Oldfort

I expect my stuff will be like that one day - hopefully not too soon.

A hospice is selling off a large collection of astro gear (telescopes, mounts, cameras etc) on ebay. Could be some interesting stuff in there https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Huge-Job-Lot-Astronomy-Telescopes-cameras-scopes-weights-Celestron-Pentax/123572515160

Someone on UKastro buy sell is looking for an ED80, just in case you missed that.

Yes, that's the one I have used. It weighs next to nothing.

For visual use, straight through, I have found a 15mm spacer works great. This is with a televue 32mm plossl, or 19mm panoptic. Inevitably, the skies have been obscured since I got all the bits.

One other thing is that the scope needs to be east side, assuming scope facing North. That could explain it going the wrong way to the 2nd star.

Although the discounts are advertised, they are not available at the moment - certainly for Telescope House and the Widesreen Centre.

This is quite a complicated topic. There is some useful information in this link: http://www.clarkvision.com/articles/visastro/ Clark's book (I'm not sure how easy it is to get these days) is very interesting, although I'm not sure all his ideas work out when you have a heavily light polluted background.

I tried that. Got a funny look.

I have monthly subscriptions to Sky & Telescope and Astronomy Now. Every few months I throw out the older copies as I don't have any space for them. This seems a waste, and I wondered if anyone had any ideas of what I might do with them - eg a local astronomy society (I'm in Greenwich, London). I don't want payment, other than to cover postage if the recipient can't collect.

Rich If you select view, then status bar, and tick the "visible" box you will get a bar at the bottom of the screen with some info, which includes the altitude and azimuth of the cursor. So with the azimuth reading , if it's less than 180 the object is rising and so on.

Renault have made a few ugly cars, but the Renault 4 is among the leaders in that group. However they are not in the same league as Citroen, who have made lots of ugly cars, albeit ugly in different ways - the Citoen D being an exception.

The Berlebach's are nice. Telescope House used to sell them, but they didn't have them on their website. I think the Giros come in 2 sizes of base - 60mm diameter and 30mm (maybe) so if you go down this route make sure to match the tripod to the mount. The Giro is great as well (mine is a Giro 2).

For 3D and driving round the solar system/universe (and a number of Sci fi universes) Celestia is a lot of fun, and free.

Where are you observing from? M33 is an easy object from a dark site, but pretty much impossible (visually) from London, even with a 10" .