michael.h.f.wilkinson

My score is 99%

I have seen both the Pup and E and F in a Celestron C8, so an 8" Newtonian should be fine, but good sky conditions are a must

Just bodged together a cool pair of eclipse glasses for my little binoculars. One piece of Baader Solar Film and some cardboard from a six-pack of beer, plus some black tape, and the result works neatly for those with an interpupillary distance of around 73 mm. Spotted one big sunspot plus a little one with them. I am currently in Stonewall, Texas awaiting the eclipse, but the forecast is not good, so I doubt I will be able to do any imaging. These SUNoculars will be ideal for potential quick glimpses through gaps in the clouds. Fingers crossed.

I will probably be visiting friends in Leon, Spain, which is also on the eclipse line. Not ideal as the sun will be low in the sky, but certainly a cheap option

80s seems about right, but 90s is also possible. Note that Vixen made quite a few items marketed by Celestron.

That is very nice indeed

I have readily seen the spiral structure in M51 from a very dark site (Bortle 1) with my 8" SCT, but it is very hard from my Bortle 4-5 garden. A 16" RC at work can readily pick up the spiral arms from the outskirts of the city of Groningen (Bortle 6-7 I would guess). I should add that the view from the dark site in Southern France with an 8"was more impressive than what the 16" could do from the city. Aperture is apparently less important than sky background. With M101 things are curiously different. Due to the low surface brightness I could not really see the arms from a fairly dark site (Bortle 2-3) with my C8, but as my eye moved over the FOV, I got the impression of rotating motion, which is a common illusion when looking at spiral patterns. Using Olly Penrice's 20" Dob (Sir Isaac) from his beautifully dark site made the spiral arms stand out very clearly indeed.

Fingers crossed!

I will be in Stonewall, near Fredericksburg, Texas.

That is pretty good. If you use automatic metering, spot-metering might be best, as long as the sun stays in the centre of the image. If there aren't any clouds, I would go for manual exposure (I will be using two planetary cameras with FireCapture, and will opt for manual exposure).

Very sad news indeed. Taken away far too soon. My condolences to his loved ones

Not really, this method simply detects structures (in stacked, linear images, so no non-linear stretch applied) that are potential objects. Fairly uniquely, it handles nested objects (objects superimposed on others), unlike Sextractor, Profound or NoiseChisel + Segment. We published a comparison paper in Astronomy & Astrophysics a few years back, and are working on several improvements. The paper is open access, so free to download. This is a figure from an earlier work by Paul Teeninga, Ugo Moschini, Scott Trager, and myself, showing the difference between SExtratcor and our MTObjects method. The latter shows much more of the faint regions of the galaxy, and detects H-II regions in spiral arms, and superimposed stars as individual objects, rather than having them cause a fragmentation of the detected object as in SExtractor. We will submit a paper on a multi-band version shortly.

Camera sensors are hitting fundamental limits. The quantum efficiency on my best camera peaks at around 85%, with low amp-glow, low read noise (just a few electrons tops), and cooling. There is simply not much room for improvement. AI cannot make up more photons, or magically increase resolutions beyond what the PSF of the optics allows. It could generate plausible images that look great, but it known that these AI methods can hallucinate objects that aren't there. This is why software for faint object detection we are developing at the University of Groningen relies on statistics to ensure there is enough evidence for the presence of something that cannot be explained as a random fluctuation caused by noise. This is not to knock systems like the SeeStar 50. If people enjoy using them: great! If others prefer more complex set-ups: also fine.

No doubt the CGE-Pro (or are you talking about the CGEM?) is a good mount, and the price seems very low, but it is a very heavy beast (154 lbs or 70 kg, payload 90 lbs 41 kg, i.e. complete overkill for a C8 OTA at 5.3 kg). Even the CGEM (which I also have) is rather heavy to set up every time. The Great Polaris is set up very easy by comparison, as is the HEM15.

That is lovely. This pair never gets old, and the number of little fuzzies in the background is amazing