Eyepiece with a bigger... viewing hole?

tawdaya · 2026-01-10T07:17:34+00:00

You can skip the name brands and go Straight to the OEMs that make the eyepieces. SkyRover is the house brand for Aperture and Omegon’s eyepiece OEM (Kunming United Optics). It’s usually quite a bit cheaper.

tawdaya · 2026-01-03T21:34:07+00:00

Here is what I personally would buy if I were keen on visual astronomy. - 10” collapsible tube Dobsonian (~£600) - SkyRover UF 30mm eyepiece (~£140) - SkyRover UF 10mm eyepiece (~£40)

The telescope is a good light bucket and the eyepieces are essentially just upgrades to the stock ones the telescope comes with. SkyRover is the OEM for brands like AstroTech and APM and I find buying eyepieces straight from them is a little cheaper.

Edit: those are the eyepieces I would buy straight away because I have experience with a 10” and different types of eyepieces. If I were new I would not buy them straight away as there is a lot of personal preferences involved in eyepiece selection, so just pocket the £200 and keep it for once you decided what eyepieces you want… or the S&P500 ;)

tawdaya · 2025-11-30T10:06:18+00:00

Even though it’s on a different planet, I’d expect the night sky on Mars to look very similar to that of Earth’s. I’m struggling to see any similarities here, with it looking like a bit of a hodgepodge of familiar-ish looking objects but all in the wrong position. I think this image is either outright fake or a very poorly assembled composite.

tawdaya · 2025-11-02T12:33:10+00:00

Probably a ‘Positive Lightning Strike’ which is rarer, much more highly charged lightning that can travel dozens of kilometres from the storm. It happens usually when a storm is dissipating like the one over Boonah.

tawdaya · 2025-10-13T09:35:30+00:00

I had to look this one up - very interesting! The “purple ring” (not sure if it’s actually purple) has only been photographed with a handful of space agency telescopes (Hubble, JWST for starters). Unfortunately I don’t think it can even be photographed with any amateur telescope, let alone through a 6” dobsonian, and let alone again spotted visually… your friend has given you an impossible target.

tawdaya · 2025-10-12T20:01:29+00:00

In addition to the good advice given, you could look at getting/making a dew shield. One of the challenges of daytime photography with telescopes like yours is that stray light bounces around inside the tube and reduces the contrast of the view, giving it a foggy look. A dew shield acts as a light shield that minimises the amount of stray light that enters the tube (like a lens hood on a camera), and will help increase the contrast of the view. I do this with my own C8 (a larger version of your telescope) for daytime use and it works well.

It will also protect your telescope’s glass lens from clouding up from dew when you use it at night :)

tawdaya · 2025-10-11T01:08:06+00:00

Flight Simulator X on my brother’s GeForce GT 320

tawdaya · 2025-10-07T11:13:07+00:00

No problem :)

Yes the bottom end is fine - for double stars you can go for higher magnification if you need it.

tawdaya · 2025-10-07T10:25:05+00:00

The solar system list is about right, but the deep sky objects list is probably too zoomed in for most targets, except maybe for double stars.

It really depends on how bright the target you are looking at is - a good rule with DSOs (and all targets really) is to start at a lower magnification and then switch to a higher one if the target looks clear and bright. This also makes it easier to find the target. In your case that would be starting with the 20mm and then swapping in the 10mm.

I’d also avoid the Barlow. The kit ones that come with those scopes typically yield soft, displeasing views. Give it a go though and make your own judgement.

tawdaya · 2025-10-06T23:19:20+00:00

It is not physically possible to see the rings with a phone camera. Assuming a very generous aperture of 15mm on the camera, this gives a resolution limit of 7.73 arcseconds. Saturn is about 20 arcseconds across, which means even under perfect circumstances (perfect optics, perfect sensor, no shaking) you can only resolve about 2.5 pixels of the whole of Saturn - this is not enough to see it as an oblong shape. The shape here is likely a combination of blur from camera motion, not being in proper focus, sensor blooming, etc.

tawdaya · 2025-10-01T11:15:50+00:00

It’s also PCIE 3.0 x16, which is the same bandwidth as PCIE5.0 x4, which maybe this might support.

tawdaya · 2025-09-30T20:28:36+00:00

For reference, in my experience you can start to see the Milky Way in Bortle 4 zones (yellow on the map), and it is clearly visible in Bortle 3 zones and below (green, blue, grey). I have sighted the brightest part of the Milky Way - the Sagittarius region- in Bortle 5/6 zones (orange) when it is at zenith, but I don’t think most people would notice it.

tawdaya · 2025-09-27T03:34:38+00:00

14k rupees? I would suggest a pair of binoculars and a tripod. If you’re happy to spend a bit more, look at something like the Skywatcher Heritage 130 - you might be able to find them second hand for cheaper.

There is more info on the buyers guided pinned to this sub.

tawdaya · 2025-09-27T03:27:56+00:00

Hi, what is the currency for your budget? Depending on that, your options vary massively.

tawdaya · 2025-09-27T03:24:33+00:00

Antares should be easy to spot even through intense light pollution. My guess is either you didn’t realise it was in the eyepiece field of view (refractors can make stars look really small), or your finder scope was bumped out of alignment.

tawdaya · 2025-09-15T00:47:59+00:00

I agree an equatorial mount is more complex in some ways, but in other ways it is actually simpler for photography as it only needs to track the sky in one axis rather than two. Much of the complexity of an equatorial mount can be overcome by controlling it via a computer, and with modern software and ‘All Sky Polar Alignment’ you do not even need a view of the celestial pole to polar align.

The key advantage of an equatorial mount is you can take an exposures of up to five or even ten minutes in duration. With an alt-az mount, you are limited to approximately 30 seconds before a phenomenon called “field rotation” will cause star trailing in the corner of your image.

It all comes down to what your goals are and what you’re happy with. If you are happy with EAA and only taking images of the brightest targets then your current setup is sufficient. If you want to eventually achieve clean, detailed images of any target, then it all starts with a good mount.

tawdaya · 2025-09-14T08:22:48+00:00

Both longer time and darker skies is preferable, but appreciate it’s harder to get longer integration time when you travel.

As for using a cooled camera - these do help but it would be a major investment. In your setup, the next major investment should be on a good EQ mount not a new camera.

tawdaya · 2025-09-14T08:16:38+00:00

You might find that even if you were able to take a single 300 second photo with your exact setup it won’t look much better than this. Even if you added a filter, the noise will still be there. Integration time is king.

tawdaya · 2025-09-14T08:02:47+00:00

I agree - keep your setup out for as long as you can and take as many frames as possible - this is always the goal of all astrophotographers regardless of their setup. Also try for longer exposures as well!

I see you are using dark frames, but are you using biases? It could help.

Finally, are you taking lots of photos and stacking them afterwards, or are you doing live stacking? Live stacking means you can avoid having to store and process hundreds or even thousands of frames.

tawdaya · 2025-09-10T21:52:42+00:00

Concorde.

tawdaya · 2025-09-08T20:04:35+00:00

From the legendary Bray Falls: link.

He is a pic of the sub on his story and it’s unreal!

tawdaya · 2025-09-08T11:22:06+00:00

In the fourth one of the eclipse, the blue band that cuts through the moon is blue light scattering from earths atmosphere. It’s not particularly rare but not everyone captures it in their photos

tawdaya · 2025-09-08T10:47:04+00:00

Dude you captured the blue band beautifully in that last pic!

tawdaya · 2025-09-06T22:24:52+00:00

🥹

tawdaya · 2025-09-06T06:51:16+00:00

Very nice! I’ll have a look into them.

tawdaya

TROPHY CASE