Fypunky

I love mine now. Goto has given us back the interest in astronomy, don't get me wrong, I still like to star hop using the telrad and then having the auto tracking on instead twisting the old knobs is better. The Synscan as mentioned was a headache to start with, but this was more the duff info in manual, a quick email to the shop I bought it from and they provided better info on alignment. I also bought a sealed battery from a local alarm company, cost me £10, its works fantastic on it. I use mine now a lot to plan my session, using stellarium I will work out which targets I plan to view, enter them RA/DEC into the handset and that is it, when out I can just go through them. I love the planning/ research as much as the viewing. In my opinion, as a noobie, the goto is something worth getting from the start, I agree with learning the sky however as in our case we were very quickly loosing interest because of a number of factors, the image is not as is mentioned a lot like the books/ hubble images, a lot of DSO are just grey smudges in the sky, any amount of light pol and they are gone ( spent months trying to find M81), I have a 5 inch reflector as a starter scope which we thought would be really really good, sadly as is often the case it wasn't as we thought. The synscan has now made this scope 100x's better than it was, the first time we had it hitting the stars and I choose M81, straight away it was there, a small faint spoldge but we found it and observed. If anyone was to ask me about a goto when starting out, I would say get one based on my experience, you dont have to use it to take you to your target and you can still star jump, but there will be times when the faint DSO's are tricky to find for what ever reason and this is when they come into their own and keep your interest, more so with kids and the tracking is a great part of them. Back on thread about the SynScan.....There is a few issues I have wth the synscan, SAO cat is not complete, take WZ CAS ( SAO 21002) it is not listed! I am currently due to intense light pol from the illuminations viewing doubles ( really enjoying it), I have downloaded several doubles list, I went through them and half the SAO's are not in the handset! I had a blip with a the last session a few weeks back, I hit Alberio in the hand set and it told me it was below the horizon! Had to pull the plug and start over (not the first time this has happened but is a rare one). As mentoned the positives out number the negs, I love the tracking side of it, I like the ability to plan and enter my viewing session, now I understand how to align, it is done in no time with ease and the targets are nearly always in the centre.

I suppose as my day job is in optometry for once I may maybe a little bit more qualified to answer (new to astronomy)! On the whole cataract surgery is successful with only around 5% having problems after (last time I looked (all surgery has risks)), depending on prescription and one or two other factors they may do the monovision as someone said earlier, one for distance and one for reading (I use contact lenses to obtain the same vision when observing). Cataracts actually start to form mid 20s but it is not until later in life do they get to a point where they have an impact on the vision and slowly you loose contrast sensitivity, similar to the misty window effect, once the implant is in place you then have a very clear window to look through, hence why colours are so much more colourful. The choice of options with the implants is limited under the NHS, go private and you have a lot more to choose from. One further point, you may even after surgery experience the cataract effect again, this is PCO, the implant is put in a sack which is original, the sack can become cloudy, the hospital will use a YAG lazer to clear it, once done that is it, it will remain clear there after.