Ricochet

12 hours ago, garryblueboy said:

Now the new lucky owner of this beautiful scope 

 

 

 

 

I've just noticed those "finder shoe rails". Do they allow you to slide the shoe back and forth to your preferred position? If they do that's a brilliant idea. I wish I'd thought of that before drilling permanent holes in my dob! 

Edit: On closer inspection it looks like the screws aren't in the right place for that.

I use one of these as my low power eyepiece and it won't be going anywhere any time soon. If you have the chance to get one at a reasonable price you should go for it. 

14 minutes ago, Hiddenpalm said:

But that's not really what Im trying to figure out. I just want to know, is there a noticeable visual difference between the $16 5x Barlow and the $150 5x Barlow? Im sure one is better made with better quality material. But what does that really mean?

The more expensive item will be better corrected, and should have better lens coatings and hopefully fewer reflections from internal surfaces. Overall this will mean that the more expensive item should degrade the image less than the cheaper one. However, the difference in view is never as much as the price difference. Marginal gains become increasingly expensive to achieve and you have to decide through experience how much you are willing to spend. Many people will probably be completely happy with the SVBony, but some people would not even be happy with the Orion and would only use a Televue Powermate.

However, for visual use in your particular scope it is not necessary to buy ANY barlow at all. At f/10 you can just buy eyepieces. The eyepiece providing the optimum exit pupil for planetary observation is going to be in the 8-10mm range, but specifically for Jupiter even this could be too much. You probably want something that is going to give a magnification in the 150-200x range, so a 10-13mm eyepiece. I'm assuming that you used a 6mm Plossl in your FOV simulations because you already have one. This eyepiece is already small enough for diffraction to be scrubbing detail and you probably want less magnification instead of more. It is also worth remembering that a field of view simulator is exactly that. It does not attempt to simulate the effects on the image that excess magnification will have. I have edited the above simulations to better give you an idea of the blurring and dimming that excessive magnification will bring.

Is this for planetary photography? You will not need a 5x barlow for visual use with an 8se. 

Given the design of the Orion and the specification of it being 4 element I think it is fairly safe to assume it is a JOC (Explore Scientific) focal extender rather than a standard barlow. 

Well that doesn't look anywhere near as bad as that bench test report that was previously linked to would suggest.

1 hour ago, DRT said:

I have recently bought various focal lengths of these eyepieces branded Lunt, APM and Myriad.

Are they all optically identical, or is this a design that allows various brands to select varying quality of optics to go into the same sexy package?

The Lunt and APM versions will be identical, why different batches were labelled differently I don't know. If I remember correctly the only claimed optical difference to the Myriad is in the coatings applied, but I'll have to leave it to you to determine if you can actually tell the difference. 

58 minutes ago, John said:

The question is, are the Myriads related to the APM/Lunt HDC XWA's in any way ?

I believe the HDCs are the same eyepiece as the Myriads but with a different eye cup design and better lens coatings (according to APM).

14 hours ago, Telescope40 said:

Hello. These came into my possession on Friday.  TS OPTICS  16x70 45 degree binos. Always fancied a pair. Came with all the original kit - carry case, cloth bag and gloves plus a blower. Three pair of eyepieces came along too !! The ones to give the 16x mag plus a pair of 12mm and 17 mm's. 

Will be used with my binoviewers and see how they compare with the TV zooms I currently use with the BV's. 

John 

Nice. I saw those on abs. I can't remember what the price was but it seemed like a bit of a a steal. If they had been 90° instead of 45° I'd have gone for them myself. 

23 minutes ago, parallaxerr said:

WARNING - THIS POST DOES NOT CONTAIN TAKAHASHI

Filling in the gaps in my ES line-up of EP's

82° 4.7mm, 68° 24mm & 62° 32mm

Nice. It would be good to hear what you make of the 62° line once you've had a chance to test them. I don't think we've had many (any?) reports so far. 

30 minutes ago, JOC said:

Scroll down and look at the pictures here

The small pictures are with a telescope nearly twice the size of yours.  You may need to re-evaluate your expectations?

I think this is probably correct. Having recently looked at Jupiter through a 114/500 the best eyepiece was a 4mm. With the current low altitude anything more was too much. For your 114/1000 I would expect you would find the same issue once you get down to an 8mm (or the current 15mm+2X barlow). However, the corrector lenses in this type of telescope do not have a good reputation and it is possible even these suggested magnification levels will be too high for your scope. 

11 minutes ago, DRT said:

That prism does not reach focus  

That is a shame. It seems to me to be a bit of an oversight by Skywatcher not to make it easily compatible for RACI use. 

21 hours ago, Piero said:

If the screws often loosen, one could glue the screws, metal plate, and microfocuser together, so that those three components stay permanently in place. A metal-to-metal glue should do the work just fine;

I would try locktite 243 on the screw threads. It should prevent the screws loosening but allow you to undo the screws if required in future. 

19 minutes ago, DRT said:

 

Here is my recently re-acquired ED120 sporting some new CNC rings and a Sky-Watcher EvoGuide ED50 finder scope  

 

Does the finder come to focus with that diagonal? If so which one is it? 

1 hour ago, 25585 said:

Bit late for New Telescope but yet to unbox the 300P.

That is both shocking and unsurprising at the same time.

1 hour ago, 25585 said:

My 40mm and 34mm Maxviews are great bookends.

Are Luminous different from Axiom LX?

According to legend Axioms were manufactured by JOC until they decided to sell under their own brand (Explore Scientific). Someone at Celestron didn't like that and the Luminos appeared as a replacement. 

The advertisement photographs show it with an extension fitted. Only the hexagonal parts of the focuser are "compulsory", anything with a circular cross section can be removed. You have to unscrew the 2" clamp (which has a grub screw) and screw the extension to the draw tube rather than just fitting it into the clamp though. You're looking for a piece like this: 

20 minutes ago, nightfisher said:

seems it can bring a DSLR to focus with no mods

It should do without the extension on the focuser. Watch out for it hidden in the packaging as you'll need it if you ever want to use it for visual. Also, I would avoid using anything with an undercut in the 2" eyepiece clamp.

16 minutes ago, Stu said:

Still showing as in stock, wonder if they have more ex demo units?

They probably do. I lost count of the number of us who bought ex display 24mm ES68s.

What are the advantages of this new mount over an az-gti? I see automatic solar finding and presumably more accurate tracking but is there anything else? I also notice that it has also lost a kg of payload capacity in comparison. 

2 hours ago, Phil73805 said:

Is this the heavy duty version of the AZ5 mount?

https://www.365astronomy.com/365astronomy-az5-tripod-only-compatible-with-eq3-eq5-and-skytee-mounts.html?gclid=Cj0KCQiA5t7UBRDaARIsAOreQticWYa9nFzfzwPNwUTenJg1uIVRYvw7fdbQVTB6EwQIScr4AzKegssaAn7kEALw_wcB

Edit: It turns out that it is the heavy duty version of the AZ5 mount and that it increases the payload of the mount to 9KG. So I bought it, fast! Woohoo!!!

Unfortunately, that is the tripod for the "365 Astronomy AZ5", which is a different mount to the "Skywatcher AZ5". The compatibility of that tripod with the Skywatcher EQ3, EQ5 and Skytee suggests it has an M10 bolt while the Skywatcher AZ5 uses a 3/8" thread. Unless it is supplied with adaptors you may need to make some modifications to fit a 3/8" bolt through it in place of the M10.

Stanley Tstack! I'll have to have a look and see if they're any cheaper than the DeWalt version. The drawer units in particular look useful as they would still be accessible while at the bottom of the stack. 

18 minutes ago, britto765 said:

Would the Celestron PS1000 Newtonian Reflector be any good? 

No. It uses a spherical mirror and a cheap corrector in the focuser resulting in poor image quality. I would avoid it. 

1 hour ago, britto765 said:

I am looking for a more portable telescope on a tripod?

The new Skywatcher mounts look pretty portable. For £200 you can get: 

Skyhawk 1145ps on AZEQ Avant (but you would probably only ever want to use a reflector in AZ mode).

130ps on AZ Pronto

Or if you can increase your budget for a better mount: 

130ps on AZ5

How about a 25mm Starguider? OK, it's not a TV or Vixen eyepiece but the AFoV will be 10° up on your Plossl and it's in the right weight range (182g according to TS).  Plus at £40 (Skies the Limit sale) I'm guessing you could probably afford to keep the LVW for other scopes rather than selling to finance a Panoptic.

1 hour ago, mikeDnight said:

Sadly ive no XW's in my possession currently. Im really enjoying some of the simpler, smaller gems that are floating about. When i bought my Tak i sold all my Televue eyepieces. The XW's were my most used eyepieces, so i kept hold of them as they were purer than any of the Televues, and more comfortable to use. One evening i was visiting a friend with my Tak in hand, but id only taken my binoviewer, as we were suposed to be observing the moon and planets. As it happened, we had opportunity to do some shallow sky observing, but as I had no low power eyepieces with me, my friend loaned me a Meade plossl ( I think it was 26mm but can't be certain). I was appalled that he'd even offered the Meade eyepiece to me and complained loudly at the insult. He laught as he knew my views about Meade in general. However, the eyepiece was a real gem, showing a clarity and peppered stardust quality I hadn't seen for a very long time. It was only a 52° apparent field but its real field was still large enough to frame the double cluster with plenty of room to spare. I hate to admit it, but that cheap little Meade plossl thrilled me so much that I decided to go retro and use simpler eyepieces (not Meade) to see if they meet my needs. So far so good! ?

I've never been so grateful to a Plossl . 

I use a Meade 2x TeleXtender with mine and after flocking the section between the two lens groups to get rid of reflections I don't think it degrades the image. The stack height isn't too bad either. The TeleXtender adds ~60mm but the shorter XW's are taller so it works out at ~40mm additional height. Besides, £50-£75 on a TeleXtender vs £300-£500 on a pair of shorter eyepieces is a considerable saving.