AdeKing

+1, the BCO eyepieces really are excellent value for money and really sharp. I have bino pairs of the 10mm and 18mm that I use in my binoviewers when solar or lunar observing and just one 6mm as whilst it's an excellent mono viewing eyepiece it gives too much magnification with binoviewers for me. If I'm off out for a quick grab and go session then the set of 3x BCOs along with a low power finder eyepiece (Celestron Onmni 32mm plossl) and a 2x Barlow are all I take. The eye relief is a bit short on the 6mm but my 45 year old eyes still find all 3 comfortable to use and they are really nice and sharp. Really excellent value and regularly show up used for about £25-£30. All of mine were used and were probably my cheapest eyepiece purchases.

I have a pair of these as well Dave and they make a very nice BV pair indeed. I'm sure that you'll enjoy them.

I had mine out again last night and am still impressed with the performance of the system when fitted to my Skywatcher 200 dob which is on an OOUK Dob Mount. Last night I slowed down a bit and the system worked exactly as the marketing material said it should and put the vast majority of targets very near the centre of an ES24 68 degree FOV, and placed all of them within the FOV. The system showed me several Messier objects that I've previously struggled to find or have failed to find and the only target that took a bit of effort to locate was Neptune as its a very small disc and it took me a while to work out which point of light was actually Neptune. Consequently, I had to move away and re-centre a couple of times and refer to SkySafari on my other phone which could have the FOV of the OTA & EP combination displayed on screen. Whilst I was using it last night, the end of the mirror furthest from the phone lens started to get condensation on it. Fortunately, this didn't seem to affect the accuracy of the system, though I can see that heavy condensation on the mirror is probably the achilles heel of the system as the mirror isn't particularly well shielded, but I'm not sure what could be done about it short of attaching a dew heater as the mirror obviously need to be open to the sky to provide a view of to the camera. Thats really good news Dave, sounds like it'll still prove to be useful on my manual Vixen GP then.

If you do decide to split, I'd likely be interested in the Porta Mount wooden tripod and porta tabletop kit. Ade

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Another vote for the WO and supplied eyepieces. I've been very happy with mine but tend to use a pair of Mk I Baader Maxbrights now as the T-2 connection works better with my solar setups. The supplied eyepieces are very good and nice and comfortable to view with.

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Thanks for the info @SmokeyJoe. I've probably not used the correct terminology, not being an imager, but this sounds like it would work. I was thinking that a ZWO120MC camera could be attached to a straight through 9x50 finder scope with an adaptor as would be fine for a finderguider but with this treated as the main camera, as I wouldn't be imaging. I just wondered whether this would give a relatively wide field that could be plate solved and then pass goto instructions to SkySafari which could then sync the coordinates from the plate solve to indicate the position of the scope in SkySafari to allow push-to guidance to any selected target. Thanks for the link to the forum, this is all academic really, but the Celestron application of a mobile phone camera for plate solving and providing push-to directions made me wonder whether the ASI Air could be used in such a way to allow the full functionality of SkySafari. Although the Starsense Explorer App is based on SkySafari, it is a much cut down version with limited catalogues. The Starsense explorer system actually works really well but is aimed at beginners hence the cut down app. Sounds like the technology is out there and could be tweaked to serve this purpose but by people with more knowhow than myself. Thanks for taking the time to answer my query.

My most used bino eyepieces are a pair of Vixen NPL 30mm which I find extremely comfortable for H-alpha solar with my Maxbrights and 1.7x GPC. For nocturnal viewing I don't find the NPLs work so well and so I tend to use a pair of 18mm Baader Classic Orthos and swap the 1.7x GPC for a 2.6x GPC to increase the magnification if needed. I'd love to buy a second Morpheus 17.5mm like @F15Rules but it's out of my budget at the current time. The eye relief on the 18mm BCOs might be a bit tight if you've disregarded Plossls on eye relief, but the NPL30s have reasonable eye relief.

Bear with me for a minute. I have recently been modifying the Celestron Starsense Explorer setup that uses your mobile to plate solve then passes the info to an app based on SkySafari as per @johninderby excellent thread: This got me to wondering whether or not the same could be achieved using an ASIair/Astroberry attached to a guidescope. For those of you that use these systems, is it possible to use the ASI Air/Astroberry to plate solve to find it's location then feed that info to a planetarium app such as SkySafari and provide push-to instructions? I know that the setup can plate solve and fine-tune a mount to frame a target, but is it possible for a guidescope to be used to plate solve and provide push-to instructions to an app? I have an unused RPi 3B+, guidecam and straight through finder that could be converted to a finderguider and I was wondering whether this is a possibility? I'm not very well versed in the RPi/Astroberry/ASIair setups, but was just ruminating. Any guidance would be gratefully received. Ade

Thanks John, found it.

Me too.

Looking good John, that's a nice interface, what app is that or is it one of the manufacturers built-in apps on the phone?

How are you finding this phone John? I almost pulled the trigger on one last week as there was a very good deal on Amazon making it only just over £100 but I read some reviews complaining about the GPS performance so I held off.

My old iPhone 6 has been repurposed as my Astro phone as it was the only way I could get a reliable link between SkySafari on the phone and my Vixen GPD2 Skysensor 2000 setup. The Huawei would work fine for part of the evening and then randomly crash and refuse to work with SkySafari again or would sometimes work all evening whilst other times it wouldn't work from the outset. My experience has put me off the brand to be honest. Next phone will be back to a Samsung. I've needed to get an iPhone case with a battery pack built in as the internal battery is shot, but apart from that it's been a reliable setup. However, for some reason the iPhone 6 doesn't support the horizon drawing function in the Observer Pro app, that lets you trace your local horizon and export it for use in SkySafari. I think that's something to do with the Gyros but it works well enough for the SSE app, though I think I need to do a lazy Susan bearing upgrade to my OO UK dob base as fine tuning position in Az is sticky to say the least.