Ricochet

Just seen your new post and photos. No, don't take the secondary out. The problem you have is that the counterweight and shaft are missing so you need to find those. The shaft is a chromed rod and the weight is the same black as the offer black parts on the telescope.

I started out with one of those. If the mirrors are in good condition then the slow focal ratio means you can easily collimate it with minimal home made tools. On mine the primary collimation screws were actually missing but some metric screws and spring washers did the trick. It uses an equatorial mount so check that the counterweight is there and have a look on YouTube for a video on balancing an equatorial mount. Check that the focuser and slow motion controls work smoothly. There is limited travel on the dec slow motion worm so you will need to loosen the clutch and re-centre it for each new object. The biggest issue that you will probably encounter is that it uses the old 0.965" eyepiece standard. If you don't have the originals then replacements are limited to a single set of new low quality eyepieces or expensive vintage eyepieces if and when they appear on the second hand market. Its best use is probably as a test to decide it you enjoy astronomy enough to invest in a new model.

If you can see a white doughnut you have defocused way too far and are seeing dirt, most likely on the eye lens of the eyepiece. You need to use a high power eyepiece with a focal length equal to your telescope's focal ratio or smaller, get perfect focus and then defocus by maybe a millimetre either side of that.

90° (non erecting) star prism. Less scatter so a sharper image than with a mirror.

I’m not sure so I would query with your supplier but l believe there may be two options. I think that your focuser has a silver draw tube, with a black ring screwed to the top of it into which you place either the 1.25" or 2" adaptors. If you want to leave that black ring in place then I think you want the S57 dovetail version: S57 dovetail clicklock However, if you remove that black ring and the silver draw tube has an M54 thread on the inside of the tube then you can use the M54 version: M54 clicklock To use 1.25” eyepieces you would use the 2”-1.25” adaptor in one of the 2" clicklocks: 2”-1.25” clicklock To determine whether you can focus, measure the length of the parts you will be removing. The clicklocks are about 30 mm and the 2" - 1.25” uses another 9.5mm so you can compare what you are removing to what you are adding to determine how much focuser travel you need.

15 or 18mm StellaLyra ultra flat field if £109 is within your budget?

I can't comment on that particular barlow, but in general a 2" barlow and 2" eyepiece tends to be a heavy combination so I would compare the weight of the combination against the single eyepiece option. Using a barlow will also extend the eye relief so you may have to hover above the eyepiece when barlowed. The eye relief is shorter, the eye cup not as comfortable and the field is smaller (50° vs 60°) but correction should be good in both. Where the plössl may have an advantage is if it has better coatings with less scatter and internal reflections. I will have to leave this to you to test as I have not used the Meade plössl. I used to have both a 7mm celestron x-cel lx and 8 mm BST starguider and thought that the x-cell Lx was the sharper eyepiece. However, it is rumoured that the Meade hd-60 is the same eyepiece and in that line it was badged as a 6.5mm eyepiece so it may not be quite the gap filler that it first appears. The 12mm is apparently not quite so sharp so I cannot say whether the x-cel lx or BST starguider is the better eyepiece. As you already have one 12mm starguider I would be inclined to go for the cheaper option and buy one more.

I think this is a very dangerous idea to take from the thread, especially the word "seriously", which could lead to having expectations which are too high and then disappointment with the real world performance of the scope. The question you need to ask yourself here is whether you are not enjoying the planets so much because your preference is for star clusters, or because you are finding the planetary performance of your 130PDS lacking. If you think that your lack of planetary enjoyment is substantially a scope issue, then you may find an increase in enjoyment by viewing the planets with a 102F7ED. Planetary observations tend to take place at high magnification which requires a small exit pupil. At small exit pupils the image quality is dominated by diffraction and so the image quality of the Newtonian will degrade more quickly as you decrease the exit pupil due to the increased diffraction from the secondary mirror and spider support. An f5 parabolic Newtonian is also quite sensitive to proper collimation as the coma free area of the scope is relatively small. On the other hand, even if you subtract the area of the secondary mirror, account for reflectivity losses and assume that the refractor is used with a prism diagonal and neither have any losses, the 130PDS still has more light gathering capacity than the 102ED. This means that for star clusters the 130PDS will pick up fainter stars than the refractor. Where the refractor will have an edge is in the darkness of the background. The 102F7ED scopes are very well baffled to block out stray light whereas the 130PDS has no baffles and the interior wall is painted in a black paint that can charitably be called light grey. In addition lenses scatter less light than mirrors across the FoV. Adding a primary baffle to mask the edge of the mirror and flocking the inside of the tube will tighten up star images in the Newt and darken the background sky. Doing this will also result in an improvement in planetary views. Where the exact balance lies between brighter stars/brighter background and dimmer stars/darker background I can't say, but I would not count on any improvement by buying the frac. There is very nice presentation to how stars look through a frac but it's not necessarily an improvement of view. If you really do have a preference for star clusters then I would consider how wide those clusters are. If you're talking <1.5° then you will see a substantial improvement by upgrading to an 8" Dob. An 8" scope has four times the light gathering capacity of a 4" scope and no quality of glass is going to make up for that difference on DSOs. For £900 you can go even larger and buy the 12" Stellalyra dob which is an even bigger step up. Of course, the bigger the scope, the heavier and more difficult it is to get out. A dob is not practical if you have a flight of stairs to negotiate and if you're feeling a bit tired it's a lot easier to pick up a small frac for a quick session. I'm also not sure that you will see much of an improvement in this regard. Typically if an eyepiece isn't rated for F5 the next step seems to be around the F8 mark. Sure, a cheaper eyepiece will perform better in a slower scope but it sounds like you will have to upgrade eyepieces whichever scope you have. I'm not saying not to buy a 4" ED, as they are clearly lifetime scopes, just don't expect one to perform miracles.

For a neodymium there are only two options, the Baader and the generic copy. If you don't want to get the Baader then get the generic one from wherever it is cheapest, which was eBay direct from China when I bought one. However I do not consider these filters to be light pollution filters but lunar and planetary filters. With the advent of LED lighting, there is not really a lot of light pollution filtering that you can do.

No, they are not. The aperture of a Mak is the size of the front corrector plate, not the primary mirror. The corrector plate on a Mak causes the light rays to diverge, meaning that the primary mirror must be larger than the corrector plate in order to retain the full aperture. It is well known that the Synta Maks use a primary mirror that is the same size as the corrector plate, which is the cause of their reduced effective aperture, while the JOC Maks use a primary mirror that is larger than the front corrector. We know this because people have taken their telescopes apart and measured the components.

Looking at your Starguider pairs I think there is a gap for a pair of 12mm Starguiders as 8-12-18 is a logical progression. Generally, I think the 15 is too close to 12 and 18 so unnecessary, but as you've already got one you are better placed to know your usage. With regards to orthos, yes they should be sharper and better coated than the Starguiders, but the field of view is narrower and they are not so comfortable to look through for extended periods. At f10 the Baader zoom will be well corrected and as good as the fixed focal length Starguiders (slightly better coatings though I think) but significantly better than the awful Starguider zooms. It does depend on what you use the binoviewers for though. I tend to use my binoviewers almost exclusively for lunar/planetary and individual eyepieces for DSOs so if you're looking for DSO upgrades then another binoviewer eyepiece might not make sense. For DSOs I would be thinking in terms of exit pupil (maybe also magnification) and for lunar/planetary exit pupil and magnification due to atmospheric limits. For DSOs I think you want your "main" eyepiece to be in the 2-2.5mm exit pupil range and then step up in a minimum of ~1.4X (root 2) steps or 2X if you miss a step so considering your 14mm ES82 and 34mm ES34 then yes, you are missing something in the 20-25 range and the 11mm would also make a nice maximum magnification DSO eyepiece before diffraction rings become detrimentally intrusive (to my eye at least). If you prefer the 82° field over the 68° one then the 20mm Stellalyra UWA would be a good choice. If reviews had been a bit more forthcoming when they first appeared under the Orion brand I would probably have bought one myself. If you're looking at eyepiece pairs for planetary and are not using any barlow/gpc to reach focus then your 8mm pair are giving somewhere around 290X and are probably above UK atmospheric limits most nights while your 18mm pairs are nearer 130X and so a bit low for planetary (moving the primary to accommodate the BV light path changes the focal length, a quick google suggests an increase of 3.1mm for every 1mm of movement so adding a binoviewer with a light path of 110mm increases the focal length to ~2340mm). Going with the earlier idea of a 12mm pair gives 195X which could also be above atmospheric limits some nights so in this case the additional 15mm pair at 156x might also make sense, and you might even want to find something between the two. Zooms would solve the issue of swapping eyepieces but if you're mostly using the 12-16mm section of the zoom then for the Baader zoom you're limited to 52-54° so take that into account.

Getting back to the original question, l assume that the "local store" is the same Indian website that you linked to in a previous thread rather than a physical shop. Looking through their telescopes I see two options for a 80 / 800 reflector: Star tracker 80 / 400 refractor KSON 80 / 800 reflector 1 KSON 80 / 800 reflector 2 The two reflectors ore the same telescope on different mounts so to start with lets just compare this refractor to this reflector. The refractor is the ubiquitous 80mm f5 and is well known. It will be best for low power, wide field observation of star fields. An achromat at f5 will show chromatic aberration on bright objects and so is not best suited to planetary observation, although a yellow filter should sharpen up the views. With the included 25mm kellner you are looking at a field of view of around 2.8° but if you add a 32mm Plossl you can open this up to around 4° which will make finding things in the sky easier. With the 80mm reflector and the included 20mm kellner you have a much more restricted field of view of around 1.1°, and again with a 32mm Plossl you can open it up, but only to 2°, which makes finding objects much, much more difficult. I would be looking to add a 5° 8x50 RACI finder to a telescope with such a small field of view, but given the size a 6x30 might be more appropriate to compliment the red dot finder. However, once you have found an object, the 80 /800 reflector might give a better image as it will have no chromatic aberration, much lower field curvature, and due to the higher f10 focal ratio cheaper eyepieces will perform much better and add fewer aberrations of their own. At this price the mirror is likely to be spherical but at f10 this is unlikely to matter. Moving on to the mounts, l suspect that all three mounts will be on the wobbly side and so you may want to find some way of bracing whichever one you choose. When comparing the two reflector mounts I think that the mount head on the more expensive option looks more substantial and also appears to have a standard vixen dovetail which would make switching telescopes and mounts easier in future, so I would go for the more expensive option if you choose the reflector. The tripod supplied with the refector looks more sturdy to me and the smaller telescope will exert less torque on the mount as well as being much les of a sail in the wind so this might be a more stable option than the reflector with the upgraded mount.

Do you use the equinox 80 on the starwave mini? I wasn't happy how mine held my 72 ED. I've not used an AZ4 but having looked at one in a shop, I think it is clearly a much more capable mount.

For planets with an f5 scope you want to be looking at something like a 4mm or barlowed equivalent like an 8mm and 2x barlow. You might be able to push it a bit higher but it will depend on the scope and your eyes, so a zoom might be a better option. The 7.2-21.5 Hyperflex zoom and a 2-2.5x barlow or the SVBony 3-10mm, probably with a 2x barlow as it seems that it's not great below 5mm or if you can afford it the 3-6mm Nagler zoom would be suitable options. For galaxies your best bet is dark skies and an eyepiece giving an exit pupil in the 2-3mm range, so 10-15mm eyepiece would be your best choice, tending towards the 10mm end of the range to give as much magnification as possible.

Are you using your Starguiders without glasses and the eyecups twisted all the way up? With that method I've never had any issue with blackouts but when I tried to look through one where someone hadn't raised the eyecup it was a lot more difficult. As for the choice between the Hyperion and Nirvana it all boils down to whether you need to wear glasses for observing or not. If you don't wear glasses, go for the Nirvana. If you do wear glasses search the forum to try to find out which focal lengths are good and which are bad with fast focal ratio scopes. Unfortunately, I can't remember which ones are which. If you want 68° that works well at F5 and don't need glasses then I would be looking at the ES68 and UFF lines. I believe that the 12 and 14.5mm eyepieces in the Stellalyra 68° line are decent performers too.

It can't be collimated in the traditional manner but I believe that it can be done, albeit a little crudely by loosening the screws connecting the mirror cell to the tube and moving the whole cell. Once collimated it should then be stable enough that it doesn't need doing again. There are better 150mm Newtonians available, but not on alt-az go-to mounts in the OP's price range.

I think I would probably go for the 150i as a more all round scope. On planets and the moon the 127 mak might just edge it but for DSOs the Newtonian will be the better scope. The larger aperture will mean that you can see slightly fainter stars and that your optimum magnifications are slightly higher, making objects a touch easier to see. The shorter focal length (half) means that when you want it, you can have a wider (double) field of view. You can also get a larger exit pupil, which is useful if your went to add filters to view nebulae, although from a Bortle 5 site this might only apply to the Orion, dumbbell and ring nebulae. However, the downside of the fast focal ratio is that you need to purchase better corrected eyepieces. The 5, 8, 12 mm BST starguiders will all work well with the telescope but for your widest field of view eyepiece you will need to buy either a 24mm StellaLyra UFF or Es 68. If you buy the Mak the longer focal who means that all of the starguiders will work although you will want to add a 32mm plossl as well in order to get a larger exit pupil. The 127 Mak is the more portable of the two scopes. The telescope and the azgti head will fit into a backpack with a few eyepieces leaving only the tripod for you to carry. As the azgti uses a photographic 3/8” fitting, a tripod that is even more compact could be added later to make transportation even easier. Overall it is a difficult choice and I don't think that there is really a wrong option when choosing between these two telescopes.

The T-ring will convert the connection type for your camera to a T-2 thread. You can then use a combination of t-2 extension tubes and adaptors to connect your camera to an astronomical telescope. However, you haven't got an astronomical telescope with standard sizes to connect to, you've got a spotting scope that doesn't look like it is supposed to have the ability to change eyepieces. Is there an eyepiece already installed in the telescope? The instruction manual gives some part numbers for connecting an SLR to the telescope so if you can get hold of a #22-3030 Telephoto Camera Mount then maybe that gives you a t-2 thread to connect a t-ring to. However, ideally you mount a camera to a telescope instead of an eyepiece. With this telescope I don't think that is possible and so the results may not be ideal.

The key is to first take your telescope out in the daytime and to try to focus it on the furthest thing that you can see. With this type of telescope the image will be inverted both horizontally and vertically, which is how it is supposed to be. The closer that something is, the further out the focuser must be and as your telescope is designed to look at astronomical objects the focuser may not move outwards far enough to focus on terrestrial targets. In this case, once you have reached the most outward end of focuser travel, try slowly pulling the eyepiece up out of the focuser. You now know that in order to focus on astronomical targets you will have to wind your focuser inwards from the terrestrial position. Secondly, while focused on a distant terrestrial target you need to align your finderscope as best as possible. Identify exactly what you are looking at through the telescope and without moving the main telescope, adjust the red dot finderscope using the two dials on the side and underside of the finder so that the red dot appears to be pointed at the same object that you can see through the telescope. Due to parallax due to your terrestrial target being too close, you may need to refine this at night once you have resolved your focus issues. Now that the finder has been roughly aligned, you have a much better chance of being able to find a bright object in the night sky and to focus on that. If the telescope comes with more than one eyepiece use the eyepiece with the highest focal length as it will have the widest field of view. If the moon is visible I suggest that you start with that as it is so large and bright that it is much easier to find if your finder is not pointing in exactly the right direction, and it should be more obvious when it is correctly focused. If instead, you choose a bright star or a planet to test focus on you may see a bright ring of light when out of focus. In order to focus you must always try to make the object appear as small as possible. If it gets larger, turn the focuser the other way. Finally, to all the people who suggest collimation might be an issue when this sort of query arises, please stop confusing new users by suggesting collimation. Unless the secondary has come loose and is facing in completely the wrong direction collimation is never the problem, it is always focus.

I used a combination of Musou and flocking on my 72ED, there is a thread somewhere with photos in. I found that brushing the Musou straight onto the tube didn't leave a great looking finish and was still reasonably shiny under bright light at shallow angles. I think that spraying it if you have the tools and skill is likely to give a much better finish. I also tried painting it onto flocking and this actually gave the best result and improved the flocking at shallow angles. It does make the flocking hard so I think I only did this on the inside of the scope and left the flocking as it is in the dew shield where it is more likely to get knocked. I think that with either Musou or black 3.0 the key would be to undercoat with a textured paint and then just use the expensive paint as a top coat.

When I bought my 8" dob the 8 and 12mm Starguiders were the first upgrade eyepieces that I bought. With a 2x barlow that is effectively 4, 6, 8, 12. Starting out you will probably think that more magnification is better but actually of the two the 12mm was my favourite because it gives a 2mm exit pupil in that scope and therefore is an ideal DSO eyepiece for any DSO that fits in the of view. For planetary the 8mm is a good choice and I used that more often than the barlowed 12mm due to the atmosphere so you would probably find a similar situation with the 5mm. When I bought a 7mm Celestron X-Cel LX I found I used that in preference to the starguider so a 7mm would be my preference for an all round planetary focal length with that telescope. The 18/25mm Starguiders need a scope with a focal ratio of at least f8. With your scope 5, 8 and 12 are the ones to get (or similarly the short X-Cel LXs). Edit: Given the current X-cel LX price, the OVL Nirvanas are possibly a better option if they are in budget and you do not leave the additional eye relief.

I would say either just touching with no pressure, or just hovering so the eyecup blocks external light.

Oh yes, I didn't mean that you should buy a second set of LVWs, but that you would need a whole other set of (smaller) eyepiece pairs.

I've no idea. I bought it second hand perhaps 5 years ago. However, I would hazard a guess that there's a 99.999% chance that the same issue exists in all examples and that the reason I noticed it was down to a) Using eyepieces with absolutely top notch coatings, transmission and baffling and b) Becoming quite picky about light scatter issues as I've become a more experienced observer.

Until you buy a binoviewer.