Louis D

My kids got in trouble all the time when visiting Grandma and Grandpa for playing in the "front room" living room as well. They were supposed to play in the basement or outdoors. My kids were so confused why there was a large, unusable room in their house.

DSO imaging can be done with a driven Dob with enough patience and experience.

Yes, hypothetically each performs best at the design's optimal distance. However, most eyes won't be able to discern the difference, but a high resolution camera might, so this is mostly an imaging issue. Here's a nice description on CN of the spot size variance in a standard SCT as the back focal distance is varied above and below the optimal distance of 100mm for the hypothetical design that was ray-traced. The EdgeHD would have a much flatter set of curves due to much better off-axis correction.

My in-laws' living room is a museum of the '60s with slip covers on all the furniture and original green shag carpeting. Everyone gathers in it once a year for the Christmas gift exchange and that's it.

You'll need a 1.25" to T-thread adapter followed by a T-ring for your particular camera's mount.

Of course, if you have the money and one came along used, I can't think of a better looking scope for the living room that also performs very well than the Televue Renaissance 101 or 102:

Man, something is skewed with US/UK pricing. The SW 120ED is $1925 here, the Baader Mark-III zoom is $289, the Baader Morpheus 17.5mm is $239, the Arcturus binoviewer is $180, 4 BCOs at $79 apiece would be $316, a used 2x Ultima would generally be $50, and a Baader 24mm Hyperion would be $147. All this for a grand total of $3146. The Apollo 11 is $1245, 40% of this total. Even if you bought everything in your list used at 60% of new, that would still be about $1900. You must have gotten some serious bargains in your astro shopping. My best would be the $200 I paid used for my AT72ED 6 years ago. I did see a SW120ED with Moonlight focuser go for $800 used last year.

The reports of the 12mm Pentax XF having quite a bit of field curvature are true. I picked one up when Amazon had them half off, and I'm still not convinced it was worth it. Below are my 12mm eyepiece comparison images. Notice how the Pentax is fuzzy at the edge while the HD-60 and Paradigm are not. Refocused, the XF sharpens up considerable.

I like spending other people's money on SGL. 😁

The only Apollo 11 reports I've seen are in this CN thread. You have to search through it to find much of anything tangible. Overall, it seems to be a fine eyepiece as it should be given its price.

Generally, the one man assembling operation Tani is credited with being the source of circle-T eyepieces. The housings and lenses came from a variety of sources. Tani-san was similar to Vernonscope's Don Yeier.

A bit off topic, but it would be a nice improvement for visual use if the Bresser Dob had had a low profile focuser and decreased the size of the secondary as a result. It could be a killer planetary scope in that configuration. I'm guessing they put the focal plane way above the tube to allow for astrophotography. Does anyone know the percentage obstruction by secondary diameter of the 8" and 10" versions? It's not listed anywhere I could find.

The do look very similar, lens arrangement is the same, eye relief is 1mm different, and weight is 40g different. The SVBONY alone claims to use aspheric lens(es). Perhaps the SWAN design was tweaked and re-released? I'm not going to buy both to try to find out, though. Perhaps they could revise the 40mm SWAN as well and re-release it?

If you have a premium mirror in your Dob with an undersized secondary and low profile focuser, lunar views are every bit as good as through an APO of a couple inches less diameter. Read this comparison review. Lumping all Dobs together isn't really fair. Also, the planetary views through 12"+ Dobs with Zambuto mirrors blow away any 6" or less APO that I've ever seen, at least under Texas seeing conditions. I've found that separating tight doubles of uneven brightness is where refractors tend to shine because of the lack of any obstruction at all. Stars have less bloat than in Newtonians, and thus close companions are easier to pick out.

Good call. 😉 Thankfully, the virus is supposed to live less than 9 days on surfaces, and it takes about 2 weeks to ship items from China to the US, so I think we're good on that point.

I recommend doubling your aperture to clearly see the difference. This might mean going from a 3 inch to a 6 inch to a 12 inch scope. In your case, 114mm to 228mm which be a 9 inch scope. That might be a 9" SCT or an 8" or 10" Dob. Doubling it again to 18" to 20" gets really expensive.

First off, are you outside the US? If so, laser laws can be pretty draconian depending on where you live. Australia requires membership in a registered astronomy organization to use one as you describe. The UK limits power to 1mW versus 5mW in the US. Even in the US, be very careful not to shine a laser at passing aircraft. Law enforcement takes a very dim view of this and will find you and put you away. Pretty much any green laser pointer will work for the purpose of pointing out constellations and such. The cheap ones at 532nm are sensitive to cold temperatures and often lack the proper IR filters on them. As a result, they often pump out way more than the rated power in the IR which is where retina's can get seriously burned. The newer green laser pointers at 520nm or so are not affected by cold and don't have the IR issue, but are much more expensive. I use a cheap green laser sight mounted on a picatinny/weaver rail on my scopes. They come with a momentary switch on a flexible cord which comes in handy. It's way easier to put a scope on a target with a laser than with any unitary power finder I've tried. I just can't crank my head around any more to look up through them.

I use a Gator speaker stand bag for my tripod. If you want to pad it, wrap some bubble wrap around it before putting it in the bag. I see B&H has a shorter, padded bag from Ruggard for tripods as well. I'm sure there's something similar available from UK photo and audio dealers.

They're down to about $59 shipped from China, so pretty cheap I'd say. I noticed that they claim a field stop diameter of 40mm which translates into a 67 or 68 degree AFOV, well short of the claimed 72 degrees. It must have quite a bit of edge magnification distortion to get that extra 4 degrees of apparent field. By comparison, my 35mm Baader Scopos Extreme claims 70 degrees but is actually 66 degrees AFOV. I measured it as having a 39mm field stop. My 35mm Aero ED claims a 68 degree AFOV, but is actually 73 degrees with a measured 44.4mm field stop. The SVBONY seems to fit right in between the two and is about 2 ounces heavier than the Aero ED.

Here's a third party comparison photo of several Baader filters: The Contrast Booster totally cuts off violet fringe, but creates a slight color cast as a result. Baader's frequency response image for it shows how it cuts everything in the violet and dark blue range:

As I tried to imply in my original post, there isn't much of a used market for introductory scopes and eyepieces. It's similar to binoculars and P&S cameras. Most people who buy used are looking to upgrade to items that they can't afford to buy new. Perhaps you could find a relative with a child interested in astronomy and gift it to them?

Because the magnification factor is dependent on the distance between the Barlow lens elements and the field stop of the eyepiece per the equation below (shameless copied from this CN posting): M = 1 - L / fb Where M is the magnification factor. L is the distance from the Barlow lens to the field stop of the eyepiece, and fb is the focal length of the Barlow lens (a negative value). Most people back into calculating the fb of a Barlow by measuring M and L and plugging them into the above equation. I did measure my setup's magnification, and it comes out right at 3x with the 140's nosepiece. It's 2.4x by itself. This was measured using a 14mm Pentax XL because it has it's field stop right at the shoulder. Thus, actual magnification will be more or less depending on how much above or below the shoulder a given eyepiece's field stop lies. Other Barlow nosepieces will have different focal lengths and thus different magnification factors from the Meade 140 both by themselves and when used with a binoviewer.

Personally, I find the TV 2x Barlow, Meade 140 APO 2x Barlow, and Orion Deluxe Japan 2x Fully Baffled Barlow are all color free and super sharp. They are all medium to long Barlows and only the TV is available new. I have a cheap, generic 2x shorty Barlow that is so bad, a friend returned it to me after I gave it to him to get him started in astronomy. He literally didn't want to keep it because it was so bad. It wasn't exactly cheap at $30 20 years ago.

I have a pair that came with my Lomo MBS-10 stereo microscope, and they seem decent in it. I've never thought to try them in my telescopes, though.

Sorry, I don't have any pictures of my setup, but I use the nosepiece from a Meade 140 2x Barlow screwed into the front of the binoviewer's nosepiece to reach focus with a 3x magnification factor.