Cosmic Geoff

Just look at the object's RA and Dec. You will soon learn what objects are likely to be viewable or non-viewable at any given time.

Not if it as bad as the other poster says. Apparently the Heritage 130 and the AWB Onesky are essentially the same. I assume that like the Heritage, the Onesky can be remounted on an astro tripod mount. Or stood on a camping box? This is typical of kit eyepieces. If you expect the manufacturer to include two quality eyepieces and increase the price of the kit by $100 AUD, that's not going to happen. In other words, the kit eyepieces are meant to get you started while maintaining an attractive lower selling price.

Until you have received the kit and used it with the stock 25mm eyepiece (which isn't bad - it's a Celestron Plossl unlike the anonymous eyepieces in cheaper kits), and the 9mm X-cel LX, I'd urge you to not even look at listings of other eyepieces. My opinion of 2" eyepieces on the C8 SE is that while they will gain some extra field of view compared with the lowest powers that fit in a 1.25" barrel, once you have paid for a 2" visual back, a 2" diagonal and a 2" eyepiece, the total bill may cause you to reflect that you should have bought an additional widefield telescope instead. Others may not agree... In any event, don't go there before trying a 32mm 1.25" Plossl. That will give the max field of view that fits in a 1.25" barrel. Don't consider the wedge. A number of imagers have adopted a wedge with enthusiasm, then afer a while given up and bought a German equatorial. There was a discussion about this on the Forum not long ago.

Don't ask us. If it looks faulty, get your supplier to deal with it. It's their responsibility.

Another possiblility is that the eyepieces are not very good. 'MA' eyepieces are not the sort of thing one would buy in the aftermarket, and the eyepieces supplied with kits are basic, cheap to manufacture to keep the kit cost down, and just intended to get you started. The same applies to the Celestron kit eyepieces. When I upgraded from the 9mm eyepiece that came with my 127mm Mak, I found an immediate and obvious improvement. It is possible that the Meade needs collimating, but Maksutovs rarely if ever need adjustment. It would be prudent to check with a star test in case you got a bad one.

Can you detatch your Dob from its table top mount and attach it to a tripod mount or camera tripod? There might be a screw hole on it that will engage with a camera holding screw. The Heritage 130P Dob has a standard dovetail on the tube which means it can be taken off the Dob mount and fixed to almost any astro mount/tripod. https://www.firstlightoptics.com/heritage/skywatcher-heritage-130p-flextube.html Some basic reflectors have a fixed primary mirror to eliminate the need for collimating (and cut manufacturing cost).

In theory, yes, but your tabletop reflector may not be up to it, so you could try a Plossl (usable in any future refractor purchase) and see if that helps. As I wrote already, if your budget is restricted, the best course would be to upgrade to the 130mm Heritage Dob, which has significantly more aperture than any of the refractors you are considering.

In telescopes other than the beginner class, f4.4 would be considered a severe focal ratio, requiring a multi-element eyepiece rather than a 'H' Huygenian or a Plossl. For more information, you'll need an expert, or to read the small print in eyepiece listings. Decent? Look at this: https://www.firstlightoptics.com/evostar/sky-watcher-evostar-90-az-pronto.html or this: https://www.firstlightoptics.com/evostar/skywatcher-evostar-90-eq3-2.html And these are nothing fancy, not ED or apochromatic and the mounts are not powered or GoTo.

I'd say that these eyepieces are junk. At least invest in a decent eyepiece suitable for a f4.4 focal ratio reflector and see how that goes. That might cost $AUD 100, but you can transfer it to any 'scope you buy later. Ideally you should upgrade to the 130mm Heritage Dob, or to a decent refractor with a decent mount. Money spent on another cheap beginner scope is likely to be money wasted.

If Mistac is still with us, perhaps he could clarify what he has bought? "Starsense" is familiar to us as a 300 UKP accessory which automatically aligns a GoTo telescope. So far as I can make out, the same technology is being applied here as a smartphone app via the built-in camera to recognise the piece of sky the smartphone is aimed at. Then what? I assume the telescope has to be manually moved so that it is pointing at an object of interest. How exactly does that work? And is this scheme really any good? There are reviews on Amazon, but nobody has written it up on this forum and I am not aware of any of the specialist astro retailers stocking it.

A note for anybody posting about Meade telescopes: please include at least the aperture in your post as it is not obvious from the model name. Apparently this one has an aperture of 90mm. What Shore Diver describes could be normal for a telescope of this aperture, especially if it has not had time to cool down to outside temperature. The planet is very low and the 'seeing' at this altitude will be bad. Maksutov telescopes in general need a dew shield to prevent dew forming on the corrector plate - telescopes of this design are notorious 'dew magnets'. It may be worth trying alternative eyepieces as with other makes of telescope the kit eyepieces supplied as starters are of poor quality. Even with an 8" SCT I cannot see a lot of detail on Jupiter. I confess to not being a very skilled visual observer, but I cannot see much more than a bright disk and a couple of cloud belts. Imaging with the same 'scope reveals more.

Take care. Don't mess with it until it's yours and you are sure it is out of collimation. If it is seriously out, a star test will look awful, maybe like a badminton shuttle. If you are in doubt, just hand it back to its owner as-is.

$250 AUD will not go far when buying astronomical equipment. If you don't want something overly compromised, consider spending more (how much did your smartphone cost? 🙂) The problem with refractors is that they do require a decent mount, typically costing as much as the 'scope. The mount for a Dobsonian, on the other hand, costs very little. The oft-recommended 130mm Heritage Dob would be within your budget. Just as an example, my 102mm f5 Startravel is a short-focal ratio achromat, with a 2" focuser and 1.25" adaptor and has metal rather than plastic parts. Nothing fancy, quite well made, but it costs 165 UKP (around 300 AUD) here, without any mount. The Skywatcher Evostar range looks like a longer focal length variant.

Yes, a barlow is not needed as a good 8mm eyepiece will give you all the power you need with this scope. You can get a wider field with a 32mm 1.25" Plossl eyepiece, or a slightly higher power eyepiece with a wider field specification (= more expensive).

Great deal for £50. The mount looks the same as my Nexstar SLT. TBH, the long 102mm scope looks a bit much for that mount. As well as being long, it may be exceeding the weight recommendation. I have used mine with a 127mm Mak (more wobbly than I liked) and a 102mm Startravel, but felt motivated to get a used EQ5 mount (not powered) and I also got a spare mount "bowl" and fitted 3 wooden legs for a permanent and less wobbly garden mount. You could try something similar if you are handy with tools. Ideally you want a better class of mount, (e.g. EQ 3 manual, motorized or Synscan) but this will sadly cost, even second-hand, more than you paid in the first place. Most people use an external battery or PSU with the SLT. You will get a better performance too if you replace the 45 deg diagonal with a 90 deg star diagonal, even a cheap one.

I have used a terrestrial 45 deg diagonal for astronomical targets. While it handily presented the Moon the right way round, it definitely had an inferior optical performance on critical astro targets. For daytime use ony.

A priority is to replace the 9 or 10mm eyepiece that came with the scope by buying a better quality item. In the case of my 127mm Mak, this resulted in an immediate and obvious improvement when used on double stars. If you don't like the build quality of the kit diagonal, then replace it, otherwise this is not a priority. I replaced the kit diagonal of my 127mm Mak with a nice Circle T prism diagonal and did not see any improvement whatsoever in the view. When I still had my 70/700 supermarket refractor (total cost well under £100) I tried its cheap diagonal in the Mak and could not detect any optical difference. The specialised filters cut down the transmitted light (often drastically) and only help with specialised targets, e.g. an OIII filter on emission nebulae. I never found the cheap coloured filters much use for anything.

So, in short you want to image planets and view DSOs. For planetary imaging you want aperture, preferably 8" or more. Same for viewing DSOs. SCT telescopes are widely used for planetary imaging as they can provide the aperture in a compact package, and have lots of focal range to cope with accessories that add several cm. to the light path. So ideally you want a SCT on a solid GoTo Altaz, or equatorial (at least RA driven), or a GoTo AltAz/EQ mount, plus a planetary video camera, and a small budget for other imaging accessories. We are looking at a budget (new) substantially in excess of your 500 to 1000 pounds here, but it can be done if you buy used. Of course you can spend less, e.g. an 8" Newtonian telescope on a RA driven equatorial mount could come within budget, but you would find this rig quite annoying to use, struggle to get it in focus with imaging accessories added to the optical path, and without GoTo struggle to find those faint DSOs. Or you can buy smaller (e.g. 127mm Mak) but the results will be proportionately less.

If you buy the Vixen 1.6mm you will find that it gives you a large, blurred image and a very small field of view. Ultra-high magnification is not useful magnification. A magnification of x1250 with this scope is, to put it politely, not a serious proposition.

I think you need to sit down and decide what you want to do, and then think about buying gear that does it. The C8 SE is a fine visual scope outfit that will show you a lot. And it is quick to set up - you can carry the whole assembled kit outside in one go. But if you try to do imaging with it you wil start to run into trouble. The C8 OTA is well suited to planetary imaging, and you can accomplish this with the SE mount. But after a while you will start wishing for a more solid and better behaved mount... I think that cancelling the X-xel LX 9mm eyepiece could be a mistake. I have one and it works well enough for looking at planets. (Ideally you want a range of several eyepieces, or a zoom). This scope is f10 so there is no need to buy exotic expensive eyepieces unless you have to have the best, and money is burning a hole in your pocket. An 8mm eyepiece is the shortest focal length that will see much use. If you want to do imaging you will need another outfit dedicated to that task. And planetary and DSO imaging have different requirements. Expensive requirements, in both cases.

I keep my C8 SE indoors, fully assembled, with the tube horizontal. I suspect others do the same. As a mechanical engineer I don't buy the 'stress on mirrors' theory. No idea what the previous owners did, but it does not seem to have affected anything. I suggest you don't detach the OTA from the mount. Since there is no grab handle on the SE version of the OTA, removing the OTA is a potentially dangerous activity (for the OTA and your wallet, not you). With the CPC800 (C8 variant) the OTA is placed corrector plate down for transport and storage. At least that's how mine came, in its original box and packing.

Possibly the point being made here is that if the sky is dark and ablaze with stars it makes it a lot easier to find objects with a manual telescope (e.g. a Dobsonian), by star-hopping. With a GoTo, the finding system is unaffected by light pollution so long as a few bright stars are visible and can be used for a star alignment. Whether you will see any dim objects when you look through the eyepiece is another matter, just as with a Dobsonian mounted scope. You will see many, many more galaxies from a dark skies site than from a town.

SCTs are the instrument of choice for planetary imaging, but I should have thought that using one for deep sky imaging would be a challenge. Small APO refractors seem to be favoured. No doubt experienced DSO imagers will advise. What I have read about wedges is that they are a problem area unless the outfit is permanently mounted, and that some users adopt wedges with enthusiasm then a while later give up and buy a German equatorial mount.. For what you hope to do, buying a German equatorial at the outset is clearly indicated. The Celestron SCTs are all available as OTAs or bundled with a German equatorial. That seems like a technologically challenging project. But some members here have done that sort of thing.

The 'all rounder' telescope does not really exist, except in a very loose sense. Either of these would serve as a general purpose scope, but the Skymax 127 (a Maksutov, I assume) has a much longer focal length and a narrower field of view. Which is fine for looking at planets, double stars and small DSO's. The other one will be more demanding of eyepiece choice because of the faster focal ratio, but will score if you want to look at wide star clusters. Your choice.

Does the outfit you are thinking of buying look essentially the same as this? I have no idea what the mount is, but it looks like a serious mount, and that upside-down eyepiece tray is the same as on my Synta-made Celestron and Sky-watcher kits. Value - try offering 66% of the cost of a new 6" Newtonian OTA? The scope will be better than a 130p if it's in good order. If the scope and mirrors look clean apart from a bit of dust and nothing looks battered, it should be OK. I would not have a Eq-2 mount as a gift, having owned a EQ-2 clone in the past. The mount in the photo should be better, even if it only works as a manual push mount.