Posts Made By: Fred Dase

I bought my 10" LX90 and several accessories from them. IMHO they are a top notch outfit. Any questions were answered by someone who actually knows about astronomy, the shipping was fast and free.
As other people have stated I too would prefer to buy from Anacortes, but I just cant pay $9 shipping on a couple $2 plugs.

Fred Dase

I agree about Star Watch.

IMHO SkyAtlas 2000 is a little overwhelming for a beginner. I would suggest either Norton's Star Atlas (which I started out on) or The Cambridge Star Atlas. Each of which is alot less expensive.

The difference in the 2 planispheres is the 10" shows stars to 4th magnitude and the 15" shows stars to 5.5 magnitude. I would suggest the 15" one unless you'll be observing in a urban (light polluted) area.

There is also free planetarium software available on the net. One of them being Cartes du Ciel
which you can find here: http://www.stargazing.net/astropc/index.html

Fred Dase

As others have stated your best bet will be with a 2" filter, which you can use on 2" eyepeices or on a threaded 2"-1.25" adapter.

I've done alot of reading about nebula filters, and looked thru other peoples to come to these conclusions.

1) There are 4 brands that outshine the rest in this order. Astronomik, Lumicon, Televue, Thousand Oaks.
2) Lumicon filters are now owned and made by Parks Optical. (most people prefer the original Lumicon filters made by Lumicon)
3) The top 3 filters are all within a few dollars of each other. Only the Astronomik comes with a 5 year warrenty on their coatings.
4) While most people do start out with the UHC filter the 0-III filter will show things the UHC won't while coming in at a close second to the UHC filter on most other nebula

Here is a website the rates the UHC, O-III, and H-Beta filters on 81 different Nebula
http://pages.sbcglobal.net/raycash/filters.htm

Personally I opted for the 2" Lumicon O-III (original) for my first filter, which I purchased on AM for a very good price. Please don't take my or anyone else's word as gospel. Theres so much information available to everyone on the net. Research pays off.

Fred Dase

The same thing happened to me when I first joined AM.
The responses go to the email address you signed up with not to your message box here at AM.

I have a LX90 LNT.

It does help to get the tripod head fairly level though it doesn't have to be perfect.

If the scope is way off (like 10-15 degrees) the first alignment star thats normal and nothing to worry about. Just center it up and hit enter.

Watch out for your cords. Even with the cord wrap feature on your power cord can still get snagged on things.

My first time out with my scope it took me 20 minutes to get it aligned.
Most of that time was getting familier with the autostar controller.
Now that I'm familier with things it takes about 4 minutes.

At star parties I've walked away from my scope for 30-40 minutes and the object is still in the (wide) field of view when I came back.

Once aligned you're going to have ALOT of fun !!!

The 41mm would just give you 1/10 of a degree larger field of view. In my own experience the higher magnification of the 31mm with almost an identical FOV would yeild more contrast due to the darker background. You might want to consider something to fill the gap between your 22mm and 12mm. Thats a jump from 127x to 233x. My choice would be the 17mm which would be 164x.

I found this little fact quite interesting. Since ebay charges you for a listing, takes a cut of your sale, then turns around and charges you a fee for the transaction thru paypal.
On top of that ebay makes it almost impossible to list your item without the "seller prefers paypal" graphic embedded.

Fred

Richard,
You would probably have more response in the CCD Imaging and Processing/Deep Sky forum.
Fred

I recently sold a "smoothie" for $150.00, so yes that does seem expensive. From what I've learned the version with the rubber eyeguard is the less desirable incarnation.

I think part of the reason could be the low value of the dollar vs the euro, and the fact that astronomy equipment just seems to cost more in Europe than in the US (based on what I've read).

Purely conjecture on my part ......

Fred

Having recently been on a diagonal quest myself you can read the results in Message #521269 in this forum.
One thing I found that most manufacturers don't tell you is how much space there is to seat your eyepiece without coming in contact with the diagonal mirror.
I never ran into this problem until I bought a hybrid 2/1.25" eyepiece. It bottomed out ON the mirror. Fortunately It was light out and I was being gentle so did no damage. The problem was easily fixed by using a piece of 2" ID PVP pipe (painted black) which was cut to the proper length to make the eyepiece parfocal with my main observing eyepiece.

Fred