Quote:
Originally Posted by ngcles
Hi Markus & All,
Thanks for the comment on the review mate -- much appreciated. I'm not fishing for feedback, but sometimes (in fact a lot of times) when you write something you do wonder whether anyone reads it at all. Sometimes you hear something (positive or negative), very often nothing at all -- stony silence. Its a curious thing.
Best,
Les D
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Hi Markus & Les,
Les,
On the topic of whether anyone may read the review, I for one, did. I thought it was an excellent article, gave an exhaustive test of the capabilities and features of the scope and was glad to see it performed admirably against your own one (great idea to compare the two) and thought if it could barely be shaded by yours on Saturn, then it must be a good thing. [One of my reasons for reading it is my desire for a 10-12" dob in the future and comparing the GSO and the Skywatcher 880-980 ones had me wondering if the Skywatcher had good views. Your article has helped me choose the SW collapsible 10 or 12 inch as the next weapon of choice
] A fine read! Well done.
With respect to Markus' question re the GSO 12" and the Skywatcher mentioned in Les' AS&T article, I think that mirror ambient is probably one of the issues here as well as collimation. I have looked through an 8 inch GSO (AlexK13's from Bintel) after minimal ambient cooling and noticed a difference between the views then and later on in the night. Things just seemed to "settle down" as time went by.
As magnification increases, tolerance for miscollimation issues decreases
dramatically, something I found out on my Skywatcher 5 inch Newtonian which really had me in a twist for a while! Make sure your collimation is pretty much spot on and then everything should start to improve a LOT! When my scope was out of collimation, NOTHING seemed sharp, I couldnt focus on Jupiter at all with anything over 100X mag and almost threw away all my non ED eyepieces. When I had the collimation sorted out,
every eyepiece now gives great views with respect to their magnifications.
Summing up (another one of my essays
) Collimate first, make sure your scope is cooled down, and then you should see a marked improvement over what you currently see now.
Cheers
Chris