Telescopes

My current telescopes are an LX-90 200 mm SCT and a Tele Vue 76 mm apochromatic refractor. I tend to use the refractor mostly for visual astronomy, particularly ‘quick look’ sessions, while the SCT gets used more for astrophotography and during the summer months for looking at globular clusters and the like where the extra aperture comes in useful. The refractor also gets used quite a bit for birdwatching and as a telescope to take on my travels.

Eyepieces

The eyepieces that get used most often are the Panoptics, the 24 mm and 19 mm Panoptic eyepieces being particularly useful.

• Meade UWA 14 mm
• Nagler 13 mm, 7 mm
• Panoptic 35 mm, 24 mm, 19 mm
• Plossl 40 mm, 32 mm, 26 mm, 20 mm, 12 mm, 10 mm, 7.5 mm

The Plossl eyepieces are not much used and mostly came with various telescopes, the Meade 26 mm with the SCT, the Tele Vue 20 mm with the refractor, and the generic Russian or Chinese 40, 12, 10, and 7.5 mm ones as a free gift with the SCT when it was bought from a particular retailer.

The odd man out is the Celestron NexStar 32 mm, an eyepiece I bought to go along with my first telescope, a 114 mm reflector. Although somewhat redundant when compared with the Panoptic 24 mm eyepiece that shows the same field of view at a higher magnification, it remains a good little eyepiece.

Lunar eclipse, March 3rd 2007, as seen through the apo refractor

Jupiter viewed through the SCT.