Posts Made By: Rod Mollise

andy si said:

Hello

Do You have any experience with usage ultrawedge on LX 200 large diameters 12" or 14"? I think mainly on shaking stability. Thanks

Dave Barta said:

The term great optics seemed to be used a lot in reviews and posts. Can an SCT from Meade or Celestron truly have great optics and compared to what?

jeff yonker said:

If you were a visual astronomer with lets say a $1000-$2500 budget and could only have ONE scope,what would it be and why?Dob,Sct??????

Slawomir Bucki said:

I am warming up to buy an 8" OTA, and I have (almost) nailed down my selection to two options:
- Vixen VMC200L
- Celestron 8" SCT (w/XLT coatings)

Which is better? Has anybody had a chance to compare these scope side-by-side?

S. Bucki

Martin Forster said:

Hello,
I purchased a meade 127ed on amart awhile back and have been learning how to collimate and center the lenses. I have done quite a bit of star testing on this scope and I am puzzled with the results. To begin with the scope does have some astigmastim which rotates 90 degrees from inside and outside focus. I think the images I get of jupiter are fairly good but my infocus high power star images are not what I would like. Stars are not a round ball with diffraction rings around it. Sometimes it is round, then elongated, and sometimes little spikes. I have a 76mm scope that has some astigmatims as well, maybe worse than the meade 127ed but still give a nice high power image of a star, round with a couple of diffraction rings around it. So I would think the Meade should be able to do that as well.
Anyway, I do star tests with and without a diagonal. at powers from 266 to 342x. I have done most of the testing on nights of good seeing, and use different stars, mostly altair and vega. What I see outside of focus is some color within the rings but concentric rings, well defined with a bulleyes in the middle. Inside of focus I don't see the color, and the rings are still fairly well defined but not as defined as the outside of focus rings, but the puzzling part is that the bulleyes is not centered inside of focus, it is off to one side. I have collimated and centered the lenses many times I cant seem to improve the off center bulleyes. If it was a collimation or centering issue wouldnt it show up in both the outside and inside star patterns???

Thanks for your help.

Martin

Mark Aguirre said:

I recently purchased used an Orion 8" Dob. The mirror looks like it could use a cleaning. I wanted to ask before trying to take anything apart. It looks like it comes out of the back fairly easily. Are there any tricks I need to know? Thanks for all your help!

Michael Tencza said:

I have a Celestron 130 mm f/5 Newtonian that works pretty well as a light, quick look telescope from my garage. I notice though that the secondary mirror is visible in the plane of focus when using long focal length eyepieces (40 and 32 mm). This is especially annoying in daylight. 1) What is causing this, and 2) aside from looking around this obstacle to see what I want is there anything else that can be done to deal with this that is not costly.

Brian Pope said:

something about creating some type of illusion around 12:37 tonight to make it seem like there are 2 moons?
10th hand info from wife, no idea myself.
Thanks for any response.
Brian