Carbon Brush

I very much agree with Floater's comments. A week is a fleeting moment in astronomical terms. Yes tackle the focusser. At some point you might visit collimation if you think the scope is not doing as well as it should. None of this costs you any real money and you will learn a lot. As you are using Kellner eyepieces, I suspect an upgrade here might be your first spend - but not yet. Try to find the limits of your current setup and maybe borrow other eyepieces from friends to see what suits you. Think in terms of tens of euros on new eyepieces and if/when you change scope, the eyepieces can stay with you. Enjoy the journey. David.

Earlier this year I suffered the 'cloudy blue' problem. I emailed Bresser Europe and within days a filter was on my doorstep. As the the filter is easy to install, I decided that was preferable to sending a package to/from Germany. Bresser did though offer to do the fitting.

Two experiments we ran at school. 1/ Not precise but gives the idea. Can be fun. Place a volunteer(?) against a wall in the shade, palm of one hand facing out. Equip the rest of the group with small mirrors. Persuade the group to shine the mirrors at the subjects hand. Not eyes, not other people, etc. As the number of mirrors increases, the subject is going to report heating. Maybe even say ouch! 2/ A more precise measure. Something along the lines of vlaiv's first suggestion. We had a metal can with a small hole in the lid, for the thermometer. This was placed inside a larger can which had a small (1cm-ish) hole in the side. The gap beteen the cans was filled with sponge insulation. Set up a magnifiying lens to focus the sun in the exposed area. Known weight of water in the smaller can. Take the temperature at the start. Run the experiement for a few minutes until there is a reasonable temperature rise. Energy received in joules is temp rise centigrade x water grammes x 4.2. Divide this by the number of seconds to give the rate of energy supply in watts. Now calculate the lens area to give the heat supply watts per square metre. Experiment 2 is more educational and teaches various skills. But unless you have enough kit to allow pairs to run the experiment, there is a lot of standing around. Experiement 1 is more fun and everyone joins in. From my (limited) experience of arranging scout activities, experiment 1 is going to receive more attention. Hope this helps, David.

I use Rigel + RA finder with my MN78. https://stargazerslounge.com/attachments/?page=4 The MN78 is in the obsy on a fixed pier with goto. If things go astray for any reason, the Rigel is great for a 'first find'. Ignore the ST102 in the image. That was part of some playing around/trials I was doing. On non-goto newt scopes I have always used an RA finder. But some won't go near them and insist on straight finders. Give it a try. Why not buy a used straight finder and see how you like it? Generally you can sell on 2nd hand kit for little or no loss. David.

I think that most of the eyepieces offered by the UK astro retailers are going to be OK. If you search the FLO site with 'cheshire' you will find a slightly lower cost one on offer. Have you checked the 'for sale' section on SGL. Or posted a wanted ad? I vaguely remember seeing a cheshire advertised on here not too long back. Sorry I did not take much notice as I already have one. If you choose ebay, be careful to check the seller location. Goods from China sometimes take weeks to arrive. If there is a problem they do refund - but often buyer pays return postage! Or there is the argument and delay for a paypal refund. Good luck searching. David.

Welcome back to the dark side! From your post, I reckon you will enjoy using a 200 dob. I wouldn't dismiss an alt-az mount just yet. Also consider goto. Quite small and quick to set up. Unlike EQ, no messing around with weights on long poles. For me, the lower cost goto mounts can be more faff than benefit. If you look at goto and are not stuck for budget look for one that has an internal battery for the clock. It really annoys me to have to enter the time/dae every time out with the 'cheapie' goto mounts. Yes you can pay a bundle of money for a GPS receiver that plugs into the mount to do this for you!. What I like about goto is that you swap eyepeices, filter, etc. Or even walk away from the scope. When you return, the object of interest is still there. Just few thoughts. David.

Just seen this..... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-south-scotland-48132532?intlink_from_url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science_and_environment&link_location=live-reporting-story My thinking is that if somone spends money on bricks, mortar, fixtures, fittings, then there is better prospect of the sky remaining dark. a few odd people wandering into a field at ight not being justification for keeping the sky dark.

I have had the 10x50 variant for a few years. Excellent performance for the money. Yes I paid full price. Double todays offer.

Hello and welcome to SGL. Both are good scopes. But the better is determined by your circumstances. Tell us about your viewing plans. Out of the back door into the garden? Down 3 flights of stairs? 10 miles to a dark site? How do you feel about handling a potentially heavy and bulky assembly. They all look small on web sites! What sort of viewing expectations do you have? Just visual? Photos? Dim fuzzy galaxy type viewing? Moon & bright planets? The best scope is the one that gets used the most. Not the scope with the best specification. The comments and recommendations will come flooding in when we know a little more about you. David.

Hello Sophie. Welcome again. You will find lots of good advice and help on SGL. It is (in my opinion) the best astronomy forum going! On the binos. If you can't return them for refund, then give them to child to play with. I did that with some rubbish binos I was asked to review for a (non astro) retailer a while back. They went down really well and I didn't care when they got broken. When you start to look for more binos, ask around on this forum, then buy from a specialist astronomy or nature retailer. Enjoy your visits to SGL, David.

Thank you Lars for going to the trouble to post the information. I have not been to Rhodes for many years. Perhaps there is a reason now to return? I think you were very brave taking the bus from Rhodes down the coast. I did it once. The driver had curtains, family photos, tomato plants and more obscuring the view from the cab. Then he kept turning around (on bends by cliff drops) to chat to passengers he knew. David.

I have only ever used steel scopes. Mostly visual. However, looking at how the OTA might change size with temperature. Steel has an expansion coefficient of about 13 parts per million, per degree centigrade. This means a 1000mm optical path length (a long newt or frac) will drift by 0.013mm for a 10C temperature change. This temperature change is a chilly evening right through a cold night. I have seen data indicating carbon fibre is about 3x better. Is this worth worrying about? If your motor driven focusser has good enough resolution on the drive, you could compensate for this by measuring temperature through the night. Just my two pennorth..

On the theft side. The villains generally want something they can grab quickly and take. If something is bolted down, it takes time to remove and they will look for something else. As a general rule layers of protection, rather than a single big obvious item work best. This occupies the villains for longer and they don't like it. I won't post details of security measures I have on my 'shed'. Only general comments. Leave a couple of heavy bikes with flat tyres chained to a nearby fence. That would occupy them for a few minutes. Have you considered some of these awful motion triggered far too bright security lights? Disabled when you use the mount. Hope something here is useful.

Pete - Welcome back. Now you have views I'm sure you are going to be looking in the 'for sale' section for something sky related. Ron. Good luck and remember your are a PATIENT. You have to be PATIENT? I once took my wife to hospital for planned surgery. A 30 miles drive through snow. We got there on time. The surgery was cancelled. The (obviously angry) surgeon reported they had too few staff in that day to run the theatres. He completely agreed with my comment that the theatre staff should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. To everyone else. Fascinating reading. It is certainly making me wonder about my eyes. As catarcts are a gradual phenomenom usually, we don't notice. Carole's comment on colour reminds me of reading about the artist Monet. Apparently his work changed colour gradually as his cataracts progressed, then returned to bright colours after surgery. A high street opto probably looks at lens condition against age and adds in comments from the patient. Referrals only being made if the patient reports issues. Then not all high street optometrists speak English. I once had to translate for someone who was told they were suffering 'lenticular opacities'! The opto man even wrote it down when asked.

While at the Kettering show, I saw some Daystar scopes on sale. As I have already spent on solar, these were of academic interest only. Or maybe providing grounds to kick myself if I saw something that knocked the spots off my Lunt kit? I did though come away somewhat confused after speaking with a couple of retailers and knowledgeable people. Products on offer included the Solar Scout 60mm, a virtually identical 60mm scope at about £1150 and the Quark eyepiece at around £1100. All show special prices. Now back to the standard price presumably. Looking from the perspective of the uneducated buyer, this is what I immediately saw. The Solar scout looks like a real bargain at £700 for an Ha scope. But next to it was another 60mm Ha scope with apparently the same Quark-Ha filter bit on the back. The only differences being a metal (not plastic) focus ring, a carbon tube (but it saves little weight) and a peli type case rather than a cardboard box. I could not see any grounds for spending £450 for the 'extras'. Then of course if the Quark filter/eyepiece stand alone is £1100, how can you sell a complete scope for £700? The logical answer (to me) is that the lower cost complete scope is not going to perform as well in terms of bandwidth or tuneability. But over to the expert opinions. Retailer 1 did not know why apparently similar scopes were £700 vs £1150. Despite having both on his stand. Retailer 2 explained that the Quark in the solar scout did not have the same filtering and was therefore unsuitable for removal and grafting to a different tube. This was how the cost saving was achieved. A knowledgeable person was confused by the two 60mm scopes and could only say that the carbon tube was probably the reason for the cost difference. But he did not sound like he was convincing himself, let alone me. At the end of the day I did not feel that I could have reasonably made a cost/performance/size/package choice based on the information available. If I had reached into my pocket for the plastic, it would have been risky. By comparison, when looking at different Lunt solar products, after a little research I felt I had a good feel for the objective, blocking filter and etalon options. Enabling me to make a cost/versatility/usefulness judgement. In round figures, I could have bought several Daystar products for the cost of a double stack Lunt package. If they really are only good for certain viewing (prominence OR surface but not both) then you buy more than one. Not quite a scope for each day of the week. But run the numbers for yourself on new and used costs. I am not out to 'Daystar bash'. I am sure there are lots of happy users of their products. But surely my experience was not unique? It would be interesting to hear comments from others on how they arrived at their scope/filter choice.

For my twopennorth. As a child I heard (or read) several times the view that 4" refractors and 6" reflectors were a minimum. This opinion was supported by my older brother being given one Christmas (mid 60s) a 1" refractor with inbuilt eyepiece on a table top tripod. Views were as expected! This was further strengthened a few years later when my father bought (1968/69?) a 60mm Prinz refractor with an awful zoom eyepiece and a table top tripod. So I stayed away from astronomy telescopes for a very long time. Books being much better. A very different sky view nowadays. If I could get even my finderscopes into a tardis......... David.

Well done FLO. Thank you for supporting UK electronics design and manufacture. I know many companies who have outsourced circuit design, PCB manufacture and PCB assembly overseas. A lot of these companies have had their (and by extension their customers) fingers burnt and had to bring the work back home. Cost of purchase and cost of ownership can be very different.

The well thought out functionality aside.... Fused cigar plug. Ferrite core on the supply lead. Nice touches.?

Well done on the cleaning. If it were my mirror, I would ignore the spots for now. As the previous post, you won't notice them in the view. Last time I tackled an abused or neglected mirror, I used warm water, liquid soap, time and gentle agitation. The leftover marks had a gentle wipe using (once only) cotton wool lumps. After a rinse with deionised water (to remove the soap) I left the mirror on a draining board plate rack. I was going to be left with droplets, so gave it a quick spray using Baader wonder fluid (eyepiece & lens cleaner). This reduced surface tension and the remaining water film just drained off. Hope this is useful. David.

Thanks Astro-Geek for the RJ crimp tool link. There is a tool at work I can borrow. I have scrounged a suitable length of curly cable in 8 core. The bad part is I splashed out almost £3 on a handful of RJ crimp housings. Still shaking from the encounter. David.

Don't bin the CG5 electronics, whatever option you choose. CG5 owners (like myself) may be interested in buying the good parts, or even everything. For example on parts, I am just about to make a curly DEC motor cable. I need to replace a broken one and could not easily find a new one. A working handset is always going to be a saleable item. Good luck with the modifications. David.

If you choose to carry a big heavy lead acid battery (the cheapest solution) then the type is relatively unimportant. In an evening of running a mount you are not going to eat into much of the capacity. So if you have a grotty old battery that won't start the car on a cold morning, or won't hold up the headlights beyond half an hour, it is probably good enough to run a mount. This statement assumes a battery with a general loss of performance through age and sulphate. If an individual cell has failed, that is a different story. If weight is of interest, or you are going to have to pay full price for a battery, then you are far better spending on something with a lithium battery. Excellent life expectancy. Superb cold performance. Inbuilt charge and discharge monitors prevent you from doing harm to the battery. If you want to run a mount, and lots of dew heaters, and a camera, and other things, then you ought to get the calculator out to ensure a small capacity lithium package is going to be good enough. Just my take on battery power - not necessarily everyone agrees! Hope this helps, David.

At work, over years of shipping and using various carriers we came to a conclusion. Carrier insurance is not worth the paper it is printed on. I have had arguments with TNT in particular who considered anything secondhand to be worth its scrap weight value only! For work, we have shipping insurance as part of the general company insurance. Never using the carrier insurance. For home use, I take the risk of breakage. When sending for work or home, packing materials and thickness always assume the item will be dropped a metre onto a concrete floor. Which it sometimes is. When receiving parcels at work, we always photograph (before opening) anything that looks abused and insist on marking the carriers document to this effect. The attached pics show two packages recently delivered to work by UKMail, now part of DHL. Draw your own conclusions about carrier care.

I am part way through fettling a Skywatcher 10" dob. When supplied, it had the basic handset and has at some point been upgraded to a GOTO handset. The original handset bracket is of course too small for the new handset and a bracket does not seem to be readily available. OK I could have used a bit of velcro. But I thought a 3D printed bracket might do the job better. The attached photos show the prototype bracket. The screw holes match those already on the mount and the handset just drops in. I suppose I should make the finished item in black or white to match the mount. The OBJ file can be opened using windows 3D viewer, or similar to get an all around look. A rainy afternoon spent doodling on the computer. David. Handset Holder-4.obj

This sounds great. Many thanks FLO. Looking forward to giving it a try out.