the next few weeks. You may find that a simple moon filter will help to reduce the bright glare. As the name suggests, this filter is very useful when observing the moon, but can also be used when observing other bright objects such as Venus and Jupiter. If you wanted to increase your recently purchased eyepiece collection's potential then a decent barlow lens could be the answer, you'll notice there's quite a range but you should probably stick to the StarGuider if you buy those eyepieces as it will be optimised with those in mind. Others may be able to provide more detailed opinions (or tell me I'm talking rubbish!), but in general a couple of good eyepieces to have will be around the 25mm and 12mm marks. If you wanted to keep the price right down then have a look at the Skywatcher Plossl range, you could get the 25mm and maybe 10mm from this range for a mere £42, probably wouldn't be as nice as the StarGuiders (the field of view is less, might not be quite as bright an image), but cheap and cheerful and should definitely be a noticeable upgrade from the kit eyepieces. As for the weirdness viewed through the 20mm eyepiece, that could be light refractions bouncing off the internal surfaces, especially if you're viewing a bright object such as Mars. Bright objects do tend to introduce unwanted artifacts and this is where expensive eyepieces and telescopes come in, they will have all sort of tricks up their sleeves to reduce or eliminate that kind of thing. I'm sure the erecting prism in that 20mm eyepiece won't be helping matters.

From your description it does sound like there may be some slack somewhere that slow speeds don't 'activate' and fast speeds overcome. If the motors are identical then you could try swapping them over and seeing if the noise follows the motor, or if it's possible to do so then swap gears over one at a time. It could be the motor spindle that has some play, not sure what you could do if that was the case.

It may be a bit "out there" but have you considered spectroscopy? I believe there are kits available to amateurs now in affordable packages, I looked into it myself a while back but decided to spend my money on visual for now. https://www.firstlightoptics.com/spectroscopy/shelyak-alpy-600-spectrograph.html

When faced with brightness, be bright. Think I just made that up, or maybe I'm just being a bit dim.

I'm sure I was having to stand on a step ladder when I last used one, perhaps I'm getting confused with the pier-mounted SCT. I'll check next time I get to use that 12" dobsonian scope. It's also possible that this particular scope I'm thinking of is raised off the floor a bit in order to avoid dampness.

To give you some idea, a 12" dobsonian is about the size of a 6' man, with a base maybe 2 - 2.5' across. You'd probably need a small step ladder to comfortably look into the eyepiece / finder when close to the zenith. Goes without saying, it'll be a two-man lift or multi-part carry job unless you're Geoff Capes. Without goto on a scope this size then definitely have a non-magnified finder in addition to the supplied 9x50. I manually star hop with my 8SE on an NEQ6 SynTrek and have both finder types fitted. Assuming that you're starting from scratch (no eyepieces etc) then I'd recommend a basic moon filter and perhaps two decent eyepieces to get you going - use the supplied 25mm when sky surfing and then switch to either higher magnification (e.g. for planets) or wide-field (e.g. clusters). A Skywatcher 300P is an f4.9 scope so should be able to make good use of some high quality glass, but don't disregard the cheaper options completely - the Skywatcher Plossls seem to have good reviews and at £20 it could be a quick and easy way of increasing your eyepiece collection - maybe pick out a 17mm and 32mm for some variety, find out how far you can push your scope's optics at your observing sites and then splash out on a more expensive eyepiece such as Explore Scientific for example, I really like their 82 degrees options for clusters and the Orion nebula. You'll probably find yourself wanting to try a specific eyepiece or accessory in the future and have the budget to do so, I think it's fair to say that most of us collect eyepieces over a period of several years.

I'm a fan of the William Optics as I have their 2" diagonal, I don't use anything else now (although in fairness I have only ever used one other diagonal, the 1.25" Celestron one that came with my 8SE). If your Mak front cap has a smaller hole and cap on it then you could use that as a stop-down for lunar or bright planetary viewing, it should reduce the brightness quite a bit; if you don't have one then you could probably make one out of cardboard or plastic sheet. I've heard very good things about the Baader Neodymium filter, only just acquired one myself so have yet to test it extensively, though I think it did make a noticeable difference for Mars surface detail. Seems like the kind of filter you could leave on your diagonal if your main goal is bright targets like Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, it shouldn't affect the colour much. I have a typical moon filter which I've used up until now on bright targets, the key is that it's neutral so won't affect the colour cast at all (if that's important to you). Just be aware that the knurled thumbscrews probably on all of these diagonals are the cheap link, they will break if knocked sharply (one of mine snapped clean in two when it hit the floor while attached to a 1.25" adaptor), substantially stronger replacement / substitute knurled thumbscrews are available very cheaply from eBay, so long as you know what to look for (get the correct length).

I'm confused then. If I put my Skywatcher 150P reflector vertically on a table I wouldn't be able to reach the eyepiece, and I am 6' tall. Is the Heritage measured differently?

Well I never did! To be honest though, I don't expect to be able to afford a Carl Zeiss pair of binos so I'll have to make-do with my "might be decent, or not" Bushnell Legends for now.

A dobsonian is indeed probably going to be the simplest and best bang for your buck. If you can get your son enthusiastic about double stars, stars of different colour (such as Alberio), clusters, and asterisms (no telescope required) then I think you'll get a lot more out of it. You could Iook up for yourself some simple facts about stars, why they are a certain colour and brightness, and back up that info with views through the telescope. There's nothing to say you shouldn't be able to locate Neptune, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn (Saturn should look very nice with the rings showing at the moment, in the new year it will become an early morning object), but as others noted mostly they will be tiny discs or just points of light in the telescope. You might need a steady step ladder for your young astronomer as the eyepiece might be too high for him, and if he touches the eyepiece or scope then he'll likely knock it away from the target.

I wouldn't say it cost a fortune, only just over twice the price of the 6 SLT, but that is my 2p worth of hindsight having initially gone down the single fork arm route myself. I understand budgets, especially when entering into a new hobby. I had a figure in my mind when I first looked at scopes but had to increase it considerably to get what I wanted (based on my own aspirations and advice here), the same happened when I went to buy my first mountain bike - sure, there were bikes available at my initial budget (manufacturers make sure of that) but the components on them are cheap, they won't perform as well or last as long as the pricier options; in the end I spent about three times my initial bike budget and never regretted it. Of course it comes down to how much you can realistically afford to throw at a hobby, how much you expect to use the equipment and what you hope to get out of it. There is nothing wrong with testing the water with the cheaper option, just so long as you go in armed with the knowledge that the more you spend on the equipment, the more you are likely to be able to get out of it.

8SE doesn't really work properly on the AA batteries option, they will provide barely enough power to turn the motors, and I think it will lose the time every time you turn off the mount regardless of any AA battery presence (there's no internal clock battery in the handset, though it might store the location data in NVRAM). If the AC power adaptor is working well for you then I'd say stick with that, however a good portable solution is a leisure battery (the type you might put in a motorhome to drive the inverter) with a simple adaptor cable to plug a standard 12v power lead into (this 12v cable will include a fuse in the plug). I've never tried the DC voltage converter / regulator option but if you get a reliable one then I see no reason why that wouldn't work, but I would have thought that one of those portable drill batteries wouldn't hold much power compared to a 12v leisure battery, and if you ever had to swap batteries mid-session then you'll be back to square one entering the time and doing 2 star align etc. Leisure batteries can be expensive but they need not cost as much as an astronomy power tank, you can add multi-socket adaptors, build a wooden crate to house it all in, whatever you want. Some people build battery cases with USB ports and such, based around several small lead-acid batteries connected in some fashion, I prefer to keep it simple with just a regular sized battery and a cable.

I've come to the conclusion that I need to remove this board to examine it and possibly replace a couple of caps to try to fix a motor dead spot / stall problem. I've looked at what AstroBaby has on her site about the HEQ5 but can't see anything about removing the motor controller board, from what I can see there are two screws holding it in but in order to get a screwdriver to them I would have to remove the two motors (rather not, but if I have to...) Any advice please?

I have a pair of 8x42 Bushnell Legends, a very nice robust pair of binoculars. A few things to look out for which ought to help: Fully multi-coated glass surfaces, nitrogen filled, waterproof, nice wide neck strap. Not all essential by any means, but I think they should help. The coatings help with light transmission and to cut out errant reflections, waterproof / nitrogen filled should eliminate fogging on interior glass surfaces. Bak4 porro prism for a sharper image and better light transmission. Oh and if looking at a binocular tripod mount L bracket, get a metal one as the plastic ones are feeble and wobbly.

I recently had the corrector plate out of my 8SE, while it may not be exactly the same as the older C8 it shouldn't be that different a procedure to put it back and collimate. I discovered small triangular markings on the edge of the corrector plate glass, possibly made during assembly to find the best position / rotation in the tube, you could note / photograph these (if present) and where they lined up when you remove the corrector plate. Before you remove anything though, get some fresh masking tape (I discovered that old stuff leaves sticky residue - test it somewhere else beforehand) and stick a piece all the way from the outer metal casing right onto the glass of the corrector plate, then, using a sharp knife, very carefully cut the tape so that you can separate the corrector plate from the holder, and the holder from the metal casing. This way you will know exactly how the glass should be aligned when you put it back. It'll probably be worth cleaning both sides of the corrector plate (there are youtube videos on this, basically treat it like a Faberge egg), I wouldn't touch the mirrors unless they were actually dirty, use an air blower bulb to blast away any loose dust or particles. If the primary needs cleaning then do it with the OTA mounted horizontally, and use just enough water to wet the mirror surface (use soft cotton wool). As AstroTim said, it's the same process as aligning a finder scope - slacken one collimation screw very slightly before tightening another. I found the collimation of my 8SE pretty easy on the whole, I just needed to point the telescope at a bright star (I don't have enough distance for an artificial star in the house). Bob's Knobs / knurled screws really help. I wonder if you might be able to fit tube rings to that thing though, maybe just behind the front cell and in front of the rear band that the finder fits to.

Reminds me of most sessions where I tried to use a goto or do polar alignment. More times than not, I just gave up in frustration at it not working as described in the manual and packed up having not actually seen anything. Since I ditched goto in favour of RA tracking only, just easy plain sailing all the way! Except when I want to find that tiny faint fuzzy, then I'm often out of luck.

I've found my Celestron XCel-LX eyepieces a bit difficult to use with the 8SE, which is very picky about seeing conditions, they appear to work much better in my refractor and reflector telescopes. One eyepiece that does work very well in my 8" SCT is the 8-24 zoom, it's the Baader Hyperion but I'd be willing to bet that the SCT will be just as happy with one of the cheaper zooms mentioned. I originally bought the Baader zoom for use with my solar scope, and it does an excellent job there too. The original Celestron 25mm plossl that came with my 8SE is still my first eyepiece for every session, performs brilliantly in all scopes, SCTs generally get on well with plossls regardless of size. Be sure to treat your eyepieces well, get yourself some proper cleaning fluid and a cloth, I've been using the Baader Optical Wonder Fluid and cloth for years, keeps my eyepieces looking like new. I only use it if they're getting a bit gunky on the top glass so it goes a very long way.

Knowing what I know now, and if I wanted to follow the Celestron route (for an SCT), I'd probably look at this instead of any single arm design: https://www.firstlightoptics.com/advanced-vx-goto/celestron-c6sct-vx-goto.html The 2" tubular steel legs provide excellent stability (better than the 1.75" supplied with HEQ5 Pro), the mount capacity is 30lb compared to the 10lb 6" OTA that's supplied with this bundle, leaving plenty of room to add dew shield, focuser, additional finder, heavy eyepiece or camera, etc. Should be much easier to balance on an EQ mount too - on my original SE mount I found that I couldn't move the OTA any further forwards in the dovetail clamp so with my accessories I wasn't able to correctly balance the scope. It should have exactly the same goto handset although the EQ mount setup will be a bit more involved than with the SE or SLT Alt/Az mounts. So, this to me looks like the same kind of deal as 6SE vs 8SE - same mount used for both, so if C6 is what you're after then it looks like you'll be getting a very capable mount to put it on, with the possibility that you could use it with other scopes as well in the future, e.g. a large refractor (102 or 120 perhaps), or a C8.

We need the Ghost Nebula as well now.

I observed Mars about a month ago, felt like I could see quite a lot of detail compared to usual, that was in my 8" SCT with 8mm eyepiece (Baader Zoom). Last night I pointed my 102 refractor at Mars, the brightness now is almost overpowering, I had to use a moon filter just to see the surface detail, I also tried out my neodymium filter for the first time, I think it did make a significant difference (glare was gone, details seemed more visible) however there was still some colour fringing and it was definitely a pale salmon colour rather than the darker muddy orange we're used to seeing in pictures or most of the time through a telescope. Just looking at Mars with the naked eye, it looks much more like one of the white stars around it than the red planet, probably even less red than Betelgeuse. I'll continue to observe Mars as it moves away and dims, perhaps there will be a sweeter spot where it's not quite as bright and still close enough to reveal the surface detail. I think the view through my refractor was certainly sharper than the SCT, however the brightness and distance meant that it wasn't quite a like-for-like comparison (there was no colour fringing that I could detect through the SCT). Perhaps viewing in another week or two would provide a fairer comparison. I have another filter on the way, the Baader Contrast Booster, which I hope will stack well with the neodymium to further reduce the glare and bring out the details.

Saw them just as I was setting up the scope, managed to look at Jupiter and Saturn before they set. The yellow crescent moon set between some buildings which made it rather more interesting. Cloudy Outside was a much more accurate forecase than the BBC for here last night, I wonder sometimes if they just look out of the BBC building top floor window in Manchester with a big pair of binoculars (might actually be more accurate for the local area there!)

I received a reply from Skywatcher yesterday, it took them about ten days so perhaps expect a delay of around that long. It was a good reply though, answered my question.

I received a response from Skywatcher about this. One of their engineers stated that they don't think that the v1.x motor controller board firmware is able to be updated, and that they do not have that firmware available anyway. Suggestion was to upgrade to a v2.x motor controller board so I'll be looking into that next. Any info on good sources of v2.x boards for HEQ5 Pro? Just vanilla, no funky modded firmware or such.

It shouldn't be necessary to collimate a new scope, just check with an out of focus view of a bright star when you first take it out at night. Bob's knobs are a good idea too as PeterCPC suggested, however I owned my 8" SCT for about 8 years before I replaced the three collimation screws - if you take care when handling your scope it shouldn't lose it's collimation easily. When is someone going to release a scope that auto-collimates?

Perhaps you could encourage your kids to write a friendly letter to your neighbours about how they used to enjoy going out in their dark garden to enjoy the night sky, but now they can't see the sky because the new lights are too bright at night. Have them hand-write it if they're able to, signed - some lovely but very disappointed kids. Keep a copy. I don't see why the neighbour couldn't install lights at ground level if their aim is to have a runway for a garden, it's not going to be that difficult to install LED solar lights which would be much lower than your fence and not blinding to look at, or if they must have 5,000 cree lights then run some mains wire in truncing along the edges. Whatever lighting they have, if it's constantly on without PIR sensors then it's not very green of them, using electricity (however little) is never going to be as green as not using electricity. There's also an envirponmental impact on local wildlife, they'll definitely be disturbing the natural habits of insects, birds, predators, prey... I'd laugh if it resulted in an influx of foxes and badgers messing up their garden! I wonder if you could even get the local naturalists involved, as it might well be a nuisance / danger to nature if your gardens back onto wilderness. Maybe someone will take up the cause and get some press involved.