Cosmic Geoff

I have a similar power tank and I have never paid any attention to the state of charge test. Connecting a charger gives a better indication of how discharged it is. AFAIK these powertanks are very reliable.

Even cardboard works for a SCT. And almost all refractors have a dew shield.

I would suggest that if your 130 PS is of good quality, you will not see much difference for viewing planets if you change to another scope of similar aperture. Though an eyepiece upgrade might improve matters. If you go to a bigger aperture (e.g 8", 203mm) that will give an improved view of planets (if the seeing is good) but not an earth-shattering difference. Personally, I have found that going to planetary imaging (with a planetary video camera and 'lucky' imaging) gets the ultimate out of a visual telescope - a few days ago I got, after processing, clearly defined images of a moon shadow that I could barely see (or not at all) through the eyepiece. GoTo can be of immense help, depending on what kind of observing you want to do. You don't need it to find Jupiter, but finding Neptune will be a severe pain without it. And if you want to find and image objects on the limits of visibility, the ability to find the right area (with GoTo), plate-solve it and then at the click of a mouse reposition the scope to get the (visually invisible) object dead centre is amazing and an aid that only a diehard would want to do without. If you want a better scope purely for visual use with GoTo, you can consider the Celestron C8 SE (a complete setup, not a scope, and one of several that mount the same OTA). I am not clear why you were considering the EQ-6. This is an extremely heavy mount, and is mostly used by deep space imagers to rigidly mount a amall high quality refractor. It is also capable of mounting a large, heavy newtonian (etc.) For pure visual use an equatorial is a liability, as there is eatra effort involved for assembly and setup, for no practical gain compared with an alt-azimuth GoTo. Deep space and planetary imaging have quite different requirements. If you want to cover visual, planetry imaging and deep space imaging, it helps to have several scopes and mounts so you can mix and match as required.

You need very dark skies to see galaxies. From a town all you will see are a few faint grey smudges, nothing like the photographs.

Can general visitors to the RGO see the Great Equatorial Telescope? I had a good look online but am none the wiser.

Check the weight of your intended 120mm OTA purchase. You may find that a substantial mount and steel-legged tripod is indicated, unless you are tolerant of wobble-mounts.

You mean, repurposed without too much engineering effort? It could certainly be re-used for something, possibly by making up an adaptor. However, a larger refractor will probably require a more substantial mount - even my vintage 70mm brass refractor required an AZ-4 steel-legged (q.v.) And moderm mounts generally come with a tripod included, and the included value of even a tripod like that used under the AZ-5 and EQ-5 mount is qiote low. A flat-topped version of the EQ-5 tripod sells for a little over £100.

Despite having visited the Greenwich Observatory some years ago, I was unaware that such a large refractor was there, or that it had been at Herstmonceux (which I have also visited). A most interesting post and links.

I have three Nexstar alt-az mounts as well as a Sky-watcher EQ5 Synscan. The Nexstar system IMHO is a better designed and easier to use system, and for visual use I would recommend the Nexstar. I have not seen the equatorial version (by which we most likely mean the AVX here). As for the Synscan even though this is very popular I found it unintuitive with features present in the Nexstar either missing or hard to use, and the star align is also harder to use - without prior planning the 3-star align is almost impossible to use. I would say that spending £1500 on a telescope outfit could be unwise unless one has a very clear idea how it it to be used. A HEQ5 could be put to various uses, if need be. A large aperture is not needed for deep sky imaging, it seems, unless one has small distant galaxies in mind, but it is desirable for planetary imaging. If one does not intend to do deep sky imaging, there is no need to suffer the aggro of an equatorial mount (or Synscan), as an alt-az will be entirely adequate for visual, or planetary imaging. Conversely, the Celestron C8 SE is a portable and easy to use outfit, very suitable for visual use, but a bit of a pain for planetary imaging and, (I expect) useless for deep sky imaging.

You can easily diagnose a loose clutch. The clutch is what prevents the tube moving freely in altitude. Just try moving the OTA up and down while the outfit is indoors. There should be moderate resistance. The OTA should be positioned fully forward in the clamp.

Have the handbook ready and treat it as a practice run. I have had my Synscan upgrade for 18 months and have still not mastered all aspects of its use. 🙁

When I connected my Skywatcher EQ5 Synscan to a laptop, as well as installing ASCOM and using the USB port at the bottom of the V5 handset, I had to install a Prolific serial driver (available from Skywatcher, IIRC). This isn't a proper USB so it needs the serial driver.

Aligning the red dot with the telescope should not present any special difficulty if you can find a suitable distant target in daylight, e.g a feature on top of a tall building. The dongle and app are optional extras and I recommend that you first master operation with the basic kit. The Starsense Autolign is a time-saver when setting up and saves the bother of selecting alignment stars and crouching over the telescope. You can bring out a chair and suchlike stuff while the Starsense does its thing. It also has some nice observer lists in the handset which are not in the Nexstar+. It's a matter of personal opinion whether it is worth the expense. I have the Starsense on a C8 SE used as a quick-deploy outfit, but I have no plans to put it on another heavy telescope outfit which takes some time to assemble and already has GPS. And make or buy a dew shield if you do not already have one.

Finally got a clear night so I could try it out. Connected up a laptop, Startravel, camera, etc on the SLT Celestron mount and once I checked the settings it all worked. The Goto put M57 in the camera field, and a Platesolve & Realign put M57 dead centre. Same with M31 - very impressive. I took everything down and re-erected it on the EQ-5 Synscan mount, selecting Sky-watcher Telescope in the setup. This also worked, centering M57 and M31 impressively, but it struggled with M52, doing a meridian swap and not getting within 3 degrees of the target. The polar align and GoTo align were both very bad (it would not place the telescope anywhere near Jupiter) but the Platesolve & Realign still worked. The All Star Plate Solve works quickly with my newer laptop, and I have still to try the ASTAP option.

This is almost certainly a problem with the input data & settings. The time has to be entered in the right (24 hour) format. Your longitude (in Oxfordshire) should be minus something, e.g. -001deg 23min or whatever, and the latitude about 52 degrees. I would also mention that the 3-star Skyalign is not (by general consensus) any more accurate than the 2-star align. Its purpose is to allow the newbie to select 3 bright objects without knowing what they are, and get a successful alignment. The 2-star align is quicker and just as accurate, but one has to know which star is which (as presumably the OP does by now).

Legislation and attitudes clearly differ in the UK vs. USA. Helicopters regularly fly over my location and I occassionally see a police helicopter hovering around. Personally I see no need to use these laser pointers on the night sky and any amateur astronomer who gets his/her collar felt by the police is not likely to get much sympathy from me.

As a concrete example, taking a 5000 frame shot of Jupiter with an ASI224MC camera and C8, Sharpcap and a USB2 port laptop results in a 350Mb file recorded in about 20 secs at around 250 frames/sec. That's for a 320x240 px reduced frame. Exposure per frame is about 2ms. Recording a full frame of 1304x976px takes proportionately longer.

You really need to invest in a new(er) laptop, as your old one is clearly inadequate. I recently bought a Dell Vostro 7th gen I5, 8GB memory, 250GB SSD (mainly brand loyalty as I already had an older Vostro). It is decidedly quick and has enough storage for several night's imaging, and it has three USB3 ports, which match the later ZWO cameras with their USB3 ports. Also wifi and Internet port. It cost about £130. No need to buy any hubs or SD cards. The SSD had enough space for a suite of astro programs as well as Win 10. Win 10 needs at least 4GB of RAM (8 Gb preferred).

I have several red dot finders and found them plagued with bad connections eg with the brightness control. One would not work from new till I packed the battery with a bit of foil. No battery problems as such.

If the 130/900 is any good, the 127mm Mak will not be an advance for double stars. That said, the 127Mak is a fine instrument that will work well on double stars, but you need good eyepieces, not the tat supplied as starter eyepieces. I would suggest you re-mount the Newtonian anyway so you are encouraged to use it more.

Your primary interest seems to be astrophotography. You should therefore buy and read the book "Making Every Photon Count", by Steve Richards, (available from forum sponsor FLO), as this will put you on the right track for deep space imaging and save us from repeating its contents here, and you will avoid expensive purchasing mistakes. As a general comment, deep space imaging is best done with a heavy GoTO mount and a small refractor telescope. At the entry level, a C8 is not suited for deep space imaging , but is very suitable for planetary imaging, with a planetary imaging astro video camera, on a modern mount. I would suggest you think in terms of all-new kit for the deep space imaging. The C8 could be de-forked and placed on a modern GoTo mount (e.g. the AVX) without too much trouble, giving you an instrument suited for visual use, and planetary imaging. The C5 SE would be a good (if somewhat expensive) starter outfit for your son, well suited for visual use, and some planetary imaging. Attaching your existing cameras to a small refractor (or the C8) should not be a problem - you just need to buy the right T-adaptors. A cautionary note here - I bought a Canon 300D for a trifling sum to look into using it on my telescopes, but found that none of the auto controls worked in the dark, I could not see to work the controls in the dark, and it did not have "Live View" so the only way to check images for exact focus was to transfer them to a PC, which was not a simple process, as the support software only ran on Windows XP. Too much trouble. Do your cameras have Live View and a large operating screen? Another approach to deep space imaging is to put a camera and telephoto lens on a small tracking mount, dispensing with a telescope and GoTo mount altogether.

My elderly Win7 desktop which I am typing this on has a TPM chip, which however needs enabling or something. PC Pro magazine has run a couple of articles on Windows 11. The impression I got was that it is nice but non-essential. Will it make your astronomy software run better? I don't think so. I don't like Windows 10 that much. The Windows Explorer has too many self-generated folders, and Windows 10 networking is awful and almost unusable, in contrast to Windows 7 networking which works every time. I'll leave it till I have to buy another (used) machine and it comes with Win 11 installed.

Thanks. I installed this driver, and "Celestron" now appears in the relevant Sharpcap setup menu. I await a clear night so I can proceed to the next stage of testing and debugging.

I hope this is the best section for asking this question. I have recently acquired a more recent and powerful laptop, mostly for astro use, and have been installing and commissioning various bits of software. Sharpcap 4, I discovered, includes platesolving and re-positioning. The platesolving (aided by an i5 processor) works great with ASPS, but I am struggling to connect Sharpcap to a Nexstar mount. The Sharpcap instructions do not include the words "Celestron" or "Nexstar" and mention the need to install the ASCOM platform. I have ASCOM installed, but regardless I cannot figure out how to make the connection work. I know that I do NOT need ASCOM to connect Stellarium or Nexstar Observer List to a Nexstar mount, but I do need it to connect Stellarium to a Skywatcher Synscan mount (I never installed ASCOM till I tried out my Synscan mount with the old laptop). I have the serial cable and USB/Serial cable I used to connect the mounts to the old laptop, and the USB/serial has the driver installed. I have not tried connecting the new laptop to the Synscan mount yet...

It's useually called the C8 SE. There will be some variants of solution: For my Nexstars I bought a fairly standard handset-to-serial cable which has a phone-like plug at one end and a 15 pin D socket at the other, and a standard USB-to-serial adapter. The two are plugged together in series. You also need a driver for the USB-to-serial adapter, and if it does not come with the adapter you can download it. The same should work with your Starsense. Alternatively, you can probably buy an integrated cable for the purpose, eg from Lynx. Ask FLO so sell you the appropriate cable. Once you have the cable(s), you still need the installation manager software from Celestron, and a further download of software that enables the Celestron installer to run. And then you can try the actual upgrade. Further guidance may be found on nexstarsite.com Yes, it does sound complicated, and it is, but in the case of a Starsense is probably worth doing as the upgrades clear various issues. Nornally I advise would-be firmware upgraders to leave well alone unless they have a clear and present reason for needing to update. 😳