Cosmic Geoff

I remember reading an article on this subject. The problem is making the binocular stay collimated while zooming. As you are no doubt aware, even regular binoculars can go out of collimation and need repair, and having a zoom mechanism as well will compound the problem. Also the zoom may not be equal L & R. Consequently you can expect that a zoom binocular costing , say, £ 29.99 will be complete rubbish, while a premium brand one costing several hundred pounds may be okay till it goes out of adjustment and needs an expensive repair.

I don't want to rain on your parade, but I had an almost identical combo of a 200p Helios (pre-Skywatcher brand) and an manal EQ-5 and I thought it was awful. It was dificult to find anything with it, or even at some angles to look through the eyepiece or finder. I rapidly upgraded to a used C8 SE SCT. I suggest having a critical look at the finder, and think of adding a red-dot finder to complement the optical finder, and think about changing the optical finder for a RACI design. With a manual mount, your options for imaging will be limited, regardless of what DSLR you get. You will probably want some upgraded and higher power eyepieces at some point if you are interested in looking at double stars and planets. Kit eyepieces bundled with scopes are generally poor.

I had forgotten the existence of the Sky-Watcher Star Discovery 150i, then I was not going to endorse it as it's another beginner scope with, it seems, cost-saving features compared with the other 150mm Newtonian models.

Whether the counterweight is over the tripod leg or over a gap depends on where you have pointed the telescope. It is only relevant if you are trying to put the outfit in a starting position for polar alignment. You do not have to polar align in order to see stuff (but if you don't, there was not much point in acquiring an equatorial mount. 🙂) With two axes of rotation (RA & Dec.) you can point the telescope to anywhere in the sky, though the eyepiece may get into odd positions as you do this. Note you can usually rotate the scope in the tube rings to get the eyepiece in a more accessible position. Newbies are sometimes advised to avoid equatorial mounts on the grounds that these are too confusing for them.🙂 You can probably reset the mount by adjusting the latitude so that the scope goes up/down and side/side, if you would prefer that.

Odd result. I'd check that both buttons are working properly. A number of buttons on one of my Nexstar handsets are playing hard to get. You are holding the buttons down and then turning the DC power on?

A 6" Newtonian on a GoTo mount seems a sensible setup for you. I would suggest having a look beyond Skywatcher mounts. Admittedly there seems little choice in between lightweight starter GoTo mounts and heavy and expensive mounts. I recently acquired a Skywatcher EQ5 Synscan mount via an upgrade kit, and am not too impressed re. ease of use. Selecting alignment stars is a severe pain and the final accuracy (as set up) was not impressive. This after several 'training' sessions. For comparison, I got some use out of my Nexstar SLT on the first night. I would comment that you don't need an equatorial GoTo for your intended use, but whether you can find something suitable in the right weight limit and cost range is another matter. I would suggest erring on the generous side in mount choice. As others have pointed out, the EQ3-2 could be on the limit with a long 6" reflector. The EQ-5 allows you more leeway. I found the manual EQ-5 was a handy mount to have around as I could put any scope in my collection on it. The potential odd position of eyepieces could be a nuisance, though. It's easy to under-mount a scope or not realise what may be required. I have a vintage brass 70mm refractor with a long focal length. I acquired it without a mount and was disconcerted to find that an adequate alt-az astro mount for it was an AZ-4 costing nearly £200. It's an excellent scope but my modern ones are much easier to handle. I also tried it out on the manual EQ-5. A suitable GoTo mount would be an EQ-5 Synscan at around £550 (ouch!). A left-field suggestion: look for a used Celestron C6 on the alt-az SE GoTo mount. With luck, you should be able to find one within your budget, its alt-az Nexstar GoTo will be easy to use and, the whole outfit will be smaller and lighter than a Newtonian and EQ mount, and easier to manage. It can be used for planetary imaging.

IMHO there is no such thing as a first 'all rounder' telescope. The Skyliner 200p Dobsonian is popular, but it does not have GoTo. It's best to think of your first telescope outfit as being an experiment in finding out what features are most important to you. Some may value simplicity or portability over outright performance or the ability to locate faint objects in a murky urban sky. You can get a 200mm Newtonian on a EQ-5 manual mount, but I had that combination and found it very hard to use. I found the lack of GoTo particularly annoying (after already owning a smaller scope with GoTo).

I can only say that I have one, and I found it okay for looking at various objects till I had the urge to get something bigger... Large, bright, star clusters will not go in the field of view. In theory, some large galaxies like M31 will not fit but in practice all you are likely to see is the bright nucleus. Otherwise, not a problem. A 32mm Plossl eyepiece would gain you some extra FOV compared with the 25mm which (I assume) comes with it. It works great on double stars (for its size, with an eyepiece upgrade) The Nexstar+ GoTo is easy to use once you figure it out from the manual. I had some use from mine the first night IIRC. If you must use primary batteries, get Duracell - cheaper varieties may totally fail to work. After I bought a specialist planetary camera, I got an image of Jupiter with the Mak which clearly showed the Great Red Spot, which I found almost impossible to see visually. I never even tried to image any deep-space objects with this telescope & SLT mount combo.

I hesitate to make a firm recommendation, as it seems risky to suggest a particular telescope as a present for a third party. The differences in telescope design between various types are more than cosmetic and affect their suitability for various tasks. I would suggest that rather than buying from your favorite online retailer, you buy from a specialist astro telescope retailer with a liberal returns policy. Seriously. Having got that out of the way, here are some suggestions. The 127mm Maksutov is a quality telescope and stands a good chance of being kept even if the recipient later desires something bigger or different. If you are looking at the Celestron 127SLT outfit, I have one and the tripod is distinctly on the wobbly side (it's almost at the max. load for this mount & tripod design) though far from unusable for visual purposes. The 130mm Newtonian can be made to do various jobs even if it is not always the ideal instrument for the task. It will need collimation which will put some people off. I have not used an Intelliscope but it is a system often used with Dobsonians (mostly in the USA) as a full GoTo pushes up the cost to that of other varieties of GoTo outfit. If you are considering this one you may find you have fewer options for re-mounting it or dispensing with the table which could be a nuisance if you want to take it out into the sticks. You could get a refractor, but a decent one adequately mounted could cost quite a lot. Beginner refractors tend to be of small aperture otherwise the cost is alarming. (I have a vintage 70mm Ross refractor of long focal length, and I found the cheapest adquate mount cost nearly £200 - and make that £550 for a GoTo mount that would take it.) I note that all the outfits you cite are either GoTo or push-to. I rate GoTo highly (as you can see from my sig), but it seems that some people just can't get on with GoTo at all. In which case you have to balance the aggravation of being unable to make the GoTo work with the aggravation of great difficulty of ever finding any faint object (and no tracking) if you opt for the simple and more-aperture-for-the-money Dobsonian outfits. Having the battery run out is not in practice a serious issue. You should be using an external power pack, or have spare primary batteries on hand. I have several powerpacks... As for "... some astrophotography", I suggest you forget about it till you have tried hanging a camera on the telescope of choice and seen how dire or otherwise the results seem to you. Deep space and planetary astrophotography have quite different requirements. One cannot guarantee than a general purpose Newtonian will even come to focus with a camera. Also be aware that whatever you buy it will come with the bare essentials to get it working on the first night, and it will be much improved by spending some money on a set of half-decent eyepieces at £30 to £50 each, and an external power pack in place of the near-useless primary batteries. Many of the entry-level outfits are under-mounted, giving some owners thoughts about a sturdier tripod.

I'll take your word for it. 🙂 But I have not seen the finder style shown in your link.

You could look at what folks who take images you admire are actually using. I use a ZWOASI224MC with my CPC800. Previously I used an ASI120MC with a C8 SE, and the best results were comparable with the later setup. In theory you would want a barlow or tele extender but with a large scope you may well find that using a barlow is not worth the bother, unless you have great seeing at your location. I have found that the seeing is the main limiting factor asides from atmospheric dispersion.

It is still not clear which red dot finder we are talking about here (there is no picture). The basic one supplied with various kits (even, it seems, a C8 SCT) is adequate when it works but I have found they sometimes won't come on - possibly because of intermittent connections at battery. If it produces a red dot you can see indoors, should be OK to use. The Celestron 'Starpointer Pro' is bigger, twice the price and is more likely to be bought as an accessory or upgrade. Distinguished by curving arms. I bought one recently - I have not yet tried it on a telescope. It wouldn't come on (DOA) until I did some fettling with a bit of aluminium foil rather than send it back. If yours produces two concentric red circles indoors, it should be Ok to use. There are complaints about these things to the effect that the mountings are bad, wih the result that the aim can't be adjusted far enough to make them work, the cure being a bit of fettling, to add some packing to correct the aim.

I assume you got the Skymax for planetary imaging. A focal length of 2700mm is relatively long. In the real world of bad urban seeing, I have in general not found it worth the bother to try a Barlow lens with my 2000mm focal length C8 and ASI224MC camera. I found the imaging results very seeing dependent.

130mm is a respectable size for a telescope , so no need to rush to replace it yet. But it might be improved by a more substantial mount than the original, or at least a more substantial tripod. Somebody may come along who is familiar with your mount to tripod attachment, or maybe you can figure it out yourself.

They do look similar. But it's the OTA + mount package that has been discontinued.

The picture shows a C8 optical tube assembly. If you are bothered, you can work out what it was bundled with (or not) by the colour. For example, orange tubes are sold with a SE mount. The one in the picture is probably an OTA (sold without any mount.) All C8 OTAs are the same regardless of colour (disregarding the EDGE HD variant). And there is no such thing as a C8 SLT. Did you mean XLT - the more recent ones have the "Starbright XLT" coating, and you can identify these by the 'Starbright XLT' sticker on the tube. I don't know what you mean by discontinued, as the C8 OTA has been in production (with minor variations) for about 40 years.

You can't get Polaris in the polariscope if you don't have one ... next best thing is to get it in the finder or main scope eyepiece, with the scope in the start position on top of the mount pointing North. That gives you a rough alignment you can refine later.

No no no.. Assuming you are describing the alignment procedure here - It will point in the general direction of Vega, then you have to centre it in the eyepiece using the direction keys, not the clutches, and press Enter to accept the alignment. Then select the next alignment star and do the same again.

I have recently fitted an EQ-5 with Synscan GoTo. If you were observing the Moon in the daytime you are unlikely to get accurate tracking, as you need at least a 2-star align for that. You should start with an accurate mechanical polar align (assuming you are in EQ mode). Place the scope in the 'home position' atop the mount. Polaris should appear in the polariscope (if fitted) or in the telescope's finder. If you now switch on and start the alignment, the mount should swing to the general vicinity of the first alignment star you select. (Selecting alignment stars from the list can be a severe pain, but let's not go there just yet.) Assuming the multi-star alignment worked, in the latest software you have a facility to go back and fine-tune the mechanical polar alignment, using a readout from the handset. (Scroll to get Alignment instead of 1,2, or 3). If you don't bother, it seems the Goto should still work accurately for positioning, except that you get some field rotation.

During lockdown, the most practical method is to find out whether you want metric or UNC/UNF screws (my C8 has two sizes of UNF/UNC, not metric) and then order some on ebay.

I recollect that with the Nexstar handsets it can be tricky to get to the place where you enter the location, after it has already been set. I remember that there is a point in the setup sequence where hitting UNDO one or more times (or is it BACK) gets you to the right place. You can enter the lat/long - which often defeats newbies - or the nearest city. If you can select LONDON the settings will not be quite right for you, but close enough to get the thing working. Or try getting to the lat/long setting via the MENU button. Your handbook should have a menu chart at the back. (downloadable if it is missing). Try going to: Menu/Scope Setup/Setup Time-site Note that you may have the "Nexstar" handset rather than the "Nexstar+" and the button labels and menus may vary. Bear this in mind when reading any online instructions. Once you have it sorted, the Nexstar system is easy to use with an alt-az mount and quite accurate, so don't give up.

For visual use I do not see that a wedge serves any useful purpose. And it will complicate the alignment process compared with an alt-az GoTo.

The C8 is f10, so any eyepiece that isn't rubbish should perform adequately. Mine came with a 25mm Celestron Plossl which I still use. I also use a 15mm Celestron Omni plossl with it. For shorter focal lengths you would probably want a more complex eyepiece to give better eye relief. For double stars I mostly use a Starguider 8-25mm zoom, for convenience. I also have a set of Celestron X-cels, which are okay but don't show a life-changing improvement compared with the Plossls.

Yes, it does look from the photo that the tube is as far forward as it will go. What are you planning to do with the wedge? The C8 SE is a visual scope outfit, and putting it on a wedge will not transform the mount into a precision deep-sky imaging instrument. Anything else, e.g. planetary imaging, can be attempted with the alt-az GoTo mount. If deep-sky imaging with long exposures is your aim, it would be less frustrating in the long run to put the cost of the wedge toward buying a proper equatorial mount.

The field of view of the CMOS camera will be very small. If you accurately centre the view in an eyepiece it should be easy to pick it up with the camera, but only if the camera is in focus. If the camera is not in focus (which is highly likely) even a bright object will be invisible. Getting this right is something of an art... To bring the camera into focus with a Newtonian you may have to move the camera/focuser inwards from the eyepiece focus by a quarter of an inch or more (There is no guarantee that this is even possible)... I found two finding devices very helpful - a RACI 9x50 finder accurately aligned (for bright objects) and a "flip mirror" for faint objects. Unfortunately the latter won't work with a Newtonian.