Louis D

Budget makes a huge impact on recommendations, so state yours. Also, by portable do you mean slipping out the backdoor with it, putting it in the car and driving, putting it in a van and driving, putting it in a backpack, or airline carry-on compatible? How heavy of a part are you willing to lift when it comes to breaking it down into sections for transport?

Not really as long as you're using a coma corrector in the Newt. Even at f/6, I see noticeable improvement in wide field eyepieces when using a coma corrector. It doesn't even have to be expensive. I use a GSO/Revelation/TPO coma corrector with a 25mm spacer ring between the eyepiece holder and the optics section and don't even both with parfocalizing most eyepieces. The lone exception is my 12mm Nagler T4 which focuses 20mm below its shoulder. I put five 4mm O-rings around the 2" skirt along with a 20mm extension on that skirt to give the focuser something to tighten onto as seen below. Pretty much, focal ratios behave much the same across design types as far as eyepiece edge correction. Differences arise due to other aberrations like coma, chromatic aberration, and field curvature.

Well, I've taken lots of images through my eyepiece collection at f/6 (albeit a field flattened 72ED refractor). Here's the ~30mm group and the 32mm and up group. You can judge for yourself how much edge falloff there is for simpler designs. The 35mm Aero ED is in the second group. It's pretty decent out to 75% of the way to the edge. The 40mm Meade 5000 SWA is optically identical to the 40mm ES-68.

Once you know you have the Orion nebula centered, shine a light on a white card for a few seconds and stare at it to activate the cones in your fovea and then quickly look back in the eyepiece to see if you can detect color. I've seen hints of green in an 8" scope using this technique. Of course, this totally obliterates any dark adaptation you might have had, but you make your choices.

And by the way, look down the front of the scope and see if there is a metal restriction plate with a hole in the middle just behind the objective. If so, you really have a 35mm or so objective instead of a 70mm objective. I disassembled mine and pushed that plate out the front with a small board and then reblackened the interior and reassembled the scope. Correction isn't as good now, but the image is brighter which is what I was going after.

Check that your scope doesn't take 0.965 inch instead of 1.25 inch eyepieces first. I picked up one of those 70x300 scopes last spring for parts to make a super finder and tossed everything but the lens, lens cell, and metal tube. Mine came with a 0.965" focuser and eyepieces. In case you don't know where to measure, it's the outer diameter of the eyepiece insertion barrel (the lower part that is generally unpainted). If it is 0.965", you'd have to get a 0.965" to 1.25" diagonal or an adapter that might not reach focus.

That, and their current scarcity, might explain why I see used EdgeHD scopes going for close to the old list prices on CN classifieds recently.

Although I can't stand the heat for longer than 20 to 30 minutes during Texas summers. I start sweating all over my equipment as well. I don't know how hot it gets in the UK during July, for instance, but we average 98 degrees F (37 C) for highs here. I sometimes run a box fan across me to draw off some heat.

Was it a manual teleconverter with no electrical connections like the T-ring? Some cameras won't fire if they can't electrically talk to a lens. Try firing the camera with no lens attached as a test of this theory.

Upon reexamining the diagram, that's 32mm of in-focus in 1.25" mode and 8mm in 2" mode, which is workable for me. However, notice that the prototype and design diagrams don't match up very well: So, who know where the focus point will end up?

It's my understanding that they take Chinese scopes and refigure, respace, and recoat the lenses for optimal performance. At least that's what I read somewhere once. They don't do everything from scratch like A-P.

Well, the 55 degree planetaries have been sold over the years under numerous other labels, their UWAs are the same as the 4mm, 7mm, and 16mm UWAs sold under other labels, and their Optimus eyepieces are the same as the APM XWA HDCs. I'm not as familiar with other suppliers for soft cases, though.

ROR MSDS: Ammonia 26° - 0.775% Sodium Chloride - 0.830% Isopropyl Alcohol - 4.266% Liquid Soap - 9.011% Distilled Water - 85.118% Baader Wonder Fluid MSDS: Ethanol - 25% Propan-1-ol (n-Propanol or n-Propyl Alcolhol) - 35% Zeiss Lens Cleaning Wipes MSDS: AQUA = Water Propan-2-ol = Propanol Ethanol = Ethanol 5-CHLORO-2-METHYL-2H-ISOTHIAZOL-3-ON = Methylchoroisothiazolinon 2-METHYL-2H-ISOTHIAZOL-3-ON = Methylthiazolinon Windex Glass Cleaner MSDS: 2-Butoxyethanol - 0.5-1.5% Ethylene glycol hexyl ether - 0.5-1.5% Isopropyl Alcohol - 1-5% Water - 60-100% So, some combination of distilled water, ammonia, isopropyl or propanol alcohol, ethanol, and liquid soap would seem to be the common thread here across cleaners. I've found that the purely alcohol based ones do a poor job of removing organic crud like tree sap.

Doesn't Altair Astro sell very similar scopes under their own label in the UK?

Buy local within your home country? 😉

Yep, the same with different markings for multiple scopes. They work great. Just make sure it has a smooth zoom movement. I recently picked up a used one for my daughter's scope for $50, and it's action is somewhat stiff. Same optics, but stiff for some reason. Both of my copies are buttery smooth in motion. One is the Celestron, the other is Olivon. The only difference is the Celestron has a ribbed metal grip while the Olivon has a rubber grip. I think I paid $65 each for my copies a few years back. If you ever want more eye relief for eye glasses or to attach a camera or other device to the top, just keep twisting the eye cup downward and eventually it will start to unscrew and come right off. It's reverse threaded (righty loosey). There's no filter threads on the bottom to reduce insertion distance for spotting scopes that don't have a lot of back focus available. The moving lower element literally bottoms out flush with the bottom of the insertion barrel, so be careful when setting it down upright without a bottom cap. Otherwise, no significant differences.

Good choice. When I went to Nebraska for the 2017 eclipse, I brought along a 32mm Plossl and an 8-24mm zoom along with my ST80, solar filter, and Bogen tripod. I didn't feel like I needed anything else.

A 32mm Plossl at f/8 will provide the largest TFOV in your scope and be pretty well corrected. The only downside is the 50 degree field of view. You could get a 24mm wide field like a Panoptic, ES-68, or APM UFF for about the same TFOV at a higher power and wider AFOV. However, the difference between it and your 20mm ES-68 wouldn't be all that much. There's also the 25mm BST Starguider that would come close to maxing out the TFOV as well, and might perform well at f/8.

He's not saying that. He's saying that even if politics were a part of it, it would not be an allowable subject to discuss on here. You could probably say that new tariffs (Trump's 25% China trade war) or Brexit added X amount to the cost, but you couldn't discuss the merits or underlying reasons for either.

I've noticed popular items that are long out of stock are commanding near new list prices on Cloudy Nights Classifieds and are selling within a day. Things like Celestron EdgeHD scopes, for instance. It really depends on the demand for the particular item you're selling. As another example, houses in our local area are commanding 7% over list price with an average of 70 cash offers in the first 24 hours. Thus, it depends on the situation for used items. Desirability and scarcity for astro gear and location for real estate.

I observe less in the summer because of the later onset of darkness (partially due to DST) and the onslaught of mosquitos, heat, and humidity. We switched to DST two weeks ago. It affected me less this year because I've been sleeping in while working from home because I don't have that hour commute into work every day.

Hopefully not many imports to the US go through there. Most Far East imports to the US just come straight across the Pacific to west coast ports.

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to complacency; From complacency to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage." - Debatable attribution

Perhaps a spent rocket stage? A SpaceX rocket just reentered Earth's atmosphere last night above the US Pacific Northwest.

After seeing local voters approve a $7 billion bond package to build a light rail system after most business owners and property owners vehemently opposed it, I realized it was all the college students registered to vote in town along with all of the renters who thought having new trains to ride sounded great, especially because they don't directly pay property taxes. At first, I thought the original US Constitution allowing only land owners to vote sounded pretty elitist, but as a property tax paying individual now, I get it. Since it was amended to allow all citizens to vote, this is what we get. Voting for expenses we may never be on the hook to pay for, even indirectly.