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Latest Posts
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Welcome to SGL from a fellow Texan living in Graham. I guess you could say I am just an old "Graham cracker" 8^) SGL is a great place to spend time when the clouds are about. BTW......Ancestry says I am 47% Scot, 33% English with a bit of Wales mixed in -
I had a similar moment to the above. Several years ago I was at Kelling Heath star party in north Norfolk. During the day I had seen Liverpool Astronomy Society’s 30” Dob, it had attracted a great deal of attention😁. The secondary mirror was 8” !!! That night was clear, so myself and clubmate Jim went over to the 30” hoping to get a peek……the 30” was aimed at M33 the well known face on spiral galaxy in Triangulum. Those in charge of the scope were allowing folks to have a look, the few minutes I waited seemed like forever…… My turn came….obvious spiral arms…..a moment like no other for me……never ever to be forgotten. That view beats any image no matter how stunningly detailed. It’s that direct connection across the void of space, those photons of light from so far away hitting my retina and perceived by my brain and consciousness…..just totally fabulous. Diehard visual observers will understand. Not knocking those fabulous images, but for me the visual view will always be king. Ed. -
One of my most memorable moments in astronomy was delivered by a 20 inch dobsonian at a reasonably dark site in Herefordshire - where the SGL star parties used to be held. I got to look at Messier 51 and Messier 13 (the owner asked me what I would like to see) and the views were jaw dropping 😲 Although the level of detail on view could probably be replicated by one of todays portable "smart" telescopes, the sheer thrill of putting my eye to the eyepiece of the big dob and seeing these famous objects in their full splendour apparently laid out in front of me was something that I will never forget. It's actually quite an intimate thing - just you and the Universe for a minute or two 😁 -
Just remember, if you store your eyepieces in a waist pouch for easy access while observing, it's called a bum bag on here. Don't even think about calling it a fa**y pack on here. It's a really weird UK-US English difference that I just don't get. -
Started out just after midnight intending a quick look round and found myself packing away at four fifteen because the sky was too bright to do anything else... My first real play with my dual Askar 120 APO set-up each has an uncooled 585MC mounted with a 0.8x reducer/flattener, a filter drawer with an Astronomic L2 UVIR cut filter plus a motorised focuser. The pair are mounted on a single platform on an iOptron CEM60. All images have been cropped a little as I still need to tweak the alignment of the OTA's slightly, no dithering was used as that has been a headache to sync between the two scopes. Omitting the dither and both run very well together. I use two instances of NINA have one with a 20 second start delay and the other with a 5 second delay start one and when it gets down to 5 seconds start the second and I'm usually within a second of sync. Both instances are set up the same apart from the initial delays. So. M13 114x 60 second subs each was set to do 60 x 60 seconds but some frames discarded due to sat trails M27 50x 120 second subs each set to 30x 120 sec M20 20x 120 second subs used, more were taken but discarded as the sky levels were just too bright. All processing undertaken in PI, RC Astro BXT, NXT and SXT routines were used BXT was 'correct only' for all images. Otherwise saturation and curves transform were the main tools used for colour correction. A mask was used when needed to control the background level and inverted to control the main subject. Images were then resized and saved. Hope you like.
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Recent Status Updates
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Blown away by the Aurora Borealis last night, fingers crossed we might get some more tonight 🙏· 0 replies
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Hi there,· 0 replies
I can see you had a Lunt 50mm for sale. By any chance it's still available?
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Had a brainwave as to how I could make a conversion gizmo to attach to my homemade spectrometer to enable it's use for nebulae. The aluminium bits arrived from EBAY this afternoon. I feel an astro project coming on!· 0 replies
Finally got the LVST (Lowestoft Very Small Telescope) reprogrammed and catching 'meteor pings' again. Everything went west after the electrical supply to the shed went down in the last major storm deluge. All is up and running again. It really does pay to write down what you have done and programmed when you get old. I'm 74 years old you know!!👴
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