Skywatcher 130p Heritage

[richbyers]

Here's a newbie review of my month (ish) old scope

I purchcased the Skywatcher Heritage 130p as a beginner scope from scopes n skies for £129 inc. barlow/25mm and 10mm eyepiece and 3 philips sky maps. I chose it based on the fact that i wanted as much aperture for my money and i wasnt yet bothered with a tracking mount.

The scope came with no fuss, packaging was fine, all in all a good tick of Scopes n Skies.

The optics seem to be set up fine, no collimation was needed.

So on to the important part!

First night with the scope wasn't under great conditions. Clouds were here and there, and viewing was under a bright moon, which was my first port of call.

Great views here, the moon showed good detail in both the 25mm and the 10mm provided eyepieces.

Trying the barlow, this was a little dissapointing. No matter how far down i screwed the focuser it just wouldnt get it sharp. I managed to fix this by unscrewing the lens a little to allow more 'downwards motion'. After this the barlow could get the moon in focus, the view wasnt bad, the quality of the optics were a little shabby, but for a freebie, whats to expect?

Taking the moon aside, my next object was Saturn.

Using the red dot finder, which i had finally aligned properly, i easily picked it out, which was pleasing for my first go.

In the 25mm the rings were just visible, though the 10mm really brought out the shape of the planet and Titan. Again the barlow was ok, though degraded the quality alot, and made tracking by hand too hard.

So which deep sky objects can be seen?

Well so far i've picked out the M13 cluster in Hercules, M81,82,94 galaxies and obviously the beehive cluster and various doubles in Lyra and Ursa Major.

The 130mm aperture means many of these need to be viewed with averted vision, as they are very dim, and is best viewed under the 25mm eyepiece, though clear dark skies have been few and far between so far, so i have yet to try the scope's full potential.

All in all the scope is a joy to use, and looks good too. The screws and friction of the scope are spot on for me, not too tight so it wont move and not to easy so that it moved about too a lot.

The only thing i would say is that the open truss tube perhaps needs flocking to keep out stray light, though i have managed this with a piece of black card!

Rich

[bombassa]

Hi,

I recently bought one of these as a replacement of my 'toy' scope, and I love it.

The 'twist' focuser works fine despite my initial concerns.

All I need now is a high power eyepiece.... and learn how to sweet talk suppliers into giving me freebies.

Plz forgive my terrible english

[LukeSkywatcher]

I bought a 130P Heritage in mid December 2009.

Its a fantastic scope. I am not very keen on the "screw top" focuser.................but other then that it really is a gem of a scope.

I had to collimate it when it arrived but have not needed to do so since.

[richbyers]

thats good to hear guys

i dont regret buying it, just need some filters, maybe 5mm EP and yer i dont really like the screw top either, can you change it? ive seen you can get replacement focusers

rich

[Chris H]

Because the focuser is part of the top of the truss it can't be changed.

[richbyers]

ok thanks

[LukeSkywatcher]

Yeah it would be nice to change the focuser but alas not doable as it is built in.

[richbyers]

do u find it a bit 'squeaky' at times?

its a bit hard to focus with i agree

[LukeSkywatcher]

It does tend to squeak. Worse then that.................when it is new when you twist it, it does a lovely job of dropping flakes of black paint onto the secondary mirror. Some genius working for SW decided to paint the inside screw threads of the focuser unit.

As soon as i noticed this..............i spent about 2-3 mins a day screwing the focuser in and out to eat away at the paint on the screws so that it was free of paint and would no longer drop onto the secondary. i also added a couple of drops of oil to the treads then to get rid of that pesky squeak. Good God it sounded as if i had a mouse as my co-observer before i did that.

P.S.~~~~i made sure my secondary was protected well during the process of ridding the screws of paint and oiling them.

The focuser is my ONLY gripe on what is a really GOOD scope.

[richbyers]

sounds like a good idea, maybe what the black specs are, genius people at SW haha

[ajg]

I bought one of these for my father sometime around July last year. I wasn't expecting much given the price, but I was pleasantly surprised!

Didn't like the helical focuser - there was some slop in the one I had which I cured with a couple of wraps of PTFE tape, and the single vane spider concerned me, but in spite of this, I got it collimated well enough.

The views were lovely for such an inexpensive scope, and it collapses down to almost no space at all! I would agree that the focuser is poor, but once again, I measure this against the price, and it still comes out good in my book.

For any beginner looking for a cheap way into astronomy, I wouldn't have a problem recommending this scope as a great starting point.

- Andrew