[Benboy (Ben)]

Hi everyone,

I own a 6" Skywatcher Dob and have been learning a lot about astronomy/telescopes the last couple of months - especially from this forum.

I've been a bit disappointed with my views of saturn since I got my telescope and was wondering if I can get some advice on what could be the problem. I have the standard 25mm and 10mm skywatcher plossls that came with my scope -plus I just recieved a 6mm sterling plossl.(It's cheap but they get rave reviews).

All I see is a white circle with a perfectly flat-straight line going through it. I wasn't expecting much from the 25mm plossl and I heard the 10mm ones that come with scopes are normally terrible so I was putting it down to the eyepieces - both focal length and quality - or collimation. Now however I have a 6mm sterling plossl and all I see is the same but bigger- no colour, no details etc just a white circle with a flat line through it. I know the sterling plossl is not an expensive eyepiece but if you look them up they consistently get great reviews so now I am not sure what could be my problem.

As far as collimation goes I don't yet have a collimating tool (buying things one at a time because of my budget) and so I did consider that could be the problem - however I have just been looking up star collimating tests and what I see through my telescopes looks like what they say a collimated scope should see. So what could be my problem?
From what I have seen other people post of pictures taken through similar telescopes (i.e. not edited photos) and their comments about what they see - I should be seeing much better images...???

Sorry for the rant, any advice on where I should be looking would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Ben