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Skywatcher Heritage 100p

FLO

By FLO
in Sponsor Announcements and Offers

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  • 2 weeks later...
Chris

Chris

Posted
Posted

Any more user opinions on these little beauties???

Yes! mine arrived today and I've just been out with it until it clouded over. I'll do my best to give you a mini review :)

 Mine arrived from FLO the very next day after ordering, thanks FLO! :) The decorative box it comes in is very nice, worth keeping. Very little assemby required of the scope itself, just the red dot finder to attach and the bearing nuts for the alt/az to adjust. The mount looks and feels quite sturdy and the alt/az bearings are nice and smooth. The rack and pinion focuser is also smooth but was caked in far too much grease on and around the rack so I spent about 10 minutes carefully removing the excess so as to not get any on my EP's when in use. The focuser is still sliky smooth after the excess grease removal. One of my main concerns about this scope was its collmation beings the primary is f/4 and fixed but I needn't have worried, looking down the focuser the secondary looks bang centre and first light showed almost perfect doughnuts on defocused stars on axis, very impressed for f/4! Jupiter was out the front so I placed the scope on the pillar of our front garden wall and found it almost straight the way with the supplied 25mm lens at mag x16. Jupiter showed as a bright disc with four pinpoint moons, there was plenty of FOV to frame it at this mag. I switched to the supplied 10mm giving 40x and this time 2 bands could be seen although there was some lateral colour showing with this lens which was distracting so I switched to my own EP case. I chose my 7mm circle T ortho giving 57x, this gave a surprisingly good view with this scope, better than I'd imagined, there were 2 crisp bands and hints of finer structure set against a crisp disc, very nice I thought! I changed again to my 30mm Vixen Plossl giving me just 13x and scanned around, the stars were plentyful even with the street light literally across the road from me, I came across a nice open cluster not sure which but it almost filled the FOV. I then decided to take the scope out the back despite my neighbours security light blaring into my garden. This time I had the scope on my lap on a chair so there was a bit of wobble like when using a pair of bino's. I pointed the scope East and almost instantly saw a round smudge near Sirius which I think could have been the M3 glob cluster, then over to where Mars was rising low on the horizon through the trees, I could see the red colour of mars very clearly at 13x and decided to go in to let it rise a bit higher which is when it clouded over sadly. 

Verdict so far in a nutshell: A well made and ultra portable scope which has already showed me some surprisingly good views on day one! The optics are ace for such a cheap scope, I can't imagine a better little scope to take camping and I'm very much looking forward to taking it to somewhere really dark.

I very good way to spend just 97 quid I think :)

Chris 

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  • 2 weeks later...
Guest

Guest

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Are there anything I "must" have in addition to what's coming with this telescope? Eyepieces, collimate tools? I have never had a telescope before, so please keep in mind that I'm completely new to this game..

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Chris

Chris

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Are there anything I "must" have in addition to what's coming with this telescope? Eyepieces, collimate tools? I have never had a telescope before, so please keep in mind that I'm completely new to this game..

Hi, Mine and Bomberbaz's have arrived pretty well collimated which is good because the Primary is fixed and non adjustable, so assuming yours arrives just as well collimated I would seriously consider upgrading the higher power eyepiece as the 10mm is fairly poor (the 25mm is quite good though!). You can't really hang a big massive eyepiece off this littel scope but something like an 8mm or 12mm BST starguider would be a great investment, they have a larger 60 degree field of view and soft twist up eyecups with lots of eyerelief, very comfortable and much better quality optics than the supplied 10mm :)

When it comes to good quality budget eyepieces, you will struggle to beat these guys:

http://www.skysthelimit.org.uk/telescope%20eyepieces.html

Cheers

Chris

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Guest

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Hi, Mine and Bomberbaz's have arrived pretty well collimated which is good because the Primary is fixed and non adjustable, so assuming yours arrives just as well collimated I would seriously consider upgrading the higher power eyepiece as the 10mm is fairly poor (the 25mm is quite good though!). You can't really hang a big massive eyepiece off this littel scope but something like an 8mm or 12mm BST starguider would be a great investment, they have a larger 60 degree field of view and soft twist up eyecups with lots of eyerelief, very comfortable and much better quality optics than the supplied 10mm :)

When it comes to good quality budget eyepieces, you will struggle to beat these guys:

http://www.skysthelimit.org.uk/telescope%20eyepieces.html

Cheers

Chris

Can I look at the moon without a moonfilter or will it damage my eyes? I'm very interested to see any Pictures taken while looking trhough the scope, if you have any :)

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Chris

Chris

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A Moon filter would make viewing the Moon alot more comfortable indeed so if you plan on doing a lot of lunar observing then this would also be a very good additional purchase.

I'm affraid I haven't taken any pics through this scope, I've not had it that long and its not really intended for astrophotography, having said this it does have very fast f/4 optics so it would be interesting to stick the optical tube on a motor driven equatorial mount and see how it does on deep sky imaging for a laugh, the focuser might struggle with my DSLR though :D

Chris

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Chris

Chris

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Watching the video of the scope that FLO posted made me think - what is the purpose of the tube end cap having a removable centre?

Mark

Hi, I think there is perhaps more than one reason for this, I know that its used for stopping down the aperture which increases the focal ratio and I've read that some people do this with large dobsonians to improves planetary observing. also Aperture stopping is used for reducing various aberrations like spikey stars etc. I'm sure there are other reasons for it too but its a great question so I'm looking forward to hearing any other reasons :)

Chris

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AlexB67

AlexB67

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Hi, I think there is perhaps more than one reason for this, I know that its used for stopping down the aperture which increases the focal ratio and I've read that some people do this with large dobsonians to improves planetary observing. also Aperture stopping is used for reducing various aberrations like spikey stars etc. I'm sure there are other reasons for it too but its a great question so I'm looking forward to hearing any other reasons :)

Chris

Just having watched that video the middle removable cap seems strange.  The thing is in that mode you'd have a huge central obstruction and a rather small unobstructed  path left. I doubt it would add anything to planetary views with the reduction in contrast that would cause and the small aperture you'd have left would reduce resolution even more for what is already a small aperture scope. Would love to hear other reasons :smiley: .  Seeing it has a three spider design  there is a fair amount of space to put 3 holes offset symmetrically,  resulting in having an unobstructed path without the secondary and spider vanes in the way.  No more spikes plus no central obstruction, I don't think in any case in a scope of aperture that size it would be worth stopping down for just increasing the f ratio gain versus aperture and resolution loss.

This mysterious central cap has me baffled :grin:

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Chris

Chris

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Just having watched that video the middle removable cap seems strange.  The thing is in that mode you'd have a huge central obstruction and a rather small unobstructed  path left. I doubt it would add anything to planetary views with the reduction in contrast that would cause and the small aperture you'd have left would reduce resolution even more for what is already a small aperture scope. Would love to hear other reasons :smiley: .  Seeing it has a three spider design  there is a fair amount of space to put 3 holes offset symmetrically,  resulting in having an unobstructed path without the secondary and spider vanes in the way.  No more spikes plus no central obstruction, I don't think in any case in a scope of aperture that size it would be worth stopping down for just increasing the f ratio gain versus aperture and resolution loss.

This mysterious central cap has me baffled :grin:

I agree Alex, I can only really see this happening with larger apertures but it was literally all I could think of at the time :D I have since had another thought though, maybe its not a practical design consideration, maybe the cap is lifted from another scope like the evostar 102mm? and it might just be cheaper to use a pre-existing cap from another skywatcher scope? Its an idea anyway :)

Chris

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gary1968

gary1968

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You can fit a small piece of solar filter film to the small hole, it stops down the aperture allowing comfortable solar viewing. I believe it also keeps the scope cooler while solar observing although I can't confirm that as it's not something I do.

Sent from my HUAWEI U8815 using Tapatalk

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AlexB67

AlexB67

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Three holes offset symmetrically would just be equivalent to really fat spider vanes...

The diffraction pattern would be different for sure. The thing with three holes is that it would smear out enough  interference to not show spikes as clearly I suspect., but I guess a flat design would/could also work for that. I thought the holes was a more favourable configuration. That said, as you say, not dissimilar as you do have a central obstruction with three holes, really only the single hole offset without the secondary in the way will be like an unobstructed scope equivalent.

There was an interesting PhD thesis floating around on the web that showed all these various designs, pros and cons discussed, but for the life cannot find it right now to demonstrate these points in more detail. There was also this  with some interesting discussion about various obstructions merits.

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1959AJ.....64..455E

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AlexB67

AlexB67

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You can fit a small piece of solar filter film to the small hole, it stops down the aperture allowing comfortable solar viewing. I believe it also keeps the scope cooler while solar observing although I can't confirm that as it's not something I do.

Sent from my HUAWEI U8815 using Tapatalk

ah, I see, I guess that would be it ?

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rodhull

rodhull

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Does anyone own both one of these and an ST80 who could compare the two? I have an ST80, but this looks like it could perform better on fainter targets simply due to the larger aperture? This is so light that it could also easily go on a regular tripod I'd imagine for travelling...I also get frustrated with the CA that the ST80 gives...

I am worried though that the secondary of this is so large compared to the aperture that it would obstruct the light pathway too much, so that extra 20mm of light gathering wouldn't be evident...

Can anyone comment on how this compares to an ST80 overall?

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rodhull

rodhull

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OK, nerd alert:

I have taken some screengrabs of the vid FLO posted, and have therefore very roughly been able to measure the diameter of the secondary support which in effect would cause the obstruction - it works out to be ~30mm in diameter from what I can tell - any owner of a 100P please correct me!

In that case, you could do the following area-of-a-circle sums using : πr2 where you ignore the spider vanes but subtract the area of the secondary...

ST80's light gathering area: (3.14x402) = 5024mm2

100P's light gathering area: ((3.14x502) - (3.14x152)) = 7143.5mm2

So, if its secondary really is ~30mm across, then the 100P can gather roughly 1.4x (or 70%) more light than an ST80

This is assuming that both scopes transmit all of the available light completely equally, the 100P is perfectly collimated and the light is not otherwise lost anywhere else (not something to be expected in any imperfect mirror and/or lens, etc.) but I reckon that's good enough for a rough comparison...

How this actually manifests in the "real world" could only be really described by someone who's used both in anger side-by-side....still looks on paper to be a worthy buy IMO though!

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