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PS, not that it matters cause you're all limeys and this isn't exactly the greatest e-commerce site but here's the shop

If it's a clone it'd have to be something he got into the shop via trade-in, this was in a rich neighborhood with Tele-vues in stock en masse and his basement is servicing 16" and 20" monsters. It does look almost exactly like the JMI EV 1N but perhaps older (which is fine by me!)

It's just so darn optimistic. It seems like when we take a step back and ask the question, "ok but really, what is the likelihood we find life anywhere else in the solar system" the answer is almost universally "near 0" from serious scientists unless you're specifically looking for it. I think there's a lot of strange and wonderful things about this universe and we're about as rare as a Quasar. Not alone, but seeing as we have the perfect planet for life and it arose exactly once, the idea that it happened on other celestial bodies with significantly less favorable conditions for (organic) life seems unrealistic. I dunno, I like that it keeps people excited about space and keeps rockets launching but beyond that, the idea that we're actually going to find life itself is so so so far-fetched in my head. I could be way more convinced of a Venusian or Martian genesis that got snuffed out than I can of Europa but whatever lands rovers on surfaces!

Can anyone help me ID it? I knew I was looking at a quality focuser and didn't ask too many "gift horse in the mouth" kind of questions, it looks like a 2" version of an older EV-1CM. I was expecting the cheapest single speed focuser imaginable! Perhaps a custom version of an EV-B he had laying around? There's no branding on it at all.

I bought a used Meade 12" Lightbridge from a local shop for $700 and figured I got a steal in this market, but when I got home and put an EP on it, the stock single speed focuser dropped and was fubar. I brought it back to the shop and he was I can only guess a combination embarassed for selling me something like that and wanted to do something nice for a newb who was really excited about astronomy. Well, I picked it up and this was on it, free of charge, which, correct me if I'm wrong but costs more than half of what I paid for the entire dob!

I'm not worthy of these things. I will own them longer than I own my children.

Checking... Wait, anyone have a spare Orion drive? Be back in 50 million years.

We're not there, and can't get there! https://www.ebay.com/itm/143085549981?chn=ps&_trkparms=ispr%3D1&amdata=enc%3A1QOJJ13iJTMGWyj_wnclc4Q20&norover=1&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-117182-37290-0&mkcid=2&itemid=143085549981&targetid=1262375642056&device=c&mktype=pla&googleloc=9004436&poi=&campaignid=12873834712&mkgroupid=117462212370&rlsatarget=pla-1262375642056&abcId=9300536&merchantid=108064078&gclid=CjwKCAjwzaSLBhBJEiwAJSRokoUoTKx-TYm1v7iPFOvjHGE9o9I-ZuNWoYcmLECINjW7mSoc76NNABoC6EgQAvD_BwE

I hear these complaints being on the border of NYC / in NYC for my viewing. My house is Bortle 8 + these obstacles which can't be overcome: For blocking out the light, I think I'm just going to get a hood for the short term. Subscribing here so I can see where this nets out. I keep having people encourage me on what I can see with my 4" reflector on a dob but Pleiades just resolves to stars, ring nebula I literally cannot find, period and Andromeda your guess is as good as mine if I'm looking at some kind of atmospheric aberration or the galaxy, it's that faint. I had an 8" SCT for a few weeks and just traded it in for a 12" dob, the telescope-shop guy again thinks I can pick a lot more out with my 12" but he's an hour more outside of the city, but he keeps telling me Bortle 8-9 I'll be able to pick a lot more out of the sky with the 12" but I remain unconvinced.

You did not! In fact I think this thread was kind of looking for an excuse to collimate. The lightbridge is at the shop getting the focuser fixed (because of course I wouldn't get second-hand first light, first night) Today I'll be taking apart the 100mm just so I have an excuse to play with the new toy sitting in its plastic, in fact so no fear instilled at all

We'll never know since I just swapped the C8 for a used Lightbridge 12" I finally pulled the trigger on a Farpoint laser, I fully expect to now have to do it all the time based on everything I've read about big dobs. I just sat ready waiting to purchase something to do it and every session I'd check the stars out of focus and they'd be perfectly balanced. Thanks for the info all.

If it's going to be worse than my C8 on the stock Nexstar mount I would say don't do it (others will have to tell me if that's true, I'm uber new). Having to wait for things to settle, sucks. I was debating similar things for months in my head and I'm glad I wound up with this setup cheaply because I now know to plus up the mount rather than try and bring it to the line of what's "acceptable."

I have a 10+ year old 100mm Orion Skyscanner and a 20+ year old Celestron C8. The latter I just picked up and I met the guy before me and he wasn't collimating anything having maybe taken it out a few times in his back yard pointing it at the moon with a solo 40mm eyepiece and had it for 5 years. How is it I've never had to collimate? Everything looks balanced but it seems like the best newb advice is, "collimate, damn it." Just don't know how long I can go never having to touch anything before I conclude that maybe things are screwed up and I'm just not discerning. Out of focus stars are always perfectly balanced on all sides. Am I just really good about not banging my scopes around or something?

Great post. I caught the same transit last night too on my 8" SCT, my first ever and it was glorious. How did you know it was Ganymede? I fancy myself one who understands these things with literal 5,000+ hours into Kerbal Space Program but I can never discern what moon is what around Jupiter because of the obvious perspective problems

Right now I'm using a baseball cap and a regular hooded shirt (which I peel off cause it's still warm here some nights). Thanks for turning me on to that though, I may try it. Last night wasn't pleasant, nor is anything really that's not a planet, lunar or the sun. No matter what I'm inevitably holding a hand over an eye and trying to crowd the other eye with the eyepiece.

Nothing to see here, just parts of the sun on an unfathomable scale being flung towards everything we've ever known and ever will know being dissipated by an invisible force field we barely understand manifested as a continent-sized display of magic-like energy. No but seriously, Stereo A and B are like the coolest things ever. (best way of how we know when these things come) Edit: Wow, didn't know they were offline sad news.

Is this how normal people approach things? I just pretend like I know it all, fail hard, fail more than anyone thought was possible and emerge on the other side somehow with applicable working knowledge. I used to go through life thinking I was (so painfully) alone, then SpaceX happened.

You really don't have to get too imaginative to envision a flexible setup. Most high end backpacks amount to a big tube of sturdy but fabric-like material, like there's no reason you can't figure out a way to use that as a shroud (not that this is top of the list) and the primary/secondary mirror mounts could easily be your top/bottom supports. The mirrors you'd want up close to the middle of your back as the heaviest items in your entire arsenal, but also protected from scratches, presumably you'd want some kind of lightweight duvatine for that. I think bottom line if you could somehow get an 8-12" OTA, I'm guessing it'd have to be a reflector setup (I mean, maybe you could try and get away with some kind of SCT so you can get a wider diameter but not get too tall?). Honestly, I bet you could take a Meade 12" and figure out a way to hollow it out and use that as your pack and protect and reassemble the scope on the other side. Is that possible with an SCT? I understand a lot goes into getting the corrector plate proper. ...those thought processes leading me to the current conclusion, "Strap on the Skyscanner and just get out there before you complicate this any further" This is about that kind of emotional/pseudo spiritual personal experience you can share with friends and doesn't have to be the showing nebulae with color. I think the Skyscanner 100mm can do that with a good eyepiece (perhaps a Pentax zoom?). Over-complicating it up front could easily kill that atmosphere before it ever gets to happen.

Well, I'm really talking about fabricating something. I work in video production/post production so I fully understand what a good carbon fiber tripod costs as I've lugged them (which are still plenty heavy btw) through pretty much every major airport in the western world I like your suggestion as the small one is out of the box way lighter. Off the shelf it may be hard to beat these smaller guys from Celestron and Orion. This may be something I want to observe my observations over some time and come up with a plan later. For right now maybe just take the Skyscanner on my trips and get laughed at. I always laugh last though with my pack weight and weighing 110 lbs I'm a mountain goat and those laughers don't have wind to laugh when they get to the destination . Spent my entire life being the least physically fit for any physical activity that didn't involve climbing something so, happy to be prideful about being a mountain goat. "I woke up early to find clouds on 10/11/21" planning so far leads me to believe carbon fiber dowels to replace any kind of support might yield a lb or two reduction. Part of me wants to go the other way, build the lightest possible structures for like an 8" mirror set or something. If I'm going to be carrying literal extra lbs, might as well make that unavoidable weight the mirrors and minimally build around it. But that gets uber complicated because if you're carrying those kinds of supports around you're really, really going to want to find a way to use that for your shelter or backpack. tl;dr: I think the answer for the immediate term is to just take these off the shelf small dobs and think about replacing the structural support for tube/mount over time. Convenient that my Skyscanner 100mm already is one of the lightest, so I guess that goes with me on the next trip! (having typed that, omg that mount is so much weight)

You're lucky man, I'm in a somewhat similar place in terms of experience in the hobby and have been similarly hunting Orion as it peers into the morning sky at the same general latitude. When I finally got it into view with my 100mm Skyscanner I had to really be acclimated and squinting to see the faintest of smudges in Orion's skirt. I see you talking about filters and stuff to resolve it better and here I am just happy to resolve it, period in a Bortle 8-9 (depending on where I'm observing). Happy hunting!

Awesome stuff! I do go kind of crazy with things as you may have seen with my pack weight, that's toting gear for a family of 4 (my wife has a pack though with similar weight) Really it was having children that made me conscious and obsess over UL stuff. What's the weight on your tripod? Part of me wants to make it a little project, maybe take the Skyscanner apart and re-assemble it as a truss tube and build a dob mount maybe out of carbon fiber dowels. I get a lot of ideas like this and then conclude the amount of time to save .2 kgs isn't worth it lol. Taking these reflector tubes w/ dob mounts though and shedding the weight could be easy enough. I just look at the dob mount with its Formica-clad particle board and think that's got to be about as practical as carrying lead weights. Frankly I'm not sure how this stuff doesn't already exist to buy, I'd have to think there was some kind of optical scope you could come up with that by minimal swapping out of optics and such you can go from a bird watching telescope to a astronomical one. Like if REI had that kind of device I feel like it would be perpetually sold out. Who doesn't want to look at critters and skies on these trips? Isn't that like one of the huge reasons to do it to begin with? Forget off the shelf, for me and my wants/needs, I feel like a 4" reflector w/ dob should be able to get down to 1.5kg/3.3lbs. Maybe not easily, it depends on the actual weight of the mirrors and eyepieces though as you can't sacrifice anything there, at all. I'd create and sell something like that as a product as a side gig, but I feel like it's obviously not an AP setup and has limited niche market. I'd be lucky to sell a dozen.

I mean, that's really all I get to see, at all, in Bortle 9. Just saw the word "Suffolk" and was like, "maybe he knows good spots?" I'll figure out the best local spots on long island when I get involved in some more in-person stuff out there. In spire of the entire island being Bortle 8+ there appears to be some good stuff and shops out there. I think the best of the best is driving 1.5 hours for a Bortle 4-5.

So I backpack a lot. I spend almost all my leisure time in Bortle 2-3 playgrounds (and frankly surprised none of the places I frequent are 1s). At least when I was younger and childless Anyways.. I already have a Skyscanner 100mm and I'm not sure if anyone here backpacks seriously but the idea of taking any part of a telescope is sacrilege and it better be like your sole reason for backpacking. We're a people who literally count squares of toiler paper to save weight. Does anyone here backpack and gaze? I feel like among all of you long time astronomers there has to be people who do this. The fully assembled scope + dob mount is 2.8kg/6.2 lbs while meanwhile my whole pack weight, including everything (but sans food and water) for a 5 day trip weighs roughly 7kg/15lbs. If you were to carry a .8kg/1.8lb chair for you when you got to camp, there would be conversations about how that chair was a luxury item, to give you a comparison So that being said, what's the absolute best bang for your buck, lightest, I guess I want to say 4-6" in. on the lighest dob mount possible. (or tell me something different, don't care about AP when backpacking, only visual) Anyone have any suggestions or experience? Thanks!

Wow very nice, I have to ask, is that Suffolk, NY or the UK/some other UK colony? Tell me it's NY and you can tell me of a good dark site out there There's one place out by Montauk I want to try but I think I gotta go way outside of NYC, west, to get good dark sites.

I have a really hard time understanding what the future of amateur astronomy is going to look like in 30 years. I almost kind of feel like anything that's uniquely suited to AP and camera tech is almost immediately going to date itself and limit its effective life and there doesn't appear to be too many "Mustang" telescopes out there for the sake of nostalgia unless it has historical value. I just bought a 20 year old Celestron Nexstar and I'm officially out of luck with a dead controller unless I can find one used (but they're all breaking apparently). I think that's the future of all these handheld devices. 20-30 years from now there'll be some bluetooth for your brain that these controllers can't do and that'll be it, once the hardware dies, no one is making new. Camera stuff itself moves at like 5-10x that speed, literally, in terms of dating and value. So with all that being said, I think the only thing to really hold its value over 30 years will be visual astronomy stuff on the high end. That's only if manufacturing doesn't reach a point where optics are trivial and cheap. It's fairly amazing what we take for granted in our pockets these days. A lot of impressive glass even if they're not manufactured by Pentax. That's an extreme new-comers perspective. I'm sure I said some ignorant stuff.