mikeDnight

No! What makes me happy is knowing the little I have is top of its league. Knowing that gives me confidence in my gear, and makes me really push things to their limit, so that I really get the maximum performance out of it. Having said that, the biggest game changer I've had occured when I bought a cheap binoviewer and cheap ortho's, proving you don't always need to spend a fortune to obtain a spectacular improvement in performance.

On my NP101 IS, I loved the Starbeam with its folding mirror. To me this was the best rdf Ive used, as it allowed me to see a large area of sky while standing at a distance. Very comfortable but vastly over priced just like everything Televue. To be honest though, I prefer a magnifying finder and no longer use any rdf's.

That's a very pretty FS102 Garry. Great to look through on a starry night, and just as great to look at when its cloudy. ☺

The Vixen FL102 was the scope that sent me hurtling down the steep and expensive apo slope. In my not so humble opinion, it is as good as anything else out there, at least as far as visual is concerned. If I'd have been able to get my hands on a new one back in 2003, im convinced I'd still be using it today. OO, the sole Vixen importer back then, faild me dramatically, and so i had only two directions in which to turn - TMB or Takahashi. Although TMB looked great, I had no experience of them and they were triplets that didn't use fluorite. The Vixen used fluorite and I wanted fluorite, so Tak was the only option, and so began my love affair with Takahashi. My first true love though was the Vixen. 💘

If you did fiberglass it, it would last forever. It might be worth hiring a scaffold and doing it once for all time! You can coat it in sections, then rotate the dome to access all round.

If its a good specimen I'd prefer the ST150. They can be spectacular rich field/deep sky scopes. Some can suffer from spherical aberration so quality can vary, but if you get a good one, it would be the perfect RFT, much better than the reflector. Colour isn't really an issue as it only shows up on the brightest stars, but on lunar it will definitely be obvious. The ST is really a specialist scope where as the reflector could be viewed as a more good general purpose instrument. Using curved spider veins on the reflector doesn't remove the spider diffraction, it only alters its pattern, so the effect on contrast is still there. Take a look at the Double Cluster in Perseus through each, and id pretty much guarantee you'll walk away with the ST.

You've nicely captured the central rille in the Alpine Valley as it appeared visually Chris.

You've definitely got a 4" fetish thing going on deep inside Stu. They are all beautiful though! Decision making isn't my strong point, so I don't know how I'd cope having to choose between them. It did cross my mind just how lovely theye'd look if you had them in an observatory in your little corner there!

Schott is just the manufacturer though, not the glass type. Same as Takahashi using Cannon Optron, but they don't advertise it, and it doesn't indicate the type of mating element. When I first decided on buying an apo, many years ago, I gave no thought to the mating element. All I was concerned about was that it must contain fluorite. I had no idea why, other than I'd seen how good fluorite scopes could be. Later, a friend who couldn't afford a fluorite refractor, bought a Vixen ED. First he bought a second hand 102mm F9 which I thought was amazing. He later sold it and bought a 102mm F6.5 ED. I told him he was crazy for selling the longer ED but he went ahead anyway. When his short apo arrived I was yet again stunned by just how good it was. It seemed the more I learned the less I knew! My friends Vixen 102mm F6.5 ED didn't state any particular glass types other than the general title of ED Apo, yet that scope floored my Televue NP101 IS on planetary. The 101 was sold the same week! Even today that old Vixen will give any modern apo, ED, Fluorite, doublet, triplet or quad a serious run for their money. The beauty of that old Vixen ED most likely lay in the quality of its optical figure rather than any particular glass type, and I think the same would apply to any of today's ED's.

Here's an image paulastro found on space weather that confirms the accuracy of the sketch above.

The 3.5mm XW was the first XW I bought. It still remains one of my all time favourite eyepieces, even though I nolonger own any. I've nothing but happy memories of the XW's.

That's a fantastic image Paul. Amazing in fact!! And thankyou for remembering my observation. Visually it was much thinner, but i supose thats the difficulty when trying to image something so bright and slender. Credit here has to go to Didier Favre for his imaging skill !

Same as John, I leave my diagonal in my refractor constantly. It frees up room in my eyepiece box for something else, and adds very little to the physical length of the scope.

It's possible that the scope that doesn't claim a lanthanum element still uses lanthanum. I bought a Baader Zeiss BBHS prism from FLO, but there was no indication in the advert about its link to Zeiss. When it arrived, Zeiss was printed on the box. Also, I have used an old version (non-FPL53) of the F7, which I think is actually F6.9, and it was excellent. It played very nicely alongside my FC100DC at the time, and good quality all round. It was paulastro who owned it at the time. It's also interesting that Tak don't go into detail about their mating elements, which apparently differ between the DC/DF, DL and DZ, but all are superb scopes. I suspect whichever F7 you chose would still give wonderful views.

That's a nice looking scope Doug, and looks well suited to the L bracket and AZ4. I'm very pleased its proved beneficial!

Thanks John! A late astronomer friend of mine used to say that I had "eyes like a sewer rat." I think he meant it as a complement! I'm not that certain that sewer rat's have particularly good eyesight? I'm not sure about my eyesight but I do have a reasonably good observing site. Having said that, the seeing went off dramatically tonight after I'd posted the heads up. The Moon became so wobbly it looked like I was observing a reflection on a lake, so I packed up sooner than I normally would. I hope others managed to catch a glimpse despite it being quite an illusive feature. Much depends on the quality of seeing. I didn't sketch anything tonight, but I have attached a sketch (prism view), that I made last month, which gives an idea of the central rille's position relative to the south wall as seen in my scope. It's a feature which comes and goes in the undulating atmosphere.

The 8.5" is a seriously nice scope. Im sure it wont disappoint if the seeing is steady. And especially if you're using both eyes!

The central rille travelling the alpine valley is currently visible as a bright line. It is closer to the southern wall than it is to the north. I'm using a binoviewer at around 128X and its still daylight, so contrast should improve as the night darkens. Take a careful look making sure you're in sharp focus. 1/6/20

If it makes you feel any better Magnus, I once walked right through a glass partition. I was only 8 years old and on the first day of our family holiday in Cornwall. I'd been playing in the hotel garden and after coming back into the hotel, I saw a beautiful little blonde girl walking down the stairs holding her daddies hand. She was so pretty she stopped me in my tracks, and I turned to watch her walk through the main doors still hand in hand with her dad. As i came back down to earth I turned to walk into the bar room where my parents were having a coffee with friends, but instead of walking through the open door I walked through a sheet of glass that extended from ceiling to floor. I cut both temples and my right knee, but I was lucky. A week or so later a lad in Scotland did the same thing and lost his life. The glass must have been terrifyingly thin, as today as you found out, I'd have bounced off the glass. Back then, health & safety didn't exist. That was fifty years ago, and I never saw that pretty little girl again after that first encounter. I wonder if she could still turn my head? 💘

I use both driven and undriven, and equatorial and altazimuth while sketching. Ive used my AZ4 while sketching Mars at 296X, but trying to control a push/pull altaz in two directions while using a 45° field eyepiece and holding a red torch, sketch book and pencil, isn't what I'd call relaxing. My personal preference is a German equatorial with electric drives in at least RA. In the past with my larger refractors I used Lozmandy GM8 and G11 mounts and loved them. With my small 100mm I'm currently using a Vixen GP in my observatory and GPDX as a field trip mount. Controlling the GP even without a motor drive is quite liberating as I don't feel like I'm having to fight with the mount; it just tracks making sketching more pleasurable. About 18 months ago I bought a brand new SW RA & Dec drive for my GP, and it worked well for a year but then started playing up. When I took the new designed hand control apart I found it was missing some bits and hadn't been put together properly in the factory. Don't trust Chinese stuff anymore I'm afraid, so I'd say a nice GM8 would be the way to go, especially when you consider the stupid high price of a brand new Vixen mount. The old Vixen GP's are superb if you can find one, especially with an ra drive and hand control. Even without a motor and letting the target drift across the field, correcting using a manual RA, is still a relaxed way of observing while making a sketch.

Have you toppled the binoviewer so your left eye is looking through the right-hand side and your right eye through the left? There may be a couple of things at play. It's unlikely that both your eyes will have equal colour and brightness sensitivity, I know mine differ significantly. But also, the prism arrangement can lead to a difference in brightness between two eyes. Individual critical focus is essential too! I don't find it distracting and I've used my revelation binoviewer in many scopes between 80mm and 250mm aperture, however I never find it necessary to use a polarizing filter. I'm not sure how that would help?

I merely copied the info in the BAA handbook Paul. It does sound ultra fine doesn't it, but I can't imagine the BAA making a mistake, can you? 😂

Really nice images Paul! Sometimes it's hard to imagine how much better a view can get, but as you say, the view through the binoviewer really is "much better". Although there was a lot to see last night, I spent a lot of my time just concentrating on the terracing and floor of Copernicus. I didn't bother with high powers as the view at only 128X was magnificent enough. I may have moved up to 178X but no higher. It was glorious!

There are numerous books that are dedicated to deep sky using a 4" refractor, so here are some. Also, many amateur observers keep observing logs and sketch books full of their observations using such instruments. Just a handful are piled up in the attached pic. So deep sky can be a great source of entertainment and interest using relatively small refractors. I've also attached a couple of sketches of Messier objects made using a 100mm refractor from the suburbs of a north England town.

After finding inspiration from Kerrylewis and his observation yesterday (using go-to), I thought I'd give Venus one last go tonight after the Sun drifted behind some trees. Immediately I was able to pick up the planet in my 35mm Eudiascopic and 100mm refractor. Increasing the power from 23X to 235X, the ultra thin crescent was simply gorgeous and a little surreal. I was only able to observe it for a few minutes as Venus was closely following the Sun and soon drifted behind the trees too. I was able to follow it for a little while through the branches. If you can keep the Sun safely out of the field, its well worth taking a look. You can of course cheat and use a go-to! 😆