Ouroboros

Well guessed. So the “waist” are the vents.

It’s a violin with a folding neck.

You can tell I’m not much of an observational astronomer by my saying I’ve really only got three - low mag, middling mag and highest mag. I start off at low mag and widefield. Then progress through middling to high. Then I usually think that’s too much and go back to middling. I’m easily satisfied. 😊

This sounds a bit like some of the quirkiness I have experienced with my AZ EQ6 mount. Quirks which have been widely reported on. The mount pointing the wrong way seemed to occur after polar alignment. A working solution was to first do the polar alignment, return the mount to the home position - weights down, telescope pointing towards the celestial pole - then switch off the mount and then switch back on again. Skip polar alignment and move straight on to star alignment etc. With my mount the alignment was so far out that I could play with this during the day until I’d worked out how to stop it doing daft things. I no longer have this problem using the ASIair to control the mount. But occasionally I use the handset for visual only and I still have to do the switch off/switch on thing.

Yes. I immediately got pop ups saying my system was infected with viruses on all the sites reporting the death of Alyn. If it’s true I should add that I too am sorry to hear the news.

Very nice sketches, @josefk. I managed to track it down through bins this evening … along with Mercury just above the horizon.

Just to follow up on my fairly negative comments earlier, I do hope the show was a success for the organisers and the vendors. It’s only by having shows like this can we see kit in person and discuss them with sellers, and maybe meet familiar faces too. Basically I’m saying thanks to those who organise the shows and long may they continue doing so. 😃

I didn’t post any because I didn’t take any ‘wide field’ pics of the whole show .. only a couple of specific items that interested me. As here … Something I noticed very starkly, although I realised this already, how refractors now dominate the telescope scene - albeit probably made by the same few manufacturers. All Chinese of course. Kit from companies like Skywatcher barely get a look in amongst all the red. Their stuff is also looking somewhat dated too.

Just got back. I have to say I was slightly underwhelmed. Seemed smaller than last time, but maybe it was a bigger hall. I am glad I got there reasonably early. By 11 o’clock it was getting so you couldn’t easily get to see the sellers’ displays. I decided I’d bail out a tad early. A plus was that I bought a small scope cover, so saved myself 10% on that plus postage, and a couple of 2nd hand 50p books on the history of astronomy stall.

Sounds good but I think Apple don’t allow an app to be downloaded to an iPad or iPhone except from the Apple App Store.

Interesting. I don’t allow my iPad to update automatically, but the App Store app flags up the number of apps needing updating. I find I have to do this every few days.

I see what you mean about people reporting USB port failures. I think I’ll give it a miss for the moment particularly because I recently installed a ZWO EAF to my ASKAR. I’ll wait until I’ve tested that in use before updating the software.

Mmmm. I’ll look into that. I don’t know what you’re running ASIair app on but on the iPad the App Store lets you know when apps need updating.

Anyone updated yet? How is it performing. I noticed this update flagged in my iPad but haven’t yet pressed the button to install. I am wary of doing so after the recent updates. Hopefully they’ve improved things, but once bitten twice shy and all that.

Yes. GHS. I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with it. I often have to have several goes before I’m even vaguely satisfied. Although admittedly it’s a better tool than what was available before. It can sometimes leave an image looking a bit flat ie lacking contrast. It’s not the final stage of course. There are other tools to apply after GHS. But part of me has a feeling that there’s got to be a better way of doing this than GHS …. it’s just that no one has come up with it yet.