Am I on the right track?

[Davehux]

Hi everyone,

Just joined the Lounge, so apologies if this has been covered a million times before.

I bought a Skywatcher 127 Mak GOTO about a year ago, and have had great fun ticking off the low hanging fruit - Moon, Jupiter, Saturn, M42 etc. I like my photography, and with a Nikon 5200 on the back end, I’ve been getting better and better images.

However, where I live is very dark, but is in a valley, so I pretty much only have a southern facing view of the sky. Anything from WNW to ENE  is hidden unless it’s right overhead. Therefore if the big guns are somewhere north on a clear night, I have to try for clusters and galaxies.

Now to the point of this post. The Mak is too powerful to show, for example, the whole of the Pleiades in one view. I get a few lovely bright stars, but not the whole effect. Therefore I am toying with the idea of a short length refractor, say about 600mm that will fit onto the Skywatcher mount, to give me a wider field of view. I can’t chuck a heap of money at it, so £250-£300 would be the max.

Suggestions and warnings would be gratefully received

Thank you :-)

[newbie alert]

A second-hand ed80 frames m45 perfectly and they pop up fairly frequently at about that figure too..try and get the reducer also

[RT65CB-SWL]

Hi Dave and welcome to SGL. 

South is where celestial objects will and reach their max elevation from the northern hemisphere.

I think you can get a threaded SCT adaptor ring, (see www.scopestuff.com), and you maybe able to add an SCT f6.3* focal reducer/field flattener (aka FR/FF). They turn up quite often in the classified section for about £60.00GBP s/h.

 

* not sure of what the focal ratio is for the SW127, but on my ETX 105 I think it is about F9 or a bit less with it attached and F14 without it.

[Davehux]

Thanks for the replies.

I’m going to go for the Facepalm of the Year Award here, but what does a focal reducer/field flattener actually do in practice?

I looked up the SCT adapter ring, and I think I have one of those. I can attach my camera directly to the scope, via a tube and aT ring.

cheers