mikeDnight

You have a beautiful set-up there Dave! Your 103mm makes my 100DC look pathetic! Anyhow, here are my Vixen mount pics. Below: my Vixen GP on its tripod. And pier mounted in my observatory. Below are a few pics of my Vixen Polaris mount which is interchangeable between Equatorial and Altazimuth modes. I bought the mount as being only useful as spare parts, but after winding in a loose worm, found that its as good as new! ?

From my perspective, Cheshire is on the equator! ???

It would be in its element! No pun intended!!

It may come as a surprise, but i regretted letting the 128 go. It was a great scope and we'd had some real adventures together! The 152 was a truly beautiful scope, but the EQ6 wasn't really adequate. I ended up mounting it on a Losmandy G11 which I attached to a pier in my garden. As far as planetary performance was concerned, the 152 offered little advantage over the 128, though its light grasp was greater of course. I found I used the FS152 much less often than the 128. One night as I was lifting the 152 onto its mount, (the G11 was at head height), my back gave way and I caught the scope as I slid in agony down the pier. To buy a new FS152 would have cost around £10,000.00, so you can imagine how upset I would have been had I actually dropped it. Grown men really can cry profusely! ? As a consequence of that night, I decided to downsize and get something I could use at a moment's notice. I made a big mistake going for the 152 and then made another mistake believing the Televue hype and going for an NP101. The 101image quality wasn't in the same league as the Taks, so I kept it for one year before selling it on. I then spent several years with a beautiful Equinox 120ED, which I bought because I wanted a doublet rather than a triplet, and Tak had ceased production of their fluorite FS apo's. When I heard Takahashi has started making Fluorite refractors again, I had to have one, and so i bought the FC100DC which has proved to be my most used scope. It's truly superb optically, so after a lot of disappointment and expense, I finally found the perfect grab and go scope! ???

I used to write up notes for each observation, but found I could rarely ever be bothered to look back through them. Making sketches along with minimal notes is now my prefered method of recording my observations. So much can be recorded in a simple sketch, that would otherwise require pages of handwritten notes to convey the same information, but in a less effective way. I've always found it helpful to draw a rough sketch at the eyepiece, then later clean up the drawing in a quality sketch book. I've got drawings spanning the last 38 years and they're not all good, but they do offer a entertaining record of my adventures at the telescope. Drawings help you to vividly relive the observing experience! A picture definitely speaks a thousand words!! Attached are some examples!

Above, a very happy paulastro with his FC100DL. Below, a very happy mikeDnight with his FC100DC. Below, Derek Hartley with his beloved Takahashi Sky 90 Below, FS128. Transit of Venus June 2004 (mikeDnight with son Daniel, and Floppy Bear) Below, Mike's FS152 (2008)

TAKAHASHI FC100DC DOUBLET STEINHEIL FLUORITE APOCHROMAT. TAKAHASHI FC100DF / DC COMPARISON: both the DC and DF are F=740mm AND FINALLY..... F=900mm Please feel free to add images of your own Takahashi scopes and mounts etc, to this thread! Thanks for looking Tak fans!

Yet more........!

Cheque books at the ready!!!...... I think its on his foot! ⤵

And......

The next exiting instalment ?

I'd suspect its a printing error. Although if you take it to the checkout, they may be obliged to sell it you at the price shown.

Just a few more for now!

Savour the starter Dave. There are some mouthwatering dishes yet to come! ?

Heres the first instalment. Enjoy! ?

Over the years I've acquired a large photo album representing the evolution of Takahashi telescopes, refractors, reflectors and mounts. The images were in the main taken by other Tak enthusiasts, with the occasional pic of my own. The above image is from page one and shows a selection of Takahashi scopes in a large observatory. There are many more great images to come, which I would be happy to post over time, if this is the place to post them?!

This is my current collection which is constantly in flux, but not all plossls. I use a Baader 35mm Eudiascopic, which I think is more than a standard plossl but similar. Then a 25mm TV plossl, two 16.8mm ortho's which work well with a barlow in mono form. Two 15mm Vixen LV's, two 11mm TV plossls also great for mono use. A 7.4mm TV plossl, a 4mm Nirvana which is truly superb for observing Saturn - sharp to the very edge and amazingly contrasty! Finally I have a 2.5mm Vixen LV. I may consider selling the LV's in the future although they are very nice eyepieces and I like them a lot, so it will need some careful thought first. I've just sold a 20mm and 5mm Ultrascopic though I'm not sure why, as I really liked them. I think I must have been bored over silly season and needed something to do! The Eudiascopic and the TV 25mm plossl will have a permanent home with me!

To my surprise Alan, they were far better in my binoviewer than I thought they would be, but I don't wear glasses for observing. If I did, I probably wouldn't be so keen. ?

I recently acquired a 25mm, two 11mm and a 7.4mm. It was a bit of a gamble as to whether I'd get along with the eleven in my binoviewer and the 7.4 due to its minimal eye relief, but as I bought them all second-hand I thought I'd give them a try. Last night was clear and so gave me an opportunity to try them out for the first time. The seeing was a little unsteady but not crippling to the image. My first view through the 25mm was of the Pleiades and it told me all I needed to know. The stars were pinpoint except right at the field edge, and there was a quality to the view that's hard to define. The moon looked sharp with no CA around the limb. The 11mm's in the binoviewer gave a great view of the Moon. I worried a little about how useful they would be, especially as they have short eye relief, but in practice they were comfortable and amazingly sharp considering they were giving me a power of around X269. In mono use at X67, the 11mm TV plossl gave a very pleasing view of both the Moon and M42. Next I moved to the 7.4mm which I thought would be my least favourite of the bunch. Not so! Aimed at M42 and the trapezium the 7.4 immediately revealed the E star without effort, though the F star wasn't having any of it. The night was a bit wobbly after all! After purposefully ridding myself of my large and weighty eyepieces in preference for smaller, simpler, yet still high quality designs, I think I could settle down with TV plossls as very good all round eyepieces. And as long as I resist reading any of Johns or Bill P's eyepiece reviews regarding other designs, I think I'll be content for some time.

Don't be afraid of using a Barlow with your longer focal length plossls. Modern barlows are superb and will help maintain long eye relief with your eyepieces. Many modern multi element designs of short focal length have barlows already built into the eyepiece, so don't be influenced by damning reports in old literature. Barlows are a great addition to an eyepiece collection!

Hi Stu, If Peter Drews bino magnification method is bang on accurate, the DC with the 16.8 orthos would be working at X176, while the DL with the 19mm extra flats was working at X189. Certainly from mono comparisons it seems to be fairly accurate. Although it was a significant magnification difference, it was as close as we could get the two powers at that time. I was looking at the moon a few days ago with the 16.8 ortho's, then I changed to a pair of 15mm LV's I've just acquired. The slight power increase meant the difference between seeing the central rille along the Alpine Valley with certainty in the 15mm's and just getting a hint of it at times in the 16.8 ortho's. It can unbalance a comparison, leading to a misconception of a scopes abilities if the powers don't match exactly, but getting that level playing field isn't always easy. Twice now I've had chance to grab a DL for myself, but it would have meant parting with my beloved DC first, which is something I couldn't bare to do. Perhaps I'm soft in the head!?

On Jupiter that evening, the difference wasn't slight, it was vast, as if the DC wasn't in focus. Very strange! The DC was using a pair of 16.8mm Orthoscopics and not 17mm plossls, and the DL a pair of 19mm extra flats. And as far as I'm aware, the DF has a fixed dew shield and not a retractable one. Its not always easy to remember all the details when writing up reports and even the best reviews can sometimes have the occasional blip! I did initially say to both Paul and Rodger that it must be due to a fogged lens, though the outer element didn't appear to be fogged up. I assumed at that point that it must be something on one of the inner surfaces. It was really only the following weeks session that seemed to point to a local heat source. Whatever it actually was it was weird!! I never lose my temper or swear while observing, not even when Paul's dear wife used my eyepiece case full of Televue and Pentax eyepieces as a chock for her car. However, if this had been my first view of a planet through the DC, I would certainly have sent it back with a stiff note! Having seen the scope perform outstandingly so on many previous occasions I had to just bide my time for a probable answer.