Skywatcher heritage 130p or the skywatcher explorer-130??

[Joem]

Which one of the scopes metioned should I get?? I'm a beginner who wants a scope to see the moon detailed and saurns rings and stuff.

Help greatly needed. Thanks.

[Brunty12345]

i'd say the skywatcher explorer 130 thats because i like them and you can get amazing detail out of them with the right mods and so on

[Brunty12345]

well... thats what iv heard anyway haha

[pvaz]

Which one of the scopes metioned should I get?? I'm a beginner who wants a scope to see the moon detailed and saurns rings and stuff.

Help greatly needed. Thanks.

I have not used any of those. The heritage with the secondary exposed to external light kind of freeks me out. It's prone to accidents and I suspect you'd need a shroud to stop unwanted light from the sides. Other then that the short focal length will make it harder to get high mags for planets and show imperfections of lower quality EPs and will need a table, or similar, to be on.

I'm a dob user so I would recommend the 150p or the 200p if you really want a dob. The ability a dob gives you to go out and observe without having to setup is great.

The Explorer seams nice. And you have it available in EQ mount or AZ GOTO in case you feel you want help finding objects.

Really depends on what you want, the heritage is the only one I'm a bit biased against.

[Chris H]

I own the Heritage 130p model and I really like it. In my opinion it does deliver very good views of the moon and so far Jupiter as well as the Orion nebula and star clusters. But unless you have a really dark place to view from it really needs a shroud. To overcome this you could go for the other 130 model. However the Dob mount is excellent, so with this in mind I would and if I was buying a scope of this size again I would go for the Skywatcher Skyliner 150P Dobsonian. A solid tube reflector on a dob mount and a slightly larger mirror. A winner on all counts I feel.

[Joem]

If I go for the skyliner 130p are there any big disadvantages or things to remember about it????

[Joem]

Also can you reccommend any good barlows for it ??

[Joem]

I heard you have to wait for them to cool down for like an hour, is this true??

[Chris H]

You don't have to let them cool but if you don't it can degrade the image quality especially at high magnifications. Cool down times can vary depending on the temperature difference between where you keep the scope and the outdoor temp, but with a 130 it should be less than one hour.

I have a Heritage 130p and also a Televue 2x barlow, I find the barlow darkens the images and only seems to work well on brighter objects like the moon and Jupiter. As a result I don't tend to use the barlow that much.