5 Telescopes I Regret Buying!

you know not long ago i did a video called the five telescopes i should never have sold i got a message from someone who asked me what are the five telescopes you should never have bought now some of these aren't necessarily the telescope's fault we either didn't get along or it came into my life in a time when i wasn't ready for it or some other non-technical reason such is the case with telescope number five my celestron c14 yes i once had a c-14 i think everybody at some point want to see 14. it's the flagship in celestron's line and i reached the point in my life where i was able to afford a used one and i got one and it was too big of course it's too big it's a c14 i've spent half my life telling people not to buy telescopes that are too big for them and now i'd gone ahead and done it so i had a las mandy g11 and i had put the c4 11 and the c14 on it but the curious thing was the c11 seemed to spend all the time on the mount i hardly ever use the c14 and i would walk by this thing every day and thoughts would come into my head you know it's been a month since i've used the c14 it's been two months since i've used the c14 i really need to use the c14 it started to feel like work and the final straw came one night it was a winter evening and i had the mount set up in the driveway i got the c14 i'm hoisting this 51 pound rain barrel sized object up at chest level trying to tip it into the lost mandy d plate and i didn't see that there was a patch of ice on the ground and i slipped on it to this day i have no idea how i avoided falling or dropping the scope but somehow i managed to recover but you know that night i wound up not mounting the telescope i brought it back inside and i never used it again i sold it by the way don't buy one of these as your first telescope even if you have the money and you have a place to put it it's not a great telescope to learn on do what everybody tells you to do get a smaller telescope you know a six or eight inch dobsonian or eight inch mesh caster grain learn on that and you'll be much better prepared to appreciate exactly what a c14 will do for you a few years back i got contacted by someone who did just that he bought a c-14 as his first telescope and the guy was in the new york city area and he contacted me and he said he was having some frustrations with the telescope and was willing to drive all the way up to new hampshire to have me help him out with it so i met him at the parking lot in the planetarium in concord new hampshire really nice guy we had a really great time i helped him assemble the scope and after we put it together i kind of hung back because i wanted to see what he did and how he worked and i saw him take a vixen two and a half millimeter lanthanum eyepiece and put it in the eyepiece holder and i said why are you putting a two and a half millimeter eyepiece in a telescope with a 3910 millimeter focal length and he replied well you know i don't do anything by half measures i always go for it well what can i say about that i can't certainly fault him for doing something like that look who you look look who's talking but i said in this case let's back off a little bit we put the 32 millimeter colossal in it and it was fine we found all sorts of things and we had a great time and at number four similar situation my takahashi mulan 180. many years ago i saw a view of saturn through a mulan that i will never forget it's one of the best views of saturn i ever had i don't know what size it was but i thought to myself that i needed to get one of these telescopes one day and i did find one and i maybe it's me i could never keep that thing collimated that is a reputation that these telescopes have but i would collimate it i would tighten everything down i would drive it someplace and it would be out of collimation again i gave it to a friend i had him do it in case i did something wrong same thing it would fall out a collimation now when it was on boy was it good but it got to the point where i was just worried about it all the time that maybe it wouldn't be in collimation and i sold it the guy who bought it really wanted it and i replaced it with an ordinary eight inch midcaster grain i got a c8 so i went from a fussy telescope to a really plain unfussy telescope and the c8 and i were happy together for a long time so i'm willing not to close the door on this one at some point i may re revisit the situation and get another one and maybe i can make the second one work and at number three my mead starfinder six inch dobsonian right around the year 2000 now i should point out that i think that need newtonians from the late 1970s up through about 1983 are some of the most beautiful telescopes ever made they still hold up today and i find them very collectible so when i got this star finder it really dawned on me how much had changed there was very little dna or lineage back to those beautiful newtonians of the late 70s and early 1980s the product felt cheap the focuser was awful it was a piece of plastic so if you wind up replacing the focuser you wound up having to put more weight on the back which you could do and things just got sloppy now right around this time orion had an xt6 which you could go get and it would be fine it wouldn't have any of these issues so the final straw came one night i was at a sky watch at a school and i heard a kid say mommy look that guy's got a giant roll of toilet paper and at number two my first mead etx 90. like many of you in the late 1990s i got caught up in the hype when these things first came out i thought i was going to get a questar for 495 i got on the waiting list for one of these people were buying these and scalping them i still think the mead advertisements from this time or some of the best ads i've ever seen for any kind of telescope in fact when i flip through my old mead catalogs today it makes me want to buy one all over again which is ridiculous because i could just go into the next room and look at the ones i already have so over time certain realities with this telescope began to come to light and today people donate these things to me so oh how the mighty have fallen from you know scalping to you know now they're donating them to me so these are quite common today and it's very common also to find that they're missing their drive bases like this one is if this happens to you that's okay you can put a rail on it like i do here you can attach the plate with an inch and a quarter screw at the bottom here and put the thing on an equatorial mount i find i actually prefer it that way you know i've said some unflattering things about the etx in the past and you know i think i'm coming around to it took me 20 years but i can appreciate the etx they're good on the moon i've shown the moon to many newcomers and they're pretty good on saturn and jupiter as well they are also good for lunar imaging these images you're seeing on the screen were taken in fact with this particular etx and at number one oh my goodness have i lost my mind two takahashis on this list two yes it's the takahashi sky 90. now the two major objections you usually hear about this model are number one it's cost and number two the fact that they tend not to stay in collimation and i would have to say both of those are true i love takahashi telescopes but i find this model probably to be the one that is the most difficult to love this is actually my third sky 90. three i don't know why i keep buying them i just like them for some reason when they show up i can't resist but yes i do agree they are very hard to keep in collimation now there were two versions of these and they look very similar but this one in particular you actually can collimate it i have told people you can't i was wrong about that but this dew shield screws off and there are three sets of screws spaced 120 degrees apart that sort of hold the lens in place it's not a traditional push-pull lens you have to be careful how much you tighten those screws make them too loose and the lenses will go out of collimation tighten them too much and you risk cracking the glass and that's what's happened with this one the glass is cracked at three places 120 degrees apart now the seller did reveal this to me and adjusted the price accordingly and it doesn't seem to affect the images but it is somewhat alarming to look at it now i've had people ask me ed what is your technique for collimating a takahashi sky 90 and i reply my technique is to call my friend who lives about 10 miles that way i'm not going to touch this thing he really likes doing it so if you're curious he has a very scientific technique for collimating these sky 90s what he does is he stands the telescope on end i'm not going to do it i'm not touching this thing take off the dew shield loosen all the screws and then you gently tap tap the sides of the tube and you hope the lenses settle in a position that is in a good state of collimation you tighten everything down you test it if you don't like the collimation keep repeating until it looks good so you have to have a lot of patience to do that and again a really scientific way to do this now if you're going to try this i would suggest don't do this on your most expensive refractor practice on something cheaper to start off with if you have an orion short tube 80 those things are very often out of collimation and they make really good practice test subjects for this technique so i've taken lots of images through this and they look pretty good at first glance but if you zoom in if you look on the upper right hand corner of this image i'm showing right now you'll see the stars aren't really sharp they look sort of like little cones or little hubble's variable nebula that's the miscollation that you've got to get out of this thing [Music] does this make any sense two takahashis on the list and the top two i still own them go figure anyway what are your regrets this is certainly a case where one man's trash is another man's treasure so this is a really subjective thing i'd be interested to hear your thoughts thanks for watching and i'll see you soon

Channel: Ed Ting

Views: 279,170

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Id: 2sVMma-ewzM

Length: 11min 56sec (716 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 13 2020