Louis D

ScopeStuff also has a Telrad Base with Orion/Synta Dovetail Foot.

I have the RQFE from scopestuff, and it works very well:

There are quite lightweight, large Dob options out there, they just cost a lot.

I actually like watching the moon drift through ultrawide to hyperwide angle eyepieces at high power when using an undriven alt-az mount. It's kind of like watching it rise and set in a way. Of course, each eyepiece can cost as much as some telescopes and equatorial mounts.

Put the camera in Manual (M) mode, set the ISO to the lowest setting (ISO 200 or thereabouts), and set the shutter speed to 1/60th of a second for starters. Increase or decrease the shutter speed as needed to get the best exposure based on rear screen previews. You'll still want to bracket your exposures around that best value because I've found that images look quite different on a large computer screen once downloaded and reviewed. You can always check the EXIF data in the photos to find out which ones look best on a big screen. Once you know what shutter speed works best, note it and use it exclusively next time. You'll need slightly slower shutter speeds to capture the Galilean moons better. Your 127 Mak is quite a slow lens at f/12, so getting the exposure down to a reasonable level shouldn't be too difficult.

Good luck to your wallet! You'll soon be sliding down the very expensive and slippery slope that is astrophotography. 😄

Just compare the price difference to understand why the difference in mechanical sophistication.

It seems odd that a device intended to make it easier to see faint objects wouldn't automatically increase contrast in transferred images for immediate viewing. Is the idea to make you still feel like you're looking at a faint object through the eyepiece? I would think sophisticated image processing software could bring up the contrast without ruining the image. Perhaps that will follow as an app to download and run on the phone's sophisticated CPU and GPU. Using a screen grab of the Wizard nebula from the next post's video, I did a quick edit. I performed levels correction , saturation boost, and mild sharpening in PSE 2.0 followed by a mild noise reduction in Noiseware. All tools are 20+ years old, so it shouldn't be too hard to have these filters available in real time in some app. Before is on the left, after is on the right. I think it makes it a whole lot easier to see the nebula.

Perhaps you could try mounting the OTA on a manual alt-az mount and simply push it to objects using a RACI, RDF, QuikFinder, etc as guides. There are various planetarium apps to help you find your way around the sky.

I have one as well as a GSO RACI. At my age, I'm finding it incredibly difficult and painful to contort my body to use a straight through finder much above the horizon. Otherwise, the views are very similar between the two.

Some gaffer's tape would probably work to affix the tele adapter in place since the imager housing is push-fit. Given the long focal length of the taking lens, finding a wide angle adapter that might work will be difficult. It would require what was referred to as a "zoom through" adapter that didn't lose much image quality as the lens was zoomed toward the telephoto end. Even then, most fall apart at around 6x which would be about 260mm FL in 35mm equivalent. The problem is that you're only using the central part of the adapter when zoomed in, and that is not the intended use case. Generally, things get blurry with lots of chromatic aberrations.

I have a bunch of fisheye, wide, and tele adapters from my videoing days. A ~50mm rear threaded adapter is going to be a bit on the heavy side to cover such a large objective. As such, a counterweight attached to the opposite side of the device would be necessary to avoid tracking issues. As a suggestion, the old Nikon TC-E15ED has 50mm rear threads, quality ED glass (no added violet fringing that I've seen in high-res test images), and weighs 275g (9.6 oz). It might be a good candidate to try. They go for about $20 to $35 plus tax on ebay stateside, a bit more in the UK. It's my goto telephoto lens for my Canon VIXIA HF M41 with the appropriate step ring. I get better image quality with it by backing off the 10x zoom a bit to 6x or 8x and letting it bring me to ~10x without as much violet fringing as the native 10x.

I believe most of the rebranded refractors from China/Taiwan are all made by Long Perng, SharpStar, KUO, Synta, JOC, and maybe one or two others. I say find the one with the features you like best at the price you like best and just enjoy your scope.

Meade was bought by Ningbo-Sunny and then awarded to Orion USA as a result of an anti-trust lawsuit filed in US courts by Orion USA. Synta (Celestron), another defendant, wisely settled with Orion for a mere $500,000 early on and kept control of the Celestron brand. Sometimes it pays to settle for a nominal sum and admit no wrongdoing. Technically correct about Meade, but I just wanted to clarify that Orion never actually bought Meade, it simply owns it.

Luckily, with so few elements, the number of combinations to try to find the best correction isn't too vast. Some combinations probably won't even allow the lenses to fit back into the holder with retaining rings.

Thanks for pointing that out. I was curious why there weren't spikes in the red and green parts of the spectrum if they were using three LEDs to get some semblance of white. I knew the blue-violet spike was due to an LED, but could not understand the rest of the diagram. A company named Seoul Semiconductor has an updated, broad spectrum white LED light for more natural (hopefully) indoor lighting. It, in their words, "combines a purple (sic) emitter with a red, green, and blue (RGB) phosphor mix, as opposed to the conventional white LED that relies on a blue emitter and yellow phosphor." I think they meant a violet emitter, not purple which would be a combination of red and blue light. It probably got corrupted in the Korean to English translation. Here's their comparison image. Their new LED is in the upper right corner: Used outdoors, this white LED would be even worse for the HB, OIII, and Swan emission bands than the typical B+YR white LED in the lower left corner.

Exactly. I've got a car dealership, tollway interchange, and multiple shopping strip-malls that didn't exist 30 years ago when I moved out here. They are lit up bright as day all night, reflecting light off of everything back into the sky. Luckily, I'm within a few years of retiring. I'll be moving to some truly dark skies when I do.

In my neck of the woods, my dull orange skies have turn bright gray as if there is a gibbous moon somewhere in the sky. In fact, in the middle of the night, it almost seems like twilight. I'm blaming much of that on overly bright LED lights reflecting off pavement. It's so bright, some drivers forget to turn on their headlights at night.

Low pressure sodium (LPS) lamps are quite easy to filter out with just about any light pollution filter. Not so with an LED lamp. Just look at the spectrograph below to understand why: That's why traditional light pollution filters will be rendered nearly obsolete in the very near future, if not today in many locales:

Would it be possible to EQ mount it and then tell it you're at the north pole (for northern hemisphere users) to fool it into EQ mode?

Since the OP doesn't explicitly say new eyepiece market, I'll include readily available eyepieces in the used eyepiece market, since I have experience with several lines that are recently discontinued or partially discontinued. For the Meade HD-60, I'd give the nod to the 6.5mm with the 9mm a close second best. Both are very close in performance to premium eyepieces in my collection at similar focal lengths. For the Starguider Dual ED (Paradigm), I liked the 12mm best despite not being great. The 5mm and 8mm are technically better, but the ability to get sharp focus is a pain. None rise to near premium levels, however. Tight eye relief for eyeglass wearers is also a minus for the entire line except for the 25mm. For the Nagler T4, the 22mm is easily the best of the three due to having the best behaved exit pupil (least SAEP) and longest eye relief. Sharpness wise, the 17mm is very close, but the 22mm wins out. The 12mm has severe EOFB sometimes extending almost to the center depending on conditions. Other 12mm eyepieces didn't show this in side-by-side swaps. For the ES-92, the 17mm is slightly sharper at edge than the 12mm and slightly contrastier across the field. The exit pupil is also easier to hold in the 17mm due to have less SAEP than the 12mm. For the 70 degree eyepieces known as Astro-Tech AF70, Omegon Redline SW, Celestron Ultima LX, etc., the 22mm is far and away the best, closely rivaling the 22mm NT4. The 13mm and 17mm suffer from lateral chromatic aberration making them unusable for me. I've also read that the 13mm has severe EOFB, but I haven't noticed it. I haven't tried the 3.5mm, 5mm, and 8mm because I've read nothing but poor reports about them. For the Morpheus, I can only compare the 9mm and 14mm. Of those two, the 9mm is basically perfect center to edge while the 14mm has subtle field curvature and edge astigmatism. For the Pentax XWs, I can only compare the 3.5mm, 7mm, and 40mm. Of these three, the 3.5mm is basically perfect center to edge while I have issues with lateral chromatic aberration in the 7mm and field curvature and edge astigmatism in the 40mm. If there was a 7mm Delos, I'd swap out the XW for it in a heartbeat. I've considered the 6.5mm Morpheus, but I've read it is tight on usable eye relief relative to the 9mm and 14mm I have. For the Pentax XLs, I can only compare the 5.2mm and 14mm. Of those two, the 5.2mm is basically perfect center to edge while the 14mm has distinct field curvature, but is sharp to the edge once refocused. Among the Aero/Lacerta ED, I can only compare the 35mm and 40mm. Of those two, the 40mm is significantly better corrected center to edge. It's almost the same correction-wise as the 40mm Pentax XW while being significantly lighter. The 35mm ED is wider in AFOV, but has less usable eye relief, so these two ED eyepieces differ in more respects than just center to edge sharpness and contrast. For the APM Hi-FW, the 12.5mm is the automatic winner because there is only one focal length in the line. I really like it despite reports of EOFB that I have yet to notice. It is what the 12mm NT4 should have been. For the Delos, I only have the 10mm, but I have a hard time imagining any other focal length could improve on its sharpness and contrastiness. Stars are pinpoint center to edge even without a coma corrector in my f/6 Dob. I've swapped the CC in and out to confirm this. Other eyepieces easily show the primary's coma without a CC while the Delos somehow does not. I can't explain it. For the Baader Scopos Extreme (Orion Stratus), I only have the 35mm, but it is very nearly perfectly corrected center to edge with exceptionally tight stars in the central 50%. I've not been tempted to get the 30mm having read multiple reports putting it well behind the 35mm. That, and I now have the 30mm APM UFF. For the APM UFF, I can only compare the 24mm and 30mm. Of those two, the 30mm is better corrected center to edge, but the 24mm is really the only game in town for long eye relief and maximum TFOV in a 1.25" 24mm eyepiece. The 30mm is the sharpest 30mm eyepiece across the field that I've used, so I'd consider it best in class across eyepiece lines.

Stray light lightening what should be a more or less black background. It's that orange glow around the sun in your image. Aha! It was clouds scattering sunlight. That would explain it. Here's an image I snapped of the sun through my RACI finderscope with a front solar filter on a partly cloudy day. Sunlight scatter is pretty obvious throughout the frame.

I'm really slacking off at 10mm and especially 11mm (none). 😊

If you don't need the money from the sale of eyepieces, have the space to store them, and enjoy comparing them once in a while; then by all means keep them all with a clear conscience. Do what's right for you. Here's my 9mm to 10mm collection. Curiously, I only have one 10mm eyepiece. Just above that at 12mm to 12.5mm is where the pile-up occurs in my eyepiece collection: Clearly, some are very specialized eyepieces at this focal length.