Cosmic Geoff

There is an Ioptron alt-az GoTo mount which is a little cheaper. Check out the price of a used Celestron C8 SE GoTo outfit. This is an 8" SCT with alt-az GoTo and if you are only interested in visual should tick several of your boxes. They often go for far less than the cost of a new one.

To see galaxies beyond those you mention you need dark skies. What are the skies like at your location? I took my 8" SCT to rural Devon a couple of times and could see far more galaxies than at home. I also put together a video- assisted astronomy outfit with a 102mm Startravel, an ASI224MC planetary camera and a GoTo mount, and this proved startlingly effective at detecting faint objects at my home location, detecting a whole lot of galaxies I could not see visually even with an 8" SCT at my home location. I assume you mean abandon GoTo on grounds of cost. If you are working in light-polluted skies you may be disappointed at the number of galaxies visible with a 10", and also frustrated at the difficulty of finding anything without a GoTo. Your choice, of course. I recently uprated my EEVA mount to a EQ5 Synscan and added software for platesolving and resync, which quickly places objects (visible or not) right in the middle of the FOV.

The answer will depend on the total load. The laptop might be the most tricky item to power in the field, but a modern laptop with SSD will image for several hours without an external power supply. Older models with hard drive consume a lot more power.

The kit 10mm and 9mm eyepieces from Celestron and Sky-watcher do not have a good reputation. I'm surprised you find it that bad, but you would find it worthwhile to invest in another 10mm eyepiece of better quality, plus a 25mm to fill out your range, as an absolute minimum.

Why wait on the weather? You can do the suggested test indoors.

Not necessarily. If you were using a kit eyepiece of 9 or 10mm focal length for the higher-magnification views, this would explain the poor performance, as these eyepieces are not much good and should be replaed by something better. I bought a Celestron Omni barlow lens to replace a kit Sky-watcher Barlow and found there was no difference at all. A daylight view would inevitably be darker at higher magnifications, and the 'seeing' would also affect the view.

I looked again at dusk and around 5pm, and saw the crescent moon, Jupiter and (with binoculars) Saturn and Mercury, but not Venus. I have seen Mercury with the naked eye on other apparitions - one needs to look in the right place at the right time in good conditions. Venus is at inferior conjunction on the 8th Jan, a few degrees N. of the Sun.

This afternoon I managed to observe the Sun (no sunspots), Venus ( a large and very thin crescent) Mercury (a dot), Jupiter, and the new Moon. 127mm Mak SLT, solar system align on Sun (using full aperture solar filter for this). Quite a good bag on one of the first clear days in almost a month.

OK, that's your lead. So have you done the test I suggested above?

IIRC I bought a cheap battery-powered drive for mine and it attached to the side of the mount not visible in the photo. It was not a very good RA drive. 🙁 See 'Meade Motor drive' post in this forum section for a similar setup.

If you want the best response, try re-posting the image in a format we can actually open. 🙁 I used to have a Lidl mount.

I have not seen the Celestron Starsense Explorers in the metal, but these are not GoTo scopes, just manual scopes with a clever pointing aid. The 5" and 6" SCTs are good telescopes, but rather different from a Newtonian, They have a f10 focal ratio but are much shorter than a Newtonian of the same aperture, and cost more to manufacture. They have a large focusing range which often proves useful with accessories. I don't think so. I think the mounts will be in the lightweight portable or 'starter' class. An EQ5 Synscan, a Celestron AVX or an Evolution would be my idea of a 'proper mount'.

I use my cheap 10x50 bresser binoulars while wearing varifocals. As for the double image, seeing two stars where there should be one is a symptom of the binoculars needing collimation. This happened with my Berssers, and this issue is more obvious when looking at stars, than in the daytime when your eyes will find it easier to combine the images.

It is not clear what you mean. The correct plug has a 5.5 mm overall diameter and a 2.1 mm inner (a hole). The point I am trying to make is that these plugs are liable to give a poor connection, as I have experienced with more than one mount, unless the cable is restrained to stop it pulling on or twisting the cable, or unless the inner pin on the mount is fettled to give a better contact. The amp-hours of the lead-acid battery is irrelevant, except that it prompts me to ask: did you make up your own lead and plug? In which case you could have used the wrong plug, as a previous post suggests. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/282995139329?chn=ps&norover=1&mkevt=1&mkrid=7101533165274578&mkcid=2&itemid=282995139329&targetid=4584826055637456&device=c&mktype=&googleloc=&poi=&campaignid=412354546&mkgroupid=1299623041023876&rlsatarget=pla-4584826055637456&abcId=9300541&merchantid=87779&msclkid=0d83cf88dee4135c98e1ae580ebc8b5c

Before you send it back, turn it on and wiggle the power lead where it plugs into the mount. See if anything bad happens on the display. If it does, check you have the right plug (see previous post) and consider attaching a cable tie to stop the cable moving at the plug.

I'm curious to know what mount. At 6Kg the Startravel falls into a gap between cheap but inadequate GoTo mounts and adequate but very expensive alt-az GoTo mounts.

Some time ago I acquired a better quality Circle T diagonal for my Maksutov, replacing the budget diagonal that was part of the kit. I could not see any improvement in quality when viewing. Elsewhere I have read that spending money on costly diagonals gets you better build quality and durability rather than any obvious visual improvement. Later I bought a new £50 Celestron Omni barlow to try instead of the cheap kit Sky-watcher one. Again I could not see any difference at all, either visually or when doing planetary imaging. On the basis of this, you should expect to see little or no difference should you upgrade, rather than an obvious improvement.

https://tejraj.com/pdf/EXOS2_GOTO-Manual.pdf Does this help?

You don't need to do that with a Celestron mount. But I doubt this is an issue. Mine never did that. This suggests that your mount has a fault. The Skyalign fails if one or more of the stars used are not in the alignment star shortlist. It should not do that. The mount may be faulty.

Astronomy is not a cheap hobby and £200 will not go far. Telescopes also need a mount which can cost hundreds of pounds by itself even without the addition of motors or GoTo. Threads like this one generally point the beginner in the direction of a Newtonian telescope (an inherently simple and cheap and easy to manufacture design) mounted on a Dobsonian mount, which is generally made of chipboard and costs only a few pounds to manufacture. The Dobsonian telescope/mount began as a design that could be made by impecunious DIY enthusiasts, but is nowadays a commercial item. There are other alternatives, but they are either toys or cost more because of the requirement for a more elaborate mount with tripod. It should be pointed out that a heavy-duty fully functional metal mount with GoTo will greatly add to the potential uses of any telescope but will generally be heavy and cost a great deal of money.

Dissatisfied with an 8" Newtonian on a manual EQ-5 mount, I bought a used C8 SE (GoTo 8" SCT outfit). Problem solved.

The SE mount used with the C8 is what it is - a lightweight portable mount suitable for visual use, but not for imaging. It can be used for planetry imaging, though the backlash is a bit annoying in this role. The whole assembly can be picked up and carried outside through a domestic doorway. The same OTA is available bundled with the Evolution mount - a better quality mount, or with the AVX (if you want an equatorial GoTo), or in the form of the CPC800, which has a heavy-duty twin-fork alt-azimuth GoTo mount. This is a great mount for visual observing, or planetary imaging, if you don't need an equatorial and don't mind the considerable weight.

It depends on what exactly you want to do, which is something only you can decide, not us. You don't need a GoTo to find the moon. GoTo can be helpful, and a greattime-saver for finding faint non-obvious objects. I know some people enjoy searching for objects manually and 'learning the sky' and 'star-hopping', but I have never seen the point myself. 🙂 Maybe the same people enjoy trying to navigate their cars on British roads without a sat-nav. But each to their own. Do whatever you enjoy. 🙂 You can have a mount that tracks (an equatorial) without going to the lengths of fitting GoTo to it. A single RA drive motor will suffice. If you have imaging in mind, you should think in terms of a full GoTo mount, and preferably not one of the cheaper lightweight ones. Should you want to secure, for instance, a live-stacked image of a 12th magnitude planetary nebula, an object more or less invisible or at least un-identifiable through a visual scope of modest size, you will have a dismal time without a GoTo to aim the scope at the right area, secure an image for plate-solving, platesolve and automatically correct the position to centre the PN in the camera, and hold the outfit very steady while a succession of images are taken and super-imposed. As you move beyond the 'beginner scope' stage it becomes more important to decide what you want to do and buy equipment that best does it, or resign yourself to acquiring an ever-increasing collection of assorted telescopes, mounts and accessories.

A number of these red dot finders come with a set of alternative mounting parts, including one to fit in a Synta shoe. I have the Baader Sky Surfer III which works well, seems well made, and (unlike others I have tried) has not gone wrong yet.

Assuming the Helios is the same size and weight as a Skywatcher, an EQ5 with steel legs would be considered a barely adequate mount for it. I once had a Helios 200mm newtonian on a manual EQ5 mount, and I thought the combination was horrible. With legs extended, the eyepiece could be 7ft off the ground, and with them retracted it could not see lower altitude objects over a 6ft fence. The eyepiece could get into awkward positions and I had great difficulty getting non-obvious objects into the field of view. The combination was quite stable for visual use though, in a sheltered location. I bought a C8 SE within a few months.