A Dobsonian family

[cajen2]

Amusing photo of three dobs: 

From left to right: 

My daughter's Skywatcher Heritage 100p, my SW Heritage 150p Flextube and my new StellaLyra 200. So the SL is only double the aperture of the little dob, but look at the difference in the size! 😱

BTW, anyone in the market for a beginner's scope for yourself, children etc: do consider the 100p. We took it out for its first light tonight and I was astounded my its images with some halfway-decent eyepieces. Views using my Vixen 30mm and a BST Starguider 8mm were brilliant, if of course not very highly magnified (the 8mil gives 50x mag). But even then we got M42 with a tiny Trapezium and nebulosity and great views of the moon. My daughter was delighted with it. Just for a laugh, I tried my Pentax XW 5 mm on it - the EP was almost as big as the scope (and twice the price)! 😄 It gave really excellent views too.

So the 100p looks like a child's toy but is in fact a very capable scope, if you use some decent eyepieces on it. With a good quality Barlow, I'm sure it would be quite happy at 100x or more.

[Stu]

Great shot! Those Heritage scopes are certainly very capable, optically very good. They make great starter scopes, but are good enough to remain as very useful travel scopes even for the more experienced.

[cajen2]

Yes indeed. Also, the 100p can be used straight out of the box: the primary mirror is fixed and so doesn't need collimating. It's true, too - I checked,!

[Peter Drew]

I have a large Dobsonian family as well, too extended to photograph collectively!   114, 150, 200, 250, 300, 425, 500 and 750.    🙂

[Mr Spock]

You need a big daddy 

[Spile]

Good to hear your comments about the 100P, I gave a talk to my local astronomy club about Dobs and I included it in my brief so it’s good to hear it works well.

Sorry the png with transparency doesn’t work well here

 

Source https://astro.catshill.com/why-did-i-choose-a-dobsonian/