SkyMax 127 OTA

[riogrande100]

Prior to buying this OTA I did a lot of googling for reviews, but most included reviews of the mount.

I am using this OTA on a CG5 mount.

Once unpacked I found that the OTA comes with what looks like a reverse dovetailed bar. I have a 15cm mounting plate and a 10 & 21cm dovetail bar. All 3 have screw hold at different lengths and all 3 could not accommodate 2 screws. Therefore after about 30 minutes looking for a possible combination I gave up and used 1 screw to mount the 21cm dovetail. It seemed to hold securely. However my intended goal of mounting the OTA on top of my Orion 80ED was not successful. As it was a rare clear night i gave up and just mounted in on the mount directly.

The OTA is a small in length but it weight is deceiving of it's size. It feels very weighty.

Upon taking it outside into my heavily light polluted street. I wanted to do planetary imaging/viewing.

My first issue was finding the moon, i use my mount for tacking and hardly set it up for proper goto.

The moon was mostly full but getting used to a reflector orientation causes issues. It took me about 90 seconds trying to find a full bright moon with a 25mm eyepiece. On my orion OTA it would take seconds (granted the Orion has a much larger FOV).

VIEWING

Once I saw the moon it was very clear (No CA), and filled most of the entire FOV. I then swapped for a 10mm and the view was amazing. I have not tried anything like this on the orion as the focal length is off. With the Skymax a 10mm is 150x zoom whereas using the orion it would be 50x zoom.

I then changed up and used my camera in prime focus and took some nice pics of the moon. However using the Astronomik EOS clip meant that it all came out to blue (adjustments in photoshop and lightroom gave them a more natural colouring).

Once finished with the moon i went looking for Mars. OMG what a headache using the 90 degree diagonal was almost impossible because of the way the image gets flipped.

In the end i had to use the eyepiece direct into the OTA to make it easier for me to find objects. I managed to find M42 i saw the Trapezium well, and smudge of the nebula. It was much brighter then appearing on the Orion. But i guess that was due to FOV.

I did notice that as I moved the scope i could clearly see the effects of Light Pollution as i moved the scope towards the zenith, as the sky gets much darker.

FOCUSING

Now the focusing of this OTA seems to go on for ever, i think sometimes i am continuously rotating for about 30 seconds and still have someway to go.

Conclusion

This is a very nice scope for planetary/lunar imaging. Get very clear visual images and the cool down time didn't seem to long.

I tried some images of Mars but was not too impressed, but I am guessing that is more my impatience.

On a whole I will be using this scope a lot for objects I require high magnification, whilst the orion will be used for DSO imaging both will compliment each other well.

[Bobcat]

I've got the same scope. What EP were you using for Mars?

I've used both the 25mm and 10mm with and without barlow and it's been quite difficult to make out much detail so I can understand what you mean about Mars.

Although Saturn has resolved fabulously when using barlow + 10mm EP.

[Stardust]

I think the 127 is a great scope at a bargain price, lovely smooth focusser. I really enjoy the views through this scope and so compact.