Good to own both Equinox 100 and 120?

[kaywanlau]

Hi, I'm thinking buying the Equinox 120 for some visual and imaging but a friend of mine is selling his Equinox 100 cheap. Would it be good to own both of these scopes? I was gonna buy another cheap guidescope but maybe I could use the 100mm for guidescope? any advice would be appreciated

[Psychobilly]

If you can get it cheap yes... if I was buying new I would buy say and 80 and 120 to give you a wider range of focal lenghts and bigger difference in the FOV.

It would make a "pretty" good guidescope although a shorter focal length guidescope is perhaps more useful to give you a wider FOV and more chance iof finding guidestars.

Peter....

[MartinB]

I don't think it makes a deal of sense given that they have the same focal length. The Equinox 100 may have marginally better colour correction but you it wont really be able to give you anything that the 120 doesn't deliver better.

[kaywanlau]

Yes I actually thought of buying the equinox 80 to go with the equinox 120 but my friend is selling his equinox 100 for £600. hes hardly used it. is it worth spending the £600? or would I be better off buying the equinox 80 for £500 from FLO to cover wider range of focal lenghts? i will be doing a bit of both visual and imaging.

[The Warthog]

Do you think there is something that you will be able to see in the 80 or the 100 that you won't be able to see in the 120?

[kaywanlau]

originally i just wanted to get the 120 and then get a seperate cheap guidescope like the skywatcher startravel 80. but i read somewhere its best to get a guidescope thats good quality and have similar focal length as the main scope then i decided maybe buy the 80 with the 120. then i heard my friend selling his equinox 100 so i'm actually not sure if i should buy his 100 or buy somthing else.

[Psychobilly]

Having a guide scopes of similar focal lenght to the imaging scope was more important in the days before autoguiding where the software can interpolate the true centroid of a guide star to a fraction of a pixel...

These days its more common to use a 66-80mm guidescope so that you satnd more chance of finding a guidestar in the wider FOV of the shorter focal length scope.

if you go for a decent quality one you can swap guiding duties to the longer scope and image larger targets...

I personally woudl by the 100 of your mate and pick up a 66 and use the money saved to buy a decent side by side mounting bar and guidescope rings... What mount do you have at the moment?

Peter...

[Doc]

Buy the 100 cheap and sell it for a profit, then buy an 80 and spend the rest on say a camera.

[kaywanlau]

thanks guys for the info and advice. really helps me decide better. i decide to buy the 100 off my friend and buy another 80mm scope as guidescope. currently i have the EQ6 mount. next on the shopping list is a webcam for guiding

[RobH]

You'd be much better getting a secondhand Meade DSI for a guide cam.....webcams are not that sensitive, and sometimes you need to guide on pretty faint stars.

Cheers

Rob

[Psychobilly]

QHY5.... Would be another good bet for a guidecam - its a much better lunar and planetary cam than a DSI as well...so multi function...

Peter...

[ollypenrice]

I agree with the generall drift of the other answers. I can't see that you'd ever use the 100mm scope really. The 120 will greatly out-see it, is faster for imaging and the 100 is slow as a guidescope. The startravel 80 does make a good guidescpe but won't double as an imaging scope with a shorter focal length because its optics aren't good enough. What I'd buy is the Celestron ED80 from FLO for £215. Now that's what you CALL a bargain. You'd guide and image with it.

I second Rob on guiding. Anything to make it as easy as possible. Webcams don't do that, though the talented can make them behave.

Olly

[nicelookie]

What is the difference between guide scope and finder scope? I mean difference from the function and characteristic.

[kaywanlau]

What is the difference between guide scope and finder scope? I mean difference from the function and characteristic.

I'm pretty new to this stuff but from what I can gather a finderscope is just for you to find your way around the sky more easily because if you look through your main scope at high mag you can only see a very very tiny part of the sky and makes it so difficult to actually see where you are looking at. the finderscope helps by giving you a wider view of the sky.

guidescope is used for imaging and its purpose is to guide the mount keeping it centred on 1 star. i think people use a normal small refractor as a guidescope. because no mount is perfect at tracking stars there will always be periodic errors. normally they attatch a camera to the guidescope and then the camera will be connected to a pc where a software helps centre a star in the same position. then there will be another cable from the pc to the mount where it tells the mount how much to move correcting the periodic errors.

thats what i can gather from reading in the forum. hope im not far off. hope that helps. correct me if im wrong.

[kaywanlau]

ok i've decided to get the QHY5. thing i like about it is that it has a guide port and can connect directly to the port on my EQ6. makes things more simple. and as olly say can do some imaging with it. seems pretty cheap too. does anybody know what colour it actually is? i seen some pictures of it and a few i see its silver and there are other pictures of it thats like a light blue colour? and then on modernastronomy.com it looks purple???