Nakedgun

A dream machine!

With a 20x wide angle ep on the spotter, I was just able to fit both planets into the same field, this evening.

Viewed Mercury/Venus Sunday night with 10x50s and 82mm spotter, Mercury ~10° below Venus, Mercury becoming visible naked-eye near 2000hrs. Monday night clouded out. Tuesday night Mercury was ~5° below Venus. Will go out a half-hour from now to look. Skies are clear now (Wednesday) and should be (Thursday) for the conjunction, as well.

Nice upgrade, to be sure! The tripod is not the HAL-130, but its model number does not come to mind, just now.

Over here, I've heard bird-watching is on the ascendant, so binocular sales are up.

Don't remember seeing a blue one, before. I'm not crazy about the current black metal-flake, which I have.

Hmm, I'll take your word for it.

I'll have to post up my 120 soon. When was that color scheme available?

Looks like something in the jungle to be avoided!

Nice having that roll-off!

Keeping it simple/inexpensive is certainly the goal, here. For me the 8-24mm zoom and barlow combo does nicely. This Celestron zoom even comes with a screw-top protective case: I have a Celestron bino-viewer, and considering employing it for outreach, too. Figuring ep sets that meet the above criteria is the challenge just now.

With the demise of the BT Technologies owner and their color-matched bases, ADM provides us Tak users with the only option in town. The BT model seen here on my FC76:

The blue finders were offered by the Tak importer here in the U.S. and with the blue accents on the OTA I just wanted something not usual. I transfer the finder between the FC-100, FC-76 & FOA-60.

A few years back I decided to lighten up, after having aperture fever push me to get ever-larger-and-heavier scopes, including triplet designed refractors, as it became just too much to deal with in spite of the color-free and/or deeper sky views offered by them. As a result, my triplets had to go, one of which was the Tak TSA102. So, when Tak released their FC-100DC I bought one in October 2013 to compare with the TSA. I'm not an imager and found the Tak doublet fit the bill visually, and mounting became much less complicated, as a bonus. The TSA went to a new owner. Parallax rings: Tak 6x30 finder: Tak 1.6x Extender Q:

Nice pair of mounts.