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Skymax 150 Pro & Eclipse 200 Maksutov

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FLO

FLO

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Posted

For what its worth... I feel contentment lies in using a telescopes strengths and accepting its weaknesses. Maksutovs are fantastic, high-power scopes that deliver contrast, resolution and acutance in bundles - which is perfect for planetary, lunar and solar (with a solar filter!).

For the cost of a quality 2" diagonal, focal reducer and megawide super-duper eyepiece, you can buy a large/fast Newtonian.

IMHO, 1x Maksutov + 1x Newtonian + 1x 'grab & go' refractor = astro heaven 8)

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chuenmanc

chuenmanc

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Hi

I was hoping to get some kind of jack of all trades scope, but i can see now that it's going to be harder than i thought! What you said makes a lot of sense - £109 for a focal reducer, and £100+ for a wide eyepiece is the cost of a Newtonian or Dobsonian. However, I'd probably need to get to a darker site to make best use of them for DSOs anyway, so their lack of portability comes into play - one of the reasons I went for a Mak. Ah its not easy! If I had the space and darker skies I would definitely be tempted to get a big Newtonian, or perhaps even a wide field refractor.

On a separate note I took a look at the moon for the first time last night and nearly blinded myself! My wife had to put on some sunglasses! The view was superb - I'll probably get a moon filter to save my eyesight though :lol:

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bonesetter

bonesetter

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hi Chuen,

I'm new to the forum but have read with interest your experiences with your Mak, and it seems you've had a fairly similar experience to me starting out, in agonising over which way to go with scopes and eyepieces - it's a minefield! I thought you may like to hear of my experiences with some scopes i have tried since starting out a few months ago

I started by getting an 8" Skywatcher DOB (1200mm f/5.9)

Unfortunately the bloke who sold it to me forgot to mention no eyepieces were included in the sale!! So, i began to look at which eyepieces i might need and the different quality etc.... What a headache!! Being new, i was starting from no knowledge whatever and in the end gave up on the eyepiece search, and decided to go for a new scope completely. This decision was made partially due to the expense of the eyepieces i needed, and the advice of a DOB not being too good for planetary viewing

A DOB will not track, and so once you have the planet in view you have about 15 seconds of viewing (fairly high magnification) before it's gone and you have to nudge the scope to look again, and so on

Anyhow, I decided to go for a Bresser Messier N230 8" from Telescope House (£349 delivered). This turned out to be another waste of time! Saturn had an outline, but was completely white with no detail, no Cassini, and would not stand any magnification. The N203 I later found out has a few things which make it unsuitable for planetary viewing - its short focal length, and the poor quality optics, particularly of its secondary mirror. I had it laser collimated (this by the way was grossly out of collimation out of the box), but this still made no difference - Saturn was still a blurry mess!

I hope you don't mind the longwinded intro, but I'm getting to the MAK connection soon

At this stage i still had the DOB, which i hadn't been able to use. So, I used the eyepieces from the Bresser in the DOB. Now I have to say at this point I was on the verge of packing the whole thing in. Well, I focused the DOB on Saturn, and using a fairly high mag was totally stunned at what i saw. I thought i was looking through the Hubble. The planet had colour, definition, Cassini very well defined, even shadow onto it's rings. I don't know how many moons i was seeing, as there some stars near, but that didn't matter. I spent the next 45 minutes just looking. With the Barlow it still took it, and gave more. In short all the agony seemed worth it for that 45 minutes. It was the spacewalk quality people talked of in these forums. Outer space background was inky black and had an almost velvety quality which made it so real. It really was a sight i will always remember.

So impressed was I with the Skywatcher DOB i decided to go for the Sky-Watcher EXPLORER 200 (HEQ5) f/5 with motorised tracking, thinking this will be almost  the same a s the DOB, but with tracking. I was to be disappointed again! Saturn would still not yield anything like the image quality I had seen through the DOB! It was better than the Bresser, but still the planet and rings lacked any real detail. I did an side by side AB comparison with the DOB using the same eyepieces, and the DOB was very superior, it won hands down!

I had bought the scope from Chris Livingstone Telescopes, who has been very helpful, and he suggested going for a Maksutov - being the best telescope design of all! And good for planets, which was now my preference. However, I was still slightly dubious of going for this Chinese scope. My feeling, based on the experiences of others from their postings, was that these 'scopes are of fairly good optical quality for the money, but quality control is an issue, and really, the optics are of mediocre quality anyway, and you run the risk of 'getting a dud'.

But, IMHO, it seems while a golden rule in astronomy is 'aperture is king' one could also say 'optics quality is everything.'

I had been looking at ORION OPTICS range of scopes who pride themselves on superior optics, and decided to give them a call. The upshot of this is I have ordered a EUROPA 200mm f/8 with 1/8th PV wavefront optics. This scope will, I HOPE be a true planet killer!

The Europa arrives at the end of the week....

Sorry to have waffled, perhaps this shouldn't even be in this thread, or forum even!. Hope it helps some of you all

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bonesetter

bonesetter

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nick

thanks for the reply and the vote of confidence on the Orion Optics. I think i was a little hard on the Skywatcher Skymax Mak - i'm sure it is very good at what it does, and the decision between the that and the orion f/8 is what people here would have daggers at dawn about.

Has your SPX200 the facility for cooling fans? And most importantly how are your views of planets?

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bonesetter

bonesetter

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steve

thanks for the welcome

strange, i was looking at focuser reviews and upgrades today! i believe OO use cheap skywatcher type plastic focusers which make sharp fucusing difficult due to the slack play which develops fairly soon.

some say take it apart and clean the glue grease out, and replace it with ? Or put big plastic thumbwheels on...

i was looking at the Crayford, and the cheaper Borg #7315 helical focuser. Can you recommend one if i should need one?

if i ask Orion Optics they'll charge me £70 for the Crayford upgrade

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FLO

FLO

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I believe OO use cheap skywatcher type plastic focusers which make sharp focusing difficult due to the slack play which develops fairly soon.

You Skywatcher owners need not worry; the focuser we're discussing here (the one supplied on the OO Europa) is nothing like the one supplied on similar Skywatcher Newtonian/Dobs.

To be fair, the focuser that I - and some others from SGL - saw at Astrofest might have been a particularly poor sample.

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Nick Smith

Nick Smith

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nick

thanks for the reply and the vote of confidence on the Orion Optics. I think i was a little hard on the Skywatcher Skymax Mak - i'm sure it is very good at what it does, and the decision between the that and the orion f/8 is what people here would have daggers at dawn about.

Has your SPX200 the facility for cooling fans? And most importantly how are your views of planets?

Amazing! I used to own a Skymax 150 and the SPX200 blows it clean out the water.

The SPX200 has a cooling fan, but I don't use it much. The main improvement over the Europa is a better (Crayford) focuser.

It'll be interesting to see how you get on. IMO the f8 Newt is an incredible planetary scope.

Regards

Nick

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bonesetter

bonesetter

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well, from what i've seen of your imaging of saturn, which backs up those Orion Optics put on their web site, I should be in for the real thing

i'm curious about how your 100ED (this is the Evostar 100ED i'm presuming) holds up in the planetary rating between your 150 Mak, and the SPX...

My Europa is going to arrive next week now

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