| Skywatcher 130M | Eyepieces | Toucam 840 |
| Meade ETX125 | Filters | Strathspey Bin's |
| Skywatcher pro 80ED | Meade #1247 focuser | |
A f6.9 130mm reflector on a equatorial mount, supplied with 10mm, 25mm and 2x Barlow eyepieces also a clock drive for “celestial tracking” hmm.
Focal length of 900mm combined with the 25mm eyepiece gives 36x magnification and a field of view of nearly 1½ degrees (89 arcmin) that will just about squeeze the Pleiades into a 25mm eyepiece.
Initially I found the lack of a goto aaytem a bonus, hand operating the scope/mount quickly increased my knowledge in several areas:
A. Orientation of the celestial sphere.
B. Planetary motion.
C. Constellation patterns
D. Estimating the magnitude of objects when star hopping.
Pros:
Field of view is fairly wide.
Slow to dew up when compared to ETX.
Tough as old boots so a good first scope.
Cons:
Mount is very poor
Finderscope is useless and was quickly replaced by a red dot finder
The focuser should be renamed to a foc-guesser.
A f15 127mm fork mounted Maksutov-Cassegrain with goto facility for locating and tracking of celestial objects, supplied with a Meade 26mm eyepiece. The longer focal length (1900mm) combined with a 20mm Meade 4000 series eyepiece gives a magnification of 95x and a field of view of just over ½ a degree (33 arcmins, slightly over a full moon) this is the scope & eyepiece arrangement that I use most frequently.
For the first 6 months I used the ETX exclusively in ALT/AZ mode, after reading the excellent D Sherods guide on weasners site I have now changed to polar alignment resulting in greatly improved tracking.
Pros:
Goto
Autostar information on objects
Tracking
Decent preformance on the major planets, good enough for webcam imaging.
A solid introduction to the brighter DSO.
Good preformance on the moon
Cons:
Dew, this is a dew magnet.
My 8x25 finder has been plagued with problems.
Back ache I am just under 6ft tall and I find the height of the eyepiece with the #884 tripod far too low.
Very noisy, sounds like an angle grinder in the dead of night.
The ETX + toucam combination struggles to live with the modern 10inch SCT with autoguiders and images with exposure times in the hours but I feel it should be a good primer.
Initially I used a 35mm film cannister to fit the Toucam into the eypiece holder but I was never quite convinced that the CCD was aligned so I purchased a mogg adapter from here
The toucam is fairly good low light 640x480 webcam supplied with painful control softawre, Many thanks go to the producers of quality programs such as WCcTrl and Qfocus which overcome many problems.
To improve image quality I have recently carried out this RAW macro mod found here and the camera is still working well :o
There are long exposure modifications available for this camera and I will eventually attempt to modify the camera, BUT realistically at prime focus the ETX tracking is not up to anything more than short exposure photography so I am in no rush.
**update** I recently attempted a long exposure modification, I am now £35 poorer after purchasing a replacement :o rethink needed.
An excellent buy, something I realised early on was that I didn’t need a telescope to view some of the best objects the night sky had to offer so I brought a pair of 15x70’s binoculars NO I DIDN’T first I ‘won’ (lucky me) some cheap binoculars on eBay, big mistake money wasted.
I cannot hand hold the 15x70’s so I have constructed a basic parallelogram mount and the 4.5 degree views are great.
Christmas 2006 and a new gadget.
This is a wondefull scope for wider views. Supplied with two good eyepieces and a 8x50 finderscope all in a solid aluminium case.
No mount for this currently but its usable on my EQ2 (see skywatcher 130M above)
The first eyepiece I brought and so far but it is easily outperforms all the other eyepieces supplied with the telescopes. My next eyepiece purchase will probably be a 32mm eyepiece (below) for some wide field views or something around 7mm for planetary views.
Bought from the Orion shop in Cupertino, offers good views of M42 and M31 with the ETX.
I bought this for planetary viewing and imaging but I have decided I need to become more competent at prime focus before adding the complication of the Barlow into the set-up.
Bought from eBay for an absolute steal at £36, although my ETX suffers from the obligatory mirror shift when focusing this is invaluable for both imaging and general viewing.
For visual use, brought here. When I first used this filter on Jupiter I was disappointed but I have found it useful on Mars.
For CCD use, brought from the same place as above. Improves Toucam imaging and it keeps out the dust.