Louis D

Will you be observing from your backyard or will you have to haul it somewhere in a car to observe?

They look to be identical mounts sourced from the same Chinese manufacturer Synta. The only question I would ask would be can you declutch the axes, move the scope manually, and reclutch the axes without losing alignment? Some of these mounts require you to use the motors to move the scope to maintain alignment. Since I don't see any way to declutch the axes, I'm going to guess no.

Optical Tube Assembly, the main telescope optical part.

If you've reached the limit of the adjustment wheels before bringing the dot on target, try loosening the mount foot and twisting it to bring it closer to parallel with the main scope's optical axis. For the other axis, you can try shimming one end or the other of the mounting foot prior to tightening it to try to again bring it closer to parallel in that axis.

Yeah, I forgot about the thread business. To keep the barrel short for spotting scope usage, they engineered it to put the bottom elements right at the end of the lower barrel leaving no room for threads. You could put them on the front of the diagonal.

Did you get the zoom eyepiece yet? Have you tried out a step-down ring on it for a Dioptrx?

I get almost the exact same artifact using widest field 2" eyepieces with my 127mm Mak. The artifact first manifests itself as the star crosses the edge of the rear aperture/baffle tube (27mm diameter) and grows bigger as the bright star is brought closer to the 46mm diameter field stop. I'm sure it's a narrow angle reflection off of some blackened internal surface in the rear baffle tube. As such, it would probably take a knife-edge baffle somewhere to reduce it. Since your rear baffle is larger at 37mm, the effect is probably not visible without the focal reducer unless you were to use a larger format sensor. Try looking through the focal reducer with a 32mm Plossl to see if you can replicate the effect visually. That would eliminate the camera as the cause. See if you can see it visually with a 2" eyepiece having a 40mm to 46mm field stop with a 2" visual back and no focal reducer, or just hold the eyepiece up to the open back of the tube if you don't have one. That would eliminate the focal reducer as the cause.

Would the view through a Herschel wedge and 90mm APO be superior to an 8" Dob with Baader Solarfilm? I have the latter setup, but recently acquired a 90mm APO and am now considering getting a Herschel wedge for it. I'll have to try six vintage new old stock notch interference color filters from Optica b/c I bought several years ago to see if they improve solar observing:

It appears to be the same price or less as the 2" Lunt when cross shipping back to the US from the UK (no VAT, duties, or sales tax but large shipping cost). The 2" Lunt is $299+tax and the 1.25" Lunt is $229+tax (and backordered) in the US while they are £339.00 and £149.90, respectively, in the UK. The Altair is only £238.33 shipped to the US, which works out to $294 at today's exchange rate. If it didn't weigh 5.5 pounds, I might be tempted to get one.

That scope looks breathtakingly steampunk in that first video. 😍 You can never have too many knobs, pulleys, chains, tubes, gears, and brass on a vintage scope.

20x is going to be difficult to handhold. I can just barely make 15x binos work handheld. To do so, I sit in a reclining lawn chair and hold the binos by the objective ends and plant the eyepieces into my eye sockets to keep them steady.

Might want to add the 4mm Tak TOE. It's supposed to be phenomenal as well.

You're lucky she didn't smash it to make a point. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

Sort of like this?

I have both 8x42 and 15x70 binoculars. The 8x42s are great for quick grab and go observing of wide star fields. The 15x70s are usable hand-held if you can recline in a lawn chair, hold them by the objective end, and brace them into your eye sockets. To be clear, stick with porro prisms for astronomy for many reasons unless you have really deep pockets.

For hand-held use, I recommend around 8x40 or 8x42 porro prism binoculars if your budget is tight. As long as they're well collimated, though, I've found just about any pair of binoculars to be useful for scanning star fields.

Now I feel so stupid. There you are in your avatar picture with your 8" EQ scope. I somehow missed that yesterday. Really it depends on your budget, but 13mm plus or minus a millimeter tends to be a very popular focal length eyepiece for many folks with many different scope types.

I think that back in the film era of astrophotography, SCT tracking errors must have much less noticeable since they were very popular in the 80s and 90s for astrophotography. You just had to be careful about trying to swing the camera through the fork mount. Some didn't have enough clearance to do that.

If you're using 50 degree eyepieces, I find many open clusters and nebula view better at 75x than 100x by giving them a bit more context. They're just a bit too small for my liking at 50x. If you have a 9mm 100 degree eyepiece or ES-120, then that doesn't matter all that much since it provides so much context already and 75x might be a moot point.

As long as you don't mind swapping the Barlow in and out, then you're pretty much good to go.

No typo on your part, just a misunderstanding on my part. The SW 200P would refer to the SkyWatcher 8" Dob over here since the 8" EQ version isn't sold under that name here. The closest would be Orion USA's SkyView Pro 8" Equatorial Reflector Telescope that probably corresponds to your scope.

I'd say 75x to 100x is my favorite workhorse power range for everyday observing of many objects under typical sky conditions. As such, I would highly recommend a low-teens eyepiece to fill that gap. Your 8" Dob is actually 1200mm in focal length, so your current powers are 38x, 60x, 133x, and 200x. That leaves quite a gap between 60x and 133x, so I'd recommend something around 86x to 100x with a 12mm to 14mm eyepiece. The 12mm BST Starguider is pretty decent at f/6. So is the 12mm Meade HD-60, though it's been discontinued and is considerable more expensive in the UK than the Starguiders.

How about this site? Wooden Telescope Part 2: Tube and Mount

I've compared them to the Meade HD-60 here. The 8mm and 5mm are very good, the 12mm pretty good. Things get progressively worse going up through 15mm, 18mm, and 25mm. Never bad, just nowhere close to premium performance like the 8mm and 5mm models.

Plenty, apparently. His last production run sold out, but he decided not to continue doing full custom work despite the demand even at his high prices. He may convert over to an Obsession Telescopes business model where he only makes identical telescopes production-line style.