Ships and Stars

Hey if you can make one of these, I'd like one please! A friend of a friend in the states makes obsolete motorbike trim parts with his 3D printer and it's his full time job. Doing well from what I hear.

Is it newer equipment or vintage stuff? If vintage, perhaps an auction house or antiques dealer? I am assuming it is newer gear though. Are your insurance agents wanting an appraisal? I'd think your homeowners insurance would cover all your items if you keep them safely locked up, photograph them and declare any specific items over a certain price. Or are you looking for stand-alone telescope insurance separate from your homeowners/rental insurance policy? In that case, usually companies that do camera/DSLR/lens insurance may offer policies for astronomy gear. Whichever route you go, they shouldn't be looking at what you paid for it, rather what it would cost to replace if something happens.

I can't imagine why people would have possibly confused that with a UFO!! 🤣 Impressive looking machine by the way! We use an older phantom at work sometimes when doing survey, but it doesn't like much wind. Bet that one will do much better.

I've a pair of 12x50 Bushnells, 12x70 Celestron Cometrons and a pair of 25x100 Skymaster observation binos. Without a doubt, the 12x70s Celestrons are far and away the best of the bunch for all-around use. Some folks on another forum decided they were rubbish without trying them because they didn't cost £500 and dismissed them as over-hyped junk. The 12x70s light-gathering ability in dark conditions (i.e. astronomy) is nothing short of incredible, other reviews have compared them to night vision only half-jokingly and the optical quality and eyepieces are above its price range. I bought mine second hand for a whopping £30 including shipping. I'd pay twice that easily for a pair. PS if you lay on the ground or sit on a beach recliner etc and tuck your elbows in for support, you can observe steadily for quite a long time without breaks. I even do that with the 25x100s. It's like photography, you can rest the binos against anything steady for a big boost in stability without a tripod... I'm sure whatever you end up with will make for good observation, just avoid zoom binos by most if not all accounts I've heard!

I've seen videos of DJI drones climbing up through the clouds, and that was an older model with about 1/3rd the range of the new consumer/DJI type drones (<7km). I wouldn't be surprised if you could (illegally) get 3,000m vertical and you'd never hear it past say 500-750m. Do you have some decent binos? Around 10-12x magnification?

A few pieces starting to come in, mainly the 70Ah L26-70 Yuasa leisure battery from Tanya batteries, £69, 2-year warranty, free next day delivery. That's on the charger topping up. Stylish 'Brunner Monsun' 12v hairdryer, £16.99. Designed in sunny Italy, churned out in China. To read reviews, these 12v dryers do nothing for actual hair drying unless you are Jason Stratham, but otherwise get pleasing reviews for cheap and cherful defrosting of secondary mirrors. I've plugged it into my van and ran it for about five minutes. It does draw some serious juice, but feels like ample heat to clear a secondary mirror relatively quickly. Time shall tell. Glad I have a leisure battery for this now, a LiPO pack would drain in short order! A set of extra long tamper-resistant torx drivers, £15.00, to remove the cover on my Synscan altitude box, there's a squeaky bearing inside that needs inspecting. Delicate surgery as to not alter the encoder settings and belt drive...more details on that to come. Holds breath... Still waiting on a few more bits, mainly the sack truck, which may fall prey to the angle grinder and MIG welder in short order to make the dob base and mirror assembly as stable as possible when on the loading ramps 😮 I'll see how it fits first before chopping and welding...

I didn't realise the 150/152s were that size! Bazooka territory!

Yep! I met the seller of the 200p in a car park for collection, and when I lifted it out of the boot I thought, oh right, this is like three 130s, haha. My AZ4 plans sort of faded a bit, but I bought the 200p in good nick with an EQ5 mount, motors etc for £250, so not to bad I suppose. Good optics with it, already had one crack at it.

I don't think it would have held any altitude, just too much weight and too far away from the centre of the mount. Plus I only had a few mm of space between the tube/tube clamps and the top of the azmiuth adjuster on top of the tripod. I had briefly looked online, and think the answer across the board was a no. It's really quite a bit larger and heavier than my 130pds. I was quite surprised when I bought the 200p.

I'd tried my old blue 200p on my AZ4 just a few days ago. It definitely felt like a no unfortunately, I didn't even bother to nip up the holder. Too bad, was going to put the 130pds on the eq5 and use the 200p for sky surfing with the alt az...

It's taken me a little time before I made much process identifying things. I started out just looking and scanning the sky, no clue what area I was viewing! Still fun though. A lot more satellites than I would have ever guessed as well. Must be thousands. Good luck and enjoy!

Supposedly the tube has 70,000 times the light gathering ability of the human eye, and the dob 5500-7000 times the human eye, so very faint objects 'should' jump out with relative ease! In theory!

Basically, if this works, I can pair the NV tube up to the plossl and perhaps a 2x or 3x powermate, and just observe faint DSOs etc with ease. Horsehead nebula apparently is a doddle to spot!?

I'm definitely not an expert here, but basically I saw a video about night vision and astronomy, think it was Montana or somewhere in the US West, and he said the 55mm plossl was ideal for pairing up to a night vision tube. The next day, a used 55mm plossl came up for a good price online. The tube he used in the video was a gen3+ NV tube, a mod 3 I think he called it. It screws right onto the plossl with a simple adapter. Insanely expensive though, and not even sure you can bring them into the UK! So a gen2 mullard 1332 tube went on eBay for a cheap enough price. I'll look into adapting it to the plossl. No definite expectations! But should be an interesting experiment, haha. Will definitely let folks here know how I get on.

Here's a quickie of the NV tube and the 55mm plossl. The NV tube is too chunky to hang off any focusser, so will be handheld up to the plossl to start, or I might use a 50mm camera lens etc and make a handheld viewing device for meteor showers, etc. It certainly works, I ran 6V to it with a cheapie lens recently in a completely dark room, and voila! Could see everything nicely.

Pieces and bits and bobs and batteries should be winging their way here, hopefully by the weekend. My poor dob's been sitting in the corner all summer, waiting for some photons to hit the mirror🤣 That reminds me, I need to re-glue the foam pad to the underside of the mirror cover. Not a very well thought out cover for such a pricey mirror. Still a few tweaks and tuning to do, no doubt, but can't wait for a clear night when I'm set up in advance and not rushing to get back home for a few hours sleep before work. And a crack at using the GOTO! At last.

After buying a SW Stargate 500p dob in March or April this year, I didn't really get to use it much, only two or three short sessions and never set up the GOTO, so for the first time in my life, I've been waiting for summer to end! I did somehow manage to pick up some nice eyepieces since the end of viewing season, a coma corrector and even a rather large GEN2 night vision tube from a Centurion tank sight (yes, seriously) which I'm hoping to use handheld to look through a 55mm TV plossl. More on that soon. Now that true night sky darkness has now returned to NE Scotland, plus I have some time here and there booked off work soon, I'm seriously itching to load the van and head to the hills. A few foibles between me and the dob: a.) It's very heavy (surprise surprise) to move around. I've discovered my level of personal fitness is slightly lower than I anticipated when purchasing, and my back has duly alerted me to this 🤣 b.) the secondary dews up quickly, but once cleared, tends to stay clear most of the night c.) unfortunately my pricey Lithium power pack died, so I needed to sort something reliable, and fast So to address these today I've: a.) ordered a heavy duty sack truck with pneumatic tyres (NO solid tyres or solid casters) with a 60cm extension plate, so I can hopefully wheel the base and mirror assembly as one up some loading ramps into the back of my van and unload just as fast. This will make life much easier and faster, almost to the point of grab and go territory - I'm optimistically hoping. Splitting the mirror assembly from the base is a pain with the GOTO drive cable and the weight, plus the risk of something falling...if all of that can be kept together, it's quite easy to install the truss rods and top end and be up and running in maybe ten minutes or less. b.) Rather than potentially ordering a dew controller and three secondary heating strips for three different scopes (130PDS, 200p and the Stargate), I went with a £15 12v hairdryer that actually received a halfway decent review for clearing secondaries. That way I can grab it for whichever scope I'm using without having to run wires along the spider vanes, etc etc and faff with controllers. If it fails, then I'm not out much. This might be temporary anyway, but the dew controllers and heating strips seem really expensive to me. c.) I went all out and bought a decent 70Ah Yuasa leisure battery - small and 'light' by leisure battery standards - for half what a dinky 7Ah lithium power pack costs. This should easily run the hairdryer for a bit, my GOTO and any other small future add-ons in the dead of a winter's night. I also picked up a 3.5m cig socket extension with HD alligator clips, some glow in the dark tape for marking certain bits around the scope, some 32mm bullseye spirit levels and finally, three 80mm 12v computer cooling fans for the primary. Soon hoping to provide a much better review of this scope/GOTO system that my first initial impression! Clear skies all.

Plumb71, I went through something similar early this year when I developed a severe case of the astronomy bug and started in earnest. It can be overwhelming at first finding your way around the sky and I'm still learning. I have GOTO on one of my scopes but have never used it yet, wanted to learn the basics first. Make sure your finder scope is adjusted properly first if you haven't checked. I pick a star like Vega that's exceptionally bright and use that to align the finderscope, but as mentioned, you have to move quickly between the eyepiece so it doesn't move out of view too quickly. This might take a few tries before you get it dialled in accurately. Also everything is upside down through the eyepiece, so that's another bit to get used to. Right is left, etc etc Another recommendation here for Sky & Telescope's Pocket Sky Atlas. I have the jumbo version, spiral bound. It's excellent. A relatively cheap but decent pair of binos are a quick and handy way to learn the sky as well. I also use two phone apps which have helped me greatly - absolutely brilliant ways to start learning your way around. The first phone app is SkyView and the second on which I use the most now is SkySafari. With SkySafari, I can advance the clock to see where my preferred target will be at say, 11pm tonight, and I can set up my scope to try and pick it up from there as the night sky gets darker. Skyview had a handy quick identify feature as well. I wish they'd combine the best features from both, but that's a different discussion. Can you use 2" eyepieces to gain a wider field of view and show more sky? Regarding eyepieces, I started out with the 2" 28mm skywatcher eyepiece which is really good for the money - cheap as chips as they say. I have an older 200p that requires the funky bevelled adaptor for 2" eyepieces, don't know if yours is the same. I've also used a 21mm Televue Ethos with a 100 degree field of view in a 130PDS which is kind of like cracking a walnut with a (very expensive) sledgehammer, but the low mag views around 37x (I think) and 100 degree field of view were simply astounding for this little scope. Maybe an eyepiece in the 20-30mm range with a wider field of view (66-82 degree) over a plossl (52 degree normally I believe?) will help show more sky and let you get your bearings easier? Plus the wider field is just nice to have, full stop. There's the Baader Morpheus line at 76 degree FOV, Explore Scientific 82 degree, etc etc. I find looking through my 25mm SW 52deg eyepiece is fairly limited, like looking down a pipe, and I don't use the 10mm plossl, never got on with it. The 28mm 2" plossl is brilliant by the way. Just to make the exit pupil police cringe, I have a 55mm TV plossl I've used in a large f4 dob, giving an exit pupil the size of a mini roundabout. It probably wouldn't even work in a 150, too little mag. However, I originally bought it to adapt to a night vision tube which I'm slowly in the process of sorting. This eyepiece gets a lot of flak, but in a big scope I think it offers great views on it's own and is just razor sharp. You are reducing the effective aperture considerably in a fast scope however. Anyway, align finderscope really well, use phone apps, Sky Atlas, etc to learn your way around - these have all helped me. It's like moving to a new town when you really start stargazing, you have to learn the streets.

Ah right, I see what you're saying. I had to take off my secondary when I was first setting it up, so that's when I think I used the cheshire in the first stages of collimation, otherwise I haven't had to bother the secondary since. I'll recheck it on my dobs though, bet they're not spot on. Thanks Adam.

I think it's Chesire for secondary and laser for primary once secondary is centered - at least according to one guide I read. After reading your post, I checked another site and they use the cheshire twice! I personally go with cheshire for secondary, then laser for primary, then do an airy disk test on a suitable star... seems ok, perhaps I could squeeze a bit more out of my scopes?

PS there are Bortle 2 skies north of Tintagel along the coast if you drive a bit past Exmoor, and for anyone who says there are no Bortle 1 skies in England, they are wrong! But it's definitely not an easy or cheap place to get to...

There's the light pollution map at https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/#zoom=9&lat=6570669&lon=-448724&layers=B0FFFFFTFFFFF ...then find a public forestry, park, lakeshore etc as mentioned above to set up gear in and check it out on google earth perhaps. Alternatively, you could just ask a farmer if you could set up your telescope for a night in their field. Should be plenty of decent spots if you do a little research? Have fun!

Sky Safari and Sky View apps are really handy as well. Sky Safari has a top ten list of tonight's best objects that's under the search menu. I also use the Sky and Telescope Sky atlas, the bigger spiral bound version.

Find a big dob for £1200-ish and convince them it's worth £800, plus good karma to them for selling cheaply. Okay, maybe the karma aspect is negligible. £1000 used should get you in the 14" to 16" range for a nice example. There's a 12" Meade dob for £175 online, but mirror needs a polish!

I'll say! Excellent work. I agree this forum has been wonderful the short time I've been here, about six months, I've tried to learn as much as I can. I have a 130PDS, quite 'cheap' in astronomy terms, and was admiring the photos other owners have made with it. Keep the excellent images coming!