Tiny Clanger

Welcome, player of games 🙂

I use one of these https://www.firstlightoptics.com/dovetails-saddles-clamps/baader-vixen-style-dovetail-clamp.html to mount my ST80 on a photo tripod head, I expect there are cheaper versions around, but it's a nicely made heavy lump of metal and does the job well. A large and a small screw to secure the 'scope dovetail, and a 1/4" threaded hole in the centre of the base to secure the clamp it to a standard tripod head to camera type screw (it has other holes to mount it elsewhere if you wanted ) Heather

Before I made the table , I sometimes put the dob on an old but heavy based cheap copy of a B&D workmate , it was a bit too high to use with the heritage dob for high alt. objects for me , but as long as targets were below 70 degrees and I could find a flat bit of grass to park the 4 feet on it worked OK .

No, these , I used the 25cm ones which proved very sturdy, I can confidently stand on my table ! The height is good to use seated with the dob, looking in the back end of a mak will probably require a higher table .Those legs only flaw was a threaded hole at the bottom (intended for a levelling foot) , which I worried might admit damp when I used the table on my lawn in the winter. Discs of closed cell foam attached to the feet with glue gun hot melt glue have stayed stuck on remarkably well and stopped any chance of ingress of moisture. Plus you get a set of 4, and wonder what possible use the left over leg can be put to .... Heather

Despite being a pretty hamfisted carpenter I made my heritage dob a triangular table out of the wood salvaged from an Ikea sofa which expired. Making a table top isn't hard, the difficult bit would be making and attaching the legs , I swerved this by buying a set of ready made metal furniture legs with plates at the top with screw holes to fix 'em to the table top I'd made . There are pictures showing the table in the thread I made for the chair I built later

^^^ What Chaz said. I see plenty of kit offered at rather optimistic prices on here and simply not selling for ages. What an item seems worth to the (one careful) owner may not be what any buyer thinks the item is worth second hand. Popular first upgrades like decent alt az heads, RACI finders, dielectric diagonals, and BST starguider eyepieces get snapped up fast, well priced wide appeal 'beginner' 'scopes like heritage dobs and st80 refractors ditto. But if the item is less in wide demand , or not an obvious upgrade path, or expensive to post, or collection only from somewhere away from major population centres, the pool of interested people is far smaller. This is also maybe the worst time of year to sell astro kit : no xmas gift shoppers, no new folk looking up on a dark winter evening getting inspired to buy a 'scope, people spending on holidays and back to school things for the family, furlough ending and a lot of unfortunate job losses ... If you want to shift the item, you can always reduce the price by increments until someone bites, but if you are willing to wait patiently in the hope that someone will eventually come along who is happy to pay what you think it is worth , do so. Heather

So will I ! I thought, buy it, (a 16mm) if I don't think it is a significant improvement, I can send it back . I think the cloud cover is intent on staying until the return window closes though ...

I'll second all of that ! Like Zermelo, I only read about the expensive stuff though, At a little under £100 OVL Nirvanas get good press too , I'd love to report on the one I bought a couple of weeks ago, but .... constant cloud 😞 . A lot of kit is out of stock everywhere at the moment, so you may have plenty of time to ponder your choices !

It looks as if you took the RDF off ? I find mine valuable for quickly lining up on brighter objects, so I'd not want to lose it, I need all the help I can get for finding targets ! I do have a rigel finder on another scope, but wouldn't find it easy to use the rigel if it was mounted on the lower half of the Heritage 150., yoga positions would be required to get behind and sight through it. Does the front mounting cope with a 9x50 RACI ? I'd be concerned about the half kilo mass of the thing affecting the alignment of the secondary .

You can see it in one of the photos in the thread below.When the 'scope is closed up, the RACI stands slightly behind and tucked neatly between, the focuser and the original RDF, which I still use . That RACI is the same as Zermelo's 9x50 , I have a 6x30 one as well which lives on my maksutov . I'd have been OK with another 6x30 for the dob, but I couldn't find one for sale anywhere.

Heritage 150 'quite' a good idea ? I'm rising to that bait ! 🙂 It's not what you'd choose for imaging, but for the price I certainly couldn't find anything compact and portable that came close . I've also got a 127 mak on an az5 and hefty photo tripod, and a couple of (cheap) refractors. They are all set up on their tripods (because I'm lazy) , and the little heritage is easier to carry outside than any of them , I pick it up along with the low triangular table I made for it , and carry it into the garden easily (despite being a weedy girlie) . The little dob doesn't have the chromatic aberration of a cheap refractor, or the cool down time and dew magnet properties of a mak , but on the other hand the simple tabletop dob base doesn't have the smooth slow motion controls of the az5, but it is sturdy, and is not prone to annoying vibrations as cheap tripods and mounts are. I don't know what tripod/mount your existing 'scope is on, but I doubt it would be adequate to take a bigger refractor, so you'd need to think about a mount/tripod too. Big 'scopes need better supporting systems, which are inevitably heavier and more expensive. A 102 mak is a small, lightweight , easily portable option you might want to consider , the long focal length makes them particularly useful for the Moon and Planets. The only thing I find annoying about the Heritage is the focuser, which is more like a plumbing fixture than a precision instrument component, but for the price, compactness, portability and aperture the dob offers, I can live with that. Heather

If you are in the UK, this is probably one of the cheapest you will find, https://www.firstlightoptics.com/finders/finder-mounting-shoe.html it's what I bought for my heritage 150 and 9x50 RACI , I don't mind that it is white against the black of the tube , besides, it is hidden most of the time under the finder foot . The shoe includes a pair of nuts & bolts, not all do . If you want to re-use the holes your existing finder made (it wasn't glued on was it ?) that one is unlikely to match the holes, and you'd best go for a slotted one instead. To drill the tube, you will need to first remove the primary mirror so it is safely away from any debris. I extended the front section and wrapped the secondary with a load of bubble wrap and some plastic bags .

There is nowhere to securely mount a finder shoe on the extending part of the heritage 'scopes , my 9x50 RACI with a vixen shoe is as close to the top of the solid tube as I could get , which is only a little way from the balance point, so the weight is not a great factor .

BST starguiders are highly recommended as good basic eyepieces , as they are so popular they frequently pop up second hand on here for around £35 when people upgrade , but you need to be very fast to get in before the rush ! The 8mm or 12mm are nice in the mak (and my other 'scopes too) I'd not suggest a high magnification plossl , because it would have poor eye relief, but a medium mag. plossl from a reputable brand at around 17mm would fill the gap between an 8mm BST and your 32mm plossl nicely , Skywatcher super plossls and FLO's own 'Astro Essentials' range are impressive for the price (£20-£25)

I'm not really qualified to answer on the diagonal question : I've never used a prism, just dielectric ones , a nice second hand skywatcher one on the mak, and cheap Chinese ones in my refractors. As mentioned on another thread, I already had some heavier eyepieces than the stock ones when I bought the mak, and I found the mechanical weakness of the stock diagonal worrying. The 127 mak is not a fussy telescope when it comes to eyepieces, so there is a huge range to consider, from plossls to esoteric stuff that costs more than the 'scope... so it depends on what you want to spend. I recall you are interested in high magnification views , so an 8mm eyepiece gives 187.5x magnification, and so far I've found anything of higher magnification gets very little use from my back garden, atmospheric conditions are seldom good enough. So to start off with I'd suggest no more than 8mm as the highest ep . There's a good thread on here about this topic:

Have you fitted a standard finder shoe to your heritage , or is the cheap 7x30 finder you have one of the sort with a built in foot you fix directly to the tube ? If the latter, you might need to drill some new holes or buy a finder shoe with slots to re-use any existing holes. Heather

First, and most likely, the focus on the mak needs very fine adjustment, a tiny fraction of a turn can make a big difference. The precision focus device I use is a plastic clothes peg clipped on the knob : cheap, easily found/replaced , and available in a range of tasteless colours. A fingertip gentle push on the end of the peg can help make those tiny adjustments. Some folk make a larger disk to push on the knob out of a peanut butter jar lid (other plastic lidded spreads are available 🙂 ) Is your poor image due to daytime use , or the stock eyepieces ? I can't say, because I've never used my mak in the daytime except to look at the Sun (with suitable solar filter on the front, obviously) and when I bought it I already had some better eyepieces, so the stock ones didn't come out of the box. Finally, and this has not been a problem for me at all, but I've read it occasionally is for some if the 'scope took a knock, a mak can (quite rarely) be out of collimation when delivered . There are adjusting screws, but I'd avoid messing with them unless you are absolutely convinced you have exhausted every other possible factor, and are sure the collimation is out. A search on how to check collimation on a maksutov will no doubt bring you plenty of information: if I recall correctly, there is a way of doing that in daylight by looking down it the 'wrong' way .

I didn't see the 127 OTA advertised with anything but an RDF when I was shopping around. I looked at all the big UK online dealers : FLO, RVO, Harrison , 365, etc etc There are bundled versions of mount + mak which have a 6x30 straight through finder as part of the package though, you can see them at OVL who are the skywatcher importer . With supplies the way they are I'd not be at all surprised to find a retailer splitting a package into OTA / AZ5/triopd to fulfil backorders on one or more elements.

I don't believe any editor , sub editor, or anyone at the bbc bothered to do more than copy/paste sections of the press release the RGO put out. Some publications did apply some editing for sense, like the Coventry Telegraph and several others I looked at , but there are other sites who use the exact same wording. Hard to think it is anything but a direct lift from the press release put out by the RGO , sold on by that 'content provider' and disseminated by the sites without a thought. The Metro "Ms Lanigan added that planets are usually in opposition for a very short length of time but, during that time, they are visible to the naked eye." The Independent "Ms Lanigan added that planets are usually in opposition for a very short length of time but, during that time, they are visible to the naked eye." Glasgow Times "Ms Lanigan added that planets are usually in opposition for a very short length of time but, during that time, they are visible to the naked eye." Wales online "Ms Lanigan added that planets are usually in opposition for a very short length of time but, during that time, they are visible to the naked eye."

Can't wait for the Grinch Full Moon Moon ....

The plot thickens ... following a few of the links my search for Ms Lanigan brought up, I read the Jersey Evening Post (largely identical) version of the enthralling story which credits it to PA News agency , whose website promises subscribing 'news' outlets that they have available : "Ready-to-publish multimedia content Designed for organisations looking to access and publish complete multimedia articles on demand, Ready takes the complexities out of content production. With up to five rich media assets attached to every story, your platform can instantly access the latest stories, helping it to become more up-to-date, more engaging and more shareable." I see The Jersey evening post went for the full package, complete with 3 rich media assets (or pictures as we simple folk call them) attached to their story, and if you read on beyond the part the BBC printed ( the beeb maybe can't afford the full package ?) there is further, more realistic information from another of these RGO astronomers, a man. I'm embarrassed for my gender. All those hands this 'information' went through, RGO press office, news agency , bbc, dozens of newspapers , and not a soul with any understanding intercepted it before it got out into the wild. Pathetic.

Anyone fancy putting the press office straight ? "Press and media The Royal Museums Greenwich press office handles all media enquiries for the Royal Observatory, the Peter Harrison Planetarium, Cutty Sark, the National Maritime Museum and the Queen’s House. For further information or images or to arrange a press visit, filming or photography, contact the press office: Email: press@rmg.co.uk | Tel: 020 8312 6790 " or maybe "If you can’t find what you’re looking for… Please email RMGenquiries@rmg.co.uk " Most of the site seems preoccupied with selling tickets .

Oh my. It's worse than just the beeb. I disregarded the damage to my mood and blood pressure and followed the link ... the astronomer was Bryony Lanigan from ... The Royal Observatory Greenwich ! Pretty much every news outlet is parroting the same briefing , as I found when cyber stalking Bryony, because the beeb said 'he' and I thought, surely that's a female name ? And it is . https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffcm&q=Bryony+Lanigan&atb=v96-1&ia=web Astronomy Education Assistant at Royal Observatory, Greenwich. Edit: in the beeb page, it actually refers to 'the astronomer' as both he and she .

Oh, fer goodness' sake ... Did they credit 'the astronomer' , or was it some random bloke authority on facebook ? I can't bear to read the original . Maybe it was an astrologer they consulted , plenty of folk don't know there's a difference ... It makes me angry. Disinformation for adults, well, growing up ought to include developing the faculty to assess silly season news fillers like this in a suitably critical way, but disinformation to children is unforgivable. Oi beeb ! I want my licence fee greatly reduced if this is the best you can manage .

What a pain . Sorry you are having no luck with this. It does look as if a different diagonal might be the only solution . Heather