Carbon Brush

Fully agree with @Highburymark comments. I have an F10 refractor that has met with a hacksaw to shorten the tube, allowing binoviewer (and other) use. For my first binoviewer I bought a cheapie, not very well made. Badged Astro Engineering, but it must have been near to the bin when it was accidentally shipped. Poor colour between eyes, one sloppy EP tube, other tight, etc. Importantly it allowed me to try binoviewing at low cost and establish which scopes could use it. Later I sold it on (with full quality report of course) and splashed out on WO. HTH, David.

OK Paul here we go. Apologies for the poor photo. A dual mount bar assembly. A freebie torch, freebie drinks coaster and some boooks. Not shown are long chats with Astrotruk, Rowan, and more about my potential future purchases. Interesting talks as well. I got two copies of 'The Story Of The Heavens' by Robert S. Ball. The 1890 hardback version (see the Saturn drawing) and the modern paperback. Aonther of his books. The Earths Beginning, from 1903. Picked up the new 'Orion' book at a good price. Signed by the Hunter, and one the contributors. I declined the 6Kg rock to add to the garden rockery. At bit expensive compared to the stuff at local garden centre. Fortunately MSG Meteorites were not charging for photos.

It is one of those built by AWR Technology. Don't know the name though.

Well I'm definitely going. Roads are going to be fine. Looking forward to the day.

I last attended in 2019. I could not get there for 2022. There were offers from some. But not all. I remember a 'today only' £100 off a Daystar scope that I didn't want! But if I had been in the market for one, it definitely covered the fuel bill. To me the important part is to have a proper look and hold things. Just how big and heavy is an EQ6? It looks the same size as EQ3 on the web page! Have a proper two way conversation with sellers about their products. See new ideas. Talk to fellow stargazers. Put faces to names.

Cold and dry. No problem Cold and condensation - to be avoided long term. Short term not so bad. Warm and dry. No problem. Warm and condensation. -eek! Best recipe for mould growth on glass. Thinking about your unheated store. After use, if your scope has condensation on bright screws, or glass, give it a quick waft over with a hairdryer to remove the moisture. It should then stay dry. If you store the scope indoors, you give yourself more work. The warm and moist house air is chilled by the scope and you get lots of condensation. Out with the hair dryer again. But this time for much longer. You need to bring everything back up to (or near) house temperature to discourage condensation when you walk away. I leave scopes in my unheated observatory shed long term without problem. HTH, David.

You have everything in there (except legs) to get you started. Maybe the previous owner used them for kindling? Just keep an eye open for either a complete heavy duty tripod, or some legs and you can work out how to fasten things together. An old tripod that is wood or heavy and no lnger wanted might be found in a charity shop. If it doesn't have the bling, nobody wants it! Maybe someone on this forum has something suitable? When buying a new package, the manufacturers always use the cheapest most flimsy tripod they can to meet the budget. Here you have the opportunity to look for a decent tripod so help this scope, and whatever comes next.

Hi Maggie. A long way to Kettering! That mirror does look good enough to allow you to continue. Scope mirrors can look really awful when subject to torch or phone light, but give good results. The smaller diagonal mirror (known as the secondary mirror) is visible when you look down the focus tube. It is reasonable to assume it is in a similar state to the big (primary) mirror. In your photos you don't appear to have any eyepieces, or a finder scope. The eyepiece is one question to answer early. Carefully measure the internal diameter of the focus tube. It will be meant to take either 0.965" or 1.25" barrel eyepieces. Knowing this tells us what to look for next. The scope is cosmetically challenged. OK it looks a bit tatty! It is the glass bits and whether they are held in correctly that matters. So far you have not showed us anything to mean big money spend. If you are happy to spend a bit of time, you potentially have a good starter scope. David.

North Nottinghamshire. Near the A1. What are you all on about? Our snow on the fields has melted already😁 No main road closures this morning. For you guys in the Yorkshire Alps, it is very different.

Hi Maggie. If you are thinking of getting this scope running, the next step is a photo of the main mirror. Just point your phone down the tube, No need to remove anything at this stage. If it is half decent, you can move on. If it is seriously mottled, the scope is scrap. Depending on the photo, we may be able to tell the difference between a mirror that just needs some time in a washing up bowl, and a mirror with damaged coating. Mirror state defines whether you throw a few £ and time at this scope, or start again. From my earlier post...... If you add your approximate location to your header, you may get an offer to help from someone local to you. This Saturday 11th. There is a BIG practical astronomy show at Kettering. Free to get in loads of retailers selling anything from starter scopes to packages you have to sell your house to afford. Not forgetting bits of meteorites and lots more. If you happen to be anywhere near.....

Just thought. If you add your approximate location to your header, you may get an offer to help from someone local to you. This Saturday 11th. There is a BIG practical astronomy show at Kettering. Free to get in loads of retailers selling anything from starter scopes to packages you have to sell your house to afford. Not forgetting bits of meteorites and lots more. If you happen to be anywhere near.....

A second to @Cosmic Geoff. If/when you buy anything related to astronomy, go to an astronomy retailer. The retailer can help you make the right choices. He can help you with after sales advice. He does after all want to see your granddaughter in a few months for additional eyepieces, a different finder, eventually a larger scope, etc. All the Amazon/Currys/department stores can offer is refund under certain circumstances if something is not right. You have dipped your toe in the water for the cost of a pint. Far too many come to SGL after discovering a £££hundreds Christmas present is entirely the wrong choice. Keep asking the questions - we are always happy to help. My granddaughter at 5 years old wanted to see the moon and had the typical 3 minutes attention span of a 5 year old. I bought a table top dob scope - it worked out well. Send us pic of the scope and we will throw in our thoughts. Oh yes I almost forgot - Welcome to SGL. David.

I used to like to see the range of astronomical objects in the header. A bit of harmless fun. But maybe SGL has to give in to political correctness?🤔 Some years ago, before we had to refer to a spade as a 'low technology manually operated cultivation device', we used something to limit customer access to certain online information. Included in the 'welcome' message was a default password, issued by our software package. In the message we strongly recommended the customer change it for something else as soon as possible. Which was easy to do. But quite a few folks could not muster the effort to change things. The default password was selected from a long list of colours and animals. The blue parrot, purple donkey, yellow tiger and green porcupine were happy enough. The white chimp took offence and complained. He seriously thought we were out to insult him. Now we give them a random assortment of characters that they can't hope to remember☹️

@rl A bit of a surprise here. Both scopes are about 70mm on the minor axis! This was done by holding a piece of card against the mirror and making a pencil mark. So is prone to error. I think it fair to say the scopes have the same central obstruction. The PDS has a mirror glued on to a stick. The GSO has the mirror in a carrier, with small clips. The GSO has secondary collimation screws are on a larger circle, so should be easier to set up. Looking at the scopes side by side, the tube construction means they are different lengths, with the focus in different locations. Primary mirror depth in the tube differs between the scopes. This indicates the PDS FL is lower than the GSO. Maybe by 50-100mm? I haven't accurately measured to make sure the primary to secondary distances are correct in both scopes. I suppose we tend to asume the scopes are assembled correctly and just collimate. It is only when doing a side by side comparison that we think a bit more. As for the PDS being optimised for photography, I think SW must mean it reaches focus fairly near the tube, rather than a long way in mid air. Looking at the SW site, they don't list the 300 scopes. As for specifications generally. They are all but non existent. This certainly does not tempt me to buy any of their products from new. I am thinking in terms of the scope being visual. A light bucket. Keeping this size scope steady for photography is a big effort. Going back to the well used saying. The best scope is the one that gets used the most. If it wasn't for the cloud and snow, I could take the dob outside, place it, and start looking. Not exactly grab n go. Grab grunt heave and stagger. But on the trolley it is fairly easy. For the PDS I would have to assemble a tripod and mount. Or the pier and ancient alt-az mount I had in mind. Then fasten the 24Kg of OTA, rings and dovetail. If I was to remove the MN78 from my observatory pier, the PDS would be OK for permanent fitting. But the MN78 views are something that I want to keep. You can see that I am leaning very much towards keeping the dob. But not yet made a firm decision. I will sleep on it. Thank you to all of you for your very useful and helpful comments. If there are other thoughts, do keep them coming in. The community input has certainly made me look more closely and think about the options - and appreciate what a wonderful resource we have in SGL. Thanks again, David.

Yes I agree. Any dob blance and stickiness issues can be improved or resolved with a bit of thought and practical work.

Fully agree. I have 20Kg of Intes MN78 on my alter D6 mount - it tends to stay in place.

I am in the situation of having two scopes that are quite similar. Being large, one will go. But which? Seeking thoughts and opinions from the community. A GSO Revelation 12" on dob mount and a Skywatcher 300PDS with rings. Both are in good order with similar age mirror coating and both have a dual speed focusser. The GSO is older, but has been well looked after. It could be argued the recoated mirror is not 100% like new having minor marks. But nothing worthy of further mention. I have not run them side by side to be able to definitively say scope A contrast/resolution/brightness is marginally better than scope B. The 300PDS is only a couple of years old and all but unused. I have a goto mount capable of carrying the 300PDS. I also have an old (last century) mount that I could, with a bit of effort, adapt to carry the PDS in no frills alt-az mode. Mods to the GSO dob include a wheeled trolley and improved balance weight arrangement. Two different handle arrangements are in my head, but not yet in hardware. The 300PDS is still as supplied from the shop. Neither scope has benefitted yet from flocking, better black paint or similar measures. These are (in my book) standard improvements for shop bought reflectors. The scope that stays will be improved this summer. Looking forward to your comments, David.

Unless I have missed it..... No mention has been made of blackening a scope tube. The light pollution enters the tube from all over the sky and bounces off the dark gey tube inner. Don't think so? Take almost any reflector straight from the shop, shine a dim red torch across the front so some light hits the tube inside Look in the eyepiece and you see red. Tube flocking, better black paint, blackening a focus tube, etc. all have their part to play. A similar blackening argument applies to refactors and compound scopes. I mention a reflector as it is easy to carry out the torch test. My uneducated opinion on aperture is that is gives you more light at the eyepiece end of things. A dim obect stands a better chance of being bright enough for your not-dark-adapted eyes. Secondly, you can afford to lose some of the 'object of interest' light when filtering out pollution. Though this does not work very well for full spectrum pollution.

When I was last there, the traders set up on Friday. So provided main roads are passable during the day Friday, the show will presumably go on. As for visitors, wait until a bit nearer the time before deciding. The UK weather has been known to change for better or worse at short notice. In winter I always have (bad for teeth) snacks, water, warm clothes, waterproof coat, boots etc in the car. When significant snow and ice are forecast I supplement the winter kit with sand and shovel.

I wouldn't worry about the mirror for now. It is good enough to provide views. Cleaning it is a project for another time. The eyepiece barrel size has me puzzled. Mine had a 1.25" (31.7mm) barrel, which is used on all proper scopes - but not the toys sold by the likes of amazon. @Astrobits mentioned 32mm on some early scopes. @Peter Drew gives an easy fix. Thank you both. There is, on some old scopes a 0.965"/24.5mm barrel size. also known as the 'Japanese inch'🤣. I would be surprised to find one of these on a TAL. Perhaps photos of the eyepiece area? The socket on the side would connect to a mains transformer in a metal box, stepping down to 12V. It turns the scope every 24 hours so the scope will follow an object as it moves across the sky. I won't give you the full explanation just now - it is somewhat lengthy. If you don't have this part, don't worry. Just move the scope manually. Get hold of an eyepiece to fit the tube. I think 25mm or thereabouts focal length is a good starting point. Look at easy objects first, like the moon, or Orion. The scope is not junk. It is quite probably recoverable - dpending on a proper look at the mirror. Even if the scope was scrapped, the pillar is really solid. Much better than the wobbly things fitted to a lot of the basic scopes nowadays. Keep asking the questions. David.

Hello and welcome to SGL. Yes a TAL scope. No there are no leads, it being completely manual operation. I used to own one. These were very well engineered scopes and mounts, with good optics. But today, it all depends on if it has been looked after. Two suggestions to get you started. First is look at the primary mirror condition, take a photo. Second measure the diameter of the eyepiece tube. hopefully it is 1.25". Though some early TAL scopes used a different size. If you include your approximate location in your header information, you may get a local offer of help.

I don't think we need a kit tester or similar marker on SGL classified ads. The rules make the seller requirements/restrictions quite clear. The moderators have the option to revoke an SGL members access to classifieds, if they feel it is being used incorrectly.

As far as possible! If you can get 100x the scope focal length, that is a good number. But in an urban area, you may have to compromise. Unlike observing, you can do this from an upstairs window on a wobbly floor.

With a long focal length scope like yours, you have a narrow field of view which means good finder to scope alignment is essential. A lot of people find more than one finder scope is useful - or even essential. My Intes MN78 is shorter FL than your Celestron. I have used a 9x50mm finder for years, more recently upgrading to a 60mm finder. I also have a Rigel quickfinder RDF. I regard this as a first try device if the goto system has got lost. HTH, David.

In my pre SGL days I used to regard UKABS as a good place to buy and sell. But after joinging SGL in 2010 I gradually moved my buy/sell attention to here. I have always enjoyed the idea of trying out different astro parts and packages. Buying used makes it more affordable. I'm still working on the sell part though and seem to have ended up having enough stuff to open a small shop😁 Don't worry FLO I'm not competing🤣 These days I tend to regard some of the ABS 'kit testers' as like buying something from ebay, but without the buyer protection. I'm sure many are honest people that don't sell a lemon and simply try to make the hobby more or less self financing or make a few ££ on the transactions. However, SGL buying means I can look at post count, history, comments and contributions. Wonderful stuff.