Dobsonian eyepieces

[Soligor Rob]

Really pleased I read this thread, as a result of which I have just ordered the 8mm BST Starguider, so thanks to Wulfrun for the top tip.

[wulfrun]

11 minutes ago, Soligor Rob said:

Really pleased I read this thread, as a result of which I have just ordered the 8mm BST Starguider, so thanks to Wulfrun for the top tip.

They get mentioned a lot, including by several others in this thread. I can't take all the credit, I just mentioned them first 🙂 Glad it helped you though.

[Louis D]

On 26/02/2021 at 05:12, Skygazerlass said:

took 3 hours to get there and back but it was worth the trip lol

It must be a US/UK thing, but when I was going into the office pre-Covid, I drove 1 to 1.25 hours each way each day, so driving 1.5 hours each way to pick up a scope is not a big deal at all.

[Louis D]

Deleted duplicate posting

Edited February 27, 2021 by Louis D
Duplicate post

[Stu1smartcookie]

1 hour ago, Louis D said:

It must be a US/UK thing, but when I was going into the office pre-Covid, I drove 1 to 1.25 hours each way each day, so driving 1.5 hours each way to pick up a scope is not a big deal at all.

i agree with you about driving to pick up a scope ... i still drive 1 hr each way every day to and from work ... so when i wanted to collect my scope last year i drove 3 1/2 hours to north yorkshire .( wouldnt want to do that everyday though lol) 

[PEMS]

The Starguiders are a nice eyepiece for that scope, at the price they are. Seem they work OK at f/5 and people say f/4.5 and that I expect is the ratio of your scope.

Likely a good idea to start at the 25mm simply for the wider views it will supply as that helps in finding things. An 8mm and perhaps a 12mm can follow later. One easy approach is, if it is possible, to buy one every month or something. The Starguiders look nice as a small set of say 4, (8mm, 12mm, 15mm, 25mm). Not sure the 5mm and 18mm would add a great deal.

A little better may be ES68's and ES82's but as expected they cost more. So a decision is required.

The one area Starguiders sort of fail in in not having a 6mm eyepiece. Sometimes it seems a 5mm is just a little too much magnification for scopes and at 5mm the eyepiece has to be fairly good as well as having to operate with a fast scope. Things just start stacking up against things going well. If in time you want more from the scope in terms of magnification maybe consider the ES52 at 6.5mm.

Slightly lesser field than the Starguiders but as magnification reduces the field of view more it would make minimal impact.

Jupiter and Saturn will not be around a great deal until the latter half of the year. Unless son wants to get up at something like 04:00AM. And I expect that is not an option.

[Louis D]

5 hours ago, PEMS said:

Likely a good idea to start at the 25mm simply for the wider views it will supply as that helps in finding things. An 8mm and perhaps a 12mm can follow later. One easy approach is, if it is possible, to buy one every month or something. The Starguiders look nice as a small set of say 4, (8mm, 12mm, 15mm, 25mm). Not sure the 5mm and 18mm would add a great deal.

Having all but the 3.2mm in the set, I would suggest 25mm, 12mm, 8mm, and 5mm making for powers of 48x, 100x, 150x, and 240x.  I tend to skip straight from widest field to mid-high power in a Dob of that focal length.  As such, the 18mm and 15mm get skipped and are too closely spaced in power at 67x and 80x, respectively, to either the 25mm or 12mm to make sense to buy them as well.  That, and they're both fairly weak performers compared to the 12mm and below.

I would pool the money saved on the 15mm and 18mm toward getting a 30mm APM UFF or equivalent (Altair/Meade/Celestron) in the future.

5 hours ago, PEMS said:

The one area Starguiders sort of fail in in not having a 6mm eyepiece. Sometimes it seems a 5mm is just a little too much magnification for scopes and at 5mm the eyepiece has to be fairly good as well as having to operate with a fast scope.

Perhaps under UK skies you might have a point.  240x is not an issue here in my part of Texas.  For 185x at 6.5mm, I'd recommend the recently discontinued Meade HD-60 if it can be found second hand.  I've measured mine to have a 64 degree AFOV, so it competes strongly with the older Pentax XL 5.2mm I have.  A zoom eyepiece coupled with a decent Barlow might also be a high power option for the OP.

[Pixies]

As if by magic, a12mm BST Starguider has just appeared in the For-Sale section!

[Spile]

If you consider going down the Zoom route as I did, then this may be of interest.

 

[Carl Au]

On 03/03/2021 at 11:06, PEMS said:

The Starguiders are a nice eyepiece for that scope, at the price they are. Seem they work OK at f/5 and people say f/4.5 and that I expect is the ratio of your scope.

Likely a good idea to start at the 25mm simply for the wider views it will supply as that helps in finding things. An 8mm and perhaps a 12mm can follow later. One easy approach is, if it is possible, to buy one every month or something. The Starguiders look nice as a small set of say 4, (8mm, 12mm, 15mm, 25mm). Not sure the 5mm and 18mm would add a great deal.

A little better may be ES68's and ES82's but as expected they cost more. So a decision is required.

The one area Starguiders sort of fail in in not having a 6mm eyepiece. Sometimes it seems a 5mm is just a little too much magnification for scopes and at 5mm the eyepiece has to be fairly good as well as having to operate with a fast scope. Things just start stacking up against things going well. If in time you want more from the scope in terms of magnification maybe consider the ES52 at 6.5mm.

Slightly lesser field than the Starguiders but as magnification reduces the field of view more it would make minimal impact.

Jupiter and Saturn will not be around a great deal until the latter half of the year. Unless son wants to get up at something like 04:00AM. And I expect that is not an option.

The starguider zoom was amazingly good value for money at 50 quid a go...

[Skygazerlass]

On 27/02/2021 at 18:50, Louis D said:

It must be a US/UK thing, but when I was going into the office pre-Covid, I drove 1 to 1.25 hours each way each day, so driving 1.5 hours each way to pick up a scope is not a big deal at all.

Firstly I do not drive so getting someone to take me there for that length of time taking time out of their day is a big deal for me if I didn't I would have missed out on an amazing deal so I'm sorry it doesn't seem like a big deal to you but it was to me 🙂

[Skygazerlass]

On 27/02/2021 at 12:56, Stu1smartcookie said:

Both planets are visiting the morning sky at present and are very low to the eastern horizon ... but later in the year they will be visible in the evening. I still marvel that we can see a gray fuzzy patch of light which is millions of light years away . Fantastic , and all a bit overwhelming in my opinion  

I totally agree the feeling is overwhelming and in that moment you think wooow and you just can't keep your eyes off the eyepiece even looking at stars through a telescope is amazing and when you see others having the same reaction to which you felt just makes you tear up as your standing on earth an are able to see planets that's in outer space with your own planet absolutely amazing

[Skygazerlass]

So a little update on my journey back into the hobby I purchased the 12mm and 8mm starguider eyepieces together last week so I can't wait to try them out I did manage to look at betelgeuse 

I did notice something strange when I was going in and out of focus on the star I will add a picture at the bottom you can see it isn't a complete full circle is it supposed to be like that or am I dotit lol  I managed to get a video but I don't know if I can add videos

[Pixies]

Hi,

re your pic:

A is the shadow of the focuser draw-tube, as it projects inside the main tube. I assume you were racking it inwards to get the out-of-focus image. Nothign to worry about

B- a bit odd. Are you sure you weren't observing over a wall, near a tree branch, etc.? Sometimes the view through he finder is OK, and it's not until you see somethign like this that you realise the view from the actual scope was obscured! Have done it plenty of times myself when observing south from my garden!

[Louis D]

2 hours ago, Skygazerlass said:

Firstly I do not drive so getting someone to take me there for that length of time taking time out of their day is a big deal for me if I didn't I would have missed out on an amazing deal so I'm sorry it doesn't seem like a big deal to you but it was to me 🙂

Sorry, didn't mean to offend.  Pretty much everyone drives around here because mass transit sucks something fierce.  My daughter was a big proponent of mass transit during her college years until she got an internship downtown.  She tried the whole mass transit thing for a month and realized it was awful.  What should have taken 35 minutes to get there took over an hour if she caught the express bus.  However, it only ran every 30 minutes for 2 hours in the morning and evening.  If she missed one, she'd either have to sit and wait close to 30 minutes for the next one or take a local bus that takes 1.5 hours to get to downtown due to all the stops in between.  She ended up borrowing a family car for the summer or catching rides with friends and coworkers.  You can't live near work because decent houses in the city start at over $1 million.  Even dumps are over $500,000 now.  Apartments are over $1300/month, so you might as well put that money toward a house in the 'burbs.

[200pman]

Depends how deep your pockets are.

For me BST are a great upgrade on the stock eyepieces.

Many on here like them.

Great scope you have.

Remember a dob is for life.

[Spile]

22 hours ago, Pixies said:

Are you sure you weren't observing over a wall, near a tree branch, etc.? Sometimes the view through he finder is OK, and it's not until you see somethign like this that you realise the view from the actual scope was obscured! Have done it plenty of times myself when observing south from my garden!

The first time I waved my hand in front of the aperture came as a bit of a shock when I was out of focus as above. 

[Louis D]

14 hours ago, Spile said:

The first time I waved my hand in front of the aperture came as a bit of a shock when I was out of focus as above. 

What's also a revelation is to hold your hand in front of the scope in the winter after pulling a glove off.  The out of focus image shows the heat waves radiating off your hand.

[wulfrun]

The part marked "B" in Pixies' post above might be due to an incorrectly positioned secondary, worth a check. My 150PL recently suffered a bump (carelessness on my part) and I noticed a similar thing on a star-test, not quite as obvious as the OP though. On investigating, I found the secondary had been bumped loose and it had "flopped" so as not to show the whole primary from a collimation cap. Easily solved, although re-aligning the secondary wasn't my idea of fun.

[Pixies]

2 hours ago, wulfrun said:

The part marked "B" in Pixies' post above might be due to an incorrectly positioned secondary, worth a check. My 150PL recently suffered a bump (carelessness on my part) and I noticed a similar thing on a star-test, not quite as obvious as the OP though. On investigating, I found the secondary had been bumped loose and it had "flopped" so as not to show the whole primary from a collimation cap. Easily solved, although re-aligning the secondary wasn't my idea of fun.

@Skygazerlass. A quick way to check would be to remove the eyepiece and have a look down the focuser at the reflection in the primary mirror. You'll soon see if anything is wrong. Point it at a pale wall and take a pic down the focuser.

[wookie1965]

A great article in AN this month about best eyepieces for different scopes. 

[Louis D]

On 19/03/2021 at 06:10, wulfrun said:

Easily solved, although re-aligning the secondary wasn't my idea of fun.

Aligning a massively off secondary with a laser is the only thing they excel at.  You just have to be careful not to lase your own eye(s) when looking down the front of the tube to get the beam centered on the primary because the return beam can be no where close to the secondary.  I wave my hand over the front to figure out where the return beam is before looking down the tube.

Done right with the secondary collimation screws quite loose, it's very intuitive to figure out which way the mirror needs to move to getting it pointing straight at the primary's center.  You then just carefully tighten up everything and move on to collimating the primary.

Edited March 21, 2021 by Louis D