a nice surprise

[groot]

hello folks! my brother in law expressed interest in viewing so a couple of years ago i got him an old orion 6" dob, deep space explorer for christmass, he loved it! but i knew it was a bit of a pain to use and got him a zhumell 8" i found at a pretty good price. well of course he loved that even better, and i wound up with the 6" back. i use an old orange tube C8 and and think it's awesome! but i collimated the 6" (best i could with that secondary) and WOW! this is a great little scope! jup, a was great at 80X detail was way more than i expected for this little dob! so much so i'm thinking of rebuilding it and keeping it myself! so did i just get lucky with the optics or were these built that good?

 

Rick

Edited July 11, 2020 by groot

[John]

They are pretty good scopes. My first dob was the 8 inch (made by GSO which is who make Zhumell scopes) and I was rather surprised when it produced as good if not better views of the planets than the Celestron C8 that I had at the time could.

The 6" would be F/8 I think ? - they can be really good planetary and lunar scopes.

[groot]

thanks John! and yes sir. i did some reading and it turns out these were made by discovery early on for orion "pre china" and over seen by Terry Ostahowski, so everyone seems to give them an excellent rating. (for a factory produced mirror) i think it's going to be a fun project to upgrade! 

 

Rick

[jetstream]

5 minutes ago, groot said:

thanks John! and yes sir. i did some reading and it turns out these were made by discovery early on for orion "pre china" and over seen by Terry Ostahowski, so everyone seems to give them an excellent rating. (for a factory produced mirror) i think it's going to be a fun project to upgrade! 

 

Rick

Terry O had an association with Discovery that greatly benefited the purchasers of these scopes. The association ended at some point I think and so did at least part of the reputation of these scopes.

Don't get rid of this scope.....

[groot]

indeed. i'm really looking forward to using this one for a very long time. 

[John]

Discovery scopes had an excellent reputation.

Rarely found on this side of the atlantic, sadly.

 

[groot]

never understood that. seems the quality would be equal across the market, maybe i don't understand world markets IDK just seems odd to me. 

[jetstream]

10 hours ago, groot said:

indeed. i'm really looking forward to using this one for a very long time. 

You might be shocked at the lunar views this scope will give!

Do you collimate with a chesire? If you ever need to get it recoated I'd only consider Ostahowski-and he likes to coat his own mirrors. He has a great coating service for others as well, but as we all know some mirrors can have issues getting re coated. His will not.

My 15" with his mirrors is a super performer on everything.

[groot]

thats a handy piece of information! thank you. i will have it recoated it has a couple of spots i'd rather not be there. found a cell and spider for it. thinking about a 10:1 focuser as well. going to be almost a complete rebuild but it's woth it!