Louis D

At least on Mars during the last opposition, the 3.5mm XW and 5.2mm XL Pentaxes produced overly bright and washed out images that lacked detail in monovision. Before packing up and declaring it a bust, I popped in my Arcturus binoviewers with 40+ year old Bausch & Lomb wide field 15x microscope eyepieces and a 2x Meade 140 Barlow optical nose piece operating at 3x to reach focus. Suddenly, Mars had an almost photographic look to it. There was no overwhelming brightness, just insane levels of fine detail visible. I switched back to the Pentaxes, but the view was the same as before. Needless to say, I spent the rest of the night soaking in the BV views. I get similar results with the full moon. Jupiter benefits some as well. I haven't tried the BVs on Saturn much if at all. It may be too dim to benefit. My point is, the view may not improve in monovision no matter how good the eyepiece is.

Guys like that are lucky you have strong gun laws over there. Rightly or wrongly, Burglar Bill might very well have been shot doing that here in Texas.

Do you have a 25mm or so eyepiece you could try in the 3x Barlow first to rule out simply pushing your optics too far?

In our neighborhood, thieves generally go for the quick, easy targets, cars and trucks parked in driveways and on the street. I can't recall any backyard break-ins.

I had the catalytic converter stolen from my parked van by an armed gang (they shot another homeowner that challenged them) that used an angle grinder to quickly saw through the exhaust pipes at either end. I'm sure one could be used to go through tripod legs or tie-downs in short order as well to get the OTA/mount head. However, telescopes are much harder to move on the black market than CCs.

Coated generally refers to singly coated, usually with MgF2 (magnesium fluoride). You can recognize it because the only reflection color is violet/purple. Multicoated generally refers to two or more coating layers of differing compositions. You can recognize them because you'll see a range of reflected colors such as red, green, yellow, and blue, depending on the angle of incidence. Often, only non-cemented surfaces are coated. Higher end optics will sometimes coat even the cemented surfaces.

You could try putting it on a wheeled platform and rolling it into a locked shed. Out of sight, out of mind.

I assume you already read this thread on here. There are more threads on these bins on both SGL and CN.

I've noticed the red and blue ends of the spectrum don't focus at the same point radially in my 30mm ES-82. On Jupiter, I could literally see fully separated red and blue versions at the edge. I was mystified why there were no other color versions in between, though. The 30mm APM UFF does not suffer from this artifact.

I've never see blue bloat in my AT72ED equipped with FPL-51. In fact, at large to middling exit pupils, there's no significant color to speak of. At small to tiny exit pupils, there's plenty of obvious violet and red flaring around bright stars and planets. I guess it depends on what you like to observe with an ~80mm ED refractor.

I have the Astro-Tech 72ED which appears to be made by the same company as the StellaMira. I really like the scope except for the focuser which slips under heavy loads. It appears that the SM 80 fixed this with a R&P focuser. I would go for the FPL-53 over the likely FPL-51 of the SW any day. Even at 72mm, I can see plenty of violet/red flare on bright stars and planets at higher powers in my FPL-51 equipped scope. Also note the nice long focuser travel. The SW doesn't even show the focuser extended or mention how much it extends which makes me suspicious.

But not the first rule of marketing. I'm dealing with that at work right now. Marketing and the execs have already oversold our product before it has even been designed.

Never claimed it was a review, merely a comparison.

A comparison to the BHZ over on CN. Biggest surprise, a sub-70 degree AFOV.

Combine push-to with an equatorial platform, and you can have both computerized object finding with tracking. Since the tracking is equatorial, some astrophotography is also possible.

In particular, the GSO mirrors can't be too bad if Rob Teeter offered them in his 8" and 10" Solid Tube series scopes. Why would he have put GSO mirrors in his multi-thousand dollar bespoke scopes if they were terrible? It's pretty much everything else that made his telescopes so expensive that the Synta/GSO scope lag behind on.

For that short of a rise, most folks in the US put in a ramp (generally made of treated wood so it can be removed when no longer needed) where your pavers are to the left, and leave a platform large enough for a wheeled chair to spin 90 degrees to enter the doorway. For longer rises, there are these lifts available:

So, are all the white pick-up trucks and work vans driven by burly contractors in the US also girly by that person's thinking?

If you have a gmail account, you can post the video to YouTube and post the private link to it here.

The Bresser is JOC made (sold as Explore Scientific FirstLight in the US). I like the giant alt trunnions just like custom made Dobs use. The azimuth bearing design is also closer to custom made Dob designs. I've read it does need a bit of bar soap smeared on it to get the motion smoother, though. Overall, it seems like the best starting point of the bunch. Skywatcher is Synta made, which is not surprising when you think about it. Synta specializes in basic scopes of all types. They work, but the mechanicals leave a lot to be desired. For example, that focuser is inexplicable having to swap the entire adapter to change from 2" to 1.25" eyepieces. Literally no one else does it that way for good reason. Stellalyra and Ursa Major are both GSO made. The former is the premium scope while the latter is the entry level scope. In the US, the former is sold by Orion as Skyline and by Apertura as AD8/10/12. The latter is sold by Orion as SkyQuest (with a slightly restyled base) and probably others. Both are good deals, but I'm not a fan of their small altitude trunnions. They don't hold their position when switching out heavy eyepieces unless high tension is applied via either tension springs or tension knobs. Large trunnions don't needs such crutches to hold position. I also have my doubts about the durability of their lazy Susan azimuth bearing. That, and it can have too little stiction to resist slight motions at the eyepiece such as when swapping eyepieces. The focuser seems nice, though.

Back in the 1990s, I planned my initial observing sessions using Xephem running on a Unix box at work. I made copies of Wil Tirion's The Bright Star Atlas 2000.0 charts at the back of Binocular Astronomy for reference and laminated them (also at work😁). I use Stellarium on a PC ahead of time to plan my observing. It's lightyears ahead of 1990s Xephem in terms of usability, features, and appearance. Nowadays, I hold SkEye to the sky on my phone to help find objects due to the massively increased sky glow in my backyard skies. Once I know where the constellations are and have swung the telescope in the general direction, I can take it from there using the scope and a low power eyepiece to narrow it down. I also have Orion's DeepMap 600 star chart in my astro toolbox. The light on dark printing is nearly impossible to read at night, and the distortion near the poles is immense, so I mostly use it as the background for eyepiece beauty shots. I still like to pull out my Chandler The Night Sky planisphere to quickly figure out where constellations will be at what time on a given date.

A much cheaper ED option to dip you toes in the ED spotting scope water is the Svbony SV406P. Even an 80mm ED spotter will "show" Saturn's rings and some banding on Jupiter along with its Galilean moons. Spotting scopes may have limits on what eyepieces you can use with them. Both the Celestron and Svbony take 1.25" eyepieces natively, but with their limited back focus, not all might come to focus. Spotting scopes also have loads of undersized prisms that will tend to vignette widest field eyepieces like a 32mm Plossl or 24mm Panoptic.

Try and locate high density P&P foam. My Doskocil case came with it 20+ years ago, and it's still in great shape. The rest of my cheaper cases came with the standard lower density P&P foam, and it is indeed tearing apart more easily despite being much younger. I don't know how to distinguish it when ordering online other than mine is a lighter gray than the lower density foam with a much finer hole size. You might need to talk to a foam distributor specialist to make it clear what you want. I took a closeup picture of my darker low density foam left and above my lighter high density foam in the lower right to try and show the difference:

What focal length scope(s)? I use my 5.2mm XL to resolve globular clusters at around 230x in my scope. My 7mm XW is just starting to resolve GCs at around 170x. The 3.5mm XW is usually too much power.

I would get a deep case and store your eyepieces and Barlows vertically. I've been doing this for over 20 years in an XL Doskocil case to good effect. The closest equivalent at The Case Shop is the MAX CASE MAX505. You'll have plenty of space for future expansion as well. It would be just over 100 Euros with foam.