Did I just buy a planetary killer?

[John]

Thats a tremedously well specced scope you have bought for an excellent price - I've seen them go for that much with no mount included !.

The well know astro writer Martin Mobberley had a very similar instrument as his main scope I believe until quite recently - when he changed it for something similar but in the latest Orion Optics range.

To be honest I'm green with envy

I hope you really enjoy it and post lots of reports

[xboxdevil]

Call me a coward but I set up the new scope & mount in the kitchen just to familiarise myself with how it all worked. Once I'd figured out that it was a lot easier to stand to the side of the mount and look at the dovetail rather than trying to slide it on blind it was easier enough to get on and off.

I also took a couple photo's to try and show the difference in the size of the secondary mirror and internal reflections compared to my dob, not great pictures but it gives you an idea of how dark and clean the tube looks :-) I think it also shows how bad the flextube design is for reflections, I think I need to get busy with my black marker pen!

[spaceboy]

Now that's a proper flocking job. Put the dob to shame though

[tom.yates]

I Think you bought a scope with great potential with very good mirrors But in my opinion in this country the seeing conditions tend to limit the scopes capabilitys I have had many scopes apo's acro's newts sct's macks and have found that scopes between 6 to 8 inches perform a lot more of the time in this wonderful country of ours

Clear skies

[spaceboy]

To be fair to xbox though Tom, he has had sale of the century on this scope. You could pay this much for an 8" on an EQ6 so why not have the 10" it will more than pay off when we do have them good nights of seeing. If I had the money I wouldn't hesitate to have bought it! I think you will be more than happy with the scope xbox but I think you need to sort out getting another dob or a couple of sheets of protostar. Looking at that picture I bet it must look like a disco glitter ball in there when your looking at the sky.

[xboxdevil]

Interesting comments guys, am I right in saying that the 10" scope would be no worse than a similarly specified 6/8" scope, but very rarely any better? or is that a decent 6/8" scope would eat up the seeing and actually perform better most of the time? I'm guessing that this would always beat a decent 6/8" for deep sky?

As for the dob I'm going to sell it at some point as I have no space for it, yes out of the box the flextube dobs suffer from poor contrast and searchlight diffraction spikes coming from the planets, blackening the back of the secondary mirror helped reduce this a lot, but it is definitely a work in progress.

[spaceboy]

Have you managed to get it out under the stars yet XBOX ???

[xboxdevil]

Erm....not really, I briefly managed to get it out last Saturday night but I had a bit of a mare to be honest. First off I forgot to point the mount North so the tracking was miles off, then I couldn't get anything to focus either side of the focus travel. It was only really when I had given up for the night that I realised that the low profile focuser had a bit that needed to be pulled away from the tube, Jupiter was still crappy due to poor seeing.

I did however swing it over to the Orion nebula and was amazed at how dark the skies looked compared to my dob, I definitely need to add a red dot finder though as I was hopeless at finding things!

[spaceboy]

Life is a lot easier with a dob but once you get a mount setup perfect you can go and have a 3 course meal come back and the object should still be in view.

Hope you have better luck next time. Sounds like M42 was impressive.

[xboxdevil]

Yep, the dob is definitely an easier setup and easier to point and shoot at targets, but for me it's quite hard to catch anything low(ish) on the horizon (due to localised fences & trees) whereas the eq6 being a bit higher had no problems and it was also rock solid even when I hit my eye on the focuser by accident! having said that I was going to look at M31 and I didn't bother because the eyepiece would have bee too high up.

For tracking my Meade etx125 kills my dob, there again I don't use that anymore, not enough colour or detail for my liking, so I'm definitely looking forward to some decent tracking again :-)

To be honest I'd never looked at Orion's nebula before, so I didn't really know what to expect, funny thing is that the white (to my eyes) gas clouds looked better when the stars were slightly out of focus, but maybe that was just my eyes :-)

As an aside I did look at the moon through a 2" eyepiece at about 38x and it was stunningly sharp with no glare, so I’m looking forward to some higher magnification now that I've sussed out the focus issue.

Hopefully I’ll catch Jupiter on a good night of seeing.....although I have never really had one of them, just nights where it didn't seem too bad....but I guess that's expectations for you.......

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

I think many of us are SOOOO jealous:Envy:.

Best of luck with your bargain, can't wait to hear your experiences:headbang:

[xboxdevil]

I think many of us are SOOOO jealous:Envy:.

Best of luck with your bargain, can't wait to hear your experiences:headbang:

Don't be jealous <embarrassed smiley> I would be jealous too, except my subjective perception is that it's maybe 25-50% better than the skywatcher heritage 130p that I got my Dad, things are all relative....I guess. Shame my eyes aren't so quantitative.

[SiriusB]

Looks a great scope, i'm sure you'll get a lot of viewing pleasure with that one.

Err,

just one small point,I'm not so sure i like the term "planetary killer"

We've already lost one planet (Pluto)a year or two back, so please be careful where you point that

thing, we can't afford to lose too many more

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Looks a great scope, i'm sure you'll get a lot of viewing pleasure with that one.

Err,

just one small point,I'm not so sure i like the term "planetary killer"

We've already lost one planet (Pluto)a year or two back, so please be careful where you point that

thing, we can't afford to lose too many more

:D LOL

[xboxdevil]

Let's hope I don't point it at Stockport either

[spaceboy]

You could do with pointing it at Brum and get rid of some of that light pollution for me!!!!

[paraman]

You could do with pointing it at Brum and get rid of some of that light pollution for me!!!!

Seems that we share the same wife blah blah and all that:)

[spaceboy]

Seems that we share the same wife blah blah and all that:)

Yeh... I asked her for a dew shield for Christmas. It arrived the other day (Thanks FLO) She wanted me to check if they had sent the right thing. Needless to say she was not overly impressed with what she had just spent £35 on.