spike95609

You can break collimation down into three parts. The first thing to do is make sure that the secondary mirror is in line with the focuser, and turn the big central screw until it is positioned equally within your view, i.e. the direction of travel is from the top of your scope to the bottom, just make sure the distance to the edge of the focuser is equal on of those both sides. Once this is done, the secondary is in line with your focuser. Next the secondary mirror, and for this I would use a collimation cap rather than a cheshire as the only thing you're trying to do here is to get that mirror tilted so that your view is looking directly down the tube towards the primary mirror. With the collimation cap you will be able to see all of the mirror clips around the edge of the primary mirror but you won't see them with the cheshire. This is important because if you move the secondary mirror about then once you can see all of those mirror clips (three I think) equally around the edge of your view then your secondary is aligned correctly. It's very fiddly to do this with the three screws as they won't change the tilt in an easily understood X-Y 90 degree direction, but at a weird 120 degrees. Make small adjustments until everything starts to come into place, and once you can see all of those mirror clips easily you know that your secondary is aligned. The most important bit though is when you tighten the screws up, if you do them one at a time it will knock the mirror out of alignment again. Instead it's best to think of them as a three-way balancing act, so tighten them up by about an eighth of a turn each in rotation. That will hold the overall view and gradually tighten them up. Keeping checking the view through the collimation cap in case it drifts out again. Then it's the easy bit and you can use your cheshire at last. All you need do now is adjust the primary mirror until the dot is more or less in the centre of the circle. Everything is now in line.

I also have the Manfrotto 502AH fluid head to mount my Apollo's, and can heartily recommend it. 15x70s are completely comfortable on it, very solid and easy to control - point it at something and engage the horizontal and vertical locks, and it doesn't move at all. I once mounted a friend's 22x85 Apollos and they were also fine, and I was considering but never got around to getting something in the 100mm+ range, which would have been towards the top end of what the head could handle but I was confident enough it could do it. In short, 15x70s will be fine.

I've got similar skies to yourself but have never seen the veil without a filter in my 10" scope. With an OIII on though it's like someone's flicked a light switch, as it's suddenly there and really quite clear, and on some better nights it's revealed a fair amount of detail.

I hope your foggy problems remain fixed. It's an odd one - I have a 10" Skywatcher dob, and have used it for years in all manner of warm, cold and damp conditions, even when mist has been drifting in and out, and I've never once had this problem. The finder scope fogs up all the time of course, or it did until I hit on the highly technical solution of putting the lens cap on when I'm not using it, but never the primary or secondary. I'm usually only out for 1-2 hours though, so maybe it would if I was out there longer but luckily for me the human body gives way long before that happens.

If you just want to do visual astronomy then the 200p is a superb scope which gives you a lot of power for very little expense, and it may well prove to be the only scope you'll ever want. The downside (or another upside depending on your point of view) is that there's no computer to guide you around the night sky, so you'll have to learn how to find the objects yourself. But it's not that hard to do - if you've got some binoculars then while you're waiting for your scope to turn up, have a go at finding some objects in Turn Left at Orion and learn how to star hop to them from an obvious nearby star. This way when your scope arrives you'll be able to find your way around, though there is a little bit of a learning curve with this as everything in a finder scope is upside down and back to front, but it's not hard once you've got your head around it. Keeping an object in view once you've found it isn't a problem at all, you just give your scope a gentle nudge up and to the right as something drifts out of shot.

I've never used a UHC but I've found that my Lumicon OIII is an occasionally useful tool to have in the box. I don't use it very often, as almost everything I look at with my 10" can be seen well enough without it, and very small planetary nebulae which look like a fuzzy blob aren't dramatically altered in appearance by bothering to put a high contrast filter on. But things like the Veil Nebula and Owl Nebula are just simply invisible to me without one, and they're well worth seeing. Also the other night I was looking at M42 at just 38x, so the background sky was quite bright, but there's no question that putting the OIII dimmed it very significantly and brought out so much more detail.

I just about got a good look at it in my 10" scope just before it disappeared into some trees. I was planning on just using my bins as I thought they would be much too low for the scope, so it had no time to acclimatise at all, but I managed to get it up to 80x and could see Saturn's rings clearly and Titan just about, no detail on Jupiter sadly. I was fooled into thinking that HD 191250 was one of its moons until I just checked it on Stellarium, I knew something was wrong because I could see what looked to be five moons in a row and obviously that's not right. Very pleased to have seen it, as the forecast for tomorrow isn't good.

You are right, the big central screw moves the secondary up and down the tube, and the 3 small ones control the tilt. In order for the central one to move at all though you'll need to slacken off the other three a little bit. Once you've done this you should find that the big screw turns easily, and all you need to do is get the secondary spaced as equally as you can get it on either side of the focuser, which will mean that they are aligned. Next you can move on to the three smaller screws to align the secondary with the primary. With this I'd just use a collimation cap, and the only thing you're trying to do here is make sure that you can see the three primary mirror clips (I think there's three in the 200) spaced equally around the edge in your view, as this will mean that your secondary is looking straight down the tube at the primary. The three screws work as a sort of balancing act, so you'll need to play around with them a fair bit to get an even view of all of the clips. Once this is done, you'll need to tighten the screws back up, but as it will trash your alignment to do them one at a time, tighten them in rotation, about an eighth of a turn each time. Then check your primary as all of this messing about will probably have thrown that out of aligntment unless everything was perfect before you started!

I shouldn't think you'll be disappointed with your choice. I've never used the LightQuest but I gather they're a step up from the already impressive Apollo's, and with its superior optics and true aperture (i.e. they actually measure 80mm and not 73mm) I suspect there won't be much difference in performance between it and the Stellar 25x100. The "other" tripod I referred to was the Horizon 8115, but I see you've ordered a more sturdy head - there's nothing wrong with the legs, it's just the head that comes with it that lets it down.

It can be done but as others have said be aware of the sheer size and weight of these things. The Stellar 100mm binoculars are 380mm long and 240mm wide, and they weigh 3.6kg, which isn't so very bad as far as these things go but still it's an awful lot of bulk to be carrying around, not that the 80mm is so very much smaller than that. Observing on a tripod can be an uncomfortable experience as you come up to the zenith, but if you're okay to suffer the neck pains or not go above 60° for any length of time, then I'd recommend spending a lot of money on the tripod because it makes things a whole lot easier. I got a Manfrotto 475b tripod and 502ah fluid head, which back in the day set me back about £350, but it was completely worth it because it's very tall and completely solid. I'm 5' 9" and can stand underneath it at the zenith without bending my knees, and there's still plenty of height to spare in the legs. I've mounted a 5kg binocular on it and once you tighten the horizontal and vertical locks on the tripod it doesn't move at all. Now this is an important point because I had a go with a friend's reasonably solid but much cheaper tripod, and it was such a pain as you're constantly wrestling with the controls to keep everything where you want it. The tripod and head weigh about 6kgs, you can get travel versions made from carbon, but they are more expensive. Also get a tripod that is rated to carry weights much heavier than what you want, because most of those are rated on the assumption that this weight will be flat and on the level, not pointing vertically with the weight offset at an awkward angle.

I just about got it on Monday night with my 10". It took a while to find as it's in a difficult part of the sky for star hopping, but after about 20 minutes of messing about I managed to see a large and very faint blob where it seemed reasonable that it should be with my 10mm SLV; it was just bright enough that I could be sure I wasn't imagining it, but no more than that. Such a shame if it's broken up, the reports I'd seen made me think I was going to see a second shadow in daylight.

I agree that anything over 10x50 would need a tripod, and by the sound of it that would be a bit too much baggage for your requirements. You could get away with a 15x70 mounted on a monopod, the extra magnification and aperture will certainly open up star clusters, but it's bulky and heavy, and wouldn't so much slip in your bag as fill it. If you don't want to spend a lot (say under £200) then 10x50 is your best bet as it will show you a fair amount and will be very easy to carry around. If you are happy to spend perhaps a few hundred more then you might want to consider 10x42's instead as they are obviously smaller and lighter, but the higher quality optics will be clearer yet show you just as much. This is because better optics generally result in true aperture - they genuinely mean that they give you 42mm of light gathering, whereas budget 10x50's are not actually 50mm but are closer to 40. Either way if you don't go down the image stabilising route a monopod would be a good investment as well to steady the view, you'll see a lot more than way.

If the secondary is centred in the focuser but you can't see the mirror clips then yes it's out of alignment. Slacken off each of the three little screws on the secondary a bit and then move them around until you can see the clips spaced evenly around the edge of your view. This will confirm that the secondary is angled with the focuser to look straight down the tube at the primary. When tightening the secondary screws back up, do each screw a fraction of a turn at a time until all of them are tight, otherwise you'll knock it out of position again. After that it's just a case of moving the primary around until you have the dot inside the circle.

Honestly I've never really had to deal with it. I don't know if it's my scope or perhaps I have an unusually steady head, but I've never registered it as a problem to keep it under control. On a side issue a few people have mentioned the brightness of the 32mm being a problem, but even in my light polluted skies when I'm trying to find a faint galaxy, I can still usually detect enough hints of it in the 32mm to go straight to it with the 10mm SLV. The twist-up eyecups on the Vixens are always used, they're very handy for burying my face into the eyepiece without worrying about making contact with the glass. With the prices of TV Plossls at the moment, if I had to do it all over again I'd probably just get an equivalent set of SLVs and maybe a wide field 25mm. SLVs have also gone up in price, but at the time I purchased my TVs I could get 1.5 or 2 plossls for the cost of a single SLV. Now they're much closer, and their lovely eye-relief, eyecups and parfocal features make a persuasive case.

I've always been very happy with my 32mm, very wide field for a 50° EP and it's a useful finder. It is the ONLY eyepiece I have which gets used on every session. True there is too much eye relief and I pick up a fair amount of coma towards the edge, but it's never bothered me and the latter is my scope's fault anyway. I bought mine 2 years ago though when the price was a lot lower than it is now. Considering the jump I'm not sure I'd buy it today when there's superb wide angles you can pick up for less.

You get an extra half a degree with the 15x85s, 3.5° vs 3° of the 22x85. In the test I did with my 15x70s against the 22x85s I didn't find there to be a massive difference in brightness. It was pulling in a little bit extra, but only in the sense that objects which were on the edge of visiibility in the 70s were just a touch brighter in the 85s, but averted vision was still needed to see them. For me their great strength was the additional magnification it gave as it helped to break open star clusters a little more.

I think you'll be very happy with them. If you've read the comparison I did between a friend's 22x85s and my 15x70s you'll know that they were easily better on M42 and a bit better on star clusters, not so much for the extra light brought in but for the magnification being able to make more sense of the smudge. From what I've read, with the 22x85s more or less actually measuring 22x85, they should be very close in performance to comparably priced 25x100s as those should actually measure something in the region of 23x90-ish and I am sure the Apollo's have much better coatings to probably more than make up the difference. You'd have to pay a lot more, or get the 20/28x110 Apollos, to better them.