cajen2

Hi and a warm welcome to SGL. I was in your situation a few months ago so I feel your pain. With a little more detail, we can start to whittle down your choices. Have you any preferences as to what you want to observe (moon, planets, double stars, deep space objects like nebulae and galaxies....)? How important to you is portability / ease of storage? Will you have to carry the scope up and down stairs, etc? An approximate idea of budget?

Sorted now with help from Pixies!

No, I'm afraid not. Yes, that's the page I've been trying to use. I get to the bit where you have to choose a pitch, click on one and nothing happens.

Aaargh! I've just tried about 15 times to book for this online and nothing happens. The campsite booking page shows blank for those dates too. Is there anyone I can contact?

Why only refractors? You couldn't get much more 'grab and go' than my 150p Flextube dob! One minute to set up.

Having trouble with your collimation? Just focus on star HD 84406 in Ursa Major. That's the one they're using to align the JWST mirrors! 😄

If those are the specs for the "Standard" model, what must the "Pro" be like? 😛 Following!

That looks gorgeous, Simon! Really looking forward to your first light report! 👍❤️

I'm hoping to go. First event of this kind for me!

I think a lot depends on the seeing conditions. On one of the clearest and most transparent nights I've observed in, Jupiter was gorgeous at only 70x mag: sharp outline and detailed surface. I've always found higher mags give a fuzzy ball effect, but when seeing is average, they may be needed to see any detail at all.

Reminds me irresistibly of a book called "The Art of Coarse Cruising." When the author was sailing across the Channel, he saw a ship. He called to his colourblind friend, "What colour light is that ship showing?" His friend thought a while.... "Brown."

Had no problem with that one. As I said, it only seems to happen at low light levels. Very frustrating when books tell you how gorgeously red, blue, etc something is.

Getting a bit crowded up there....🤔😄

Am I the only one with this problem? I keep reading (here and in books) about stars which are deep blood red, dazzling blue, etc. I also note some people say they can see reds and greens in M42, for example. I'm not talking about long-exposure images here, but I can't see any of these colours - everything looks white to me. I tried to persuade myself that Aldebaran, for instance, was really orange-red but I'm not convinced. This seems to be true at any magnification too. In normal light, I'm not colour blind or have any trouble distinguishing colours. Is there a condition like mine at low light?

@Orange Smartie or @Astro_Dad I assume you've put your Rigels to the right of the finder scope? With sticky pads, I want to get the location right first time.

Er...Flo anticipate getting more SL scopes in next month....😉

Mine is the Heritage Flextube 150p. I was expecting a mediocre performance compared with high-end scopes, but properly collimated, I've seen excellent detail, splitting the doubles Alnitak and Rigel, for example. Views of the moon are also wonderful (not usually considered to be a dob speciality!). Overall, it's been very capable - a good all rounder.

If your preference is for DSOs and portability isn't a factor, I'd go for the 8". Otherwise, you'd always be wondering what you were missing.... Having said that, I've been very impressed by what I've been able to see with my 6" dob. In either case, careful choice of eyepieces is important IMO.

....a bit wyrd, in fact!

Also take into account the storage and portability factors.

Hi young'un and a warm welcome to SLG. There are plenty of people on here who are happy to help.

There's always the Pentax XW range. Wide afov, long eye relief and well corrected.

Sorry, Stu - didn't realise!

What you need is a bomber jacket (a real one). Mine weighs a ton and is so warm that I can only wear it in zero temperatures or lower. I work on the principle that if it kept my father warm at 14,000 feet or more in a Lancaster, it's a good bit of kit!

A zoom has several advantages in addition to those mentioned: - you can focus on a target and decide how high you want the mag. If you happen to have a high quality EP at that mag, you can switch to it. If not, the zoom will still hopefully be good enough. - if you're using a filter, it saves faff and time, as you can attach it to the zoom without having to change EPs and thus the filter too. The same is true with a Barlow. Personally, I use an OVL Hyperflex 7.1-21.5mm. it's a pretty good one, though I have fixed-focus EPs with better resolutions.