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Old 03-05-2019, 03:12 PM
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mental4astro (Alexander)
kids+wife+scopes=happyman

mental4astro is offline
 
Join Date: Jun 2008
Location: sydney, australia
Posts: 4,979
Hemi,

The BEST scope is the one that gets used.

If you are happy with what you have, then you a blessed!

Why would you feel "guilty"???

Your question seems to me more about justifying you getting big aperture than what a "Newtonian" entails.

Why not get a BIG SCT then?

There is soooo much hype, demonizing and scaremongering about collimating Newts that it is astounding. It is only aligning the mirrors, nothing more, nothing less. And ALL the hype exclusively stems from the word ""collimation"

There is nothing demonic about the collimation process. Remember that a Newt is a scope where the optics are not rigidly held in place, but in spring loaded mechanisms, so if subjected to vibrations, say from a car or setting up and taking down, things can move. And any movement is only very small. Ok, so you need to tweak a screw or two 1/16th of a turn, big deal! The optics will not be horribly misaligned. It's done at the start of your session and you know that if you spend the 2 min that it will take AT MOST, the scope will be performing its very best for you!

Don't make "collimation" your excuse for not getting a big aperture if that's what you really want. More significant is do you have the space to store it and a car to transport it if you need to. Those are much more pressing issues to consider.

Alex.

Last edited by mental4astro; 03-05-2019 at 04:07 PM.
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