Louis D

6 hours ago, JeremyS said:

I’ll get my mac🧥 …..

 

I had to look up that reference.  We don't have them much over here.

Have you done a Panoptic 41mm vs Lacerta 40mm comparison for grins?  My 40mm Meade 5000 SWA (Maxvision SWA) is nearly perfect edge to edge compared to either the 40mm Pentax XW or 40mm Lacerta, but boy is it heavy and bulky.

That's Mak (as in Maksutov, the Russian designer or it).  I thought of the Apple product at first for Mac.  My next thought was, why the choice between a computer and a telescope for a 5 year old?  Then I got it by your second sentence.  I'm a bit slow.

As far as Barlows, I'm a sucker for 1990s Japanese made Barlows only available used, so I can't really make any modern, off-the-shelf recommendations for them.

At least eye floaters shouldn't be an issue for a 5 year old at high powers and small exit pupils like it can be for us gray hairs.

3 hours ago, great_bear said:

I have recently painted the inside of the baffle tube for my Mak 180 Pro with the paint mentioned in the original post.

I was pleased at the very neat job that I did, but to be honest it has made absolutely no difference (thankfully it didn’t make it worse!). So it seems that at the very oblique angles that light strikes a Mak baffle tube, this paint offers no benefit. 

So don’t bother doing this on a Mak.

I may have an attempt at flocking instead at some point in the future - there is just about enough room in the Mak 180 if the flocking material isn’t too thick and will stay stuck down.

What is the rear port diameter?  In my 127 Mak, I get reflections off the rear baffle tube from bright stars when using 2" eyepieces because the rear port is only 27mm in diameter at best.  I keep thinking I'll install flocking inside the rear tube someday to tame those reflections.

Had a quick peek at the moon this morning through the 127 Synta Mak with both the 40mm Lacerta ED and 40mm Pentax XW.  Surprisingly, not much improvement over the views through faster scopes.  The Lacerta still starts to blur at about 85% to the edge, the Pentax just a bit closer to the edge.

Overall, I was very surprised that neither was sharp to the edge at f/12 and improved only slightly from f/6.6.

12 minutes ago, RobertI said:

surely just one little eyepiece can’t hurt? 😉

A very slippery slope indeed as I can attest. 🙄

1 hour ago, Mr Spock said:

Done. I'll do a full review of them once they arrive and get some use 👍

Way to take one for the team!

2 hours ago, Mr Spock said:

I'm thinking about a 16mm and a 10mm. I don't have any really wide eyepieces anymore and the Naglers are stupid expensive - £398 for the 16mm as opposed to £89 for the Nirvana. I'm sure they aren't more than four times better, especially for my intended 'casual' use.

Here's Ernest in Russia's review/test of the 16mm Levenhuk Ra version.  He briefly mentions the 16mm NT5 and has a photo of them side-by-side.

1 hour ago, dweller25 said:

Where’s the Leica ASPH zoom?  😈

Well, I am looking at having Santa drop off an APM SuperZoom for Christmas if they come back in stock before then. 😁

I've never been convinced that the Leica ASPH zoom would have enough eye relief for me and my massive astigmatism.

Nothing wrong with you wrt eyepieces.  To each their own.  I must be going now, or I'll be late for my EA (EyepieceAholics Anonymous) meeting: 😉

I'll never understand the recommendation of binoculars for astronomy.  Unless you buy the expensive image stabilized ones or mount them on a tripod, the view through them at night is extremely disappointing because stars and objects dance around due to human unsteadiness.  That, and 7x to 12x just doesn't cut it.  You'd think that at least large objects like the North American nebula would pop out at low power, but they don't unless you're under very dark skies.  I had binoculars for years, and they were fine for peeking at lunar eclipses, planetary conjunctions, etc.  You can't really learn constellations through them because they're way too big to fit in the field of view.  However, once I bought a Dob, I went wild learning the skies, so I could find Messier objects, observe Jovian moon (and their shadows) transits, resolve Cassini's Division, follow Venus's phases, explore the lunar surface, etc.  I tried the binocular route for a few years before buying my first scope based on recommendations, but found it extremely disappointing.

Did anyone on here find binocular astronomy anywhere near as exciting as telescope astronomy?  Without excitement, passion quickly wanes and interests migrate elsewhere.

I bought my XLs in 1998.  XWs didn't show up for another 5 years.  I guess the last XL version lasted quite a while.

It appears to be the same as the Orion EON 110mm ED f/6.0 refractor which has been around for at least 8 years.  Do a Google search on it to see what has been said about it.  They should be equally applicable to the SM version.

It should be a major step up from an ST 102 color correction wise.  It won't be apochromatic at high powers, but it won't be horrible, either.

5 hours ago, Don Pensack said:

Pentax XW eyepieces have undercuts on the barrels.  The older XL eyepieces did not.

Here's some poor pictures of my various Pentax XF/XL/XW eyepieces.  All have undercuts:

2 hours ago, Franklin said:

I'm so used to sitting in the garden freezing my **** off that I very rarely heat my home, even in the winter!

How do you avoid bursting pipes?  Here in Texas during Snowmageddon 2021, without power to run furnaces, many houses ended up with burst pipes in the walls, ceilings, and floors.  Do you folks rarely go below freezing in the winter despite being at 53°N?

On 06/09/2022 at 11:22, Mr Spock said:

I hear NASA has just placed an order for a few cans of this:

Being that Artemis is in the US, and having been bombarded by the following TV commercials a few years back, I'd recommend Flex Seal or Flex Tape for the job: 😁

Just keep an eye on the wood through which the metal rod passes.  It can split, dumping you on the ground:

Those feet will also be great to keep it from sinking into soft soil.

10 hours ago, Stephenstargazer said:

Is the Stella Lyra LER WA possibly a poor mans LVW ??🤫

Here is Ernest in Russia's testing/review of the entire line as the Levenhuk Ra.

3 hours ago, globular said:

Did you ever cut a slot with scissors, to mirror the one already there, to turn them into double sided?
Happy days.

Absolutely with the 5 1/4" ones.  There were square hole punches that worked very well for this purpose.

Just saying, when I take a statistical cross section of an observing field of dozens of scopes of all types, and the SCTs are putting up the least pleasing images regardless of aperture, I'm going to blame the design.  After attending multiple public star parties in the 90s, it was clear enough to me that I took a hard pass on buying an SCT and instead bought a Dob (Newtonian).  A Dob simply wasn't what I thought of as a desirable telescope as a newbie (big, dumpy, awkward, undriven, yard cannon, etc.), but multiple comparisons over several years lead me to that decision.  I'm still using that scope 24 years later on a regular basis.  I've since added an achromat, an ED, an APO, a big Dob, and a Mak, but I still love that midsized Dob all these years later.  Other than an EdgeHD, I haven't seriously considered getting an SCT of any size in those 20+ years.

3 hours ago, Andy ES said:

Can I please ask what mushiness actually is, or how does it manifest its self.

Stars don't focus to pinpoints.  They're a bit bloated at best focus compared to the view through a refractor or Newt under the same conditions.  Planets don't manifest much distinct detail as compared to other designs.  This SCT mushiness becomes painfully obvious at star parties if you take the time to walk around the observing field and check out the views through a multitude of scopes all dealing with the same conditions.  There's simply no way every SCT is out of collimation when so many advanced observers are about.  Only the Edge HD design has shown sharp images rivaling Newts and refractors in my experience.  As such, I'm going to chalk the mushiness up to uncorrected spherical and other aberrations in a standard SCT.

5 hours ago, Marvin Jenkins said:

Even in broad daylight the image through the EP (20mm) was incredibly dull and dark.

Well, you are working with a 1.3mm exit pupil, which is fairly small, but certainly not very small.  Try looking at the aerial image without an eyepiece as you did before and see how dim the telephone pole looks.

I just had a funny thought.  The upcoming generation of kids will one day ask why they're called telephone poles when they mostly carry electricity or perhaps broadband lines.  It's funny to see them try to dial a rotary phone in a period school play.  My daughter was doing just that 10 years back in a high school play.  She dialed the number and then picked up the receiver!  Us oldies in the audience stifled our chortles as best as we could.

4 hours ago, Marvin Jenkins said:

Thank you for the compliment, it is inside my house. I live the Quercy Blanc region and all the stone in this region is white limestone, a left over from a shallow tropical evaporitic sea.

Same here in our part of Texas.  Locally quarried white limestone from an ancient inland seabed is a very popular as an exterior cladding: