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Thank you all for your comments Am really happy with this @FenlandPaul @davew it looked like Lindisfarne Castle was unlit. Yes, a disheartening first go, am not sure why I posted it. Shows its not easy! @Saganite I am Paul, cheers.

Exactly the boy could have lost the sight in his right eye. Why does the owner of the scope not put a solar filter over the main tube.

https://astro-talks.ru/forum/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=1483#p101290 Yup. 3.5-8.1mm Review: https://astro-talks.ru/forum/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=4585&p=94406#p94406

Just a thought. If it does have full air functionality and ZWO mess up the firmware updates (not uncommon), does the camera become an expensive paperweight? They'd better up their software support game and upload older firmwares for users.

And yet, people heat their secondary mirror or corrector plates or eyepieces to prevent dewing. A very slight change in the optical image is preferable to the problem of opaque optics.

DPD left this on my doorstep today- about 3 weeks late because they lost the first parcel. Also Altair Astro's communications are quite slow, as I'm sure many of you have already experienced. Anyhow it's here at last, and the sky is looking clear-ish. I've just tested it against the neighbors chimney pots, the sensitivity compared to my DSLR is amazing!

That looks very similar / the same as the Skywatcher 2 inch dielectric and also the Opticron one, which FLO sold a few years back. I'm sure it would work well with a 4 inch F/10 achromat such as the TAL 100. It's probably very nearly as good, maybe just as good, as the Altair one. Edit: check that the 2 inch diagonal will actually come to focus in the TAL 100. I've known of TAL's with the sort of focuser yours has, where even though they would take a 2 inch diagonal, you could not get an eyepiece to focus in it !

I think the image was taken by Clarkpm4242....

No need for acceleration - just uniform motion is enough to produce Doppler shift. On the other hand, red shift (or blue shift for that matter) - can be due to acceleration - but we might not need force for that either - curvature of space time is enough to produce the effect. Light emitted from vicinity of large mass will be red shifted to observer that is far away, while light produced by observer floating in intergalactic space and observed near massive body (or even inside the galaxy) will be blue shifted due to it "falling" into gravitational potential well of mass concentration. This is closely related to time dilation effects by the way (think of laser producing exact wavelength of light and those oscillations being slowed down due to time dilation and thus producing longer wavelengths - red shift).

Some time ago I picked up a Celestron NexImage 5 which is basically a colour 5MP webcam. At the time there was no INDI driver and so after a bit of playing around with the Windows software the camera was stowed away until later. Today I discovered that an INDI driver is available so fired it up under Kstars/EKOS and took some images, with mixed results. First, the image size is reduced to about 4MP. Second, only 8-bit images are recorded, despite the camera having a 12-bit ADC. Third, it appears that only the green channel is recorded when in RGB mode with FITS output, even though the FITS file contains three image HDUs. Is this the best I can expect, or are there some configuration settings I have not yet discovered? My thanks in advance to anyone who can help with this issue. Paul

Something else that has occurred to me is that we are reaching the end of a period of several years when the planets that we love to observe most (ie: Mars, Saturn and Jupiter) have not been well placed for observing from the UK - generally low in the sky. Jupiter is looking better now and Saturn and Mars will slowly get better placed as well. I found that observing the planets when they were low in the sky was quite a different proposition, scope choice-wise, than when they were high in the sky, as they were when I was observing them 20 years or so back. My refractors took over from my 10 and 12 inch dobsonians because they were able to provide better views and cut through the shaky seeing and the additional atmosphere thickness. There was a period of a couple of years when I gave up using my 12 inch dob for observing these planets altogether. I guess what I'm suggesting is that what has delivered the best planetary observing for the past 5-6 years or so may not be the optimum instruments for the future, or at least might have any edge that they had in the past few years removed by more favourable planet positions allowing newtonians, SCT's and maks to deliver more of the benefits that their additional aperture suggests they have the potential to do. Just a thought 🙂

It is due to be clear here after dusk, but I expect it will have subsided by then.

I'm in two minds of which 2" diagonal to sell with my Tal now I have seen how much the Altair lightwave is to buy new on that note can anyone identify this one please and tell me if it is any good. Thanks Paul

Well, I'm not going to buy it as I already have ASIAir Plus v1, 2600MC and 2600MM. I take it as a curio for beginners. Rich beginners... 😉

It's beautiful Paul. So enchanting. Top work on continuing to build on an already brilliant image. 👏 Clear skies Lee

The Double Cluster is quite satisfying, as it covers more of the frame than a number of other open clusters.

He assumes it is. Unless the power ports, usb ports & wifi are on the end of extended cables it's likely a re-configured base board. Though could be the basics of the ASIAir Mini or the SeeStar.

Why would anyone laugh at this?

Latest Aurora map image ...

Thanks for this reco! I'll try this out. I guess I adjusted the curves already before I did the white balancing.

This worked wonders!! Thanks for this suggestion. I believe this is better since I think this doesn't clip out the data but just lessens it compared to adjusting it via Levels

I think at the first Astrofest, there were 6 and 8 inch Parks equatorially mounted Newtonians. Lovely quality and engineering with rotating tube ends to rotate the eyepiece position. Alas, I've never had the chance to use one.

I'll give you process try with my mount next time. It hadn't occurred to me to check the drift of stars within a frame to check what the maximum exposure time should be. Something I relly ought to do give I operate in AZ mode.

Awesome pics and info guys! Thanks for sharing! Have fun and look forward to seeing some items on FLO website soon!

You would be building a larger observatory first Mike.