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Thanks for the heads up on NGC 6229. Manage to see it (amongst other target) after reading your above post. Off to bed, I’m tired!

Comfort is a very important point, more especially as you get older, also convenience is a big factor. If your scope is easy to set up, comfortable in use, your eyepieces are not challenging to get a good view then you’re much more likely to take advantage of any clear skies.

Next, S3 PanSTARRS, which was in Cygnus, near Deneb, and with a backdrop of a great number of Milky Way stars and emission nebulae. Consequently I may re-visit the data, and see whether I can get the long comet tail and nebulae to show better. In the meantime, this is the result, using the same equipment and processing as the Tsuchinshan-ATLAS image, except that 26 sub-exposures were obtained.

Hi everyone—I’m late to the party on this thread, but I see that it is still active. Great work by all, and I’ve enjoyed learning what you have been trying. I’ve been hard at work on trying to make the plan from the OP work for my Apertura 10” Dob. Sadly, my base is slightly too large for the original plans posted here and my groundboard feet sit about 2cm centimeters outside the template on the north axis. I’ve been scouring also through the www.reinervogel.net website referenced in the beginning, to try and work out how to make this project fit for my Dob, and trying to figure in Centre of Gravity (COG) calculations and his original measurements to see how to “stretch” this template to fit and be accurate and stable. When designing according to Vogel’s original instructions, I am getting my South axis calculated to be underneath my Dob groundboard. Knowing my groundboard is larger, and guessing my COG is lower than the OP template—perhaps this makes sense. But I have not seen anyone else here with this issue and am not certain how this would affect balance and tracking. I have thought of 3 options overall: 1)Extend the North axis base by several centimeters on both ends and build the rest of the template according to the OP plans. Again—no idea how this would affect balance and tracking 2)Use my calculations from Vogel’s original plans that puts my South axis underneath my Dob and hope that works. Also—no idea if this is safe or effective. 3)Reach out to the community here and get help. I believe this will be my best bet. I am hopeful that someone will be able to provide further direction before I put saw to wood. Below I am including some of the parameters and measurements that I have been gathering, and I hope that will be enough to give someone who is experienced what they need to point me in the right direction. Measurements: Outer distance from one groundboard foot to a second groundboard foot: 465mm Optical Tube Centre of Gravity to ground: 600mm (assumes this is from centre of the altitude axis pivots) Rocker Box Centre of Gravity to ground: 150mm Optical Tube weight: 18.63kg Rocker Box weight: 13.63kg Distance from azimuth bearing to outer side of groundboard foot: 267mm Calculated COG of assembled telescope: 388mm to ground Height of ground feet: 22mm My latitude is 53.5 degrees, in Sherwood Park, Alberta, Canada Many thanks to anyone who can provide me with direction and support! Thanks, Graeme LaRue

My first session imaging with a ‘scope for many weeks due to the weather, tackling 2 of my favourite subject - comets. Both were straightforward to find with the 12” Newt, after checking their positions via Heavens-above.com. I imaged Tsuchinshan-ATLAS first, as its location would soon become inaccessible due to local obstructions. Below is the result of 19 x 2-min auto-guided exposures at ISO 3200, with an astro-modded EOS 600D and 12” f/4 Newtonian on a Losmandy G11 mount. The frames were stacked in Deepskystacker and processed in Canon Digital Professional (curves) and CyberLink PhotoDirector (noise reduction and a slight crop). Regards, Mike

Thanks @wimvb and @PhotoGav . I had found formulae but was not confident in their use. All noted for future reference. 🙏

Apologies for going off topic Some high cloud around , took a couple of photos from the garden with phone. Sometimes the picture has a lens effect artifact that shows up and messes up the exposure bloating the center. Anyone else have this with the pixel phones? example below Here is another photo below taken about 23.20 with the phone that came out ok with some in phone processing. The Plough and Arcturus Short time lapse with satellite flare PXL_20240504_213929911.NIGHT.mp4

I have four Baader Diamond Steeltrack focusers and three Feathertouch focusers. When @bosun21 says above that the BDS is not quite an FT, what he’s actually saying is that the BDS is not _total perfection_, which is what an FT is. But the BDS is very, very good indeed. Magnus

Actually, that's the norm in physics. Even the 3 body problem in Newtonian physics has to no analytical solutions. It is also true in quantum mechanics, fluid mechanics and solid state physics etc. etc. Regards Andrew

I took a quick one with my Seestar S50 this evening. I used Epsilon CrB (top left), at magnitude 4.1, as a reference for brightness. T CrB is the bright spot above-right of IC 4587. It should be obvious when T CrB goes nova. Geoff

The short version of @PhotoGav: Multiply z by 14 000 to get the distance in millions of lightyears

I meant to add: great image! Well done on acquiring sufficient data to create an image… tricky so far this galaxy season. I like the wider field of view, which puts the galaxy into context.

Just sent this to myself for a future reference and observing project. Thank you

I stand corrected (for this one at least). But there are other uncertainties.

Astrobabys guide to collimation is the most recommended on sgl https://www.astro-baby.com/astrobaby/help/collimation-guide-newtonian-reflector/ It uses a 200p skywatcher as the example so very close what you have. do it to letter no matter how odd the instructions sound and you won't fail. I have the same flextube telescope. I first tried a laser collimator then got a cheap Cheshire and it is much easier with the Cheshire. Finally, Just a word to the wise - make sure you draw the flextube apart TWO clicks! It is very easy to think you are there at the first set of stops, but you must pull it again and get it to the second clickstop to make it long enough to use. It will not work at the first stop, take it from one that knows! Oh yes, also make sure you have removed the big plastic cover too, sometimes it gets plonked down on the second stage and you forget to remove it!

Redshift (z) is the fraction of the speed of light that the galaxy is moving away from us, in this case: 0.072523 x 300,000 km/s = 21,757 km/s Plug that into the equation: v = Ho d where v is the radial velocity, Ho is the Hubble Constant and d is the distance. Rearrange to get d = v / Ho Let’s use a value of 70 km/s/Mpc for Ho (debatable what value to use here depending on your preference for working it out! So I’ve gone for a middling value). Plug in the values and you get: d = 21,757 km/s / 70 km/s/Mpc = 311 Mpc 1 Mpc = 3,260,000 light years, so the distance is 1.01x10^9 ly, which is just over a billion light years. Far, far away…!

The sky was clear for me too. This was from my Seestar S50 this evening, direct from my tablet, without any post-processing. The S50's plate solving was unhappy with the fairly empty star pattern, so I used Porrima for alignment. The "Mark" function could not find an obvious target, and a Stellarium search for "UGC 8262" just placed a cross about where the fuzzy blob is above-right of the comet. Geoff

I've moved onto Hercules now and it's 3 globular clusters. The very famous Messier 13, the nearly as well known Messier 92 and the more obscure NGC 6229. The latter globular cluster is 4 times further away than M13 and M92 and correspondingly fainter. I posted a little report on this interesting object back in 2021: https://stargazerslounge.com/topic/378625-hercules-3rd-globular-ngc-6229/

John good catch. 👍 I had a quick check of R Vir, not a significant change from last night. l was pleased and surprised to spot M51 and M101 in the 15x70's Cheers Ian

I took the plunge and bought a new cem70 mount and tripier a few weeks back and so finally managed to get it all set up. Today I set up the mini pc and cables and as luck would have it tonight is clear!!! I've spent tonight setting up phd2 and making sure everything is talking to each other. We'll to say I'm blown away by this mount is an under statement. Slewing to targets via nina puts them bang center of my camera!!!! Guiding performance seems to be something I could of only dreamed about a few days ago, I'm really pleased with this mount and pier combo, I'm sat here looking at the a guiding graph that is almost perfectly flat!!! RMS error total 0.17 !!! unbelievable, this mount has replaced my trusty neq6 and I have to say I'm not disappointed. My only gripe is the small screws holding the top plate of the tripier, these are totally inadequate imho, so will probably replace these.

Focus looks iffy (mask incoming) needs calibrating hot pixels obvious, then lots more frames EOS 50D 10-18 @10mm ISO 1600 30s testing 123.mp4

My knowledge does not go as far as calculating distance from redshift. How do you do the calculation ( accepting the uncertainty)? LEDA 1650398 -- Galaxy Other object types: G (2016RAA,LEDA), Opt (LAMOST,SDSS) ICRS coord. (ep=J2000) : 142.67269037 +21.45612886 (Optical) [ ] C 2020ApJS..249....3A FK4 coord. (ep=B1950 eq=1950) : 09 27 51.56168 +21 40 35.1496 [ ] Gal coord. (ep=J2000) : 208.62660025 +44.19877366 [ ] Radial velocity / Redshift / cz : V(km/s) 20955 [~] / z(spectroscopic) 0.072523 [~] / cz 21741.85 [~]; (Opt) E 2018MNRAS.474.1873W

Great I'll look it up thanks👍

No. It comes with a paper template showing the mounting holes. There is a video or two on YouTube showing how to fit them. I fitted mine without a template. Just measured it out.

Nice catch @John 👍🏻