Raph-in-the-sky

Very interesting! How good is the GSO/Revelation coma corrector? Obviously I am not expecting Paracorr performance but how does it compare to other cheap coma corrector (SW, baader,...)? Would you care to eleborate?

I'm also quite new to this hobby. I found a good way to, at the same time, have fun and learn my way around. I started with the constellation Cygnus and found a few nice objects to look at it that constelation (yay, enjoyment). Then I would try to find something close to Cygnus like the ring nebula (now I now what Lyra looks like) then a bit further, say M13 in Hercules... and so on until I have a complete mental map of all northern constellations.

Hey! This is probably not what you want to hear but if the Celestron Kit is not paid yet, I would advise not buying it. The 15mm eyepiece is a Kelner which is an old design and gives very limited apparent field of view. The 6mm is a Plossl which is a good design for longer focal lenght eyepiece (15mm +) but will have a very short eyerelief at 6mm (thus not comfortable to use, you would have to jam your eye against the eyepiece). The barlow is likely to be pretty bad too and color filters are not that usefull (actually very few observer use color filter on a regular basis). Finally, the whole thing will have very low resale value when/if you decide to upgrade. I would do as suggested by Rob and first assess what I have and then I would try to buy a few eyepiece on the second hand market (amateur astronomer tend to maintain their stuff very well and if you don't like something you can always resell it with no or minimal loss). Clear skies, Raph

Enjoy it! You just got yourself a fine instrument!

Now, I just have to wait for Mars and Jupiter to come back...

Fair enough.

That's kind of what I expected. Still, I'd rather pay £3 less than £3 more.

One thing that has not been mentionned is that with an optical finder (either 9x50 or RACI), you will see a lot more stars than with naked eye. This is great if you already know roughly were you are but can be very confusing for initial alignment. Also it's very difficult to initially point the telescope by look along the tube hence Telrad Finder! One more thing, astroshop.eu sells radian finders which are identical to Telrad but 20Eur cheaper... Although you should check if it's worth it once the delivery cost is included.

Actually, I got a cheap laser collimator as soon as I heard it was possible to collimate it by yourself. Initially, I was skeptical towards those as it seems that a bad laser collimator would mess up collimation more than it would improve it but knowing I could easily fix it I got one on eBay for £15. It was totally off when it arrived but I managed to fix it easily and I now get quick half decent collimation. Before that I "used" a cheshire but could not understand how it was supposed to be working so I didn't collimate at all (let the one who has never been axious about collimation throw the first stone)

Yes, he did biult it Hand luggage is 8Kg or 12Kg depending on the airline but in practice they never weigh it

And the scope in the video is 10''

I don't think I'm handy enough to build one but the idea of having a big scope you can take on a plane is very appealing. Can you imagine going to the southern hemisphere with a 8'' or 10'' scope! That's definitely making it to my bucket list!

True! The only issue is that the 10'' dob doesn't fit in any of my Ferraris 😉

I do it the other way around. I got an ironing chair for 15GBP which is adjustable in height. Works perfectly for those 1200 FL dobs.

Actually, he's about to buy a Dob (I'm guessing manual but I could be wrong), in which case he doesn't need any set up appart from putting the scope on the rocker box and collimating.

Actually strocks are ultra compact dobs. Have a look here. It's in french but you should understand what I'm talking about.

So the only information I got is that it's 3.5cm thick, weighs about 2.5Kg and is lambda1 /6.... that doesn't mean much to me. Is that good?

I was thinking dob or strock... I'm not sure yet if I want to try this or not. I'm not much of a tinkerer but this would be a nice project

Yes the seller posted some pictures. Can you have a look here (https://www.2ememain.be/a/tv-hi-fi-video/materiel-d-optique-telescopes/m1477470257-primaire-spiegel-d-200-f-5.html?c=08c285449651fa109c354bbabe740c1b&previousPage=lr) and tell me if you notice anything worth mentioning?

Thanks for the info. I beleive it's the primary only. How could I know if the coating is all right? Is it something I should notice straight away?

It's f5. It's not ABS UK... I'm belgian, so local to me 😉 Thanks for the advice. I'll gather all the info I can get and I'll come back here to see what you guys think about it.

Hey guy, I just saw a 8'' primary mirror for 40 Eur on a local second hand website. I was under the impression that those things were a bit more expensve than that. If I decide to get it (and eventually build a strock), what should I pay attention too? Kr, Raph

That's exactly what I would have needed yesterday! I just started observing in summer so I didn't need this so far but now winter is coming ...

Was that confucius? I though it came from the bible: "take eat this is my body, collimate this is my scope"

Great report and what a night! I also recently had some kind of breaktrough night when I bagged 7-8 new objects!