First light for Skywatcher flextube 200P, and a question.
OK, a brief First light report and a question.
Having seen the flextube goto 8" at Starstuff at a price too good to walk past and being able to swindle freight back to Vic for a bottle of Baileys, we bought this scope for my now 10 year old son for his "Birthday" (It will not be the end of the world if he looses interest, I will keep and use it myself)
On to a first light, we got the scope assembled quite quickly and without hassles except for two minor things, on the original assembly for display someone managed to cross thread one of the bolts in the base which will take a little to sort out properly, and also the (Very short) screws which mount the hand controller clip to the Alt motor cover were over tightened and pulled through the plastic, a repair job for later.
Aside from that (Which I am overlooking for the price we paid, around than half the list price) it all went together like it should.
On to a first light, my apologies to Melbourne folk, we managed first light on Sunday night in decent conditions and that was the end of that for being able to see the sky.
The assembled base and scope is just barely doable for me to carry alone but would be easy work with the OTA removed, making the obvious extra trip. A dob trolley will come later.
Once on the ground, getting it in operation was quite straightforward, loosen the flex tube lock screws, slide it out to the second stop and nip them up again. The ability in this instance to heavily shortcut on alignment by putting the scope in the home position (Facing North and level) plugging in the normal lat/long/timezone/time stuff and then abandoning the alignment process makes it very quick to get observing with, with a bit of an impact on tracking and goto precision.
Abandoning the alignment process at "Start alignment" on the hand controller puts it into a basic mode where it assumes that it is level, pointed north and at zero elevation. At that step it would do a goto to Jupiter for instance and put it in the FOV of the supplied 25mm EP (40X mag, I would have to do a bit more homework to work out the AFOV) and track it without obvious drift for a decent time before my son wanted to move on. I later powered it off and did a better two star alignment, the process for which is better than for my Orion Atlas pro mount with the ability to align first on a solar system object like Jupiter and then it will slew to a nearby bright star, so it is more user friendly if you are not sure of star names. After a decent alignment it put various objects well in view in the 25mm and they stayed put.
Optically it seems like a pretty decent instrument for the money, crisp views of the first quarter moon when seeing allowed, two cloud bands starkly visible on Jupiter despite the moon and seeing, flashes of the Cassini division at 100X power (Seemingly seeing limited more than anything else) and about as good a view of Omega Cen as you can expect early in the night when it was only just getting properly dark and with a quarter moon. I imagine the views will improve slightly as a star test showed that collimation is a little off but I have not got a cheshire to sort it with yet so I am going to leave it alone for now. Cooldown seemed to be relatively quick but it had probably not quite cooled to ambient when we had to pack up (School night) Again, it is only likely to get better.
My only real gripes are that the eyepiece holder is a bit basic and exposed, and it seems to be set up with AP in mind as an extension tube is required to reach focus with an eyepiece. That is my bigger gripe, the 1.25" and 2" adapters are actually two separate extension tubes so to change to a 2" EP requires the EP and then extension tube to be removed and the 2" extension put on before slotting the 2" eyepiece in place.
That leads to the question, does anyone know of an extension tube that could be fitted to one of these that incorporates a 2" to 1.25" adapter as is common in a 2" diagonal for instance? Less removal of bits in the dark is less chance of dropping something.
Overall and particularly for the price I am quite happy with it so far.
I think I might have been standing around that 8" dob while you were ruminating on it at StarStuff, if you were the chap that also had his son there. For what you paid, that's a great price - never seen one so cheap.
Not sure I can help with your adapter question - I do find that the basic 1.25" eyepieces will reach focus without an extension tube, but better quality 2" ep's need a 35mm tube for my 8" which is the same as yours. All my 1.25" eps reach focus with or without the 2" extension tube in, so I just generally leave it in there the whole time, and swap out the 2" eyepieces for a 1.25"+ adapter as required. I find the 1.25" adapters that come with basic laser collimators are good for this, as they sit deep into the extension tube. I tend to use a zoom eyepiece quite a bit with the 8", so changing eyepieces all the time isn't too much of an issue.
Regarding the eyepiece holder, the exposure didn't bother me so much as the limited storage, so I removed it and replaced it with a plastic tray from Bunnings, which I put some black flocking on the bottom of, and just clip it to the front panel with a couple of bulldog clips - holds several eyepieces plus you can put your phone, filters, chocolate, etc in there and just put a cloth over it if there's dew about.
Good luck with your scope - I think you got a real bargain.
Yep that would have been me. It took a bit of devious talk to keep Toph (Christopher) from realising we had bought it. I knew what kind of deal it was.
By extension tubes, basically there are seperate adapters for 1.25 and 2” eyepieces and both of them serve as extension tubes rather than a 2” eyepiece holder with a slip in adapter to use 1.25” eyepieces.
Edit: On the plus side, the setup would mean that if he wants to try out doing some lunar imaging with a DSLR it should be possible to get it to achieve focus with a T ring adapter straight on the drawtube.
Last edited by The_bluester; 26-07-2018 at 10:05 AM.
