Moonshane

Maybe it was this one. You have a good memory!

You may well be right mate. I have been finding a lot of my old articles/posts recently !  I also discovered last night that I have an atmospheric dispersion corrector that I have never used!  

I'm sure I must have only referred to someone else's work though as I have never seriously tried to see the HHN as far as I can recall. 🙂

I suppose it's an inescapable fact that dark skies rule for visual observing of dsos, even with narrowband filters for appropriate objects.

My best view of the Cygnus region was at Glan Conwy in the back garden of a house I was working on with a 6" f5 dob and a 32mm TV plossl with an Oiii filter. Truly exceptional. Exit pupil 6.4.

So sorry to hear about the loss of your mirror. You seem to have received really poor service. Hope the new one is a belter.

What scope do you currently have ?

Although I tried this

on a large dob, if you have a smaller one already it may be worth a go.

In general I tend to prefer refractors for doubles. Anything about 100mm plus is good. You need a decent mount though. 

Doubles are good through newts too albeit slightly less defined. Aperture does matter as for many things. That said you can see a lot of beautiful doubles with a small decent frac as above.

Cheers all. Yes I've not seen Jupiter for ages myself.

I think most scopes these days give decent views per aperture. People should make choices based on observing preferences and personal circumstances. As for eyepieces, you may be surprised what little difference there is. Perhaps read https://stargazerslounge.com/topic/166265-cheap-vs-expensive/ which I wrote a rather shocking ten years ago! Not much has changed since then although I did sell the 13mm Ethos, preferring Delites now. The 26mm Nagler remains 😁

I have not observed for a while but dusted off my Equinox 120 and Baader wedge today. The Baader SC filter is built into this and I have used it on other scopes previously with front end and herschel wedges and its definitely worth getting one for brightness control and also optical quality.

In terms of magnification  I use binoviewers so have to add a corrector which at 2.6x makes focal length 2340mm. Today, in intermittent good seeing, I have used 25mm (93x), 20mm (117x) and 15mm (156×). All gave good results but you needed more patience at 156x. I personally preferred the 93x.

Hope this helps.

Cheers

Shane

Sorry for my absence recently, due to many factors but I took a break. 

However, recent solar activity and a recent reach out by @Stu and I am starting to do a bit. Currently have my 120mm Equinox and cool wedge showing me what I've been missing.

Ha later.

Cheers all

Shane

I sometimes find the position more comfortable with a frac if I look 'side on' rather than from the back. The angle of the object can be a bit odd of course but the detail is the same.

I prefer sitting too.

Top result Stu 👍👍

I split this regularly with my 80mm frac but at 150x. Don't forget to check Vega while in the area. 

I'll try next time out to see how low I can go  with my 120mm Equinox.

Just saw this mate. Ouch. Although I did think it looked like it would be ok with a new end ring.

All looking great to me 👍👍

I could not stand being under a cover so made these

13 hours ago, John said:

The colour of the scope was only small one part of the package of the scope that I linked to. The specification of the scope, the mount and it's price all added up to what I felt was a poor deal for the budding astronomer. If the price had been £25 then I would not have thought to mention it.

I suspect that I've no chance of redeeming this thread though so fair enough. Apologies to those who I might have inadvertetly offended.

As the saying goes, "the first thing to do when you are in a hole is to stop digging" 

 

 

 

Oh dear. Can't we even insult inanimate objects now? Truly it seems the end of any sort of deprecating humour is nigh. 

2 hours ago, John said:

I fell into the trap of commenting on the options that the OP is considering

There are other very good  options of course

Good point John. 😄

How can it be waterproof?

A6" f5 Newtonian on an AZ4 is a pretty good combo.

Bear in mind you will need a correct image diagonal (prism) for terrestrial use or your image will be left right reversed. Maybe this is not an issue though for stated use.

Here's my 12" and 16" both f4

You may be right Craig but it's the OOUK one and it usually has a 2" extension on it which I can remove. I can just reach focus with binos and a 1.7x GPC.My 12" and 16" are the same. I'll be doing a bit of trial and error.

Totally off topic but I just noticed your avatar and loved Blakes 7 when I was a kid. In fact I was at an event in Manchester for the opening of a sci-fi themed night club called Fab Cafe  http://www.fabcafe.co.uk/  and Gareth Thomas was there as the VIP.

12 minutes ago, BGazing said:

Having trawled some threads for refractor measurement it appears that 2.6 GPC is around 2.46x when mounted on the diagonal and bino threaded directly on it and that the values are growing in a linear fashion with additional optical path, see here https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/397010-glasspath-magnification-factors-including-the-26/

For every 100mm of additional optical length between bino and GPC there appears to be 1.6 increase in magnification, approximately.

Mounting in front of BBHS T2 would add 48mm optical path, so 0.77 in plus, for a total of  3.23x.

Mounting in front of T2 zeiss prism would add 38mm optical path so 0.6 mag more, total 3.06x.

ZWO ADC body alone is 29mm, so 0.46 mag. If GPC is screwed into the diagonal, the magnification is 2.92x. Mounting bino on that ADC EP holder is probably around 17-18 additional millimetres, so around 0.28 more mag, altogether 3.2x. That's how it felt last night.   So mounting it in front of BBHS and in the default position with the ZWO brings to similar magnitude. If 2mm optical path male to male T2 ring is used instead of the EP holder this reduces magnitude to around 2.95x.

I do not know whether mounting via Zeiss bayonette adds anything in comparison with the T2 nut ring. This combination  https://www.teleskop-express.de/shop/product_info.php/language/en/info/p7744_Baader-2456322---Schwerlast-T2-Wechselsystem.html is listed as 15mm optical path, but it is difficult to know how much it adds to the default option and is in any event a different construction of bayonette than the one used in MBII. But if one wants to use it to connect ADC to diagonal and allow for rotation it would apparently add 0.24x.

Hope my math is correct, apologies if it is not.

This is excellent info - thank you!

Just had a read and for my f11 6" Newt, I hope I might just get away with no barlow for visual. I'll try it and see what the view is like.  The issue with a barlow would be that assuming 4x amplification, it would mean a 6.4m focal length LOL. This would make my 27mm Panoptic a high power planetary eyepiece at 237x.

That said I am more likely I think to use my 120mm Equinox. Over the next week I am hoping to actually put the thing into play.

Cheers Craig

I have printed it for reading so will digest 👍