michael.h.f.wilkinson

I get a full disk image on my ASI178MM with my APM 80mm F/6 (480mm focal length), but not with loads of room to spare, the Lunt has 500mm focal length, which might be a bit tight around perihelion (which is in winter)

Just stacked a better shot taken yesterday with the Meade SN-6 and ASI183MC. Also taken through cloud, but I apparently caught more decent frames.

Clouds rushed in just as I had got the scope out, and collimated, but managed to grab a few hundred frames with the ASI183MC. I didn't get this scope for lunar, but it proves this combo has a nice FOV. Not that sharp, but through fairly thick cloud, this is a promising result. The experiment also showed that my new laptop can store images far faster than the old, allowing 19.6 FPS sustained at 20 Mpixel resolution. The old struggled to reach 5. Now THAT is progress.

Amazing piece of kit!

Got a special beer mug as gift

Had great fun giving a talk on solar observing and imaging at the Astronomy on Tap event organised by the outreach group of the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute. The movie on the solar eclipse of 2017 with pelicans transiting the sun was greatly appreciated.

T2 is a standard thread, so any T2 adapter will work.

A focal reducer (which also acts as flattener) is often used. It comes with a T2 thread on the camera side, so all you need to attach a camera is the appropriate T2 adapter.

The Sky-Watcher 80ED has a very high reputation. My APM 80mm F/6 triplet was also fairly cheap when I bought it, but they have gone up in price since then. The same scope is sold under a variety of brand names. Both the 80ED and the 80 mm triplet scopes are capable for imaging DSOs and for visual on wide field objects. The will show quite a bit of lunar and planetary detail, but are definitely not as good in that area as larger aperture instruments.

The EQ-5 is a clone of the Vixen GP mount I have had for over 24 years (so it's doing something right 😉). The Vixen original is considered more stable, but I have done a lot of deep sky imaging with a humble EQ3-2 (including the two shown here). The Jupiter image was taken with the Vixen GP mount. The EQ-5 should suffice, although an HEQ-5 is often considered a minimum requirement.

For visual, aperture is king, and the same holds for planetary imaging. For DSO imaging, short apochromatic refractor are better, as fast optics allow shorter exposure times, and wider fields of view. A 4" refractor will easily be outperformed by my 8" Schmidt-Cassegrain on all planets, and shows far better views of all compact DSOs. The image below was taken with my Celestron C8. By contrast my little APM 80 mm F/6 triplet (apochromatic) is way better for wide-field views and imaging many DSOs, as shown below: If you first want to go down the visual route, an 8" Dobson is probably the safest choice, for a modest investment. My C8 offers the same aperture, in a more compact package, with a slightly narrower FOV, and at a considerably higher price. If you really want to go into imaging, especially in the case of DSOs, you need to think about the mount first. An equatorial mount is a must, and it needs to be robust.

I am glad you are happy with the scope, but I am puzzled by the suggestion that the Cigar Galaxy didn't show up in the C8. I have had a C8 for 24+ years and have frequently looked at the Cigar Galaxy from my suburban garden. It has such a good surface brightness that it always stands out boldly, with a lot of internal detail visible. It is in fact an easy target, even for my 10x42 birding binoculars, and striking when viewed with my 16x80s. Only if the skies are hazy do I struggle with the Cigar. I am also a bit worried about the assertion that software upgrades will necessarily make image quality better. Ultimately, the resolution of the camera and aperture limit what can be done. As an image processing professional, I know software can get more detail out of image data, but there are limits.

I read a review that on the minus side listed: "is attached to the LXD55 mount" as the first drawback. They weren't too impressed with the 6x30 finder scope, but it is actually a bit better than the one on my old C8. Having said that, you really need a fairly wide angle finder, because the scope itself has this 3.75° maximum FOV. I will replace the finder with a RACI (9x50) with a 5.6° FOV, but might well try a red-dot finder instead. The focuser has already been replaced by a decent dual speed, which holds even my biggest camera with ease. The optics were praised in the review, and from what I have seen so far, rightly so.

Managed to catch a brief gap in the clouds with the humble Lunt 8x32 SUNoculars, and lo and behold, a spot was visible, northern hemisphere, right of centre. It must be a decent size to be visible at just 8x. I rushed downstairs with the Coronado SolarMax-II 60 I keep in my office, but I was too late to set it up , clouds rushed in. Still, I actually spotted a spot, so shouldn't grumble (too much)

Not here. It was bucketing down, snow, hail, rain, we got everything bar sleet

Great result! No luck here, alas, just clouds, rain, and more clouds

I still have this mini-Dob (gathering dust, I will donate it to the outreach group of the Astronomical Institute I also built an alt-az mount for solar work, which handled the APM 80 mm with ease, and could even manage the C8 My p-mount is of course also an alt-az, and also a DIY item The only "proper" alt-az mount I bought is the little mini-giro

I have 1.25" 2x and 3x TeleXtenders from Meade (apparently optically very similar to the ES version), and cannot really see any difference in performance with my 2.5x PowerMate

I note it is only claimed to be achromatic, rather than apochromatic. They note "markedly reduced false colour", which has alarm bells ringing. I would indeed go for something like the SW 80ED, with focal reducer. I myself have an APM 80mm F/6 triplet with TeleVue TRF2008 0.8x reducer which works nicely. The EQ 6 you have is a more than adequate mount for AP, of course.

Very brief first light report here:

From the same day as John's memory: We got a 4 minute gap in the clouds outside Sarreguemine in the Alsace region, and I shot this image with my C8. A few years ago, I captured the 2017 eclipse with rather more success:

I sold the LVs when I switched first to Radians, and then to XW and Delos EPs. A retired colleague of mine bought them to replace his 10 mm Plössl, and is still very happy with them. It is better that they get used than sit in a box.

I have just held the SLV 5 and 15 mm EPs up to my eyes and the 5 definitely has a slightly smaller AFOV. They are very comfortable to use with glasses, I find. The coffee tone wasn't obvious in my LV 9, but it was in the LV 7mm

I have three SLVs (5, 9, and 15mm) for my travel gear, and they are excellent. They are very close to the performance of my Pentax XW EPs, in everything except field of view. They are comfortable, very sharp, and better than my previous LVs. I only had the 7 and 9 mm, and I found them to have a slight brown cast absent in the SLVs. Furthermore, the stiff rubber eyecups were a pain to roll back, especially in cold weather. I can wholeheartedly recommend the SLVs

I think it is quite tricky with 80mm aperture. My luck with the 16x80 binoculars (where you have the advantage of TWO 80mm scopes) was a bit patchy. I did spot it once, quite distinctly, but in the rich star fields in Perseus, this object really calls for a bigger scope (and clearer skies).