Equipment
Not much of it, used a lot. Opinions are mine and some of them are wrong.
Telescope
200 mm f/6 Dobsonian (1200 mm focal length), a plain solid-tube Newtonian on a rocker box, bought second-hand in 2014 and the scope behind almost every entry here. If anyone asks what to buy, this is still my answer. It cools in about forty minutes, collimates in two, carries out of the back door in one piece, and f/6 is forgiving enough that cheap eyepieces still work at the edge of the field.
I have added three things: a cheap right-angle finder alongside the zero-power one, a counterweight on the back of the tube for heavy eyepieces, and some teflon pads on the bearings that I should have fitted the day I bought it. It has no motors and no computer. I like finding things.
Binoculars
10×50, porro prism, nothing special. They go round my neck every session for sweeping, for checking where I am, and for anything too big for the telescope. Better than an 8-inch for the Pleiades, and I will not be argued out of that.
Eyepieces
| 32 mm Plossl | 37×, 52°, about 1.4° true field. Finder eyepiece and the Double Cluster. |
|---|---|
| 24 mm 68° | 50×, about 1.4°. The one that lives in the focuser. |
| 13 mm 82° | 92×. Galaxies, globulars, the whole Moon edge to edge. |
| 9 mm 66° | 133×. Planets on an ordinary night. |
| 6 mm 66° | 200×. Planets on a good night, which is not often. |
That is the lot. I owned a 2× Barlow for years and almost never used it, so it went. 200× is about as far as the air above northern England will take me on most nights; I have had perhaps a dozen sessions in twelve years that would have carried more. Spending money on a 4 mm would have been spending money on blur.
Charts and books
- Pocket Sky Atlas
- The spiral-bound one. Lives on the eyepiece tray, gets damp, has survived. If I could keep one book it would be this.
- A large paper atlas for planning
- Indoors only. Too big to handle in the dark, which is not a complaint.
- Rukl’s Atlas of the Moon
- Everything I know about lunar names comes from here.
- Turn Left at Orion
- The book I started with. It draws what you actually see in a small telescope, not what a long exposure sees, and that matters more than it sounds.
No planetarium app at the eyepiece. A phone screen at full whiteness wipes out twenty minutes of dark adaptation, and even at its dimmest it is brighter than it needs to be.
Light
A red head torch with a dimmer, turned right down until I can only just read the chart. Most red torches are far too bright out of the box; mine has two layers of red tape over it as well. A spare torch in the coat pocket, because the first one always fails at midnight.
Dew
This is the north of England, so dew is the real opponent. The solid tube keeps the main optic dry nearly every night. The weak points are the finder and the eyepiece on the tray, and the secondary on the worst nights.
The finder and the eyepiece in use get a heater strap run from a small battery pack. Eyepieces not in use stay in a closed box in my coat pocket. The secondary gets a long dew shield made from camping mat on the front of the tube, which also keeps stray light off it. A hairdryer on an extension lead is the last resort, and I have used it more than I care to admit.
Everything else
A drum stool, because comfort at the eyepiece is worth more than another inch of aperture. A notebook with plain pages and a soft pencil, never a pen, because pens stop in the cold. Thick socks. A flask.