Cosmic Geoff

Two points here: I had a 200p newtonian on a manual EQ-5 and I thought it was horrible. It was big, and I found that there was no leg extension that would let me view low objects over the garden fence and also view the zenith. The stright-thru finder was hard to use. The eyepiece often got into awkward positions. In fact I disliked it so much that I soon bought a more expensive C8 SE GoTo SCT outfit. Getting the Newt operational was for me a four-lift operation: the tripod and mount, the counterweight and spreader tray, the OTA, and the other bits such as eyepieces and observing notes and a rest for the observing notes. If you persist in buying the 200p and EQ5 or the 200mm Dob, which is of similar bulk and weight, I strongly recommend you get a 4-wheel camping trolley or similar on which you can load up all the stuff and wheel it out to your observing site.

This caught my eye in 'recent posts'. One does not hear much about Dobsonians installed in observatories. Asides form the practical isues mentioned above, if you look at the total cost it is probably cheaper to put a SCT in a substantial observatory than to install a large Newtonian. Similarly if you are going to that expense you might as well include a proper fully capable mount. There is a college observatory in a campus near here with a 16" SCT on wedge Goto mount in it. This seems to be the typical college observatory set-up.

The Nexstar 3-star alignment can fail if one of the stars you pick is not bright enough to be in the shortlist of alignment objects. The solution is either pick brighter stars, or do a 2-star align wich is just as accurate (but you have to know your stars.)

ROFL.🙂 The recommended mount for the Skymax 180 Mak seems to be the HEQ5. Note that the cooldown time for the Skymax 180 is said to be quite long, so it's best kept in a cool place. Both scopes would be good for planetary viewing and imaging.

A Heritage 150p should be a sound starter, and if you decide you later want GoTo, or astrophotography kit, you can add to your lineup later on. Just be aware that astrophotography can be a massive investment in time, effort and money.

The Star Discovery is a cut-price 6" Newtonian on a GoTo mount. If that is what you want, fine. The 80ED is not cheap, and has a small aperture. Most people buy them for deep space astrophotography, so far as I am aware. For planets and DSOs you really need more aperture. The AZ4 is a good solid mount for general grab'n' go use. If you are thinking of spending in the region of £660 for the scope and mount you could cast your net a bit wider. Do you want GoTo? Or a plain manual alt-azimuth mount?

Having suffered the deficiencies of straight-thru finders, I would recommend a RACI finder, plus a red dot finder or a simple sight to act as a 'finder for the finder'.

Where? Some people will tell you that any eyepiece costing less than £300 is not great. I use the kit 25mm Plossl and a 15mm Celestron Omni Plossl with my C8. Bear in mind that the C9.25 has a long focal ratio so is not demanding of eyepieces. But I do not suffer from astigmatism. For planets I use 8mm (or a zoom) and have tried a 5mm. If you have the budget, it is worth getting a binoviewer (amazing on the Moon, helpful on planets.) I have a 32mm 1.25" Plossl which I rarely use. It has plenty of eye relief. You will also need a dew shield (which you could make yourself.) If you want to go the 2" diagonal route, that's up to you - it's your money - but add up the cost of a 2" visual back, 2" diagonal and 2" eyepiece and ask yourself what sort of widefield scope you could have bought with that money. You should not find the Nexstar GoTo system hard to learn - I got observing objects the first evening I had my new 127mm Mak out of the box.

I mostly use the original 25mm Plossl, a 15mm plossl and 8-24mm zoom eyepiece with my C8 SE. You could also get a 32mm plossl which will give a wider field at low cost. My Zoom is not perfectly parfocal and the zoom mechanism is very stiff. The Orion Stratus eyepieces look expensive. If you are on a budget you should forget them and stick to plossl and other eyepieces in the £50 range which will be adequate for a f10 'scope. You can make a dew shield yourself from cardboard, or foam matting, and put the money saved towards an eyepiece.

So far as I am aware, the Celestron and Sky-watcher 127mm Mak OTAs are essentially the same. As for the mounts, I prefer to use a handset as I feel it is more reliable as you don't have to deal with the vaguarities of wi-fi. I remember working in a lab where they had to rip out the wifi connections to the laptops as other gear there interfered with it. Re software, I prefer the Nexstar system as it seems more user-friendly. You don't for instance have that Synscan bother of having to align the mount north before you start. And it has a useful 'solar system align' feature. Re the tripods, the SLT tripod is quite wobbly and I try to avoid its use as far as possible, by putting the 127mm Mak on a totally different and more solid mount/tripod, or using the SLT mount with a sturdier wood tripod. I suspect the other lightweight mounts cited are not a whole lot better. I hope this helps.

Do you mean, can you move the finder base that is bolted to the telescope tube? I would not try if I were you. Without knowing what is on the other end of the screw, you could have a nut bouncing around inside the scope, and you would also have to drill new holes, which would release swarf inside. BTW, I recognise the finder in the link. I bought one and was not impressed with it. It would not turn on at all until I inserted a small piece of foil packing, and then it was too bright. I currently use it as a coarse finder for the optical finder on one of my scopes. To attach it further forward, maybe you can use double sided sticky tape with one of the bases in the finder kit.

I paid £650 for my C8 SE which was a bit scratched on the paintwork and had some dents in the legs but otherwise fine and no bits missing. If this one looks like it will clean up OK, use your judgement on whether you want to put in an offer. If the corrector plate is not cracked, it should be OK if it will clean up. To bring it up to the completeness of the standard package you will need to buy a prism star diagonal (which I do not see in the photos) a 25mm plossl eyepiece, and a long power lead to plug into a cigarette lighter type outlet. That will cost you up to another £100. The knob for securing the eyepiece tray does not show in the photos either. I don't recommend buying an eyepiece kit - it is best just to buy the eyepieces etc that you actually want/need. In addition to the above mentioned, you will need a power pack (many options) and a dew shield (which you might be able to make). Used Celestron SCT outfits often sell at a large discount compared with the r.r.p. of a new one (typically 50% off), but the current scarcity may push up prices.

I have a 102mm Startravel as an alternative to my C8. It functions as a grab'n go (I can carry it in one hand) and as a widefield viewing scope, and (with a solar filter in front) as a solar imaging scope - all tasks for which the C8 is unsuited. But I mostly use it for EEVA live-stacked imaging - another task that does not work well with the C8. I use it on a AZ-4, or a SLT GoTo mount. The AZ3 is not a great mount, and will limit what you can do with your proposed purchase.

Have you read "Making EveryPhoton Count" by Steve Richards, available from FLO? It's the essential guide to deep space imaging. A C6 SE is not the most suitable tool for deep space imaging.

The C5 is a nice scope. You may be able to get the mount working, but many people would regard it as obsolete. You could put the C5 OTA on a modern mount of your choice. The C5 is relatively light, and there are many options, including GoTo mounts. The wedge is also obsolete, as a modern alt-azimuth GoTo will find and track without the need of a wedge, and if you really want an equatorial mount you could buy a German equatorial. You mention 'pictures'. A telescope of this design is well suited for taking images of planets, using a planetary video camera and some processing, but it is not really suitable for deep sky imaging.

First piece of advice: Don't buy a binoviewer till you have got used to using your scope. Second piece of advice: If you do buy a binoviewer, just get a pair of low power Plossls to use with it, if they are not supplied with it, not a whole set of eyepiece pairs. I have a binoviewer which came with a pair of 30mm plossl eyepieces, and two Barlow lenses to incrrease the magnification. I bought a second 20mm Plossl as (I thought) an exact match of one I already had. Unfortunately one had a retention groove (the supplied 30mm Plossls did not) and when I tried the pair of 20mm I could not get the images to merge. The 20mm pair was unusable.

I had an 8" Newtonian on a manual EQ-5 equatorial mount. I did not like it, and I did not like not having the GoTo facility I enjoyed with my Mak. I thought of getiing a GoTo upgrade or another mount with GoTo, but opted instead to get a used C8 SE, and I have never regretted this decision in the slightest. The C8 SE is easier to set up, more pleasant to use with the eyepiece at the back of an alt-az mounted stubby OTA, and contrary to the comments made about SCTs it worked better than the Newtonian. I also found the large depth of focus made it much easier to use devices such as a binoviewer or flip-mirror diagonal. The Newtonian would only focus a planetary camera with the focuser right against the stop. The only thing the Newtonian did better than the SCT was to give a nice bright view of the whole of the Perseus double cluster.

In my polarscope, Polaris looks like a moderately bright white star. I may be suggesting something too obvious, but have you checked that you have turned the Dec axis so that the hole in the shaft allows the polarscope a clear view, and taken the plastic cap off? Look down the hole - can you see a void or a shiny metal shaft? And have you set the mount head for a latitude of 30 deg and pointed it north? Can you see Polaris with your unaided eyes? If you can, the polarscope should definitely pick it up. One thing you could try is to just do a two-star align, ignoring the mechanical polar alignment. It may well align successfully, but report a huge polar align error. Which you can then try correcting. If that works, you may eventually figure out why you are not locating Polaris with the polarscope.😀

My C8 actually performed better optically than the 203mm Newtonian it replaced. (That newtonian was mounted on a manual EQ-5 and the combination was horrible to use). I'm a pensioner, and I can pick up the whole C8 SE assembly without too much effort. Alternatively, you can move the OTA/mount assembly separate from the tripod. While the SE mount is not great, it is lightweight, adequate for visual use and does not require any polar alignment. The Nexstar operating system is fairly user-friendly and easy to use once learnt. If you want to try AP you will need totally different kit anyway - maybe a camera directly attached to a small EQ mount. I suspect that you would find a HEQ-5 or EQ-6 imaging mount far too heavy.

The 'Edge HD' scopes are designed for full field imaging, but unless you are an expert astro-imager, a small aperture refractor with a focal length of about 500mm (the scope you link to has a FL of 2000mm) would be far easier to use. The AVX mount would do nicely for visual observing or planetary imaging, but deep space imagers seem to regard it with muted enthusiasm. I respectfully direct your attention to the comments above. From personal experience, I can tell you that I produced some pretty-looking deep space images using my 102/500mm refractor, but the deep space images I tried with my C8 were all rubbish.

If you want to do deep space imaging, you should buy a telescope and mount suitable for the purpose, and before you click the Buy button, obtain and read the book "Making Every Photon Count" available from forum sponsor FLO. It could save you a lot of wasted time and money. If you are interested in deep space imaging, a C8 on its lightweight SE GoTo mount is entirely unsuitable. I have one, so I should know. As for putting it on a wedge, 😂 just don't go there. Doubly unsuitable. A Dobsonian is equally unsuitable for imaging. Visual use, planetary imaging, and deep sky imaging all have distinct requirements, and trying to use one setup for all three is like buying a pickup and trying to use it for closed circuit racing. For visual you can pick a mount that is quick to deploy. For planetary imaging, you want a well-behaved and stable mount + a planetary video camera, and for deep space imaging you want the most solid and accurate equatorial GoTo mount you can afford, and start with a small high quality refractor.

That requires a good quality telescope with a moderate aperture. The telescopes you cite are unlikely to be up to the task. Astronomy is not a cheap hobby, and a budget of $300 does not go far unless spent wisely. Unless you are wedded to the idea of a "traditional" telescope (i.e.a refractor on a tripod), I suggest you look at Dobsonan or mini-Dobsonian (tabletop) telescopes. These will give you the most optics for your dollar, as nearly all the cost goes to the tube rather than the (very basic) mount. Yes, you have to find things yourself and push the scope to follow them in the sky, but that is no worse than the ill-balanced alt-azimuth mounts in your links.

First, even 'casual AP' is going to require more expensive and different kit than if you stick to visual. You can do planetary imaging with a visual outfit by attaching a planetary video camera, but deep sky imaging with long exposures really requires totally different (and expensive) kit + hours of post-processing. If you stick to visual you could get a C8 SE, which is a fine instrument for general and planetary viewing, with a lightweignt mount. You can pick up the whole outfit and carry it outdoors. For more money, you can get the same OTA on more sophisticated mounts (Evolution, AVX and CPC) The CPC800 is great for general viewing and planetary imaging, but is heavy. You could get the Skywatcher 180mm Mak, but this is heavy, best suited for planetary viewing and imaging, and will require a substantial mount. Things to avoid IMHO: trying to do deep sky imaging with a SCT - for advanced imagers only. Putting a SCT + fork mount on a wedge - get a proper German equatorial mount instead. A note in passing on GoTo systems: if your interest is primarily visual IMHO you will find a Nexstar alt-azimuth GoTo much simpler to set up than a Synscan equatorial GoTo. No polar alignment, and more user-friendly software.

You should be able to see Polaris through the polar scope in those conditions, so long as you orient the DEC axis to clear the view path... The field of view is fairly small, though. From your lat/long you appear to be in the USA. Check you have entered all the data in the right format. The lat/long may require leading zeroes. And don't enter the decimal format you quotre above.

You can buy a polarscope as an aftermarket accessory for the EQ5 if you want. It costs about £35.