MartinT

I did also attempt it with my 2x Barlow, because why not, but I think the view was better without - certainly too dim by eye though the little animation the phone made still impressed me. Although I wouldn't have thought anything was in there without the previous hours observation to guide me. PXL_20220513_232549616.NIGHT.mp4

I think I might have pushed the pixel 4a about as far as it'll go! This counts as the very first galaxy I've spotted, so I'm unreasonably chuffed. Also what with the light pollution here and the bright shiny moon last night I realise I didn't make life easy - but I've found picking one target and sticking with it definitely helps me. This was too faint to see much of anything through the eyepiece (celestron ultima duo 13mm on my skywatcher 130pds), so I used the phone with astrometry.net (such an amazing resource) to work out what I was looking at and hone in - turning myself into an iterated plate-solving, push-to system. Once I was on target - and had the reassurance that I actually was where I thought/hoped I was - I could make out more detail by eye (though not as much as the phone could show). I spent a good while peering at (down?) the whirlpool before the bottom of the scope contacted the tripod - another rookie mistake! - and, not having the confidence to try and reset/refind it swapped to splitting the double double (just because I'd read about t earlier in the week) before heading to bed far later than planned. What a fabulous night.

Hi all, I realise that this is a decade old post, but my googling of this very problem last week led me here, so I thought I'd write down the answer for any future searchers. Those daft crosshead screws holding the slo mo controls on are M4 sized. I found a generic m4 thumbscrew that worked well. Although, if you're searching, 5mm would have been better than the 10mm I had - the RA one needed a quick introduction to the hacksaw to trim it to clear the clutch. M

Thanks @Zermelo that's really helpful - ta for the linked thread too. Very informative.

Wow!

Fabulous. I really love the composition of the 2nd one - the building looks almost cosy under the sky

Really nice shots

Lovely images - I really like the 2nd to last. 👍

lovely, evocative shot. 👍

really nice shot, and so good to hear about the efforts and thinking that went into it.

Thanks @bomberbaz I'll have a look

Thanks both, really appreciate it

Hi, I have a skywatcher 130 and would like to look at getting a particularly wide angle, low power eyepiece. I have the 28mm 2" eyepiece it came with and I think that has a 56deg fov (though happy to be corrected here), but I see eyepieces listed with wider view and wondered about them. I've been told that the f5 of my scope is fast enough to cause problems for wider view eyepieces, especially at the cheaper end of the market. How problematic are these limitations? I've also been told that the advantage of using a 2" is the wider views possible. So does anyone have experience of a 2" wide-fov, low power eyepiece - particularly one that's good value (or one to save up for tbh!) Cheers, M

Thanks @Philip R that's a great tip - sounds like an ideal Xmas list addition!

Ta very much. Cheers

Really nice chair. Lovely design and finish.

Thanks everyone for the encouragement! There's been not a sliver of clear sky since, so I've not been able to get out again. The advice about keeping the magnification down is great to hear. I'll take my finger off the buy it now button! Speaking of which I think if @FLO had a function where items reduced in price (just slightly, mind) as consecutive cloudy nights amassed then my credit card would be bang in trouble. 😂 Course, might be tough for them to stay afloat... But the urge to browse on a cloudy night is quite something! @IB20I think I'll see how viewing goes in the field literally opposite my house before I wade into council bureaucracy, but good to know. Cheers all, M

I didn't know these came as sets - makes total sense now I think about it - thank you

Fabulous shot!

Hi, I'm a beginner myself and after consulting this very forum (and the local telescope store) settled on the 130pds on the eq3-2 as my first scope setup earlier this month. I'm very happy with what I got, but it's a really difficult decision - there's soooo many options and at least twice that many opinions! I imagine it'd be very easy to end up with buyers remorse, especially considering how much it all costs! The important things for me - i.e. great advice I got here - were to think carefully about what I wanted to do with my first scope (I started out thinking about something easy to involve the kids with and maybe transport, but admitted to myself this is dad's toy for now 😀) and to actually visit a store, see the telescopes in the flesh, and have a conversation with the person selling them. You mentioned a telrad and a finder scope - i have a telrad on my scope and love it. It's very easy to use as everything is the right way up and normal sized in there. I took the finder scope which came with the 130pds off to fit the telrad to the shoe, but you could easily fit both to the tube if you wanted. Take your time, don't worry if you get opposing advice, and keep looking forward to your first light with it - whatever you choose its gonna be great! Good luck!

thanks @bomberbaz, yes I'm using skysafari plus, rather than the free. I looked at the free and was impressed enough to pay for it. It did walk me through signing up to livesky when i installed, and as I've used the app to make notes, i see now that I can view them online. But i think without paying the subscription i can't edit or make new lists etc. from another device. I can definitely see how actually putting some thought in before stepping outside would improve things - and this does look like a way of spending money to do that (which I'm learning is key to astronomy, right?! 🤣 ) plus it'd mean i can do that from not-my-phone, which is just better all round. I'll have a play, see if there's a free trial (that will be entirely filled with cloud I'm sure!). Cheers. Also, just because I spy from your signature you have the GTi mount, can i ask if you consider that to be suitable for the 130? Obviously, not yet, but at some point i imagine I'll shell out for a goto solution and i think that mount would be about the same as adding the synscan to the eq3-2, with the advantage of wifi (and so skysafari control) all built in.

Thanks everyone. There really is just so much to learn. Thanks for the tips re: magnification level. I was just looking at moon filters, so @bomberbaz that's a great shout.

I finally got out with my new skywatcher 130pds and eq3-2. I've been very patiently waiting for a break in the clouds and have fiddled with everything I could think of in the meantime: I installed bobs knobs on the secondary and collimated the scope using a collimation cap. Before i attempted it, collimation was as daunting to me as others have found - hence the bobs knobs - but now it's done once I'm confident to do it again as necessary. I was a bit surprised how much adjustment it needed (It needed the height of the secondary adjusting and presumably it won't need that again) and it really is a matter of patience and time to get your fiddles to faddle it in the right way. I also adjusted the RA axis of the mount as it was a bit sticky. All of this was following tips either actually on or linked from this forum - so thanks everyone. Thanks to the clouds I also even had time to make a little riser for my telrad viewer using a cheap finderscope mount from daddy bezos and some sugru. The clouds finally gave me a break and I was able to sneak a very quick garden session after kiddos bedtime but before grown-ups dinner (isn't parenthood just wonderful for time management skills). I have three eyepieces - the 28mm sky-watcher that came with the scope, a celestron omni 6mm, and a celestron 8-24 zoom - and a 2x barlow. I used the zoom all the way out to start, zooming in once centred and then swapping for the 6mm. I aligned the mount using a compass - I don't have a polar scope, would people recommend that as an 'essential' accessory? Presumably not for viewing - I've been assuming that as i also don't have an RA motor (yet, that's on my list) I don't really need to worry about how accurate alignment is and can just account for my poor alignment while i'm viewing with the controls. Once I've got the motor I'll start playing with taking pictures - unexpectedly the zoom lens has a t2 thread at the top, so along with the prime focus of the scope I'm going to try some afocal on the planets and moon. It was early enough that jupiter was still high enough for me to see - to the south of me there's a steep hill so the houses uphill give me a very high horizon in that direction from the garden and my own house blocks the view west. There's also a really annoying streetlight on the pavement by my garden which means its not really that dark and I don't know how I'll handle that (hadn't considered it before, so now I'm idly wondering about a gazebo). Despite all that, I could clearly see, what i assume were, the four Galilean moons and the bands were wonderfully clear. That sent me running inside the house to convince my wife to brave the cold and share my joy at what was a birthday present from her. Can anyone tell me how one discerns which moons are which or even if these would have been those?! I spent quite some time looking at Jupiter and experiencing the telescope - learning to control the mount and the focus control, changing eyepieces and barlow, etc. At the most I used the 6mm with the 2x barlow, so I think that's 217x magnification. Jupiter was far brighter than i expected, and at times it was had to see detail because of this - do people use filters to help with that? Is it worth pushing the magnification further? I think it might be, so would it be better to get a different eyepiece (4mm or even lower?) or a replace the barlow with a 3x? My star finding skills are essentially at zero, so for want of a better idea, next I turned the scope to the moon and was rewarded with phenomenal views. So sharp and detailed - i really enjoyed the dual speed focuser here, i've no frame of reference but it was so easy to get the image utterly sharp. On the terminator I could see such strong depth on the craters' edges and i had lots of fun zooming in and out or tracking the terminator up and down. Then I used skysafari on my phone to help point me towards the pleiades, as I'd been told these would be an easy first messier and, popping in the 28mm 2" was blown away by the richness of the view. So many stars. I found skysafari really helpful here, the audio guide was really great to listen to while I gazed up. Then it was time to come in and fizz with excitement drone on at my wife about the fabulousness of that hour-and-a-half or so. I'm a very happy lad and super excited to get out again - I'm really pleased with my purchases, it's all far in excess of my expectations. I think next time I'll head for the end of the playing field just over the road from me to escape the hill and streetlight, get me some more darkness.

I realise this is an old post, but thanks for flagging this little tip @lenscap. I'd readied myself to a full strip down and regrease on my brand new eq3-2, but this has completely remedied the issue. I'll leave the teardown for another day when it actually needs it. That said, I'm fast running out of things to tinker with while I wait for the clouds to break... . 😂

Hi everyone, So, today was a very exciting day. I've bought my first proper telescope! (I'm not counting the powerseeker 127eq). I saw a few folks in the thread saying they were in similar positions in years gone by, so having pulled the trigger i thought i'd lay out my decision here to tie this off for anyone at a similar point in the future. After endless internet research, I went to the local telescope shop and chatted to the chap there - it was so helpful, as someone suggested, to see the scopes in the flesh. I explained what i wanted from my first scope, what options i was thinking of, and what my budget was. We ran through all of the options that were discussed here - and some entirely new ones too. So after popping out for a coffee, cake and a final think-through... I ended up right back where i started - I'm now the very excited owner of a 130PDS and an eq-3-2 mount. I know some of you actually advised against this combo (well, I think more this mount tbf), but I think what's changed is my intentions/expectations and understanding - I'm now planning on using it primarily for visual right now. The chap in the shop wasn't concerned about mounting the 130 on the eq3-2 and I've read other threads on SGL (I've read so many threads!!) where it's worked out for some folks trying (some) AP so i think it's fair to say opinion is divided there. I respect the opinion of those advising against the eq3-2 and realise this mount isn't man enough for proper AP but i didn't have the budget to go bigger, didn't want something less portable right now, and I'm comfy with knowing that this part of the setup is something that'll need replacing if/when i want to go further down that road - plus, frankly, it'd be a bit wasted on me at this time. But wanting to leave that door open did feed into the decision for the 130pds rather than a different, more specifically visual, scope - like the Dob - where I'd be looking to replace with (or, lets be honest, add) another scope in that circumstance too. Given the decision to focus on visual right now, I also thought long and hard about EQ mounts vs AZ mounts, and settled on EQ for a couple of reasons - EQ makes nice sense to me and I'm comfy doing the mount alignment, I liked the idea of having one handle to turn for tracking things once i've found them, the AZ4 i looked at didn't have slow motion controls which just seem so handy (i know other AZ mounts do), and i like the possibility of adding an RA motor later on for tracking - this'll definitely come in handy when the kiddos are a bit older and want to view things with me for a bit longer. I still don't see me upgrading to the GoTo kit - though ask me again after an unsuccessful night of hunting! But again, i like the option to add to the gear i've chosen, rather than replace it all. I feel like I've ended up with a setup that'll suit me well for a good few years and only run out of road if i get seriously into AP - which probably would mean a longer sit down conversation with the wife/bank manager! I also scoured 2nd hand listings, and very nearly went that way but eventually i decided I didn't want to spend what would have been less, but still a lot, of money and end up without any aftersales support or such confidence that the gear is all tip-top. I can see myself going 2nd hand for later purchases, but just not for first scope. Thanks to some very kind relatives, I've already got some extras too. I'm all tooled up with a barlow, a collimation cap, a telrad finder and a copy of 'Turn left at orion'. So if only these clouds would clear, I'd be well away Thank you to all the people that contributed to this and offered me their advice - this is such a common question here so I'm very grateful for people taking the time to advise yet another newbie. I really feel like i shook all the trees and kicked all the tyres of the decision here, and that's really great. Cheers, MartinT