Tiny Clanger

My thoughts would be that any binoculars (as long as they can be adjusted so the distance between the eyes is small enough for a child) will give at least a somewhat enhanced view : you probably know the first number (the 8 in 8x42s) is the magnification .Apart from showing a bit more detail when looking at the Moon, the main thing increased magnification is going to do is increase the jiggling around of the view when held by an excited small person, so low magnification is no bad thing. Greater magnification for handheld binoculars won't affect views of planets (which will always be little featureless blobs whatever the mag.) and stars (which will be bright points) . The advantage binoculars give for stargazing are to do with the size of the front lens, the 42 in the 8x42, a 42mm diameter lens. It is bigger than your eye pupil, so improves your view of faint stars etc.However, as those front lenses get bigger, the whole instrument gets heavier. I have a pair of the opticron 10x50s , and they weigh just over 800g, whilst the 8x30s I inherited from my dad come in at 510g. The 8x30s are less good for looking at the night sky than the 10x50s, but they are significantly better than the naked eye ! I think that putting heavier binoculars on the meade tripod would be a faff, awkward for you to set up at a height where junior can see through ... you'd have to be sat or kneeling or on all fours . I suppose you could get the binoculars lined up at adult height (if the tripod is tall enough, I have no idea !) then have the little one stand on a box or something to see through it, but that sounds a dodgy dangerous thing to do in the dark ... My suggestion : lightweight cheap binoculars for junior to feel he owns, light enough for independent use (including taking along on daytime walks to the park to spy on squirrels , ducks etc) .Don't worry too much about high quality, think about practicalities of holding, eye spacing and weight, discard any that boast about high magnification then consider what would most please him as far as colour and design go . Then either hang on to the 'scope you already have ( Alan64 is obviously your best source of information on if that's a good idea) or think about one of the tabletop dob.s , where instead of the cost being spread between a 'looks the part' metal tripod and a complicated mount (head) and a telescope , most of your cash goes just to the telescope, with just a simple wood base. The firstscope you linked to has the drawback of no aiming device , so I'd be more inclined to go for one of the 'Heritage'series. which do have finders on them. Whatever you do, make sure you can get an in stock telescope before you return the one you have : old Chinese proverb (which I've just made up) Confucius he say, a telescope in the hand on Christmas day is superior to a better telescope on a container ship on its way from China ...

Wise words, and a realistic approach.. I taught the 7-11 year old age range for many years, and would absolutely go down the cheap kid's binos route , children generally like to own and control something themselves. Imagine being given an Xmas gift, then told don't touch it, someone else must do all the setting up for you, and you can just look through it without having any input ... Having their own instrument to role play with while someone gets a 'scope set up though, that would be less frustrating. I have a relative whose first words were 'Mine !' (directed at his older sister who was about to try and play with the toy which was the subject of his second word 'tractor' !)

Will be giddy ? 😀 You sound so excited already I think you may explode ! Fingers crossed for you to get some nice clear skies for that first light ! Heather

I think amazon pack stuff they dispatch from their own warehouses. I've had things (small ) inside boxes ( large) with twists of brown paper filling the spaces. My cat likes those. She is less keen on the little plastic pillows of air . Amazon delivery around here seems to be done by self employed folk in white vans one guy (Romanian I think) who has delivered my orders a few times actually runs from van to door, rings the bell and once he sees movement through the glass of my door, runs off, but still manages a cheery wave when I shout 'thank you' at his receding figure ... He looked so stressed in the height of summer that I gave him a bottle of chilled water , they must be under terrific time pressure to fulfill the round amazon gives them for the day. I've had many small items (both breakable and not) dispatched from China through the post, they inevitably come in a grey plastic bag, occasionally with a single layer of bubble wrap inside, and if you're lucky a flimsy white card box or plastic bag inside that. Remarkably nothing has ever arrived broken .

I bought my second 'scope from FLO, it was out of stock but expected in a similar time frame to yours. I contacted them by email asking what happens if you order before it's in stock . The answer was, payment is taken immediately , but if you have to change your mind for some reason , they will refund you. They prioritize orders by date, so by ordering and paying, you secure your place in the queue for whatever arrives. I also asked if they'd be able to give me some idea of how likely I was to get my order from the delivery that was scheduled, making it clear that I understood they couldn't be absolutely sure until the delivery arrived at their warehouse. I was told they only had a few orders already for what I wanted, so I was likely to get it. I ordered, I saw the delivery estimate roll up to 30-40 days a few days later, but sure enough, the estimated date from when I pushed the 'buy' button was when my order arrived. If I was you, I'd trust FLO , make my order very soon, maybe after making an email inquiry about your specific item as I did, then keep my fingers crossed ! Heather

To me (and bear in mind I'm pretty much a beginner myself ) that sounds like the sort of out of focus view I get when swapping from plossls to my 8mm BST, or adding in the barlow to any of them. Have a look and make sure nothing bad has happened to the focus device on your 'scope, and it still has full travel in and out . It's another 'I never realized that' thing which surprised me when I found I had to re focus when changing between some eyepieces. Now I know why some eyepiece adverts boast the range is 'parfocal' , and why it is a good feature !

As far as I know, tripod to binocular mounts usually use a standard photographic tripod screw thread. The telescope you have already purchased may or may not have a standard photographic screw, probably not if it has an eq mount. I doubt anyone here will have one of those telescopes to check it for you, maybe do an online search for the instruction manual to find out without opening the box.

Brilliant, thanks.

I keep mine in the house , partly because the shed is a disaster area of garden tools, bags of compost and spare bits of timber, but mostly because it's convenient to take them outside through the back door and plonk them close to it to cool down. If the weather changes, it only takes a moment to bring them back in. I put waterproof covers over them while they cool , just in case . The covers are the ones that came with my Lowe Alpine 35L and 45L rucsacs , I don't need them for the 'sacs because I use roll top drybags inside instead, but I knew those rectangles of waterproof orange material with elastic shock - cord around the perimeter seam would come in useful one day !

Yesterday, an unexpected delivery by the postie of a little far eastern thingummy I ordered 10 days ago which had an expected delivery date in January ... Now I need to think about making a setting circle ...

It can't hurt to ask them what 'available to order' actually means for this specific item at the moment. I'm afraid I don't recall if the listing said that when I bought mine, or if it actually said 'in stock'. Good luck ! Heather

Yes, it's wrong 😀 This is the proper sound: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OvefhhMbbg

Good choices, the 8mm BST is great in my 150 dob. should work really well for you too. Getting the hang of observing takes a bit of practice and perseverance, and there is a huge amount of information around to take in, get your daughter to do some of the research too, it's all useful exercise of her academic skills (don't tell her that though !) Heather

You need an observatory spider (one specifically trained not to spin webs across tempting metal tubes)

I found mine at Bristol Cameras, they seem a decent outfit : https://www.bristolcameras.co.uk/p-sky-watcher-6x30-right-angle-erect-image-finderscope.htm only a 6x30, not the larger one generally seen as ideal, but I'm cheap and it was in stock ...

Thank you. Experience is a great, but often annoying, teacher. The need for more than one sort of finder hadn't really occurred to me until that moment, I'd not properly appreciated the practicalities . It took quite a lot of searching to locate an RACI finder during lockdown #1 , much that was available seemed to be close to the outlay I'd made on the entire heritage dob itself ! Eventually I tracked down a reasonably priced 6x30 in stock at an obscure camera shop's website. It was almost as elusive as Andromeda .😀 So, a happy ending to the tale, I now find M31 is easy to line up on. It is indeed a good target, and an amazing thing to be able to see with your own eyes .However, checking FLO's site, it looks as if the 130p the OP has ordered comes with the RDF ...

It might just be me being particularly useless, but I had a hugely frustrating time trying to see M31 in my telescope from my suburban back garden. With dark adapted sight after an hour of lying on the grass meteor watching in the summer I'd accidentally caught sight of something in the right area with averted vision, and realized it had to be Andromeda : yes, a fuzzy grey something showed in the 10x50 binoculars, but I had a nightmare trying to get the RDF on my 'scope lined up: every time I looked at where the dot was M31 vanished as I was looking straight at it , and when I averted my eye ... I couldn't get the dot lined up .... aaargh. And that's why I got on the internet and ordered an optical finder the very next day ! Not sure if the instrument Jasonb has ordered has an RDF or an optical finder though.

Oooh, flashback to undergraduate history of science module , specifically T.S Kuhn's 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' . Long , long time ago when I read it, but it was an interesting book.

Garden looking south west is good ! If you can get them before they dive too low to see at all, try Jupiter (lower but brighter, so easier to find first as you will be getting used to the RDF). You probably won't see any detail with it so low, and with the stock eyepieces , but possibly some indication of colour bands if you are lucky, and maybe some of the moons will be visible too. Then move to find Saturn : it was the first thing I saw on the first use of my 150 dob (with the same EPs as you will get) and despite it appearing tiny, the rings were clear to see. That first vision of a tiny distant shiny bauble is a memory I treasure. For easily recognised and found features I'd say the Pleiades are a beautiful sight , and the nebula in Orion M42 is easy to find. The Moon is an obvious target, but don't think a crescent is less interesting than the full disc, the interest is often the terminator, the line between light and dark, where shadows and side lighting show the detail most dramatically. For further guidance, as (still) a newbie myself, I downloaded the old 'Moore Winter Marathon' info from this page : http://astrog80.astro.cf.ac.uk/mwm/ Altho' it dates back to 2013, all the info apart from that for the planets still holds. Beneath each chart is a tab with 'observing guide PDF' , I downloaded bot the first set (binocular & naked eye objects) and the telescopic ones. Print them out and you have a nice set of targets chosen for you , with helpful little maps and some basic information about what exactly you are seeing. I started working my way through them before getting diverted by Mars ... If you've not already done so, explore one of the neat, computer, tablet or smartphone based sky map programs . You can set your location and direction of view, which will let you anticipate what will be up to see from your garden . I like Stellarium , but there are plenty of others. Heather

Yes, I'm wondering if some sort of pocket type arrangement might work to hold the device without having to damage the surface , but with zero idea of its shape/dimensions/controls/cables whatever I can't be much help ...

I'd try some experiments with whatever glue/sticky pads/double sided tape you have handy. That's what I did when I used some self adhesive velcro to make wrap around dew shields for my 'scopes . The dew shield material is 3mm closed cell foam (I intentionally bought more than I needed to make the heritage dob. a shroud) and the self adhesive stuff on the velcro removed form the foam with less force than the velcro took to separate. I tried PVA , shoe goo ( a great adhesive for various plastics as well as repairing shoe soles ) leather glue ( why not ? you never know) , some contact adhesive, photo spray mount and hot glue gun stuff, as well as a few types of double sided tape and pads I had . On a scrap strip of foam , predictably most glues either failed utterly or melted the foam , but what surprised me was that the hot glue gun didn't destroy the foam, and did grab the velcro backing strongly. So I used that, and have had no problem with the velcro lifting or the foam tearing , and I'm not being terribly delicate with removing the shields after use . I just put a thin layer of hot glue right on top of the glue already on the velcro.

Welcome, I recently bought the slightly larger 127mak, which gives nice views of the Moon and planets. A few things to consider : first, the maksutov design has the advantage of being relatively compact, but it really does need to be left outside to cool down before use, Even keeping my 'scope in an unheated room I've found half an hour outside is sometimes not long enough (but the smaller instrument you are considering will cool faster) . Second, the inevitable consequence of greater magnification (good for viewing planets) is a smaller field of view. I doubt I'd have been able to easily use the mak on a non go-to alt/az mount (as I do) if I hadn't spent some time with a lower magnification, wider field reflecting telescope first. I don't know to what degree the go to mounts in your price range will make it easier for you to find things I'm afraid, as I've not used any of them. Heather

Hey Stan, You never bought a Lee filter then ? Or only once ... 🤥 I have a similar prehistoric film photography based set of thoughts, but it never crossed my mind to bung a protective filter on a telescope eyepiece, it would be on the wrong end to do any protecting ! I wondered how much of the price difference astro vs. photo is down to economies of scale, with a far bigger market for photo filters . Heather

I took the same advice you have read, and bought the Opticron Adventurer 10x50 T WP Binoculars (and a suitable bracket ) when they were in stock 3 months ago (from Tringastro, not FLO who had sold out) I like the binoculars a lot, but need to have them on a support to keep them steady . For portability I use a monopod + ballhead, but I see you are intending to use a tripod. That's a good idea so you can set them up and lock the tripod head to let your child see what you found ... you may find you have to kneel or sit to get yourself low enough to match their eye level though ! Be aware that a ball head on the tripod will be less annoying than a pan/tilt one, as the ball head doesn't have protruding handles to get in the way. I have no experience of the other binoculars you mention, so I'm afraid I can't help you with those.

Ah, hard luck, you could watch the thread here: https://stargazerslounge.com/forum/197-flo-clearance-offers/ or keep refreshing FLO's page here: https://www.firstlightoptics.com/offers.html they are letting things out a few at a time, you never know what might come up next ...