Louis D

As @Don Pensack pointed out in another recent thread: Sky Rover (China direct, Australia) APM (Germany) Tecnosky (Italy) Celestron (USA) Meade (USA) Altair Astro (UK) Stella Lyra (UK) And I'll add Orion USA for the 24mm. I think their version is the only one to include a thread-on 2" barrel.

@Moonlit Knight and @Neil H, are Celestron Omni Plossls really that much better than FLO's Astro Essentials Plossls to justify them costing double the price (or more in the case of the 32mm and 40mm)? The 6mm to 15mm COPs are only £16 less than the BST Starguiders at FLO while the 32mm and 40mm COPs are £10 more than the BSTs. The COPs don't seem like much of a value proposition to me when starting out. Am I missing something when people recommend them?

If you're going to insist on using that relatively heavy 2" diagonal, rather than simply exclude 2" eyepieces due to balance reasons, how about giving an upper limit on eyepiece weight you'd be willing to allow for? I've got a 12.5mm APM Hi-FW that weighs 555 grams, so not exactly a lightweight despite being a 1.25" eyepiece. There are some lighter weight 2" eyepieces out there like the 40mm Lacerta ED at 501 grams that perform well at f/6 and cost under £150.

If you're only going to use 1.25" eyepiece for reasons of balance on a small scope, I'd get a quality 1.25" diagonal to further reduce the loading at the back of your scope. A 2" diagonal adds a lot of weight in my experience with the GSO dielectric.

@LDW1 I do have to ask, are Canadians paid roughly 35% more than Americans for the equivalent job to offset the negative effect of the CAD to USD currency exchange rate? I ask because my company adjusts pay based on the employee's local cost of living, and exchange rates certainly have an effect on purchasing power of foreign made goods or goods made with foreign made parts.

I did quote both MSRP and sales and referenced each to the same: I'll explicitly do the math on each since you're challenging my assertion that the two track less than 20% apart: MSRP: (266-226)/226 * 100% = 17.7% Sale: (199-169)/169 * 100% = 17.8% The 30mm UFF tracks almost exactly the same percentage higher either in MSRP or sales price above the 31mm Hyperion. Where did I mix the two?

Not every question posed on here has an answer. I will admit I was surprised by how cheap the 24mm Explore Scientific 68° is in the UK, £132.50 or $162.41 USD after conversion and before VAT. The same eyepiece is ‎$269.99 here in the US, so the thought never crossed my mind to recommend it since the cheapest of the line is $219.99 before tax in the US, making it £215 after converting to GBP and adding in VAT. This would be well above the OP's limit of £150. Regardless, the 24mm ES-68 does not have a big eye lens and is very difficult to use with eyeglasses as a result. The 24mm APM UFF is much better in this respect and has a 37mm diameter eye lens.

Do you have another scope besides the Skywatcher Heritage 130P in your sig? There's no use for a 2-inch diagonal in it. Big eye lens eyepieces equates to big prices. Your Skywatcher Heritage 130P is demanding on eyepieces at f/5. Low cost eyepieces don't generally play well with f/5 scopes. Up your budget, and I can recommend the Morpheus, Pentax XW, and Tele Vue Delos lines.

Eyepieces: Lots has been written on this. If you don't have astigmatism in your observing eye, you can get away with eyepieces that have less eye relief. However, below about 10mm to 12mm of eye relief, and most folks complain about it being too tight. For Plossls, this happens below 12mm or so. I would go with BSTs at 12mm and below and with Plossls above that. A good set would be 32mm and 20mm Plossls and 12mm, 8mm, and 5mm BSTs. You also wouldn't duplicate your 25mm or 10mm eyepieces focal lengths, either. You can try sealing the ends of the scope and the focuser with covers/plugs while outside to slow the inrush of indoor humidity that leads to condensation on optical surfaces before they have a chances to warm up. Don't do this if it is more humid outdoors as in the summer when bringing it into an air conditioned house. You'll trap the excess moist air inside the scope which is a very bad idea. Dirt and debris on mirrors usually has little to no effect on optical quality. Conversely, adding microscratches to a first surface mirror due to aggressive cleaning can lead to increased scattered light and lower contrast. Diffraction spikes are perfectly normal. To decrease them with curved spider vanes leads to spreading the light of those spikes across the field of view as a brightening of the background, decreasing contrast. This can make seeing nebula more difficult.

As long as price comparisons are done consistently within a single country, in a single currency, and consistently including or excluding tax, they should be fine. The Meade and Celestron brands tend to price their gear on the high side. I guess they're trading on their past reputations as innovators in SCTs. Celestron is now a Synta brand while Meade is an Orion USA brand.

The 31mm Hyperion has an MSRP of $226 (USD) and is on sale right now for $169 (USD). The 30mm Celestron Ultima Edge is exactly the same optically as about a dozen other UFFs rebrandings, so let's just use the original APM UFF as the reference. It has an MSRP of $266 (USD) and is on sale for $199 (USD) right now. I can't help it if folks don't shop around for the best deal on rebranded optics. I'm pretty sure KUO makes all of them. That makes for a difference of $40 in MSRP and $30 in sale price. I'd call that roughly the same ballpark for pricing. I know if I could upgrade my car for less than a 20% increase in price and go from utilitarian performance to luxury or sporty performance in so doing, I'd be all over it in a heartbeat. The difference in resale value in 5 or 10 years time would also make it more worthwhile as well to upgrade at purchase time.

And yet their MSRPs are similar.

I bought a pair of new old stock 100% Sorbothane insoles from the 90s off of ebay and cut vibration absorption pads to put under each tripod foot. It cut settling time with my 127 Mak from 3-4 seconds to 1/2 second. It went from unbearable to completely usable. This was with a Manfrotto 058B tripod and DSV-2B mount.

As my move-up scope from my AT72ED, I bought a used TS-Optics 90mm FPL-53 APO f/6.6 Triplet used a few years back for about $900 shipped. It has been fantastic. I love the 2.5" focuser, the camera angle adjuster (beats loosening the diagonal retention screws to angle the diagonal to the side), and the complete lack of false color in focus. I will say I've not been happy with the slow cool down time of the triplet objective. Based on this, I'd recommend a doublet. Getting even an FPL-51 equivalent doublet would be a major improvement over an achromat at these short f-ratios. Thus, I'd say go for a 102ED over a ST102. Certainly, an FPL-53 doublet would have correction comparable to an FPL-51 triplet, but the cost is considerably higher than an FPL-51 doublet. TS-Optics has 102mm ED doublets in both FPL-51 and FPL-53 if you want to compare prices.

Way to be on top of this, @FLO!

Yes, the other versions I linked to quote 13 to 15 pounds. I think the variance can be accounted for with whether or not the rings are included in the weight. OPT is also selling the StarField Gear Series f/7 115mm Triplet for $2,130+tax. Their description states FPL-53 glass: The StarField Gear Series f/7 115mm Triplet APO Telescope with FPL53 changes the game in wide field imaging. The StarField website description does not specify glass type, however. FLO is including a hard case with theirs. Orion seems to be the only one else including a hard case.

I wonder how it compares to the TS-Optics PHOTOLINE 115 mm f/7 Triplet, Orion EON 115mm ED Triplet and Astro-Tech AT115EDT F/7 ED Triplet refractors. It costs quite a bit more (over $1000 more) than any of those, so it might be using FPL-53 glass. However, why wouldn't @FLO advertise that fact? Perhaps they can chime in and clarify.

It's so difficult to get above a 4mm exit pupil with an f/10 SCT or f/12 Mak, let alone an f/15 Mak. You need a 40mm or longer eyepiece just to get close to 4mm. 50mm or more is better. Then the problem becomes you're looking down a straw.

Makes you wonder why the Chinese optics houses haven't come out with their own image stabilized optics. If they could do it for 1/3 the price of Japanese optics, they'd probably sell a bunch of them.

You can thread 2" filters on the bottom of many 2" to 1.25" adapters. Just be careful the bottom of the 1.25" eyepiece doesn't hit the 2" filter.

Does StarSense work in Bortle 7 and higher skies with limited sightlines? I often can see only a few brightest stars naked eye anymore from my backyard thanks to all of the development around me. I find that SkEye works well for me to get my bearings under these conditions because it doesn't rely on actually seeing the sky at all. I can point it through trees and buildings to get an idea of what will be visible in the near future as well. It usually gets me to within 3 to 4 degrees of the target which is generally enough for me to fine tune my object alignment with a finder scope or lowest power eyepiece.

I setup my grown daughter with a 127mm Mak on an alt-az mount attached to a heavy duty camera tripod for camping usage. It's compact enough to not take up too much space in the back of her SUV. She and her husband already have a dog and all their camping gear in there, so space is at a bit of a premium.

I'd check my HD-60 set to compare, but I've loaned them out to my grown daughter for her use. I don't ever recall having any issues fully seating them in a diagonal or Newtonian focuser, though. The field stop was a bit indistinct in a most focal lengths IIRC, but I always wrote it off as the field stop being positioned incorrectly. I had never considered poor glass or cementing issues. I never noticed scatter in the field around bright objects that such flaws usually introduce. It doesn't mean it wasn't there, just that I never noticed it.

32mm Plossls are always handy to toss into a travel kit even after you've upgraded eyepieces. I took one to Nebraska in 2017 for the total solar eclipse along with an 8-24mm zoom and ST80 scope. It was perfect for low power views to center the solar disk and to observe the extent of the corona. I wasn't worried about any of my kit being stolen while stored in my unattended vehicle due to the low total cost and easy replacement, and yet it was more than sufficient to enjoy viewing the eclipse.

Have a look at the post below in my thread showing through the eyepiece images I've taken through my eyepieces using a field flattened 72ED refractor (f/6). The 25mm BST is already getting fuzzy while the 32mm Plossls are still sharp to the edge. The 24mm APM UFF is better, but still not perfect, for a lot more money. It's up to you if you can live with the inner 75% being pretty sharp with the outer 25% getting progressively fuzzier with the 25mm BST. In a faster than f/6 scope, the outer field that is fuzzy will grow toward the center and be even fuzzier in the outer 25%. At f/10, it will be fine, though.