Someblokius

1. The sun projector is pretty good. It will let you see sunspots and works very well as an eclipse viewer. I have one and use it, despite having a solar telescope. 2 and 3. The telescopes aren't bad for educational kits. They work but they won't give you views that compare to a normal telescope. The refractors are tiny - the size of a finder-scope but with worse optics. The Newtonian is 70mm so it should give slightly better views than the refractor. I don't want to be too harsh on Astromedia since you can buy both the kits you mention for about the cost of a bargin eyepiece. Also I'm not sure how long a cardboard telescope would last in the damp night air. (Depends on conditions where you are, I guess.) 3.Projection won't work for night-time objects. The images are just too dim, even with a larger telescope. If you're looking at something to learn about optics with then they're worth a try, and they are fun kits to play with. But if you're wanting something that you can actually use for observation for that kind of money then my advice would be to look for a used pair of binoculars, which would give a much better experience. Sorry if that's a bit negative.

Bought these a few months ago to tide me over while in the middle of a sunscope upgrade and I was really bored. Cost me £30 from Harrison Telescopes. I have now used them enough to form an opinion. Kind of. I was hoping for something that would show larger sunspots (also eclipses, naturally. Still a few more partials to come in the next few years.) It would be amazing if the same sort of build quality of the Lunt solar scopes could be delivered for this price. Sadly this is not a time of miracles. When I took them out of the blister pack for the first time one of the objectives fell off. Normally that would lead to some harshness in a review, but bear with me. The objective cell (if that's not a melodramatic name for the little rings of rubbery plastic that hold the leneses in place) did just clip back on. Yes, these things have a Fisher-Price feel to them but they do actually work pretty well. With a few issues. i) The limited focus adjustment meant that I can't use them without my glasses. I am very myopic though, and I get the same problem with lots of binoculars. These things also have pretty brutal eye relief which means I have to jam them against my specs. ii) They don't come with any covers, case etc. That was solved with a resealable sandwich bag. No strap either, just a long lanyard made of what seems to be piano wire, from the way it made my neck feel. That got cut off pretty quickly. iii) Finding the Sun in them is hard. I wasn't expecting this. There is exactly one object visible from Earth through these binoculars. So no lining up foreground objects to guide the view in like I would with normal binocs. No following the glare in like I would looking at the Moon, either. Sweeping around and trying very hard not to peek directly at the Sun is what I settled with. Glueing a sheet of solar film to the top to act as a sight might help, but that would probably double the price of the things. The field seems tightish, I think. About three Suns, so roughly 1.5 degrees? As for what you can see, you do need the largest sunspot groups. Or an eclipse, I guess. So in summary I'd say these might be worth considering if you want something to look at the Sun for less than solarscope money, and one of the cheap projector options doesn't draw you in. They're small and light, which means you could take them places, I guess? Maybe it would be cool to take them out with you? They might brighten up the tedium of all those annoyingly non-astronomy places like offices, weddings etc. So yeah, not quite as awful as might be expected. I wouldn't go so far as calling them 'good' either, but they're not totally useless.

I deforked my 12" Lx200 GPS about a decade ago when the mount died. I put a losmandy dovetail on it and ran it on a NEQ6 for many years. Undermounted, but it worked well for visual. I've never regretted it, not even now that the now worn out NEQ6 has followed the Meade fork to telescope valhalla. The LX200 tube is thus about to get its third mount. I can see that you might have a dilemma with your mount being operational, but I think that in your position I'd still go with the defork, assuming that your mount will take the tube. The current Celestron SCTs seem to be well thought of, but I think for most uses 12" is going to be better than a 9.25". The 12" has about 60% more area than a 9.25", big enough to notice I'd think. Quite the downgrade. EDGEHD optics might be nice to have if you're doing imaging, but for visual I'm not sure it matters too much. I guess the big questions are how much you'd get for the Meade as it is, and whether your GEM will take the weight of a deforked 12" tube. Portability would be different too, although deforking obviously makes the LX200 a lot lighter. And quieter. If you do defork, one hint I might offer is to avoid putting the little bolts back in to fill the holes. They will stick out into the tube and you don't want to wind your primary mirror against them when focusing as I almost did. EDIT: just looked how extensively you've modded /restored the scope. It does seem a bit of a waste to throw that away. Although I guess you could always keep the fork mount in case you change your mind later. That wouldn't make much room in your garage though.

Astromedia Solar Projector - https://www.firstlightoptics.com/astromedia-astronomy-model-kits/astromedia-the-sun-projector-kit.html Introduction If you are unaware of how putting telescopic optics, cardboard and the Sun together can produce fire then you had a much more responsible childhood than I did. This is a papercraft (actually fairly dense cardboard) kit that uses a 30mm lens and mirrors to project an image of the Sun onto a card screen. What could possibly go wrong? I'm middle aged now but I still like astronomy, I still like model kits and I still like starting fires, so this thing had to be tried out. Assembly My first impression of this kit was surprise that the lens was actually a 30mm glass doublet. I'd been expecting plastic. My surprise was calmed a little when I saw that the lens is actually stopped down to 23mm, '80s toy telescope style. But enough nit-picking about optics. I judge cakes by their taste, not their ingredients. It was time to start assembly. At this point I hit my first roadblock. The instructions are terrible. A certain large Scandinavian furniture company has realised that by making instructions largely pictorial they can be made clear and useful with minimal translation needs. Each step of building your bookcase can be made simple with a diagram showing what goes where and in which orientation. Astromedia seem to have made the opposite decision. The pictured page of the instructions is typical. You get a couple of photos illustrating each page, usually showing the end result of a subassembly when you'd prefer to know how the components go together. What you actually get is a dense, small-print nightmare, verbally describing a process that would be so much easier to visualise if there was a diagram. It's possible that I am being unfair here. I doubt that (the assumed) translation has done the text any favours. Drawing diagrammic instructions might well not be cheap. But being a reasonably avid wargamer I couldn't help but wonder how much better instructions a certain large UK wargaming miniatures company would have made. Having panicked at the instructions I had a revelation. People are going to buy this kit to do with children, right? What do kids do if they can't do a thing? I went to cry to my big sister. She's big on arts and crafts stuff. She scratchbuilds paper flowers that look shockingly realistic. She has [deleted due to terror of sisterly wrath] years of making stuff out of card and paper. No way she was going to be intimidated by some weak instructions. The kit was as good as built. She dragged me in to help with the instructions, because she thought that they were terrible. In the end we more or less managed it with only one mishap (We mounted the objective doublet the wrong way around. A minor error as I'm sure you'll agree. Correcting it took some nifty knifework but in the end we flipped it around.) One thing that did help was the big picture on the cover slip, which helped in ways that the instructions did not. In the end we got it looking more or less like the picture on the cover, which is more than many of my gaming miniatures can claim. Use Fortunately by the time we had the thing put together there was a partial eclipse imminent. We set it up on the latest "Wheelie Bin" mobile pier mounting and found the Sun. Despite the slight wonkiness due to both the wobbly bin and some minor assembly issues on the alt-az base (they call it a Dobsonian base, and I can sort of see why. On the other hand that feels wrong to me since this is not a Newtonian, so terminology rejected!) we got an image of the Sun. It was beautiful! The projector offers a pair of switchable mirrors that give images 55mm or 75mm in diameter. The image seems enormous. The image is clear, too. We settled on 55mm since the 75mm version only just fits on the screen and therefore needs constant fiddling to keep it in view. It is also naturally dimmer. Watching the partial eclipse via the projector was hassle free and social - three of us were sitting a metre or so away and it was still clear. There's a bit of chromatic fringing, which can, according to the instructions, be dealt with using a series of even smaller aperture stops on the objective. We didn't bother with them since the fringes were only visible if I practically shoved my head into the box and we didn't want to lose image brightness. We all enjoy a nice equipment comparison, don't we? I also have a Coronado PST H-Alpha sunscope on a Skywatcher Solarquest Sun-tracking mount. My PST is much loved and has given me a lot of fun over the years. On June 10th though, I was reminded of its limitations. One thing I've noticed about the PST is that even a wisp of cloud seems to kill the image. The Solarquest tracking camera also needs to see the Sun to track, as you'd expect. June 10th was pretty cloudy. The eclipse was only visible intermittently until we got a long break in the cloud in the second half. By then I'd given up on the PST since by the time I had it realigned on the Sun when it returned to view the cloud got in the way again. The projector, on the other hand, gave a fine image of the Sun even through much of the broken cloud. It also has the advantage that despite being manual and alt-az it only needed to be fiddled with every five minutes or so. This meant that the Sun was usually still in the field after one of its disappearences. The body of the projector gives a nice dark surrounding to the image. We found that glare was not an issue even when looking towards the Sun. I took a couple of images using a phone. My first eclipse photos, amusingly enough. So in the end the fancy autotracking mount and solarscope were conculsively beaten by cardboard. Nice one, Astromedia! Conclusion. Negatives first: The instructions. This excellent kit deserves better. That's it, really. I've said enough about that. Positives: Everything else. I was honestly shocked by how good this thing is. (Caveat: I've not actually had a chance to see sunspots on it yet. I'm assuming that sunspots are a more challenging target than an eclipse but I can't imagine it'll be that bad.) The projector is ideal for group viewing, particularly for non-astronomers. I've shown it to my nine year old niece, wheras I'd not show her the PST yet since I don't want to give her the idea that looking at the Sun through telescopes is a good idea. Naturally children should always be supervised when solar observing, but the design of the projector makes it very difficult to see the raw beam from the objective so I think that the projector is pretty safe. Despite warnings about the consequences of leaving the device unattended I have yet to even cause any scorching of the casing, which is testament to the foolproofing of the design. I can be quite an impressive fool. I'd recommend this to anyone interested in solar observing, particularly if you want to share the Sun with someone. I'd definitely think that the £23 (FLO price) for the Projector is an excellent deal even if you only use it as an eclipse viewer. Most of all using it is simple and fun, even if building it sometimes wasn't.

Hello, Posts here have helped me a few times over the years so I thought that I'd stop lurking and say hello. I'm in my middle years and have bounced in and out of this hobby a few times since my youth. Currently I feel very much 'back' so I've been dabbling with binocular viewing of the Moon and playing with my PST sunscope. I have an old SCT that I hope to get back into action once I have a working mount for it (currently only have an EQ5 Pro operational and a 12" SCT on that would be a teensy bit optimistic.) There's also an Esprit 100 bought for imaging a few years back, which I'm leaving for the moment as taking pictures is probably something to move on to later. It is a nice apo that I could fit eyepieces on though, so I might give it a go visually on the EQ5. My interests are pretty wide - I've observed Deep Sky and some planetary. I've never really done lunar much but I seem to be leaning that way now. And of course there's imaging. Lots of rabbit holes to fall down. Fun and clear skies.