niallk

The Pan24 is a beaut to use.

The only finder on my 15" is a Telrad - straight through, erect image

Nice post! Very interesting indeed - you've inspired me to try it

I tried that too with my 10" I've never admitted it before!

Same thing for me on the 4th of Feb - best looking night in ages... but also our wedding anniversary! The scope - with its recently cleaned mirror - stayed put. For once I'm kinda thankful that it is looking cloudy on the 14th. I'm itching to get that mirror dirty again

Oh yeah forgot to add seeing a flare loop - a real bright concentrated horseshoe that evolved as I watched with my Lunt 50mm. That LS50DS has wowed me many times over

1. Sombrero Galaxy in my 15"... just seeing that iconic galaxy with my own eyes 2. Io as a beautiful 3D ball transiting Jupiters limb one stunning night, also detecting varying colour within the GRS with all that turbulence trailing, plus white ovals. 3. 1st light with my 15" in my back garden, starting on M81/M82. M82 showed wonderfully detailed mottling, but M81 was just huge - the sweep of the outer arms was visible to me for the 1st time and a 'wow' escaped out loud... Many close runners up: The Needle Galaxy; one amazing night on Saturn detecting the dark polar region where the hexagon is and wondering if I was detecting the Encke minima & swinging over for my best ever Mars on the same night - stunning; teasing out intersecting ovals in the Cat's Eye neb; M31 as a huge extended lozenge in the sky naked eye from Kerry; M27 in my 15" from the same dark place - a huge rugby ball; my first time sweeping Virgo and Coma B: all those galaxies & Makarians Chain with my 10"; Uranus one really steady night with 4 and maybe 5 moons (15"); detecting a tint of pink once in M42, on top of the usual green; finally catching E & F plain as day in the Trap

Wow - thanks for posting

Thanks. Ive been in touch with James Mulherin before, and found him very helpful and responsive. I hope things will be ok for him & the team there.

Going by posts on CN it is true, confirmed by someone who is a known friend of Dave Kriege of Obsession Telescopes.

There's a nice article on coating technology here: https://web.archive.org/web/20100601235121/http://www.opticalmechanics.com/technical_articles/Demystifying Mirror Coating.pdf

Geez. This is why I was happy to go back to OMI if I ever needed to in the future, and incur the cost. When the conditions are right, my mirror has delivered what I consider to be stunning views, and I wouldn't want that ruined.

Here's a link to an archive of OMI's technical articles - some interesting stuff on interferometry testing: https://web.archive.org/web/20080512150818/http://www.opticalmechanics.com/technical_articles/index.html Here's an archive of interferometry data for mirrors OMI made - interesting to view across 12.5" to 30": https://web.archive.org/web/20080512153416/http://www.opticalmechanics.com/telescope_mirrors/testdata.html

After a while, I took the plunge on a Moonlight focusser for my LS50DS: it really is much, much nicer to use - the fine focus response really helps to bring out the best views and get things real sharp on the disc - I do love it. However, for visual with light plossls, I could certainly still enjoy the scope with the orig helical focusser.

1. Same 2. Yes it's fine 3. Same procedure as any dob really; Astro Baby's guide covers it thoroughly. The tricky part of collimation is the secondary. It comes with 3 Allen key hex bolts plus a central bolt: if you get a mental picture of how they are arranged to hold the secondary tilt + position along the optical axis + rotation, then it starts to make sense. The tricky thing is tightening down and the flex in the spider vanes/ holder assembly. This leads to lots of iterative tweaks - just takes patience. The good news is my solid tube 250px holds secondary collimation ridiculously well! Rarely needs a tweak. I shift it sometimes in one piece via the handles, but it takes only a min to separate and carry in 2 parts - makes it easy and safe. The Bresser dob has large alt bearings and a tube ring mount. This looks really very attractive, imho - I've only seen pictures of it, not used one. A nicely moving well balanced scope is a joy to use manually at high powers. Being able to move a fraction of the fov without overshoot or droop or flexure makes an enormous difference.